@Boabster

Really we need a more resilient system. The problem is the USB stack is task based so any system freeze will lock up input as if multitasking is disabled the stack is dead. This wasn't so bad on PS/2 (A1/XE) as it could read the ports in an interrupt and still detect it.

Anyway for reboot Ctrl-Alt-Alt is for hard reboot and will fully reboot machine. Crtl-Amiga-Amiga is still there in the form of Ctrl-Windows-Windows. Or Ctrl-Logo-Logo as I call it. There's some alternate forms if right Windows is missing, usually selectable in some input prefs, if it's not removed.

@walkero'

I keep thinking of Talladega Nights. I bet it will just as fun!

@Boabster

That's good. Yes it is annoying when a simple text file can break the system. A good idea would be a simple system manager that could be called from start up menu that could do basic editing and disable these drivers.

@Boabster

Open up early start-up menu and boot into a shell. Rename or delete file out of the way. Then reboot.

Just like in the classic days.

I can see a recovery Workbench would be beneficial here.

With a foreign file system, I think a feature like UAE has would be good for Workbench, that copies over Amiga attributes in separate files. I somewhat expected OS4 to have a feature like this already.

Opening a FAT stick on OS4 looks like a dogs breakfast already when you need to show all files, it just isn't aware of non-Amiga file systems. This way we wouldn't have to worry so much about protection bits and what not. It might even work with other software like DirOpus.

It might not help people that unpack Amiga archives on their PC, then copy to Amiga and install. But it would bring OS4 up to the same level as UAE where you can freely share files with host.

@joerg

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That makes no sense. AmiDVD is offered for free on OS4Depot. If it's not permitted as a Contrib then that's fine as it is available online. But why doesn't the public version work? Or why aren't they updated to work? Seems there's a circular dependency if Hyperion is banned from including it, but it needs an OS produced by Hyperion to work on, regardless of where it is located from.

@elfpipe

It's rather confusing. Going from AEON site or AmiSphere it's hard to to find a log in page. All pages from links suggested are for new registrations. They've changed it around. I had logged in from Firefox but my log in was missing. I checked and it still had my details but doesn't fill in my log in any more.

Have you registered from a browser that recorded your log in? In case you have check this for log ins. If you have any log ins saved somewhere.

https://secure.a-eon.biz

As to AmiStore. Have you logged in from the store? Does it know your details? You need to make sure it's logged in from a button on the bottom left. It should tell you if you aren't. But I recall getting stuck on this myself. If it isn't logged in then pressing account button should ask for login. Generally logins start with an "as" and have an account number attached.

BTW what games? NovaBridge is for bridging old Warp3D games. So unless you are wanting to play some older Warp3D games you shouldn't need it.

@daveyw

It may or may not help but common risers I noticed used USB3 cables to connect. This looked very strange when I saw one such solution in a small Sam case. It just looked wrong to see a graphics card hacked into case using a USB3 cable and sitting on the bottom of the case!

@MartinW

Thanks for explaining. I can understand. Having recently learned about PCIe risers in solving PCIe issues I can see how this would be an issue.

I don't quite know why but the X5000, which has overshadowed the X1000 now, has unusual limitations. I knew of the SATA but now I find it's PCIe as well. It appears to be a jumped up Sam 460!

I suspect the Linux limitation is because the RX drivers are developed on x86 and little endian only. The hardware used to be dual endian and the drivers portable. Then AMD dropped big endian hardware support and soon after the drivers lapsed so they only had partial support and went faulty. The cards that work lack hardware 3d and Gnome support unless you have an old HD 6000. My X1000 has an R7 250 which worked ok with Ubuntu Precise, albeit without any hardware 2d or 3d, but broke with Xenial and needed work just to show a display. Later cards up to an AMD Radeon RX 7600 are known to work in a Raptor POWER9 server, which uses little endian. I wonder if a little endian port of Linux to the X1000/X5000 would solve a lot of issues. Fienix is already a whole dedicated distro for PPC.

@daveyw

Is this a hardware limitation? I thought another would just plug into another PCie slot? I'm surprised if it needs to be extended somehow.

@MartinW

Sure, but it would help to have hidden tags, so it doesn't bloat up. This is from my volume without much extra clutter. It's recent but I didn't do an update check on it before building the list. It's from my X1000 so would differ to your X5000 but can provide a guide.



Here's my Libs:

@MartinW

It's possible that may affect it. Though if standard updates have been applied on top it should be fine. Would be good if there was an integrity check of all components above that of doing a simple AmiUpdate.

@MartinW

I suppose you're over it now but I noticed your DVD drive came up as unit 0. I wonder if this might mess up the boot process? If it's setup to boot a HDD of unit 0? Usually that was the case.

The system does sound a bit flaky if it just crashes like that. Something is wrong there. I have noticed that sometimes if a system component is an incompatible or older version then something will crash. That doesn't look like well programmed software which would use a specific version and fail otherwise.
That's what Amiga standard software is expected to do and I expected system software to set an example and hold to that standard tightly.

@skynet

Funny. T6: Dark Fate is on tonight. Thought I'd seen it but turns out I haven't. Apparently no ones heard of Skynet.

Anyway in my case I couldn't get AirScan to scan. I tried to print from Wordworth but got the same kind of result as you with the AirPrint window opening up. But I was able to print from AirPrint directly.

So what I did was open it up. It gives me SSL errors for some reason. But I was able to open a PDF I had and it printed it. My printer is a simple HP Deskjet 3630 and I had no idea it could accept PDF as that tends to be accepted only by office grade printers or lasers. It supports PCLm which is a PDF variant. However, even though I printed PDF, it's more likely AirPrint took the PDF and had it converted to a compatible raster format for the printer.

According to below site URF, JPEG, and PDF are supported over AirPrint.

https://openprinting.github.io/driverl ... standards-and-their-pdls/

@MartinW

An audio CD should show up as data CD with AIFF files. If it doesn't something has gone wrong. As least for a pure audio CD.

To play it the audio out jacks need to be connected to the computer or some external stereo system. The drive would be sent a play command and going with what joerg stated it would be an MMC command by the looks of it. This is how things usually worked in a classic Amiga with a CD drive connected internally. It's also how things worked in the XE days with CD audio out connected to sound card.

The other way was to read the CDDA data direct from the drive and then play it to an audio device. This method is fine for newer systems with 16 bit audio. But it wasn't as common early on. Later on it became more common. Especially with digital outs and leaving analogue CD outs to be depreciated.

It shouldn't matter with ubsdisk.device not sounding CD-like, the same as scsi.device isn't CD like either. It's just a transport device. But I think what does matter is supporting the MMC commands. Given USB uses some SCSI subset of commands it should know more than generic ATA commands.

It may or may not help but SYS:Documentation/Kickstart/CDFileSystem.doc does give you some keys you can press on CD insert:

@skynet

Did you try from the AirPrint app? Or just another app doing normal printout?

@pvanni

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It does comes with a PS interpreter. I suppose this is for programs printing as PS format which are then converted by the printer driver. Unless printing as PS document is useful I thought just using a direct driver would be best.

It's still updated for Linux. I don't know how up to date the driver are but it's still newer than the Amiga version. The Amiga version cost 30 euros more. Strange situation. Technically they still support the Amiga as they still sell it. But it looks like abandon ware as the newest printers supported are about 15 years old.

@Tuvok

First, lol. Good one. He is also one of my favourite characters.

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Thanks. Yes would have. Suppose I could still look into it.


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Yeah, pretty much, but even going deeper. So these days, when you add a printer, using USB as an example, you plug it in and the printer is auto detected. A dialog comes up and it determines the driver for the printer and activates it for you. Usually downloading it.

Now, if we take the net out of it, we can even use examples like Windows where it does the same but looked for drivers on the Windows disc, or another disc inserted.

On AmigaOS, not only is the design old, but it comes with a limited subset of drivers. Ancient really. They've removed some newer stuff from OS4 but left all the older drivers in. Has anyone really connected an MPS1250 EpsonX in IBM mode to an OS4 machine in the last 20 years?

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I'd start with the user experience. Now not much can be done about the drivers. But it would be good if a generic GDI or PCLGUI driver was offered. Something that updates the drivers to printers in this century. HP even have sources for their drivers that I've looked into retrofitting into the existing HP_CYMK Amiga driver code.

Drivers aside, a daemon of sorts that picks up USB devices would be good, which already exists for storage devices so detecting printers should be just as possible. Even without that, Printer Prefs could scan for a printer over various transport layers, display a list to pick from and suggested driver. Or select one to activate and copy in if needed. But leave out parallel.device, usbprinter.device and all that technical stuff. It's called a user interface, not a developer interface. They need to shake that off. Another backwards step, going from a user oriented OS to a developer oriented OS. No user should need or know what device driver API to use. Forcing users to learn programming terms is a red flag you are programming the OS wrong. Even Linux wouldn't do that on the desktop surface level

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That's been suggested in the past. The problem is CUPS is designed for a different OS driver API system. Though, by contrast, AHI does have some Linux based drivers used as basis for AHI driver. So there is the printer API and then the driver API. A device API using library API for drivers. Either printer API would need to be wrapped around CUPS core and drivers. Or drivers would need adapting with CUPS driver code to work with native printer API. Best would be broad drivers to cover a range of models. Such as broad HP drivers that can drive a broad range of printers. Of course, the driver being able to communicate with the printer, so it could determine model and features would be good to configure a run time driver model adapting itself when loaded.

One thing I will say needed is jobs. The printer API and clients have no concept of print jobs. I touched on this earlier. Given you've got old programs (or new) that write random data to the printer API, it would be hard to add that concept. By random I mean a reset command or writing lines out at a time. There's nothing for starting and stopping a page. Even opening and closing the printer device won't do it, as that can happen, while a program writes different data to the printer in one session.

OS4 development is still happening. Just not in the printer department. Enhancer had some update in August 2022 and another is due this year.

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For drivers it would, yes. Of course, driverless is a fallacy really, since there is still data that needs encoding in a specific format. Given it could be PDF or JPEG or URF makes no difference really, as it's still a data format. But being a common format that can be generated easier does make a difference.

IPP over USB would be good. But since my printer is on the network, I can still reach it from my X1000.

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No I certainly hope not. 1985 wants its colours back. Ha. IIRC it's been 24 bit since OS3.9 and OS3.1 on AGA should have fixed that.

@mcleppa

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Ok I understand now. Needed to refresh my memory. I was aware there was a LPR driver but I don't recall testing it as my X1000 is connected to my printer over USB.

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So checked and my printer supports PCLm and ARF. PCLm looks interesting as it's some kind of PDF format. So apparently my printer is better than I thought it was for a budget home model.

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I had read about that years ago. I'm sure my HP does support it. But that is not through network so not relevant to IPP in this case.

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To my knowledge NotePad would just dump text to the printer through the driver. You could likely find out by extracting it from the prefs file it uses. But that limits it to NotePad only so other text editors printing won't use it. There's ways to find default font. I know the non-proportional default font is in GfxBase->DefaultFont after asking around, which is used by the CLI.

IntuitionText is probably the best way. I've used that to grab text sizes when calculating a layout. Text() function could be more direct but Gfx is made for bitplanes while Intuition can be used for pixmaps transparently. It can also provide a default font. But for single colour printing a bitmap may actually help. If PCLm supported basic text you could have just encapsulated it inside a basic PDF, but it looks like it has the same raster limitation.

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PS would have been accepted by earlier printers over direct connection. IIRC PS was supported before PDF. As PS was suited for being a printer PDL while PDF was suited to viewing documents on screen.

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That would create a dependence on Enhancer but these days some OS components in the OS4.0 days are now depreciated and moved into Enhancer from OS4.1.

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Ah yes, I recall using AmiPS and AmiGS to print. They aren't very well integrated in the OS. Well, an add on really. The Amiga printer system is very old. It works backwards to how things work today, as you need to manually select and install the driver. And the printer device API has no concept of what print job is. I found this out when developing my HP_Photosmart driver based on the HP printer source. I had to work around it somehow as clients tended to send discrete dumps to the printer device, so most printouts were writes of various data.

It's going back years but I recall some things about AmiGS/AmiPDF and just checked then to refresh myself. So you could chose Workbench driver or custom driver and direct device. Workbench driver would go through printer device but other drivers which included PS, PDF, images and specific printers are sent to DOS device. It defaulted to PAR: but that was rather obsolete by then. PAR was old, lol. I had some alternate called USBPRT: or something that diverted to usbprinter.device. So it sent it to the printer direct as possible without involving printer device. A NETPRT: or AIRPRT: could be conceived in the same way. AmiGS and AmiPDF are really just facades for the ghostsscript command. The way they work is rather sloppy as they invoke a CLI command to do their dirty work. That may be acceptable on an OS like Linux where it lives on CLI commands, since it wasn't designed as a desktop OS; but AmigaOS is more integrated like Windows, and there should be a library acting as driver to handle it. It was a bit of a hack and the interface was messy with needing to deal with old DOS devices.

For a number of years I wanted to write a PSPRT: DOS driver. This would have accepted PS as input but would have rasterized the output to a non-PS printer. So it would be a PS to PRT converter you could say using printer device. It would have used ghostsscript command to convert PS to a raster so would have been a bit of a hack in the same way. But I never got around to it. A few word processors could output PS and there is the Workbench PS driver. So it looks like my printer supports stripped-PDF. That's useful, but still not much sends PDF on Amiga, so would need converting from graphics to PDF I would think.

@MamePPCA1

That doesn't sound like a good omen. Giving it 7 years and say it will die. That's not how you give your customers confidence!

If your X5000 still works the hardware should still be good. But RAM, cables and HDD can degrade. Dust can accumulate. In particular RAM sticks can collect micro-grime just sitting there. Even just pulling them out and back in can help. Otherwise removing and cleaning the contacts can be good. I replaced the RAM and SATA cables in my X1000 when I saw signs of instability like crashing on boot. After replacing the battery.

While I don't think the X5000 is dying just yet, 7 years is a long enough time for mechanical wear on a harddrive. Be good to check the smart log for any issues. But OS4 only has a smartmontools command I know so having Linux with a GUI is just easier.

So you have Enhancer on CD and that should be a way you can get access to your files again. In the least it should have a working SmartFilesystem and PartitionWizard. You could try copying files or installing. Best to backup pendrive on another computer as a full image backup just in case.

SmartFilesystem should be easily found in the installation files under Kickstart drawer on CD. Then just copy over the top of the existing one. On the pendrive.

Another way, and this may be easier, is to simply install Enhancer on the pendrive. You may need to do more clicking off for options you don't need if you just want to update Kickstart. Or you can just install most or all to pendrive.