So, if I am understanding this correctly, Amax is capable of booting System 6 off Amax converted disk images?
Yes. You either boot off original Mac disks via a Mac floppy drive, or A-Max format disks that were originally Mac images and converted. (Or a hard drive partition, which we've already gone over.)
Worth noting that when you boot A-Max up into System 6, you're really looking at 1 computer at that point - a Mac. You can't see your Amiga drives, in other words. And, since you don't have a Mac floppy drive, you'll only be able to see A-max format disks. Which means, at least at first, only the System 6 ... system.
The A-Max II Plus (Zorro) card allows you to read and write native format Mac disks on your Amiga, but of course that requires a big box Amiga with Zorro slots.
When running A-Max 2.5x, you can specify one of your
Amiga partitions as a
transfer partition. You use the A-Max Transfer utility to copy files between the two.
But yeah, you can't access any of your Amiga partitions directly from the Mac desktop. This is because A-Max is really a
port of the Macintosh OS that happens to be running on Amiga hardware at that point.
If you ever do get an A-Max partition running, it seems that A-Max has a limit of about 300 MB, so that also means that you can't create a huge A-Max partition. I would stick with 250 MB or less.
Also, A-Max works very well with software that is system friendly, but falls down when software tries to go directly to the hardware. A lot of games bypass the OS, and talk directly to the Mac chips, which on the Amiga, aren't there.
Fortunately there are a lot of games that are system friendly, and do work with A-Max. And, a ton of productivity software, which is really where the gold is hidden.
From a software perspective, A-Max 2.56 was the last of the 2.xx versions (which I have and can share later if anyone is ever interested).
UPDATE:
I think I misspoke earlier. I used a 1GB SD Card and I think I made the A-Max a ridiculous 250MB partition, WB a 50MB partition, and the remainder an Amiga "Work" partition.
I'm also running an ICD AdSpeed at 14Mhz and so, yeah. Once my 128K ROMs load. Sys 6 starts in like 3-4 seconds.
UPDATE 2:
I have all of the System disk images. One would need to use Chris' Img2Amax tool to write them to actual floppies on an Amiga. I didn't have to personally do this because I used a Floppy Emu which actually comes with System 6
dsk images on it and I installed them from there to the HDD.
But the Img2Amax tool should be able to be used to create an Mac img into an A-max system disk. (And again, for a floppy setup, just the 1 disk is probably all it takes).