The notebook motherboard has a name and it is Powerboard Tyche, and no, it does not reach the point of launching U-Boot, yet.

Calling it simply the "ACube notebook" is fine, but technically not quite right, so here a little clarification of the somehow complex situation, for those of you that love the details.

The entire notebook project of the motherboard is coordinated by the not-for-profit organisation called PowerProgressCommunity, that finance the initiative via its notebook project website.

We at the PowerProgressCommunity (I am part of it) defined all of its specifications.
Being a not-for-profit organisation under the Italian law, we are not allowed to produce anything, we are limited to perform an intellectual work only.
Our goal is to publish all the electronic schematics of the board using an Open Source Hardware certification, so that potentially anybody could make it.

ACube Systems is being paid (hired) by PowerProgressCommunity to design the board, in their turn they hired an electronic engineer firm to do the job. Apparently it seems unusual to subcontract like this, but within our association we are all volunteers, and none of us has the expertise to be able to deal with the technical requests of the electronic engineer, so we are forced to rely on the ACube expertise to do so.

Once the prototypes will proved to work, we will publish all schematics, and the PowerProgressCommunity will reach its goal.

At this point, we all hope that ACube Systems will be enough motivated to make the boards based on the public schematics, which is a risky business for them given the small market.

Long story short: the more donation we receive, the faster we can pay ACube to finish the prototypes.

(Quite) slowly but steadily progressing against the odds.
Here the latest post on the most recent development advancements
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2023/ ... or-latest-u-boot-version/

@Hans

Did test lame using a 10MB wave file as input downloaded from https://file-examples.com/index.php/sa ... iles/sample-wav-download/

lame -V2 test.wav test.mp3

Sam460ex - 0:15
WinUAE 4.10.1 on i7-1265U Win 11 - 1:05
QEMU 8.0 (no TCG) on i7-1265U Win 11 WSL2 Ubuntu 22.04 - 1:14
QEMU 8.0 (with "-accel tcg") on i7-1265U Win 11 WSL2 Ubuntu 22.04 - 0:59

I launch QEMU using the following command




Benchmark using SysMon QEMU 8.0 on i7-1265U Win 11 WSL2 Ubuntu 22.04








Benchmark using SysMon on Sam460ex








I am unable to launch SysMon on WinUAE, I always get a Grim Reaper.

@geennaam

Oooohhhh! That come as a big surprise indeed!
Another contribution that will turn out to be of fundamental importance once the PowerPC laptop based on the T2080 CPU will be ready!
Finger crossed, we are currently trying to run u-boot on the prototypes that proved to be electrically working.

@kas1e

Being user of a Sam460ex (AmigaOS 4.1 FE), WinUAE (AmigaOS 3.x and 4.1FE) and QEMU (Sam460ex and now Pegasos2 emulated machines) I can assure you that QEMU+Pegasos2+AOS4.1FE feels as fast as WinUAE+OS4.1FE.

Sure, the boot time is quite higher with QEMU compared with WinUAE, but the overall speed of using the system is comparable.
Sure, being limited to a SM501 video card that has only 64MB of video RAM is quite limiting: 16bit depth screens only (no 24bit nor 32bit), and the maximum resolution is 1280x800.
Other than that, I feel the overall graphic performance is comparable, if not better than WinUAE, and yes, compositing can be turned ON.
Being limited to FFS disks is also a pain at the moment, but hey, this is the first release of QEMU supporting such Pegasos2+AOS4.1FE, so it is quite promising indeed.

I discovered that the SM401 device in QEMU supports the "vram-size" additional parameters, but I think there is an hardcoded maximum RAM limit of 64MB.
I have tried to set 128MB passing the parameter "-device sm501,vram-size=134217728", but QEMU replied

I would love to test QEMU+Pegasos2+AOS4.1FE on a PowerPC machine enabling KVM, but I haven't got any already PowerPC CPU Book3s machine already setup with Linux, at the moment got only a PowerPC CPU Book3e (NXP T2080).

@kas1e What the fastest possible x64 emulation way of OS4 today ?

QEMU v8!

Moved out of curiosity after I watched the videos by Rene Engel (https://www.youtube.com/@reneengel2258) I have order a copy of AmigaOS 4.1 FE for Pegasos 2 at (https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-So ... 1-Final-Edition::689.html).

After trying a few times, I succeed running AmigaOS 4.1 FE on QEMU 8.0 rc1 emulating a Pegasos 2 and I must admint I am quite impressed by its performance.
The overall speed is so good that the system is quite usable, light years ahead of the sluggish experience I obtain when emulating a Sam460ex running AmigaOS 4.1 FE on the same linux x86_64 laptop.
Is still slower than running AmigaOS on my real Sam460ex, particularly true when writing on the HD, but it might be due to the fact that I was forced to format the HD with FFS and not SFS, because I am unable to mount any partition formatted SFS.

At the moment the ISO with AmigaOS 4.1 FE for Pegasos 2 cannot be launched directly, because the ATI Radeon emulation on QEMU is not mature enough.
So, in order to launch AmigaOS, I had to manually copy the SM501 video drivers from the AmigaOS ISO for my Sam460, as the AmigaOS ISO for the Pegasos 2 does not contain these drivers. In order to modify the original ISO image I installed the UltraISO app for Windows (https://www.ultraiso.com/), and these are the list of files I added:

In order to load the SM501 driver (“siliconmotion502.chip”) when booting AmigaOS, I had to edit and modify two files:

I then turned to my Ubuntu 22.04 linux laptop and compiled the v8.0 rc1 of QEMU following

Prior to being able to build qemu, I had to install some additional packages on Ubuntu

Once QEMU was compiled and installed, I then created an 20GB HD image file entering

As the Pegasos openfirmware ROM is closed source, it does not comes with QEMU, so I had to retrieve it manually. On the Linux terminal I used these commands to download a BPlan firmware update file, a script to extract the ROM and then execute the script to obtain the "pegasos2.rom" file

I then launched QEMU with the following command

At the openfirmware prompt I entered
At the first boot I partitioned the HD with two partitions, a DH0 partition with FFS (could not make SFS work so far), and DH1 partition for SWAP.
At the second boot, I proceed into Workbench, quick formatted DH0, and then I could install AmigaOS on it.
I then switched off QEMU and re-launched but this time without the cdrom with the following command

At the openfirmware prompt I entered and you are good to go.

I am very much grateful to Balaton Zoltan, it is thanks to his huge work that we will be able to enjoy this great performance increase emulating AmigaOS 4.1!! More info at
http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/
and
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/

Some additional infos are available in a post on amiga-news.de also.

@alfkil

Well, meanwhile you'll wait to have such an important answer, you could take a break from that monster and try to port a STL 3D model viewer based on QT:
https://github.com/fstl-app/fstl

I have tested it on my PPC64 linux machine and they have provided a patch for big endian CPUs
https://github.com/fstl-app/fstl/issues/73

@alfkil

What you are doing is simply marvellous!!!

How can I show my appreciation?
Do you have a PayPal button somewhere?
The website associated to your account seems vanished (http://www.cphjazzquartet.dk/)

@billt

Uhm, just tried on my AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 2 installation using QEMU 6.0 with no luck.

Used the latest archive on os4depot then launched the usual QEMU command adding "-device intel-hda"

qemu-system-ppc -machine sam460ex -m 2G -rtc base=localtime -device intel-hda -device ide-hd,drive=disk,bus=ide.0 -drive file=amigaos_4.1_fe_upd2.img,format=raw,id=disk

as it did not work, tried adding "-device intel-hda -device hda-output", again with no luck

qemu-system-ppc -machine sam460ex -m 2G -rtc base=localtime -device intel-hda -device hda-output -device ide-hd,drive=disk,bus=ide.0 -drive file=amigaos_4.1_fe_upd2.img,format=raw,id=disk

On the AHI prefs still no HD audio device shows up
http://www.locati.it/mario/sam460/qemu_sam460_hd_audio_test.png

This is how the audio board appears on Ranger
http://www.locati.it/mario/sam460/qem ... _hd_audio_test_ranger.png

@geennaam

I find AmigaOS 4.1 a great fun to use, and to enjoy it more, I personally don't care too much about the noise made by always the same well know people.
Sure, the situation could have been better, but it could also be worst with such a small user base.
Sure, more and more people are running away from it, and it is a shame, because the system is simply great.

It is mostly thanks to people like you, a user that spend his spare time to solve practical issues, that the system gets a more usable environment.

I personally thank you a lot for your contribution, and hope that you still be able to enjoy the platform even if it has its own twists.

Does anybody knows anything about the USB 3 stack that was announced back in 2012?

Wondering whether its source code (even unfinished/not working) could be shared in order to support the USB 3 controller chip mounted on the PowerPC notebook board (see https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/campa ... three-working-prototypes/).


The chip selected for the notebook is the Renesas μPD720201
https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products ... 01-usb-30-host-controller

You can buy a PCIe x1 card based on this chip for about € 30 / USD 36.

@all

See what I mean?

Amiga Kit Ltd just donated €100!!
Thank you guys!!

@walkero

> should we put more effort on projects that are public and open source, instead of following companies and major players?

I think open source initiatives and business driven companies are both fundamental components that may advance the platform.
Sure, sometimes they may extremely diverge in the internal mechanism that drive each action, but when they work together a great results can be achieved.
This is particularly true for the hobbyist Amiga platform, where the market barely sustain the very few remaining companies that try to live on such a niche market.

There should be close cooperation between the two environments when a common goal cannot be achieved by one party alone, the alternative is wiping out completely any attempt to continue the development on anything "next generation" and consequently fall back in the retro-computing.

I am telling this because is the main reason that got me involved in the PowerProgressCommunity (https://www.powerprogress.org/) because I wanted a notebook with AmigaOS 4.1 and there was no company openly pursuing that goal. This is a concrete community driven action that tells the existing companies what do we want.
So far, the cooperation with the guys at ACube Systems has been great. PowerProgressCommunity alone could not go that far, and the same is valid for ACube, they couldn't afford to undertake the notebook project alone.

Sure, when I see that only 60 people are financially (https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/campa ... three-working-prototypes/) supporting the project of having the most powerful Amiga ever in a notebook form factor is not what I have hoped for, nevertheless we still are progressing.

I am advertising the project with this post?
Definitely yes.

Successfully tried many shaders on my 10 years old Sam460ex equipped with a RadeonRX 560 and it look awesome!

Thank you guys, ShaderJoy is simply impressive, and the shaders pack made available by kas1e provide a good selection of ready to use examples.

Just a question: why the GPU animation freeze when I move any icon on the workbench?

@cygnusED
yes, you are right, using SSHterm I can already launch a remote app on Amigygnix, however I don't know how to open it on a dedicated window on the workbench, and I must add every time the destination display, whereas I would like only to enter the name of the app and nothing else.

@NinjaCyborg
Yes, for an RDP server on linux you need to install "xrdp" then you connect to it. You need a fast connection to end up with a pleasant experience, but Linux and the Amiga should be on the same LAN attached using an ethernet cable.

<p>@NinjaCyborg</p><p><span style="font-size: 9pt;">Sure, you can use pretty much any remote linux app in this way, just tried running firefox on my Raspberry Pi 4 and using the GUI from Amicygnix. See the result on my Sam460ex below.</span></p><p>I must say that you may obtain more usable result using a Remote Desktop connections (see rdesktop.lha on OS4Depot).</p><p>I see forwarding X11 apps to Amicygnix better for less demanding GUI apps, such as a text editor, or smaller apps that do not require refreshing the GUI too frequently.</p><p>http://www.locati.it/mario/sam460/tes ... x_amicygnix.jpg</p>

@cygnusED

Being able to use remote X11 apps on a local display greatly improve the ability to use AmigaOS on a everyday life basis.

I have tried and succeed to open remote apps on the Amicygnix as explained in this thread, however that was a bit tricky, and I do not understand how to open such an app on a dedicated window on the workbench instead of opening that app in the Amigygnix desktop (see screenshot above by @smf), much like you are able to use Amicygnix apps such as Abiword in "standalone" mode. Do you know how to do that?

Could include in a next Amicygnix release:
- a guide on how to use remote apps with Amicygnix
- a new GUI to manage allowed IPs instead of editing "Cygnix:CygnixPPC/etc/X0.hosts"?

As a further improvement, I would love to see more integration between SSHterm by Fredrik Wikström and Amicygnix.

It would be great to simply type the name of an app in SSHterm while connected on a remote Linux host and see that app appearing in a dedicated and re-sizable window on the workbench using the Amicygnix X11 display capabilities.

@mritter0

Hope the Oculus Quest still as enjoyable as it was at the beginning, and that you did not fall into the 3D universe completely and still have time to do some coding ;)

During these long days of self isolation at home here in Italy I am learning Python and I would love to do some testing on AmigaOS using a convenient editor like yours.

Do you have any news about it?
I just had a look at the videos record last October and your tool looks exactly what I would need
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh2cTu0WQ3U

Are you planning to integrate some sort of quick method for launching an interpreted script (i.e. Python, Hollywood, Perl, PHP) directly from the editor?

@salass00

Donated!
Great work!

@salass00

Wow! I love SSHTerm!




Would it be possible to have the hostname/IP and the user name in the title bar so when we have multiple windows opened one can spot the correct window to use?

How can I support your work on this?
Is that correct if I donate using the PayPal button at http://www.a500.org/ ?