My Amiga 500 has arrived

So this weekend I received a surprise to play with from George, the president of the Adelaide Retro Computing group - a stock standard Classic Amiga 500! Thanks mate! The first challenge of course being that it doesn't work and I needed to work out why before I could use it!

I haven't had an Amiga 500 since around 2004 when I sold it to raise funds for my Amiga 4000T. It is nice to have one again in 2016 :-)

When I hooked up the Amiga 500 at home with my external scan doubler to VGA converter it flashed the power led and the screen was Yellow. Not a great start!

I took a few pictures of the Amiga 500 itself, which seems in good condition externally:

So I pulled the case off the Amiga 500 so I could have a good look around:

I then remove the metal shield protecting the motherboard, exposing the A500 board:

A quick snoop turned up that this particular Amiga 500 is a Revision 5 board, and has a Fat Agnus chipset, meaning it is an ECS machine (not OCS).

Here is the yellow screen - apologies for the strange lines, but the external Scandex scan doubler I was using is poor quality - but good enough to see what is going on for now:

The yellow status screen means either the CPU or an expansion card is faulty. Since no expansion cards are installed, that means the 68000 CPU is not working...

Luckily for me I have a spare 68000 CPU I could slot in, so I set to work removing the old one and putting in the new one. Below is a pic of the new one installed on the left and the old faulty one nearby on top of the Fat Agnus chip:

So I powered on the Amiga 500 again and bingo, I get the insert disk screen - excellent!

Next up was trying out the floppy drive, which I quickly found was faulty.

Since I didn't have an immediate solution to this, I decided to connect up my ACA500, which I think will be perfect for this Amiga 500!

I used this previously on the Amiga 1000 back in this blog post if you would like to see more information about the ACA500.

Here is the ACA500 connected to the Amiga 500, ready to test:

The ACA500 worked straight away and I selected the Kickstart 3.1 boot up, which soft kicks the 3.1 kickstart into the ACA500's memory, and then boots the hard disk from the CF card:

That being done, I set about fixing the awful video output. I bought a Indivision ECS to install into the Amiga 1000 a few months ago but that didn't go well! So it seemed the perfect opportunity to install it into the Amiga 500:

I removed the Denise chip, ready to install the Indivision ECS in it's place and put the Denise chip on top of the Indivision ECS.

Here it is, all plugged into to the Denise socket:

All connected up now, I then fed the VGA cable through the small gap in the left hand zorro slot expansion and powered on. It worked! Of course this looks so much better!

Next I reconnected the ACA500 which slotted in nicely and didn't get in the way of the vga cable running through the slot - the ACA500 booted up no problem:

I then set about fixing the workbench overscan settings in preferences to line up the Indivision ECS display with my screen:

That done, here is the Workbench 3.1 with DOpus running in Workbench replacement mode:

The lack of memory (only the 512k onboard since the ACA500 memory is used to soft kick the kickstart 3.1) makes things pretty unusable at the moment:

Next I sourced an Amiga 600 floppy drive to make sure the floppy can work correctly:

The A600 floppy drive worked perfectly on the Amiga 500, here booting the Workbench 1.3 disk:

I also ran a Razor 1911 Voyage demo to test the sound, which was working perfectly also:

There is still plenty more to do, but this Amiga 500 is already starting to show plenty of promise. More to come in a future blog post!

Updated SMTube on X1000

Today I wanted to take a look at the recently updated SMTube 16.6.0 for AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition on the AmigaOne X1000.

SMTube is a program for playing back YouTube videos via a simple search GUI, without all the pesky ads and annoying pop ups you get on the YouTube website itself. Ironic that YouTube Red charges a monthly fee to remove the ads, when this program does it for free...

Since the last time I looked at this program on this blog, YouTube has updated their website multiple times, most likely to ensure it breaks this program so it no longer worked under AmigaOS4 or other platforms SMTube is available on.

However, the good news is that this latest version of SMTube solves the problems and now can work again with YouTube! Zzd10h handled the work on porting this to AmigaOS 4.1 - thanks mate!

Firing up my X1000 I felt the need to change my backdrop again as it has been a while since I did it. I hope you like it, I certainly do! As always click/tap on the photos to see the larger version.

SMTube is available on OS4Depot here. Please note that SMTube is a QT program and as such requires QT4.7 to be installed in order for it to work.

I covered QT4.7 installation and configuration on my X1000 in this previous blog post if you don't already have it installed. Also remember to install the later Quickfix 7 patch for QT4.7 which I covered in this blog post if you need more information about it.

Also you will need to download the latest version of MPlayer and ffmpeg, also available on OS4Depot. I already have MPlayer installed previously so I don't need to do this here.

Here is the downloaded and extracted ffmpeg archive, ready to extract to the SYS:Utilities drawer:

Update 16/7/2016: I missed a step that the ffmpeg and ffplay needed to be unpacked first. I have updated the instructions below to reflect this - thanks to MickJT for pointing this out. Sorry for that!

Note that the Altivec drawer has the ffplay and ffmpeg programs needed for the X1000 (since it supports Altivec), but they are compressed with xdelta3 and need to be unpacked before you can use it:

To do this, from the Shell go to the ffmpeg drawer and then run "Unpack" and the ffmpeg and ffplay programs will be expanded into their respective altivec and generic drawers, ready for use:

I then Ran the ffmpeg program once from the Shell, to be sure that it worked, and that APPDIR:ffmpeg setting in SMTube can find it.

Having done this, I next moved onto SMTube. I renamed my old SMTube drawer to SMTube.old and extracted the new version - here is the drawer after extraction:

Inside the Amiga drawer is the playvideo.rexx file that we used to need to modify with our player and ffmpeg settings in older versions.

However in this new version it has changed, but the AmigaOS4_readme.txt documentation in the SMTube archive unfortunately has not - please ignore this documentation as it is no longer accurate.

On inspection of the rexx file It clearly now stores it's settings in ENVARC:SMTube.ini instead.

This file is only created on the initial launch of SMTube, so lets do that first:

Here is the SMTube About... showing the new 2016 version which is 16.6.0:

If I search for Warp3D nova videos (I couldn't resist), I can see the interface is still very similar to the old version which is great:

If I then try to run a video at this point, I get an error prompt like below:

If I answer Yes then it updates the scripts in SMTube to be compatible to the latest YouTube requirements to play videos - all done:

I then close SMTube so that the ENVARC:SMTube.ini file has been created. I then edit it to modify it's settings for MPlayer - this is the file before I changed it:

Some examples are included in the file for MPlayer based on the setup on your X1000 - if you have a Radeon HD video card with overlay support or not (ie. Radeon HD 6xxx or 7xxx series for overlay support with the Radeon HD v2 drivers purchased from AMIStore).

Also it depends on if you are running the SDL-Player or MUI-MPlayer (Overlay / Non-Overlay) or LiveForIt Player! Would love one MPlayer version that supported everything!

In my case I have the overlay compatible card with Radeon HD v2 installed and MUI-MPlayer Overlay, so I modify the file with the MPlayer options from the example. I also modify the log output window to be at the bottom right of the screen (as I have a 1080p display) by changing the CONSOLE dimensions option.

Here is the resulting SMTube.ini file after my changes:

If I run SMTube again and select the same Warp3D Nova video from the search results as before, the video now plays perfectly!

Close up of the video playing on the X1000, using SMTube with Player overlay support at 360p.

Why only 360p? Well, because my ADSL internet here in Australia really sucks. It struggles to stream 720p well, so this setting is safest (and also the default for SMTube).

Next I tried out a much longer video which works really well too - no glitches or drop outs:

I relaxed and enjoyed some time watching and listening to some great music on my x1000 using SMTube:

In addition to streaming YouTube videos, SMTube also provides the options to download the video to your X1000 too. If you right click on a search result video, you get the options:

You can copy the link to a web browser, copy the link to a clipboard, stream the video (open with playvideo.rexx) and also download the video (open with downloadvideo.rexx) or just play the audio.

If I download the video (Open with downloadvideo.rexx) I am asked where I want to save the video:

It then started the download:

When completed it automatically opens the destination drawer and highlights the downloaded file, ready to view - very convenient!

Here is the resulting downloaded video being played back directly from the X1000:

Definitely glad to see SMTube working well again and definitely worth the small work to get it running well. Running this program on AmigaOS 4.1 for the X1000 is fantastic and recommended.

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!