@Samurai_Crow

Hi there,

So it was built using publicly available knowledge. That's clever!

Quote:

I thought that they were planning to embed a 68000 in the FPGA, rather than a 68040? Got to admit that worried me slightly as I thought the 68000 was 16 bit, but the 68020+ were 32? I don't think the addressing would matter since that would be handled by the 68060 in the developer board and the coldfire on the production(?) But what about the maths functions? Also didn't 68040's have MMUs and built in FPU's where as 68000's don't?

Still beats me how they re going to fit all this into a Coldfire CPU. I mean how big are these things?

As to using the Kickstart - it makes a lot of sense having this as a file on the disk - and booting using something like Grub in Linux which loads itself and then the system - so that we can get around all the fun of multiple boots. My A1200 needs to boot 3 times if I use fusion. Once to load the cold start stuff, once to patch the kickstart and then finally to work!

J.

Hi All,

By the sounds of it they are thinking of using the Coldfire as it allows them to initially build a cheap 1 chip solution. This, as has been pointed out, has the problem that the Coldfire is not 100% compatible with the 680xx series and since it does not fire exceptions as the 68040 and 68060 do and you will need some kind of vitalisation/jit or whatever to get os 3.x programmes to run. But then you're going to need something like this in any case whatever you run them on as they are so tied to expecting classic Amiga hardware.

This kind-of brings me back to the poll that Chris kindly placed for me (is the Amiga's future as a virtual platform? ---
http://www.amigans.net/modules/xoopspoll/index.php?poll_id=34
---).

To get os3.x sw to run at native speeds you need hw that it understands *or* an emulator/virtuliser of some sort and much more powerful CPU, such as a 1+ gig pentium/AMD/PPC and at present UAE.

So a 680x0 and all the blitter/paula etc hw that a classic system has - or UAE etc. The Natami developer boards will have the hw solution, as they will have the blitter etc in a FPGA and a 68060. But this will be very expensive, $1,000 or so, so not really a viable full term solution, hence Coldfire and a CPU HAL. I guess the initial solution would be an E-UAE port which does not need to emulate the blitter etc, since they are already there!

The plus for the Coldfire is that it is a 1 chip solution so a lot simpler to build (though I have *no* idea how it works!). With an intel cpu you'd have to have the blitter etc in an FPGA , and all the usb stuff outside, which would bump the cost and I guess complexity up.

There is, as someone pointed out on the Natami forum, the problem of Amiga Inc and the old Commadore Trademarks/copywrites. Heaven knowns who actually holds them! I have a feeling the reverse engineering (which is basically what the Natami is) is OK in Europe, but a complete No-No in the USA. So it could be that Amiga Inc will get miffed and kill the project - if they can prove they own the copy writes... Time will tell on that.

If they don't, or if they loose the court case(?) then it could be that the Natami will provide an initial boost to us classic owners who always wonder if they are going to be faced with a single colour, or worse black screen when we turn our Amigas on. And then PPC or other accelerators for OS4 or whatever -if enough people buy the cold fire kit.

Dear all,

I have failed abysmally to add a poll for the last week and a bit. I click 'add new poll' follow the instructions in the polls manual, the screen displays 'database updated', but the poll just does not appear. Could someone please have a look and tell me what I am doing wrongly? I am completely stumped.

J.

@Spud

Hi Matt,

Just to add a *lot* to Mikey_c's reply.

1. Yes Amiga inc, who sort of fell out of the ashes of Commadore, though they say they did not (it's very complicated!), are in court in the USA with Hyperion, who wrote OS4, and no-one really knows how it will pan out. Amiga Inc are not the flavour of the month due to a lot of history which you can read about on the net if you like.

2. OS 4 does require a powerPC processor (often abbreviated to PPC) and either an amigaOne (rare) or PPC board that plugs into a 'Classic Amiga (very rare). Oh classic amiga's are those made by Commadore and a few others, they are A500's (like yours) A1200's A1500's A4000's etc. It will not work on a PC or Mac. OS4 will not work on your A500 either.

However it is not all bad news, especially of you want to bin windows. Two projects spring to mind. The first is UAE. This is a piece of software that emulates the classic Amiga on a PC, Mac and a few others (?). It forms the basis of Amiga Forever and you can buy a copy of this from cloanto at http://www.amigaforever.com/ . It comes with everything you need to run a vast array of classic programmes on a pc, I am not sure of a Mac version. You do need Windows - but see below - or their mini install of Linux to use it and it is not perfect... Then again its not at all bad. If you want to support development buy a copy.

Once you have you can tweak it like mad by downloading (and donating to) amikit - http://amikit.amiga.sk/ (10,000 downloads and counting) or amigasys - http://amigasys.extra.hu/winuaefeature.html. Both of which accept the amiga forever cd and add patches to the software to make it a very usable environment on a windows pc (and now Linux)

The second project is Aros. This is an attempt to produce a pc (and other) native version of OS3.1. Its now got an installer and will also run as a hosted OS on Linux. Work is under way to produce a version of UAE for it. Check out the latest here. http://aros.sourceforge.net/ Once this is complete you will be able to run classic programmes in uae on Aros without a sign of windows. You can do this now on linux using uae, or E-uae (which is a port of the windows version - info here - http://www.rcdrummond.net/uae/ )

Aros is under test on A cube's Sam 440Ep (news here - http://www.acube-systems.biz/eng/index.php ) as is Ubuntu - a version of Linux. So if all goes well you will not need a pc at all.

There are 2 hardware projects out there that you might like to look at as well. The minimig is an attempt to get all the special hardware of an A500 into a single chip. A cube were selling these, and the last time I looked they had sold out. The other is a slightly mad(?) project to produce a new A1200 look/work-alike called the Natami - check it out here - http://www.natami.de/ . Opinions vary as to how successful it will be.

Finally there are still companies who cater for people with amigas - not sure what is available for the A500 but one such is Amigakit, their website pops up in place of Eyetec's - who were the people who developed the AmigaOne... http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/amiga-shop.php


Cheers
J.

To explain;

It is currently very difficult to get hold of Amiga system hardware. Systems (classic or A1) come up from time to time on forums or ebay but none are made other than the Minimig, which has sold out... As far as I can tell the only currently available 'system' is UAE based, either via cloanto or Win-UAE, E-UAE etc. OK this is a classic emulator but 10,000 people downloaded the latest Amikit, which is I guess more than the number of people who bought the A1?

It is possible to emulate a PowerPc - Sheepshaver does this.
An uae port is being written for Aros. E-uae runs on linux. Both are under test on Abox's SAM440ep.

If UAE included the ability to emulate a PowerPC, and PPC code natively on a PPC system then OS4 classic might run on UAE.

If this was successful OS4 would run on any powerful HW, PPC or not. So all PC's, all Apples, the SAM440ep, etc etc. OK I'm probably simplifying here, but if it did the Amiga would be a virtual platform. Is this the future?

<edit>

OK I am stumped. I have tried and tried to get the poll on this to work without success. It comes up saying 'database updated' but the poll just will not work! Help anyone?
</edit>

@All

I don't know if any Amiga users have had a go with this, I'd be interested in knowing how fast it is on non ppc systems - the benchmarks are for PCs, PS3's XBoxes and Macs. In any case looking around there appears to be a split in developers who have. Some like it, others not. One site I found had a discussion on the licence, which appears to be a sticking point with some people.

The Docs mention the Amiga quite a bit along with some quite old PC hardware (such as 3dfx Voodoo cards and glide) so I guess the question is has anyone installed it and what do you think?

J.

Hi All,

As I understand things you need to put the c:morelibspace *before* setpatch. and append REBOOT - the caps are needed, I don't think reboot will work(?) - to it if you are running 3.1. Having said (typed?) that it don't work for me.

I have a number of patches running on my OS3.9 install, so I am guessing there is a conflict. At present all I know is that it fails to get as far as a boot picture I have, all I get is a black screen with the dick drives (DF0:) clicking away. If I take the boot picture out of startup sequence I get no further. I have the following patches;

fblit, ftext, BlazeWCP,WBAllocFast

Could someone who has this working please post their startup-sequence?

Many thanks

J.

@TiredOfLife

Hi there,

Many thanks for posting your startup-sequence. There are a couple of things I don't recognise, could you confirm;

Blizkick - I guess you have a ppc, or other Blizzard board (68060?) with a rom-mapper? I have an Apollo 68040 which I do not think has this facility (though don't know) I would guess that Blizkick takes the rom updates that setpatch uses out of chip mem and into fast? Yes/No?

4xEIDE.driver - not heard of this, I see it's for Elbox eide interfaces . Haven't a clue what I have - its been in the A1200 for 10 years! Any idea how I can find out?

BlazeWCP - does it boost general performance, or just 3d doom style games?

TagLife - another one I have not heard of, and having read the blurb on Aminet I confess don't really understand :/

Powericons - worth using? - what benefits, other than the ability to use PNGs...

MemOptimizer - I looked at this, but was not sure if it would help.

WBAllocFast sounds interesting, will give it a go.

Cheers J

@TiredOfLife

Hi there is an Option in WBprefs which says use graphics or other memory for icons. Hmm does not seem to do much either way, though this could be due to the fact that it's now been patched out by Fblit or one of the others I mentioned?

Highest chip I have seen on the wb screen so far is 1.6 mb. it seems to oscillate a bit during use. So start a prog or 3 do things, shut em down, result is either less memory than I started with (mem leak I guess) or occasionally more... I'm not running pool mem or similar so this is a bit of a puzzle.

Using the patches with PPaint means I can now edit a 256 colour image at 1024*768 with 128k left in chip, but cannot convert it to anything else (jpg to ilbm for eg).
J

Hi,

Is anyone running Fblit version 3.79a successfully with OS3.9?

I'm getting a line of corruption appearing on the screen each time I click on an icon. I have a default install, 0s3.9 +boingbag1 on an apollo 68040 with32mb ram. Any thoughts anyone?

J.

<Edit>

Hmm OK I think I may have figured this. Taking out the simplegells option from loadwb and using the QBSBlitPatch (see fblits docs for the two that you have to remove to do this) seems to have cured the corruption, and given me around 1.5mb chip mem with a 256 colour wb. I also added wbtofast from the os3.5 cd, icontofast and ftext from aminet. Not sure if this helping or not...

Has anyone managed to get more chip?

J.
</Edit>

Dear all,

While wondering around looking for a few answers via Google I stumbled across this on Youtube. Enjoy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q

J.

@thomas

Hi Thomas,

Very odd, I'm sure its the 97 version. That's what it says on the floppy and the draw that's created on install anyway. I read on the net that os3.9 patched scsi.device, but thought that was just to make it able to use disks bigger than 4gb. Guess getting the aminet version of Idefix won't hurt. I just checked, the mounts for the cd and ls120 do use atapi.device

J.

@cogvos1

Sorry me again.

Having got my A1200 back from the dead I decided to clear out the startup-sequence and user-startup-sequence of junk

In the process I noticed that the lines relating to ide-fix were commented out in startup-sequence. But I have a 4 way buffered interface! That can't be right. So I uncomment them, re-boot and get read errors on all my partitions Eek! I reboot using no-startup and comment the ide-fix lines out again and it all works. How is this possible?

I've got a 4 way buffered ide interface (can't remember the make) with the following drives

Unit 0 Hard drive 20gb
Unit 1 Hard drive 30gb
Unit 2 LS120 drive, so I can read PC format HD disks. And I have OS3.9
Unit 3 CD rom

All of these work, if rather slowly as I am using FFS at present. Has anyone got any ideas? Is there any way that ide-fix can get loaded, without the C:idefix command in the startup-sequence?

J

@thomas

Hi Thomas,

Many thanks for putting me right on this. I had assumed that it would be the same as the first blocks (can't remember what they are called, mdb?) on a PC where the boot loader is stored (Grub/Lifo in the case of linux). If you overwrite that you can end up with a dud system that won't boot.

So I can have multiple file systems stored, which is good. I presume it's just a case of sticking sfs there using hdtoolbox and then partioning using that filesystem. Do I have to install the disk? or can I just copy the filesystem over? I think installing zaps the whole disk? Sorry if these sound stupid questions, it's been a while since I had to do any kind of HD work. Just shows how reliable my A1200 is!

J

Dear all,

I have just had merry fun getting my towered A1200 back from the dead after a system disk crash. The real pain involved getting information from the internet (PC) to the Amiga - no internet - using floppies. It was not fun!

Does anyone know of a way to connect an A1200 with eide and not a lot else to a card reader? I have not idea if it has a clock port and cannot get at the card thingy while it is in the tower.

Thought I saw the solution in Maplins (uk electronics store) as they were selling a dvd drive with card slots, but it turns out that the drive connects via eide and the card reader via usb. Not a lot of good. You can get adaptors that go from usb to eide, but has anyone seen one that goes eide to usb?

J.

<edit>

Hmmm, I just picked up Linux Format (in the UK) and there was a project in there that uses an eide to compact flash adaptor. You can also get compact flash to sd card adaptors. So an adaptor in and adaptor... Snag is that the eide to compact flash adaptor looks like it fits directly onto the eide interface, so you loose an entire bus and does not appear to be jumperable as a drive. Of course there is no guarantee it would work on an Amiga's 4 port extender anyway. Ho hum.
</edit>

@thomas

Hi,

I had a look at SFS and was going to give it a go, but got seriously put off by all the dire warnings (if it breaks tough kind of thing) in the documentation. I use Linux (ext2) so have used journalled file systems but I was not at all sure how sfs would work next to ffs drives. I have mac, ffs and linux partitions on a second disk and was concerned that sfs would not like to sit in an amiga with such a combination.

I was also rather baffled about whether you could have sfs and ffs partitions on the same drive (not the mac/linux one) since you have to place it into the rdb. Would I run into the usual problem with having multiple filing systems=multiple icons for the same drive? (PC0/DF0 sort of thing)

Finally having just got the amiga to work again I am rather loathed to install a filing system which would mean having to reformat all(?)/some of the partitions again and re-install. How easy is it to to play with sfs on a single partition without having to reformat the whole lot?

J.

@all

Dear erm, everyone?

Many many thanks for your replies. I found (after turning the place inside out) the activation code so IDEFIX no-longer whines.

I have also managed to get a 20 gb disk, which is now installed in my Amiga, and works... buts (you could feel that coming)

Disk access is much slower than the old 1 gb drive. I know that the FFS does slow down with bigger disks, but could anyone suggest ways of getting to be a bit quicker?


PS the 40 gb disk just refused to work - no idea why...

@Framiga

Oh rats! the idefix.library file was part of the backup. So I would have thought that this would have meant that I would not have to enter it again (?). I've just emailed Power Computing (who I bought it from some 9 years ago). In the vain hope I can either buy another copy or get the key from them. I also tried Elaboratebytes. Both are still going, but neither mention Amiga products. Power have Amiga as an option on their support email, so perhaps there is hope?

One thing I do not get is why the UAE install I have, which is basically a direct copy of my Amiga does not keep moaning that IDEFIX is an evaluation copy. Surely it should?

<edit>

Actually the serial number and company did come of the backup! But it still wants me to enter an activation key. So I guess that's what I need to find on the old disk, there must be a flag or something!


<edit>

Actually the plot thickens. The UAE version is 2003, the one on the Amiga is 2002... When I copy the UAE one to the Amiga and reboot, it goes back to 2002!

@meega

Many thanks, I'll look at the thread...
Right read it! I'll see what check4gb comes up with.

There are also mentions of SFS and TD64. The last I know of, though do not use since I am on 3.9 with IDEFIX 97 (but see ---below---). SFS sounds intriguing. A quick look around shows it's journalled (ala Ext2) has anyone had any experience of it? What compatibility issues are there re recovery software (see ---below---)

NTSC - NTFS yep got it wrong But can I quick format a NTFS drive and then use it on the amiga?


---below---

After much sweating I got to a stage where I could run disksalv (aminet version) on the old system disk and transfer as much as possible onto the borrowed HD (not the 40gb that I am still struggling with). This worked OK. I have the icons back in full colour and all looks OK. disksalv reported 8 errors. But I could not find out what they were.

The thing that has not worked however is IDEFIX which now has the correct serial number and company. But has lost the registration code! I guess this is somewhere on the old disk. Has anyone any ideas where?

J.

@cogvos1

Hi all,

Many thanks for the replies.

The Roms, are 3.1s as I upgraded when I purchased 3.5 so the 4 gb limit on boot makes sense, except...

I'm trying to format after the rom update has loaded. The Amiga boots and then boots again. So I should be able to format > 4gb? Or is there a limit to the size of the partition in 3.9. I know there used to be a 2gb dos limit, which TD64 could not overcome, but would guess that 3.9 does?

Am I still limited to 2gb partitions even though I can use a disk >4gb? HDtoolbox reports the disk as 37.9 GB.

Do I have to full format the partitions, or can I just quick format them? The disk will have been originally formated as PC (prob NTSC). It's the full format which is falling over, after taking ages to do so :/

On the Icon front I am truly baffled. The icons that are not being shown as 256 colour are the new icons! The ones that come off the 3.9 cd. They're all rendered as 2 colour, but the
screen mode is 256 colour pal. Weird....

Hope someone can help and once again many thanks for replying.