Prototype game on AmigaOne X5000

Today I wanted to take a look at a recently released game for AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition called Prototype from Dark Castle Software and ported to AmigaOS 4.1 by Kas1e. I tried it out on my AmigaOne X5000.

It is one of the first games to take advantage of the A-Eon released Warp3D Nova OpenGL ES 2.0 functionality. It is great to start to see games for AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition take advantage of the latest software developments that really push the functionality of the AmigaOne systems forward in 2019!

What surprised me was just how great a game this is! It is a modern remake of the classic Irem game R-Type, released on most 1980's/1990's computer/console formats, including on the Classic Amiga many years ago.

The graphics take advantage (and require) the new A-Eon Warp3D Nova and latest A-Eon Radeon HD drivers to function. So you also need to have a Southern Islands Radeon HD graphics card installed in your AmigaOne system or A-Eon Radeon HD driver supported AMD Radeon HD chipset card to play this game.

If you don't have Warp3D Nova or Radeon HD drivers yet, you can purchase it from Amistore, separately or as part of the Enhancer bundle. If you don't have Amistore installed on your AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition system you can download it from here.

The game Prototype itself is free and can be downloaded from os4depot here.

Once extracted to a drawer and the game launches, showing a nice animation and intro story to set the mood for the game:

There are some instructions on the main menu screen to help with the game, although anyone familiar with R-Type will not need to read this! Kill anything that moves!

Being a remake of R-Type, it is a sideways scrolling shoot-em up, with the usual power ups and enemies to fight. The impressive part is the quality of the graphics and sound, and the game is easy to pick up and play:

The power ups are great and make disposing of enemies much easier, but the game gets harder and harder as you go!

Some of the enemies are tricky to dispatch, but I never felt it was impossible at any stage. I think the difficulty curve is hard but fair.

I had such a big smile on my face playing the game on my AmigaOne X5000. Why? Because I am so glad to see quality games like this on my modern AmigaOne  system in 2019! It is great!

Here is the end of level boss and yep, he (it?) is hard to beat:

Sure enough, I couldn't beat him!

I uploaded a video to YouTube with a play through of part of Level 1 for those interested to see the game in action on my AmigaOne X5000 (apologies for my reflection on the screen in the video but my screen is very reflective!). The game runs smooth and looks fantastic in my opinion:

Basically, this is a great game. If you haven't already, download it today! I can't wait to see more Warp3D nova accelerated games on my X5000 soon!

AmiCygnix 1.4 on AmigaOne X5000

Today I am taking a look at the relatively recently released AmiCygnix 1.4 update for AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition on my AmigaOne X5000. Due to moving house I had to delay this blog post from December 2018 until I was set up again!

AmiCygnix is a X-windows implementation for AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition that allows you to run some Unix applications under AmiCygnix (separate screen) or standalone windows within AmigaOS 4. The advantage of this is access to Unix applications that are not yet available under AmigaOS 4!

I have looked in detail at Amicygnix in the past on this blog, covering a number of versions since 2012! 

https://amigax1000.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-started-with-amicygnix-11-on.html

https://amigax1000.blogspot.com/2012/11/amicygnix-12-upgrade-and-audacious-on.html

I installed the last 1.3 version update on my X1000 too but didn't cover it in the blog.

It has been a number of years since it was updated, and this update in late 2018 fixes the issue introduced in AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition and updated Radeon HD drivers prevented Amicygnix working on my X1000 with a Southern Islands Radeon HD card installed.

Slightly off topic - Since my last update I have made good progress on setting up my computer rooms, with my Next Gen AmigaOne A1222, X1000 and X5000 all setup.

Here is the X5000 up and running:

I decided to try out Amicygnix on my X5000. Since it has my X1000 setup copied over, it already has AmiCygnix 1.3 installed.

I downloaded the latest AmiCygnix 1.4 from os4depot.net - the base packages is here and the tools package is here. Once downloaded you get the drawer contents (once extracted) of the base package as below:

The installation works much the same as previous versions:

There is a installation readme that pops up to warn that you need significant space and it should be installed on a SFS2/SFS partition. In my case it is installed on SFS2 so we are good to go:

The installer picks up my previous 1.3 installation and offers to upgrade it - which of course I want to do!

I then grab a coffee while the files copy across:

Along the way it asks you to set the screen resolution for AmiCygnix. Since I am using a 1080p screen I choose 1920x1080x16:

The installer then asks for language and character set options - which I leave as default:

The installation then asks me to set the location, and automatically opens the drawer showing the countries and cities inside each:

Glad to see Australia and Adelaide are there, and I input them according to the instructions on the installer.

You also get the option to map unix Ctrl-X Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V keys to be usable under Amicygnix in addition to the usual Amiga+key combinations for cut, copy and paste functions. I choose to enable this:

I leave the next few options as per defaults:

The installer also reminds me that the MyX11Setup program allows customisation of Amicygnix from AmigaOS 4 as needed:

Some libraries needed are copied and caches and databases updated - I won't bore you with those screenshots!

With that done the installation is completed!

After a reboot, I then installed the new Amicygnix tools v1.4 package as well:

The installer works much the same:

As before, it detects my older 1.3 Amicygnix tools installation and offers to upgrade, which I do:

Eventually the installer completes:

With the installation all done, I fire up AmiCygnix using the Start_Amicygnix program in the installed drawer - I then get the main Amicygnix desktop appear as a separate screen under AmigaOS 4:

I fire up Audacious audio player to play some MP3's under Amicygnix 1.4:

I previously installed Gimp 2.6 image processor/editor/viewer and a number of other packages too, all available on os4depot for Amicygnix, which work well. Here is Gimp:

I then tested the standalone functionality of Amicygnix 1.4, by running Gnumeric as a 1024x768 window under the AmigaOS 4 Workbench screen:

You can drag the window around the AmigaOS 4 workbench as with any other window, and click inside the window to use the application running under AmiCygnix.

In Gnumeric you can save in Excel .xls format which is great as it means you can work on spreadsheets on the X5000 under Amicygnix 1.4 and then transfer easily to use on Mac or PC systems with Microsoft Office.

I look forward to the day when Libreoffice is available for AmigaOS 4 and we can do this natively, but this is still a good thing in 2019 that we can work on common Word and Excel documents with any Mac and PC owning friends!

As an aside I had to fix an issue with the X5000 when using MUI patched requesters like WinAmp, Odyssey, etc, which is related to the last version of MUI5 I installed in September 2018. It causes Grim reaper errors (which you can ignore) when opening drawers in the requesters, but getting them every time you use another program is quickly annoying. I disabled the patchasl MUI command from the s:user-startup added by the MUI installer and the issue went away. I should check if there is an MUI update to fix this...anyway, for now back to Amicygnix.

We can run Abiword under standalone mode in Amicygnix too, allowing us to edit and save Microsoft Word formatted documents under AmigaOS 4:

AmiCygnix has a start menu in the bottom left corner to launch games, utilities, applications and settings, and a taskbar for quick launch icons and running applications can be selected to switch focus as needed.

Under settings in the start menu you can customise the look and feel of Amicygnix. It is already set to mimic AmigaOS4 look and feel, but you can change this if you want to:

Of the cool features of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition which is carried over from the Classic Amiga earlier versions is the ability to "pull down" the workbench screen from clicking and holding the left button on the title bar, revealing the other opened screens behind.

For fun I did this again with Amicygnix 1.4 running on the rear screen, and AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition on the front. For good measure the standalone Gnumeric is running as a window within AmigaOS 4 as well! Very cool, and smooth operation while doing it too:

There is a lot more to explore with Amicygnix 1.4, and many applications available for it on os4depot so please give it a try!

My AmigaOne X5000 has arrived!

I am very excited to say that I finally saved up the money to get a AmigaOne X5000, and it arrived in the post this past week from AmigaKit in the UK. To say I am very excited to receive it is an understatement. 6 Years after I bought my original AmigaOne X1000 it is time to upgrade to the latest AmigaOne system in 2018!

I opted to purchase the full system in the case with the Boing ball cover and X5000 logo:

The case is smaller and lighter than my AmigaOne X1000 case.

Here it is side by side with my AmigaOne X1000 and Sam460CR systems. The A1222 is sitting on top of the Sam460Cr and is mostly not in view:

Next I took off the X5000 case to take a look at the interior:

I decided to include a 1TB hard disk, 4GB memory upgrades with this X5000 system.

I realise that the X5000 has been available for some time, with many articles covering it in some detail. So I won't go crazy with 10 million photos of the board - it is well documented already. But I am so glad to finally have one of my own:

The cardboard box inside the case located in the bottom bays contains the tower case spare parts and most importantly the recovery AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition USB stick.

I checked all the X5000 internal cards and cable connections to ensure everything was connected as it should be after it's long trek from UK to Australia!

Here is the rear view of the X5000, showing the usb ports, network ports and serial port for troubleshooting. There is a PCI sound card and network card in the bottom of the expansion bays.

Unlike the X1000 the X5000 doesn't have onboard sound so the sound card is necessary. The X5000 does have network driver support for the onboard network ports, but they still include an extra RTL8139 PCI network card with the system too.

Included with the system is the Enhancer Package CD, AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition registration card and X5000 technical reference manual. Unlike earlier systems there is no AmigaOS 4.1 final Edition CD included since the version released on the X5000 is a Prerelease version.

Instead, as mentioned earlier, there is a recovery USB stick to restore the system if something goes wrong with the hard disk installation that comes with the system.

I quickly hooked up the system to try it out.

I am pleased to say it booted up first time with no problems!

The default AmigaOS 4.1 final Edition Update 1 installation has Enhancer pre-installed, but initially using a low screen resolution (presumably for maximum monitor compatibility)

I quickly fixed that - 1080p tested and set using Screenmode prefs:

I also received a Boing ball keyring (with torch light), AmigaKit floppy disk labels with Amiga checkmark, and a Boing ball ruler:

The floppy disk labels will come in handy for me as I have some disks that need relabelling, and the torch on the boing ball key ring has already come in handy!

The Amiga 1200 board cardboard cutout frame was an interesting inclusion! Not sure what I will use it for.

I quickly fired up Tunenet and got some internet streaming music going while checking out some of the backdrops with Multiviewer - both part of the Enhancer package installed already with the X5000 out of the box:

Here are some screengrabs of the X5000 in action:

I was thinking to add my 2TB SATA disk to the X5000, but I will need to add a SATA PCI-e card to the X5000 first - it only has two SATA ports onboard - one is used for the DVD drive and another for the 1TB hard disk.

I would have to take out my SATA card from the Sam460CR to add the extra drive. This would render the Sam460cr inoperable since it has no onboard sata and needs the card. I might still do this though as I rarely use the Sam460cr these days. I might pick up another SATA card to backfill the sam460cr...

I am hoping to use the extra drive to host data for Linux and MorphOS builds on the X5000 in the future.

Unlike the X1000, the X5000 uses the UBoot firmware (similar to what is used on the Sam460Cr and also the upcoming A1222). You have an Early startup menu (like the Classic Amiga one) accessed by pressing enter while the X5000 boing ball animation boot screen is running.

The firmware is stored on a MicroSD card on the board, making upgrades easier to do and easy to revert in case of problems. This is also on the A1222 system board too.

From the UBoot early startup screen you have the option to boot AmigaOS, MorphOS, Linux, other boot options and System Information.


This is the System Information screen:

On the Other Boot Options menu option, you have the ability to Boot from hard disk, via DVD, Ethernet or USB Mass storage (which includes USB flash drives):

Booting from USB from UBoot is a new feature I haven't played with before. The recovery AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 USB stick included with the X5000 can be booted by using this menu option:

My issue here is that everything I use is on my X1000. Well over 700GB of stuff, not to mention the 6 years of customisation, upgrades and configuration of AmigaOS4.1 to get it the way I like it.

I really don't want to do all that work again. (Yeah I know, lazy Australian, etc)..

The X5000 hard disk (1TB) is split up into 20GB for the System drive, and the rest for Work partition.

I do plan to put MorphOS on the machine at some point, so it was necessary to use Media Toolbox to delete and recreate the Work partition to use 800GB instead of all of the space, leaving enough room to put a MorphOS system partition and Linux partition. The Work partition was empty as delivered, so nothing was lost by doing this step. I renamed Work to Work2 temporarily (you'll see why in a minute)

I read that MorphOS needs to be installed on the primary hard disk so I think this resizing step is quite important to avoid having to do everything again later on...

With that done, I then took out the sata hard disk from the X5000 and installed it in my X1000 for the large data transfer:

My X1000 already has two hard disks in it, the second one being for Linux. So I simply removed the Linux drive and swapped it with the X5000 drive.

With the X1000 now booted up, I needed to use the Mounter tool in the System drawer to mount the Work2 partition. This is because the device names (DH0 and DH1) are the same as the X1000 system drive partitions...

When the X1000 mounted the Work2 partition from the X5000 drive, it was easy to tell the two partitions apart by the name to avoid mistakes, which is of course why I named the X5000 partition Work2 temporarily..

With the disk mounted I set to work copying the 700GB of data from my X1000 Work partition to the X5000 Work2 partition. This took a number of hours to complete, so I just let it run.

On completion, I then created a X1000_System drawer on the X5000 Work2 partition. I then copied the full System partition from my X1000 to that drawer.

When that was all completed, I took the X5000 drive out and put it back into the X5000 system and booted up the X5000, now with all my data from the X1000. I renamed the Work2 partition back to be Work again.

With that done I then created a new drawer on the Work partition called X5000_System, and copied everything from the System partition to this drawer.

At the end of this process, it meant I have a full backup of the X1000 and X5000 System partitions on the Work partition on the X5000. This I believed was good insurance for the stupid thing I planned to do next...

I really, *REALLY*, didn't want to have to do all the work and configuration I did on the X1000 again on the X5000.

I decided to copy the X1000 System drawer contents over the top of the X5000 System partition. Yeah I know, stupid right?

And so it proved. I thought I could stop problems by changing the System:kickstart/kicklayout file to be the X5000 version and not the X1000 version.

I was partially right but not completely. I also removed the catweasel DF0 dosdriver since it is not installed on the X5000 and know it would cause problems. I thought that would be enough - I was wrong. Don't do what I did!

Sure enough, after rebooting the system wouldn't boot. I realised what I did wrong instantly but fixing it meant using the USB recovery stick since I could no longer boot to a working system.

When I tried booting from the USB recovery stick using the UBoot Other Boot options menu and selecting Boot from Mass Storage menu option, but it continued to boot the Sata disk everytime and fail, even though the USB stick was installed:

To resolve this, I removed the 1TB SATA disk from the X5000, and connected it to the X5000 via a SATA to USB adapter instead, after the USB recovery stick had loaded successfully on the X5000.

Note also that the USB recovery stick should be installed in the bottom USB ports at the back of the X5000.

Removing the SATA disk allowed the Recovery USB stick to boot as expected:

Yes, I have a Workbench screen again!

The lesson here - listen to your inner voice when it says you are doing something stupid. It is normally right :-)

The USB stick uses ADH0 and ADH1 device names, and System_Rec and Work_Rec partition names, so it doesn't clash with the 1TB SATA disk partitions at all :-)

With the USB AmigaOS 4.1 Recovery stick loaded, and the SATA disk connected via the USB to SATA converter, I could see the partitions (as above) and now fix my mistake, all thanks to taking a full backup first.

Of course I wanted to fix my mistake, but still don't want to lose my X1000 configurations. I don't want to do that work again. It took my 6 years of playing around to get it where it is.

So, to fix the problem I created copying the X1000 System backup drawer contents over the X5000 system drive, I first copied the full Kickstart drawer contents from the X5000 backup drawer on the Work partition to the System:Kickstart folder. This restores all the critical modules needed for the X5000. This was my main mistake in the process - I forgot to do this step, and only restored the kicklayout file.

I then did the same copy process for the Devs drawer and C drawer as the X5000 version contains different versions of programs to the X1000 contents.

These steps still keeps all my X1000 installed programs since it would only replace the X5000 needed files and not everything. I avoided copying over Prefs, S, etc, since all my X1000 settings and customisations are in there.

With that done, I then turned off the X5000, removed the USB stick and reconnected the 1TB SATA disk back into the X5000 SATA port.

On X5000 boot up on the SATA disk I could now get the Workbench again - success, and relief! In addition it now it has my full X1000 setup and customisations too! :-)

But I needed to fix up the internet settings for the network adapter, as the network adapter used in the X5000 and X1000 is different. I removed the incorrect X1000 adapter and added in the RTL8139 adapter in the X5000, restarted the network services and this was fixed.

So after some bumps in the road, I now have successfully moved my X1000 setup to the X5000 :-)

I also learnt a lot about how to recover the X5000 system, which is a good thing to know. Admittedly I didn't expect to have to learn it so soon but hey, it's all ok now.

I need to address some other points, like replacing Altivec versions of video players, etc, with non-Altivec versions as the X5000 doesn't have Altivec support, and linked library references but that will come later.

Something to note with the X5000 is that the USB ports on the top of the tower case don't work. This is because they are USB 3.0 ports and the X5000 board doesn't have support for those ports.

The A1222 board had the same issue with the case I bought for it, and I solved it with a USB 3 to USB 2 header converter cable.

I have a lot more to do yet with this X5000, but I will cover this in future blog entries. I am very glad to have the system at last!