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!

AROS Vision on Amiga 4000T Part 1

It occurred to me that I have not yet tried AROS Vision 68k on my Amiga 4000T, and with the announcement of an updated version recently I thought I would give it a go!

Currently AROS Vision 68k has two versions for Real Amiga systems - a PAL barebones version, and an RTG version for 060 Amiga systems like my Amiga 4000T. The website to download them from is here.

Here is the contents of the AROS Vision PAL barebones archive:

Logically though I wanted to try the RTG version, which was 1.6GB archive and almost 2.6GB when uncompressed as it included a lot of software in it already configured for use in AROS Vision and apparently supports Mediator PCI cards too. This appealed to my Australian laziness gene :-)

To use this RTG version of course meant I needed to have a 4GB partition for it.

Given I installed Amikit Real 8.5 on a MicroSD card in the Amiga 4000T recently (Part 1, Part 2, Final), I thought it made good sense to use a new 4GB MicroSD card in my IDE to SD Card converter for the test, removing the AmiKit setup temporarily so I could try it out.

This means I needed to prep a new 4GB MicroSD card in the Amiga 4000T for use by AROS Vision. So I fired up my older AmigaSYS4 OS3.9 build on the 127GB IDE hard disk still in my Amiga 4000T so I could do this.

I ran HDToolbox, which picked up the 4GB MicroSD card ready to prepare the RDB for it:

I didn't need to modify the detected size, so I installed the disk, with the obligatory warning of course:

HDToolbox then auto partitions the MicroSD into 3 partitions as below:

I blew this away and started fresh with one 3.6GB partition using all the disk, calling it AROS0:

I then went into Add/Update to add the SmartFileSystem to the RDB for the MicroSD card:

Now I have the Smartfilesystem (SFS) partition support on the MicroSD RDB.

I could then modify the partition AROS0 from Fast File System (International) - called Standard File System in the dialog box below) to use CFS\00 which is SFS, and adjusted the block size to 512 as recommended:

Changed and ready to save:

The warnings about destroying the existing partitions comes up of course:

I then had to reboot:

After the reboot I then got the uninitialised AROS0 ready for formatting:

I quickly formatted the disk and labelled it AROS:

The formatted disk ready:

I copied the AROS Vision RTG archive zip to a USB stick and unzipped from the usb stick directly to the new AROS partition using the shell:

This took a long time. I let it run through the evening and it finished late at night:

I then moved all the drawers from the AROS_Vision drawer to the root of the AROS partition.

The AROS partition now has the files copied and moved to the right place as you can see below:

Having got this far, I was excited to try it out, so I rebooted and went to the early startup menu to select the AROS0 drive to boot from (I set it to be a lower boot priority than AmigaSYS4 so I need to select it each time this way when I reboot). As you can see the drive appears, ready to select:

However I hadn't read the instructions on the AROS forums here - apparently some customisations needed to be made first to the startup-sequence and other things to boot AROS Vision on a real Amiga. So I booted back into AmigaSYS4 to make the changes needed.

I needed to copy across the Picasso96 .card and .chip files for the graphics card I am going to use with AROS Vision - in my case Voodoo.card since I am using a Voodoo3 PCI card in my Amiga 4000T.

I then went into the startup-sequence on the AROS:s/ location to disable the Poseidon PsdLoadModule (as I have it preloaded in the Deneb USB card flash rom on booting):

Next I needed to move the Setpatch QUIET command to occur after the AROS bootstrap load command, which I also had to change to reflect the location of the AROSbootstrap and picasso96 drivers I copied across earlier:

For some reason the AROSbootstrap location in the startup-sequence is wrong, so I had to change it as shown above.

The next problem I ran into was that the files in C and elsewhere were not set executable as extracted from the archive file. I don't know why this would be, so I set about changing the settings on all the files in the partition to be executable.

After this I could boot from the AROS Vision drive, but only to a point:

It freezes at this point every time. I can't cancel or do anything with the mouse. Hmmmm.

I noted that the AROS Vision RTG archive had Picasso96 driver files for Picassoiv setup already, so I assume the author was using a PicassoIV. I took apart my Amiga4000D to get the PicassoIV card out to try this possibility:

The PicassoIV is a great card, and I am very glad to have one - it supports true colour screen modes and also scan doubles all standard Amiga screen modes through the same card, meaning only one screen is needed to see either:

The Amiga4000T has two video slot expansion ports in it, so I can add the PicassoIV in addition to the Indivision AGA and Voodoo3 PCI without changing anything! :-)

Having switched the primary output from the indivision aga to picassoiv (actually both output at the same time, I just move the vga cable between them), I then tried to test AROS booting. First though I updated the startup-sequence to use the PicassoIV.card instead of Voodoo.card.

Unfortunately, no go with the Picassoiv either - same errors as before!

Not sure why env: is complaining. It comes up before the machine freezes at the "Debug info" line. I even tried moving the ENV: declaration near the top of the startup-sequence as well without any change.

Perhaps AROS Vision doesn't like SFS on a real Amiga - does it need to be FFS? Might try that next time.

I ran out of time at this point, so I put the AmiKit Real 8.5 MicroSD back in while I have a further think about how to get this working.

Hopefully some helpful tips from some AROS guys out there who might know what the problem is...more to come.