My Amiga Blog is back in business!

Hi All,

I am pleased to say that my study is finished for the year and exams done too as of today! This of course means that I can now return to my blog again!

It's good to be back.

It has not been an easy time for me since I stopped the blogs back in July. My father in law passed away suddenly in Japan in mid August which meant stopping everything to go to Japan to arrange and attend the funeral. It has been tough for my wife to deal with, being so far away from Japan and not being able to say goodbye.

In addition I have been quite unwell over the past few months, culminating in an emergency ambulance to hospital last month and a not so fun visit to the emergency room and lots of tests and pain pills. Fortunately things are on the improve and I feel considerably better now.

I have been studying when I have not been working, juggling that with my Adelaide Retro Computing Group responsibilities, continuing to help organise and run the monthly meetings.

Unfortunately it seems that the December 2017 Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting may well be the last one. :-(

The other two organisers have decided to stop being involved from the end of this year, which leaves just me to carry on the groups activities. Given my health issues and lack of free time to take on running it by myself, I was left with no choice but to close the group down with the last meeting coming up this Friday December 8th. Hopefully we can see some of you there! I never say never of  course, and if someone is able to commit to help running the events for at least 12 months then maybe we can find a way to continue in 2018. We'll see how that pans out.

Just because I have been busy (and off air) does not mean I have been idle on all things Amiga. Far from it.

Those who follow my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts will know I have continued to muck around with my Amigas still during this period when time allowed. I also mucked around a bit with my new FM Towns system too, but that is not really relevant to this blog so...

There have been some great Amiga demos released this past few months on the Classic Amiga, both AGA and OCS/ECS demos!

I have also continued my AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition beta testing duties on the new AmigaOne A1222, but unfortunately can't discuss that since that work is covered under NDA.

I recently wanted to get the Vampire 500 V2 into my Amiga 500, but that meant fixing the Amiga 500, which has not worked since the last time I tried to use the Vampire in it...heh.

While mucking around with troubleshooting that, I reseated all the chips, and unfortunately managed to break some of the pins on the fat agnus chip when removing it! Argh! So the A500 went into storage until I could source another one.

Finally though I managed to get another one from Germany recently, so I pulled apart the A500 again to hopefully get it working:

My Amiga 500 has an Indivision ECS installed, as well as a gotek mounted on a 3D printed floppy chassis that is designed to fit the A500 case without any modifications:

Here is the missing Fat Agnus chip location:

Here it is with the new Fat Agnus chip installed:

Unfortunately though, the system still doesn't boot and work as expected. Green screens, red screens and black screens, with no idea what the issue is yet... I tried changing the CPU, the kickstart roms and even installed the Vampire 500 V2 again minus the cpu and kickstart roms but no joy as yet. Sigh, back into storage for now until I can come up with another way to fix it or replace the motherboard. Looking like that path is more likely...

So I hooked up the Amiga 600 to make sure it was still working and put it all back together as a complete system again. Here it is working great:

Back in August 2017 at the Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting, some friends and I organised a two player null modem link up between my Amiga 2000HD and a friend's Amiga 4000D. It made for a lot of fun that night, although being beaten so badly at link up two player Stunt Car Racer made me feel very embarrassed - I thought I was good at that game! At least I won at Lotus 2 and Vroom :-)

As you may recall my Amiga 2000HD was downgraded from the Vampire installation that was in it before, and now has a 68030 accelerator and 68882 FPU, 128MB fast memory, Picasso II RTG AmigaOS 3.9 BB2 Workbench, Rapid Road USB installed on X-Surf 100 network card, Prisma Megamix card, MegAChip (2MB CHIP), Oktagon SCSI card with 1GB HD (need to upgrade that still), SCSI CDROM, Indivision ECS and kickstart switcher 1.3/2.0/3.1. Whew. :-)

The Amiga 4000D here next to my A2000HD is not mine, but does have the new MNT VA2000 RTG Zorro graphics card installed, 060 and plenty of other goodies too:

Let's take a closer look at the MNT zorro RTG graphics card, with scan doubled pass through native Amiga display addon with HDMI output:

Meanwhile, reviewing on things that happened since the blog stopped, back in July 2017 I replaced the CDTV SCSI card module I bought a long time ago now (and had plenty of issues with it too) with a new one I found on Ebay. This one works a lot better and much more consistent - the old one is on the left, the new one on the right:

The new one is a lot simpler on board as you can see:

It still has the internal SCSI cable, as well as the external SCSI connector, and a SCSI card disable switch.

I hooked up my old Amiga 2000HD 52MB SCSI hard disk to it and it worked perfectly - here playing some mods using Octamed Professional v3 on the hard disk:

Of course I soon got distracted, playing Psygnosis demo CD, and some music too - the CDTV is so great for CD playback:

I also tried out my Defender of the Crown Extended Collector Edition CDTV version (not pictured).

I got into playing Xenon 2 Megablast, the CDTV version. The audio is fantastic on this compared to the original Amiga version. As a big fan of Bomb the Bass, I was glad to finally here the remixed versions of their Megablast (Hip Hop On Precinct 13) included on the CDTV version:

I received a spare Amiga 4000D from a friend in Sydney that has been tower converted (not working) with a number of interesting expansions, including the rare Picasso IV Paloma add on! :-)

This A4000D has been towerised in a Dell Inspiron desktop case from the late 1990's with plenty of modifications.

Cyberstorm 060 accelerator with 128MB memory and the optional SCSI addon installed, connected to the SCSI Hard disk and SCSI CDROM:

Also installed is a USB v1 zorro card I haven't seen before, with the Picasso IV Paloma and PVE 2.0 expansion installed:

Once the daughterboard and cards are removed (difficult job given they were mounted into a customised cage, you can see the Amiga 4000D motherboard, 16MB memory, along with a Varta battery installed. Argh! Get that off quick! (Yes, I did...)

You can see the mouse/joystick extension cables to route the A4000D ports on the motherboard to new locations on the rear of the case, since they would otherwise be completely inaccessible.

Unfortunately although this system looks impressive and powers on, there is nothing appearing on the screen and does not boot. I have stripped it of all non-essential boards and still nothing. I have tried a known working cyberstorm 060 and even the original Commodore 040 accelerator board from my own A4000D but no go...guess this one also goes into the too hard basket for now.

Just to prove that not everything Amiga related is Classic Amigas, I also installed the updated Enhancer v1.3 software package from A-EON Technology on my AmigaOne X1000.

I enjoyed greatly the updated PTP functionality in Enhancer on AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1, which allows me to transfer my photos and videos from my iPhone 7 to my X1000!

I have to say this is a really big step forward on AmigaOS 4.1 final Edition Update 1, thanks to Enhancer - it works great:

Here it is showing previews of the photos on my iPhone, allowing me to select the photos for transferring to my X1000:

Here is the transfer underway. And yes, I do have a lot of photos on my iPhone!

 I also played around with the new updated Radeon HD and Warp3D Nova drivers, enjoying the live workbench cube demonstration, which has a rotating cube with each face containing a live view of my Workbench screen. As I move the mouse and windows around, it updates on the cube in real time. Very cool:

Last but not least, I also played around with the updated E-UAE with SDL RTG support, which allows me to get full screen 1920x1080 emulated Workbench OS3.9 on my X1000:

Here is the lines highlighted in the E-UAE configuration file .uaerc I had to modify to get the RTG card support, which I could then setup through Picasso 96 under the emulated OS3.9 installation on the X1000:

Here is the resulting 1080p AmigaOS3.9 emulated Workbench screen on my X1000. I could switch easily between it and the normal AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 screen with the Amiga-M/N keyboard combination.

Well that should bring up mostly up to speed with what I have been up to during my time away. I did installed a replacement RapidRoad USB into the X-Surf 100 on my Amiga4000D system too, and finished the reinstall of the Amiga 1200 system hard disk, which I have been enjoying many 030 AGA demos as I have been typing this entry tonight!

Oh, and I recently tweaked the appearance of this Amiga blog, using a new theme Blogger has available now that looks much more modern. Still finding my way around it (having some trouble with the image on the left which doesn't auto size right for some reason) and expect to tweak it some more still. Happy to receive feedback on what works well and what doesn't.

I will hopefully do a few more blog entries before the Xmas break. Stay tuned!

AmigaOne A1222 Debian 9 build

I am very sorry for the delay in posts from mid June to now. There have been several very good reasons for it.

First up, I recently lost my job through redundancy, and secondly I have not been well at all for the past few weeks too. I hope you can understand why I have been quiet!

Despite this, being quiet on this blog does not mean I have been idle. On the contrary, I have been working in my beta tester capacity on testing linux builds on the AmigaOne A1222 of late. 

As regular readers should be aware (as I mentioned it earlier this year), I am unfortunately not allowed to discuss AmigaOS4.1 testing on the AmigaOne A1222 as it is covered under NDA.

Linux testing is fine to discuss though. On the A1222, I upgraded my Debian 8 installation to the latest Debian 9 Sid build, following the substantial work of the A-EON Open source team members to get the PowerPCSPE version builds running 24/7 builds on a couple of A1222 systems to the very latest, still in development, linux builds!

Getting newest version linux kernel builds working on the A1222 (and X1000/X5000/Sam460) has been a priority also.

I have previously produced several articles in 2016 on initial building and testing on the A1222. If you want to do some catch up reading of my A1222 system (including Classic Amiga emulation) please check out these articles:

My A1222 has arrived!
Debian Linux on AmigaOne A1222
Classic Amiga emulation on AmigaOne A1222
New case for AmigaOne A1222

I was keen to try out the latest development linux versions on my A1222 with E-UAE to run Amiga systems, so I fired it up, changed my sources to the dev builds and run the apt-get dist-upgrade option.

I put up some photos of these upgrade results already for those following my Facebook profile...but I know not everyone uses it.

For everyone else who is not on Facebook, here is some screenshots from my AmigaOne A1222 of the latest Debian 9 sid build and 4.7.0RC2 kernel running JIT E-UAE with my Amiga 4000 AmigaOS 3.9 hard disk setup!

I also tested new linux kernels 4.4.6, 4.5.0 and the latest 4.7.0RC2 kernel too - they all work well on the A1222!

I even installed the Xfce4 desktop on the Debian 9 Sid build for a much nicer desktop than the default one - here it is running Pen Pal under Amiga 2000 emulation on E-UAE:

Getting this running well has been very satisfying, and the help of the A-EON Open source team with my questions has been invaluable - thanks guys for your patience!

Building of new PowerPCSPE version packages is still ongoing, and I look forward to trying out some other new things on the AmigaOne A1222 system I can share soon!

MorphOS 3.9 - OS4 Theme and Classic Amiga emulation

After mucking around with AmigaOS4 themes in Linux on my new AmigaOne A1222 last week, it inspired me to see if I could do something similar in MorphOS 3.9 on my Powerbook G4 this week. As it turns out, I could!

Now, before people get too defensive, I just wanted to see if it was possible. I know MorphOS fans generally prefer the Ambient GUI look, but since I predominantly use AmigaOS 4.1 nowadays and use MorphOS less often, I find I personally prefer the AmigaOS 4.1 look better - it feels more Amiga to me. You may feel differently - no worries, the nice thing is we can all have it set up how we want it!

I found an interesting guide on how to achieve this transformation here. I won't explain it any further as this guide does such a good job to be honest!

Now, you can go crazy with it (as per the guide), removing MorphOS features and changing the icons for AmigaOS icons and so on for an exact(ish) match, but I don't want to change MorphOS functionality - it is a different NG Amiga operating system after all. I just prefer the drawer frames, Title bar, etc to look like AmigaOS 4.1.

Job Done!

Last time I looked at MorphOS on the blog was on the Sam460CR and Powerbook G4 in May 2015 when MorphOS 3.8 was released. Wow, has it been that long - time does fly! Unfortunately the subsequent MorphOS 3.9 update in June 2015 has not fixed the issues I experienced on the Sam460CR back then, which is a shame.

That said, MorphOS works great on the Powerbook G4!

While I had MorphOS 3.9 fired up on the Powerbook G4, I took care of some other housekeeping -  namely, updates!

Fortunately the Grunch tool exists to make this less painful by letting you know what versions of games, tools and utilities you have installed on your system are out of date, and a simple install process to update them automatically.

After upgrading it's own database to reflect changes, Grunch gets busy checking my system for updates needed:

For those curious, MorphOS has a very different way of file management to AmigaOS 4.1, and yet still similar in some ways to AmigaOS.

As you can see above, drawer in MorphOS have a navigation bar across the top. This functionality is absent in AmigaOS 4.1 unless you run Directory Opus 5.91 in Workbench replacement mode.

In addition, in MorphOS you have the option to quickly navigate to previous folders by clicking on the directories in the navigation bar. This functionality is similar to Windows and Linux.

You can also choose the icon view, rather than the list view. As you can see it renders AmigaOS 3.1 icons (Newicons and MagicWB icons) very well indeed:

Grunch has now finished it's sweep and reported back with the updates needed - I get into it as there are quite a few I have to do:

Here is MPlayer being updated:

 
MorphOS 3.9 also has available a slightly newer version of Odyssey 1.24 web browser for it. The AmigaOS 4.1 version of Odyssey is 1.23, and for AROS it has a newer version of Odyssey than both of them - 1.25. Odyssey source code has recently been made available for anyone to develop so hopefully we will see more enhancements soon.

The MorphOS focused Morph.zone and WarmUp websites render well, as expected:

My MorphOS 3.9 system has the Chrysalis Pack installed from an earlier version of MorphOS 3.7 (I did an upgrade to 3.9 - not a fresh install). It installs most tools and utilities people need for a well functioning MorphOS installation, as shown below:

Currently the Chrysalis Pack for MorphOS 3.9 is temporarily unavailable while they fix some issues with it. Hopefully people will be able to get it again soon.

Preferences in MorphOS 3.9 are very different to AmigaOS 4.1. Instead of individual preference icons in the Prefs drawer, MorphOS combines all the preferences into the one Preferences application, in a similar way as MacOS X does:

When you select a setting, it opens within the same Preferences application:

Screen blanker settings - note that GLMatrix works flawlessly on the Powerbook G4:

Laptop specific settings:

USB settings - this is Poseidon, also used on AmigaOS 4.1 and AmigaOS 3.1/3.5/3.9 too.

Last, but not least, is MUI. MUI for MorphOS is different to the MUI developed for AmigaOS4.1 and AmigaOS 3.1. That is a shame, as it no doubt creates little incompatibilities here and there. Unlike the AmigaOS4.1 and 3.1 versions, registration keyfile for MUI is not needed.

Moving away from Preferences, I was keen to try out some of the new games for MorphOS, the main one being the MorphOS port of Amiga Racer, which I have been trying out on AmigaOS 4.1 on the AmigaOne X1000 recently as well.

As you would expect, it runs perfectly under MorphOS 3.9 with the Powerbook G4.

Live update worked well also, as the game was updated from 2.7 to 2.7a while I was testing it on MorphOS! Indeed it has been updated again while I have been writing this blog entry! :-)

Next, I got busy with setting up E-UAE 1.0.0 JIT under MorphOS 3.9. Previously I just used the right click run in E-UAE 0.8.49 WIP functionality added automatically by the Chrysalis Pack.

However, this is a bit limited for me as it is intended for booting ADF floppy disks. I really wanted to boot the backups of my Classic Amiga systems under MorphOS, and also use the new JIT for running AGA demos, as I already do under AmigaOS 4.1 on the AmigaOne X1000.

The setup can be a bit daunting, but fortunately there is a nice PDF document prepared  that explains how to get everything up and running on MorphOS. You can download it from here.

You can download the E-UAE_1.0.0 JIT for MorphOS from here.

The extracted E-UAE_1.0.0-JIT drawer looks like this:

 
So, time to grab a coffee while I copy the files across to the extracted E-UAE_1.0.0-JIT/HardDisks drawer:

While that was underway I went into the E-UAE_1.0.0-JIT/Conf drawer to start editing the configurations:

I copied the A500-hires.conf to a new A2000-hires.conf so I could setup the Amiga 2000 hard disk I copied across:

Here is the config file, showing the changes made - I highlighted the hard disk line I put in (note that the Amiga 2000 hard disk was labelled Apps: originally (long story), hence I kept the name so that the startup-sequence works without issues. For most people this would normally be called Workbench:

I then run E-UAE and call the A2000-hires.conf file from the MorphOS shell. BTW I am aware that the JIT has no benefit on an A2000 configuration, but bear with me - that is coming:

It works perfectly - my Amiga 2000 system now running under MorphOS 3.9 - excellent:

Here is the Shell showing the successful run of the emulation:

I made a mistake with the fastmem size as you can see, so I adjusted it back to 1 (instead of 3) and then it worked fine.

You can also run the emulation in a window (rather than full screen) by modifying the A2000-hires.conf line that reads:

amiga.screen_type=custom

to be:

amiga.screen_type=public

It then runs nicely in a window on the MorphOS desktop:

I put it back to full screen to enjoy my favourite thing on Classic Amigas - demos. I ran a number of demos - this one is of course Interference by Sanity:

So having got the Amiga 2000 system working on MorphOS 3.9, next up was the Amiga 4000D system. I still have both of these actual systems  - these are just backups of the hard disks from both so I can use my normal setups under emulation. It is also future proofing for that terrible day when they eventually stop working...

The Amiga 4000 hard disk runs AmigaOS 3.9, and I setup the config file as follows:

I then ran the emulation from the Shell as before:

Here is the resulting Amiga 4000 running with E-UAE JIT on MorphOS:

I had to run a few AGA demos to test out the JIT - Mad Wizards - yes I think so...looking good!

Ephidrena - Fake Elektronik Lightshow also runs well on MorphOS under E-UAE JIT:

As a final test I tried out some WHDLoad ECS games under the Amiga 4000 emulated system - it works well too:

The next MorphOS upgrade is expected to be 3.10, with support for the new AmigaOne X5000 system. This should be very exciting indeed as it should be faster than my current Powerbook G4 is!

For now MorphOS 3.9 is fun to play with...as long as the demos, mod players and trackers are working I am happy!

The MorphOS dev team are also working on MorphOS NG, to run on x86 PC's in the future. So there is certainly plenty of active development going on for MorphOS in 2016!