@vodkasoda

Bejaysus! Another Irishman... If you're ever up in Dublin I could show you my AmigaOne and my A1200, maybe give you a hand with your machine...

Basically, a few years ago, the AmigaOne was commissioned - a totally new machine using a modern G3 or G4 processor, industry standard fittings and the capability to use modern peripherals. Seeing as it was a totally new architecture, a new OS was required. However, due to many issues, not many of these AmigaOnes were made, a lot of them problematic, and the OS was delayed. Nonetheless, it was released, followed by a version for classic A1200 and A4000 machines with the rare and expensive PPC expansion cards. Recently however, an update to the new OS, version 4.1 was released for the AmigaOne, and also for a new motherboard called the Sam440. This board is readily available, for the first time in years it's possible to buy a new machine that runs AmigaOS. By and large it's pretty similar to the A1, though there are many differences so a different version of OS4.1 is required for each.

[Edit: oops posted too early!]

Yeah, you'll have to buy it I'm afraid, and it only comes on CD. To get your CD-ROM working though you should be easily able to download some drivers from Aminet on the PC and transfer them. Once you have that working, the OS3.9 installed will let you make a boot floppy that will support the CD-ROM.

Yup, I second the 3.9 upgrade suggestion. 4MB sounds about right, it was massive years ago ;) especially for an Amiga! It's not a whole lot for doing anything modern with, such as internet browsing or anything, but I guess that's not what the plan is for this machine anyway. It will serve very well with WHDLoad and a bunch of games on the hard drive as a nice retro machine, the extra ram coming in handy there.

Regardless of anything else it might be an idea to at least match your Kickstart and Workbench versions, they're not really meant to be mixed and while it's probably working fine, it may fail at some future point. Workbench 3.1 will have a version number beginning with 40, 3.0 begins with 39.

@vodkasoda

Quote:


Well, OS 3.5 and 3.9 both need at least more memory than the standard 1200 has built in, so you'd need to get yourself some kind of RAM expansion, or preferably an 030 accelerator or something. Amigas can read 720KB formatted PC floppies no problem - it's PCs that can't read Amiga disks ;) You'll find a PC0: DOSDriver in Storage:DOSDrivers/ if it isn't already in Devs/DOSDrivers, and like the CD0 driver, just douple click it to enable PC floppies. Unfortunately though the standard floppy drive in the 1200 can't read 1.44MB floppies, so if you can't find a 720KB one, tape over the hole that's not for write protecting it, and reformat it at 720KB.

GMail offer a standard POP3 interface to your account so you should be able to use that with pretty much any mail programme from the last decade...

Thanks guys, was a very interesting meeting, great to see so many people there! Including a few who hadn't had much to do with the Amiga for several years and are now getting their interest back. It's the first time I was ever at an Amiga meeting even though I've been pretty dedicated to the cause for over 10 years now...

Who knows, maybe next time I'm in London there'll be a meeting on again and I'll be sure to show up!

Thanks again,

Rob (The bloke from Ireland)

Wow! That is good news!!

@saimo

I vaguely recall something about your boot partition having to be FFS formatted - was this just for the pre-release or is it still the case?

@BillE

If there are any corrupt entries in your UBoot it can cause this, even if every setting you go into appears correctly. Similar thing happened to me, only mine couldn't find the SLB. All the UBoot settings were exactly as they were before I replaced the battery, but it refused to boot until I did a factory reset in the UBoot settings screen and enter all the settings a second time.

@Mikey_C

That's good news... Under OS4.0 final I could only ever get the demo of Wipeout to run once, maybe 20 or 30 attempts crashed the machine. Never got Payback to work with 4.0 Final - we'll see what 4.1 is like - maybe it improves it for me!

As regards OTTD, have you tried increasing the stack? I saw similar symptoms under 4.0, even with the recommended stack. When I doubled it, it worked fine.

You never know, if I happen to have some spare time around then I might pop over from Dublin :D

@Swoop

If you're looking to use two monitors, the DVI spec is to allow the use of two monitors per DVI connector, and most graphics cards support this so it might be better to use that than having two separate interfaces set up. I've used two monitors on my PC and one of them was VGA and the other a DVI, both connected to the DVI port via adaptors. I guess part of the work for supporting multiple monitors is already there with multiple intuition screens, but extending the desktop is a different matter entirely.

I'd like to see it too, having Workbench open and playing a DVD/video/music on the other monitor is a nice idea!

OTTD runs fine here... I was never able to get glQuake running here however, but maybe I was doing something silly - I'll try it again sometime soon...

@Jack

Wow! 1991... I haven't used Matlab in a few years, but I do remember it having some nice graphical tools which sped up development of scripts. I guess the 1991 version is probably so out ofdate that nobody really cares at all about it...

Ah, yay :) Turns out I was using PowerIcons and not the IconModule system at all. All sorted now, thanks guys for the help!!

@BillE

I installed the PNG icons patch there recently to use MasonIcons, and it worked for that, but I've no idea if there's an IconModule entry for it. I'll check it out when I go home. Thanks for the pointers!

@BillE

Hmmm... Yeah, I saw that looking through the docs, but I don't know how to enable software sprite mode (or if it even needs to be enabled), and I've a Radeon 9200SE which should be up to the job... It's not a major issue, but it does bug me :)

Hi all, sorry for dragging up an old thread, but... I have the opposite problem. I want to use a 32-bit pointer but even though def_pointer.info and def_busypointer.info are in envarc:sys/, the system still uses the default red pointer (or whatever I've saved in Pointer prefs). Is there some env variable that needs to be set to tell it to use the PNG icons instead?

@Hans

Hmmmm... I guess you could be right. There seems to be proper support for transparency in the icon library, just Amidock "feels" like it cuts out the background - like so many programs I've written which do a similar thing for transparency. It's entirely possible that there's a function to do this in a library somewhere, but it needs some work if so.

AmiDock doesn't really use transparency, and I don't know if it's even possible to use alpha in an Amiga window. What Amidock does is grab a piece of the screen the same size and position as the window it's about to open, and puts that image in the background of the window to give the impression of transparency. That's pretty easy to do programming-wise, and you could even pop open a "stay on top" window on the frontmost screen if you liked - on a graphics card colour matching shouldn't be that important.

Without OS support for true alpha windows/screens I don't see how you'd do it on top of any screen, though it would be a nice feature...