MorphOS 3.13 and Iris Beta 71 Email on X5000

First off I must apologise for the slowness of blog updates this month. I have been quite ill for the past two weeks (especially the last week) with some kind of bad flu thingy. And no, I haven't travelled anywhere overseas or even Australia recently...I am still recovering, so I have been isolating and working from home (just in case) to protect work colleagues and family.

Despite this, I have still been doing some Amiga stuff this month.

Before I start on MorphOS 3.13, one thing I have been enjoying on weekends and evenings while being sick at home has been playing Worthy, Blood Money, Pinball Illusions and Simulcra on Classic Amiga 1200 and 500, as part of a monthly gaming high score competition being held on the amigaretro.com forum, run out of Brisbane, Australia for Australian (and other) Amiga users!

I didn't win, but did finish second in Worthy and Pinball Illusions (Babewatch table) high score competitions last month:

This month's ECS high score game is Simulcra, and I am leading the high scores so far :-)

My high score on Simulcra is 25725 - can you do better?

Feel free to join in on amigaretro.com forums if you want to take part too.

With the Coronavirus forcing a lot of people locally and globally to be at home, I am hoping more people will try to beat the high scores on their Amiga systems!

One other thing I have sorted out last week is my new NBN internet access. Since moving to my new home in January last year, I have been waiting for NBN to be available at this address, and using mobile 4GX internet in the meantime.

For those not in Australia, NBN (National Broadband Network) is Australia's new crappy internet to replace the even crappier ADSL we used before. Hand crafted by the best accountants in Canberra, the final version of the NBN supplied to most households is a mishmash of shitty technologies, resulting in far from optimal performance. For IT people like myself, it is incredibly frustrating to see the final crappy resulting internet rolled out to many homes (including mine).

Now it is available and it is installed in my house. I now have the maximum available NBN 100Mbps download speed (theoretically) to my house. In reality it is around 90Mbps during peak evening usage, but a big improvement on 16Mbps variable internet performance under 4GX and 8Mbps under ADSL I had before...so, it is better. My AmigaOne X5000, X1000 and other Classic Amiga systems can all use it too:

In reality, in the global scheme of Internet, Australia's internet speed is still awful. Truly awful. I had 1Gbps fibre internet direct to my apartment when living in Tokyo 10 years ago. 10Gbps is the standard now, with 100Gbps trials underway in Tokyo for the next phase...we are soo far behind.

Anyway, it is what it is. Here I now have 100Mbps download speed via Hybrid Fibre Coaxial Connection (Coaxial Cable from the nearest fibre node to my house) with 20Mbps upload. This makes doing blog posts much easier now for image uploading. On ADSL at my old place I have been uploading at 512kbps!! It took so long to upload photos for a single blog entry for years and years, but now no more!

Let's move onto MorphOS 3.13, released recently as a bug fixed version of MorphOS 3.12 released late last year.

We now have our first 2020 NG Amiga OS released which is exciting! I burned off the CD-R ISO image from the MorphOS team website to load onto my AmigaOne X5000.

I covered MorphOS 3.12 installation in some detail on my blog here in January, so I am not going into the same detail again here as I am just upgrading it to the new version.

The CD live booted into 3.13 and I started the installation process:

The installation prompts to upgrade the existing installation or start a new installation. I want to upgrade my current MorphOS 3.12 so I select that option:

The setup detects my 3.12 installation on the X5000, which I can select and then click on Update:

The copy then gets underway - time for a coffee and more fix me up pills...

Setup completed successfully:

With MorphOS 3.13 now installed I rebooted the AmigaOne X5000 to boot into the new environment. The main visual change is the window frame theme has been changed from the MorphOS original translucent gradient blue frames to the flat blue (more Workbench 3.1 looking) theme. I like the new theme actually, feels more Amiga now:

Because my purchased registration file is already installed on the system, the upgrade OS is already fully activated and works without any restrictions. It runs well.

I also took the opportunity to upgrade my Powerbook G4 15" to the latest 3.13 MorphOS release, which worked perfectly as well:

 I returned to my AmigaOne X5000 to download and try out the new Iris email program (Beta 71) under MorphOS 3.13. I am pleased to report it works very well with Gmail, supporting HTML format emails, embedded images in emails, and more.

There are some great developments going on for MorphOS like Iris, and provided at no cost for MorphOS users to get more value from their systems!

Some of the features of Iris email client are:

• Extensive IMAP support based on VMime, including local storage and folder management
• OAuth2 authentication support for GMail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail
• Support for all common authentication and security methods
• Support for custom / self-signed server certificates
• Encryption of passwords and authentication keys via cryptostorage.library
• Email account autoconfiguration
• Multiple accounts
• HTML email support within the application thanks to inclusion of WebKit
• Rich text email editing, including a spell checker
• Attachments including embedding images in emails
• Full Unicode support, everywhere in the application
• Massive multithreading for all of networking and I/O operations
• Read-only offline mode
• Support for OpenURL
• PDF export of emails

This is an exciting step forward for Email clients on NG Amiga.

The big feature for me with Iris is the ability to work with Gmail accounts (and others) using IMAP connections, rather than the older fiddly to configure POP3 connections required before.

Note that I originally did some screenshots below from 3.12 MorphOS on the X5000, which uses the older window frame theme. Iris functionality is unchanged under 3.13, it just uses a different window theme now as the default.

There is a nice wizard that walks you through the process to add your Gmail account to Iris:

After putting in your Gmail credentials, you are automatically redirected using Odyssey to Google to login using your Google account and allow the Iris email program to access your emails.

You need to allow Iris to access your Google account for the email functionality to work:

Once done, you are prompted to close the Odyssey web browser window:

The setup was completed successfully in Iris:

It then populates the mailbox view with the Gmail content using IMAP:

Under 3.13 MorphOS it still works just as well, now with the new window theme.

Using Iris under MorphOS 3.13 I sent a test email from the X5000 to validate Iris sends email successfully from Gmail - I embedded an image in the email to test that too:

The email sent successfully and received in Iris (as I sent it to myself), so I can could see the HTML format email displays correctly with the embedded image in it. Success!

In the Iris settings, you can adjust the appearance of the columns, default font and spell check:

Under Accounts option in the Iris title bar menus, you can adjust the Gmail settings, and also your Email signature to use when composing emails, so you can tell everyone you are emailing them from your AmigaOne X5000! Spread the word!

Having now got Iris working well under MorphOS 3.13, I then relaxed listening to a MorphOS music disk demo from Uprough called Saturday at Joes EP - an oldie but a goodie:

That's it for today - I hope you enjoy playing around with MorphOS 3.13 on your AmigaOne X5000, Sam 460 or the other supported older PowerPC Mac systems!

Amiga 500 updates

As readers will know, I bought a replacement Amiga 500 recently, and have started migrating my upgrades from the non-working A500 to the "new" one.



This meant breaking the original seal on this Amiga 500 to take a look inside. All things considered and considering it's age, not too bad. Bit of rusting on the top metal shield, but I don't intend to keep that in place anyway.

Removing the shield, here is the Amiga 500 board laid bare, with the 512k memory expansion card I got from AmigaStore.eu:

Looking at the revision information on the board reveals this is a Revision 7 board.

On my non-working A500, I previously installed a gotek floppy emulator board with a 3D printed case designed to fit the Amiga floppy opening without any modifications needed to the case:

Here it is installed in place of the original internal floppy disk drive:

Next, I focused my attention to the Even CIA chip, which needs to be removed to install the DF0 selector hardware switch, with the even CIA chip then placed on top of it.

By doing this, I can still boot real Amiga floppy disks using the external floppy drive by flicking the DF0 selector switch to use the external floppy drive port as DF0, rather than the internal floppy drive (now the Gotek).

I tested this using a Workbench 1.3 floppy disk in the external floppy drive with the DF0 selector set to use the external floppy port as DF0 and it worked perfectly:

I then installed the USB stick into the internal Gotek floppy drive, and switched the DF0 selector back to the internal floppy drive. I could then test important stuff works using the gotek, like demos for example:

For those not familiar with the Gotek, it is a floppy drive emulator connected to the floppy drive connector, and can boot Amiga .ADF floppy disk image files from USB stick.

You can select the floppy disks by booting the included selector.adf floppy disk image (set up to use position 000 on the Gotek).

When booted the selector software boots up and allows you to associate gotek display numbers to specific Amiga .ADF disk files, as below:

The annoying bit is you need to take a photo of the screen showing the mappings, since you almost certainly won't remember which number is which later on and need it to know which number to select on the Gotek...

With the Amiga 500 case on, you can see the gotek snugly fits in the floppy drive space without any modifications to the case. It makes me sad to see people cut up the floppy drive opening to fit the gotek in. It looks awful and it prevents installing a real floppy drive if wanted again later on. This solution is much neater in my opinion:

You can insert the usb stick and press the buttons from outside the case to select the floppy disk image number without a problem. Time for more demos! Time for "Sunglasses at night" :-)

Up until now I have been using the AmiVGA RGB to VGA converter plug and my 15khz compatible TFT display.

But now I have installed my Indivision ECS from the old Amiga 500, which gives me a scan doubled de-interlaced VGA output that I can use on my standard TFT screens (normally I use with my A4000T), so I hooked them up. (photo taken from the old Amiga 500 - but the setup is exactly the same)

I also connected my ACA500 expansion card on the left side of the Amiga 500, with an Amiga 1200 A1233 030 33Mhz accelerator from Individual Computers plugged into the A1200 accelerator board slot on the ACA500. This gives me 030 acceleration, twin CF 4GB hard disk support and 128MB of FastRAM from the accelerator!

Alternate view of the ACA500 with the casing (photo taken from the old Amiga 500):

With the casing back on, things are looking great!

The ACA500 also gives me softkick 1.3/3.1 boot support in it's memory without the need to swap the kickstart roms onboard the A500. I can boot in 1.3 or 3.1 mode from a boot selection menu on power up, with plenty of customisation options for the settings for those boots.

I also installed the Subway USB into the ACA500 casing (small space available within the casing next to the A1200 accelerator to fit it exactly!), connected to the A1200 clock port connector on the ACA500. This gives me USB support on my Amiga 500 hard disk setup as well! (sorry I didn't grab a photo of the Subway USB installation)

I also connected the Rys II USB mouse adapter to the A500 so I can use a standard USB mouse with the Amiga (no driver needed) and avoid a mouse pad and regularly cleaning the mouse ball on a real Amiga mouse. At the moment I use a spare USB mouse from my AmigaOne X1000!

I bought the recently released OCS game called Worthy, and put the ADF onto my Gotek to try it out on the Amiga 500. It is a very nice game indeed. I would love to see more new games for the Amiga.

The graphics are classic Amiga, very pretty, good sound and the gameplay is fun too!

For now my Amiga 500 is where I want it to be upgrade-wise. I could install the Vampire 500 V2 into it, but as regular readers know, that is how I ended up with a non-functional Amiga 500 in the first place. I am happy with it at this point. I will leave well enough alone this time!

I am giving thought to putting the Vampire 500V2 back into the A2000HD with a CPU slot adapter to solve the previous problem of it being unreliable on the A2000 68000 slot (popping off on cool down needing the case and internal floppy drive frame assembly to be removed every time I powered on). I have recently picked up a CPU slot adapter for this purpose. A likely future project when I have free time for it.