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!

Taking a break from this blog

After returning from my two week holiday this week with some much needed time to think about things, I have decided to take a break from this blog for a bit. I haven't decided if it is permanent yet.

The reality I have to face now is that I don't have time to update my blogs anymore due to recently undertaking long term study commitments outside of work, leaving me little free time to play with my Amiga systems beyond my beta testing duties.

I wanted readers to know that it is this lack of time, rather than enthusiasm, that is the reason for that.

I want to be up front so you know why I am stopping rather than just leaving people hanging and everyone wrongly assuming I gave up on it. Something had to give.

Thanks so much for following this blog for the past 5 years.

I am happy to see over half a million readers have now read this blog since it began, which is wonderful! This blog should act as a hopefully useful hints and tips archived website for some time to come. :-)

I hope the entries and photos up to now have been interesting, and I hope that you continue to enjoy your Amigas, Classic or Next Gen as I still do. I have no plans to get rid of or sell my Amigas - I couldn't imagine doing such a thing!

I have stopped all my other blogs for the time being too.

For now I will continue to help manage and attend the Adelaide Retro Computing Group meetings with my Amiga systems, as long as it doesn't interfere with my studies. Indeed I was there as usual last friday. So if you are in Adelaide for an upcoming meeting be sure to say hi and chat with me about all things Amiga!

I am still posting Amiga and Retro computing stuff from time to time amongst my other interests like trains, Adelaide and travel that I was blogging about, now via my Instagram account. Look up instagram.com/epsilon2012  if you are interested in following - I am still learning Instagram but it is surprisingly fun and takes less time than blogging and I can simultaneously share my posts to my Facebook, twitter accounts and stream live too (and have already a few times) so I am using it as a replacement of sorts in the interim.

When my time is freed up again I expect I will return again to add more blog posts here and I'll announce that via Facebook and Amiga websites at that time! In the meantime, enjoy your Amigas!

Note that I have turned off comments for now as I don't have time to moderate them.

Regards,
Epsilon

Removing Mac index files on my X1000

One of my pet annoyances on the Apple Mac is the autocreation of thousands of ._blah index files for every file on your hard disk, cached by MacOS X.

How does this relate to my X1000? Well, when I copy my music and photos across from the Mac to the X1000 I end up with these really annoying files on my hard disk, which are not visible on a Mac but very visible on anything else.

These files get in the way when selecting a drawer for playing music in AmigaAmp or other music players, adding extra unusable files to my playlist when using the default filters. Also, these index files appear when selecting images for viewing and so on. I want them gone from my X1000!

Deleting them all individually is just not an option as there are thousands of them scattered in hundreds of drawers all over my hard disk!

But fortunately, help is at hand to solve this problem. Actually, thanks to some help from Severin (thanks mate) I have two ways that work under AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, depending on whether you have Dopus 5 installed under AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition or not.

Let's start with the case that you don't have Dopus 5 installed on your X1000, as this probably applies to more people.

Open up a shell and pick a drawer that has some of the annoying files in it. For my test I used a Photogenics drawer. Don't run it across a whole partition or large drawer with lots of sub-drawers until you test it does what you expect!

I won't be held responsible for losing files on your hard disk from following this so please be careful. I recommend backing up first just in case.

The command I used is:

list <path> pat="._#?" all lformat "delete %P%N" to ram:script

What this does is takes the path you entered and matches recursively anything starting with ._ (which is what Mac index files start with), and then generating a delete command for each file and writing the full command to a file called script in RAM:

In my case for my first test I used the command below in the Shell:

list sys:Utilities/Photogenics5/ pat="._#?" all lformat "delete %P%N force" to ram:script

The resulting script file shows the deletions to be performed and the path too. You can review this to make sure nothing important has been picked up by mistake and remove it if it is.

The force is important as the ._ index files are read only files and they will not be removed without it under AmigaOS 4.1. You can then type in the following to perform the deletions:

execute ram:script 

Here is the example, and showing the clean drawer afterwards:

Neat huh! You can of course do this from the root of your hard disk partition to speed this up, but please be careful and check the script file carefully for anything important before running it.

The other option is using Directory Opus 5 if you have it installed under AmigaOS 4.1.

In my case I have the updated 5.82 Directory Opus 5 updated for AmigaOS 4.1. It was available on a website for download but no longer available there. You can get it from the wayback web archive though here if you want it. I looked at Dopus5 previously on this blog here, here and here. I even covered the toolbar icon functions here.

In any case, assuming Directory Opus 5 is installed and running, I need to turn on the Recursive filter so that Directory Opus applies the operation recursively. You can access this option from the Settings menu:

That done, I then locate a music drawer with heaps of these annoying files. I could select all drawers but initially I will test with a single one:

I then go back a drawer to select the drawer to delete:

I then select Delete from the menu as below, but don't panic - as long as Recursive Filter is selected it will prompt before deletion:

Here is the filter pattern prompt that then appears for the deletion - by default the filter #? deletes all files:

You need to change this to ._#? so it only removes the index files. If you leave it as the default it will remove all the files so please check you have this done before proceeding! Then click OK.

You will get one final confirmation before it deletes. I select Delete All, which deletes all the  ._#? files and leaves everything else.

Here is the clean resulting drawer with no more index files - fantastic!

I then did the same steps starting from the iTunes Music drawer I copied across, which removed all the ._ files throughout the whole structure recursively!

It is a useful tip that works well, and thought it might be useful to share with you all in case you are experiencing the same issue on your X1000 or other AmigaOS 4.1 system.

Celebrating 5 Years of this blog!

Well, today it has now been 5 years exactly since I started working on this Amiga X1000 blog. Amazing that I have been writing so much and for so long about a true passion of mine!

For the past 5 years I have been focused on purchasing and getting the most out of my Amiga systems, whether that be Classic, Next Generation (NG), FPGA or emulation based.

I have looked at countless new Amiga software and hardware products introduced in that time and I am always amazed by the quality of what is produced, as well as the enthusiasm of the community to support these efforts and keep Amiga alive in 2017 and beyond!

The AmigaOne X1000 was the system that really rekindled my interest in things Amiga back in 2012, and following actively the developments of AmigaOS 4 and the latest developments in operating system, applications and games, and even beta testing software has been very satisfying for me personally.

This also logically rekindled my interest in Classic Amiga systems too which I had to buy again, as I sold a lot of them many years ago - although I had kept a few favourites like my Amiga 2000, Amiga 4000D and 4000T. All this I covered on this blog in detail.

After all this work I ended up with upgraded Amiga 500, 600, 1000, 1200, 2000, 4000D, 4000T, CDTV and CD32 Classic systems, in addition to AmigaOne A1222 (AmigaOS4), AmigaOne X1000 (AmigaOS4), Sam 460CR (AmigaOS4), Powerbook G4 (MorphOS), Acer AspireOne (AROS), Minimig FPGA (A500), MIST FPGA (A1200), Amiga Forever and AmiKit X emulations! Whew, how fantastic!

I learnt all about alternative Amiga operating systems like MorphOS and AROS alongside AmigaOS 4.1 and optimised classic setups like AmiKit X, AmiKit Real, AmigaSys4, ClassicWB and had a lot of fun building the systems and trying out all the new software on offer! I have covered these in detail in this blog too over the years!

I hope I have inspired a lot of you to tinker and play around with your Amiga systems again!

It seems so, since I have almost a thousand people reading my blog everyday, and half a million since I started on it five years ago. For an Amiga focused blog I think that is amazing!

I have to thank you, the reader, because it is because of you all, your feedback and questions that I was so motivated to complete my Amiga projects that I have always wanted to do since I was a teenager.

I have been so engaged in all things Amiga I even travelled to the other side of the world to visit the AmiWest 2014 show in Sacramento, USA, and was really inspired by the current developments and developers of AmigaOS, pushing the platform forward.

There I also saw AmigaOS Final Edition and the new AmigaOne X5000 for the first time in the hands of Beta testers, which is of course now available for sale to the general public in 2017 with AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1!

I would love to go again to see an overseas Amiga show some day!

Following this AmiWest trip, I decided to help create the Adelaide Retro Computing Group, and as a result we now have a local vibrant and interesting monthly meeting of Amiga and other Retro systems brought in by passionate Retro system fans - right here in my home city of Adelaide!

We learn so much about new projects for our Retro systems from some very inspirational attendees!

Even Trevor Dickinson from A-EON technology came to visit us in late 2016. This is something I am very proud of!

I even got involved this year in the beta testing of AmigaOS 4 for Hyperion Entertainment for the upcoming AmigaOne A1222 (and Linux too)! Unfortunately this current AmigaOS related beta testing work (very interesting though it is) cannot be shared with you on this blog due to NDA's.

In combination with a long period of illness for me in the first part of 2017, beta testing, and a quiet period in 2017 for new release NG Amiga software means that recently I have not much new NG Amiga-wise to offer to this blog in 2017 as I would ideally like, and have focused instead on upgrading my classic Amiga systems as far as I wanted to keep my Amiga interest (and this blog) going.

In addition to the ongoing release of new Classic software and hardware, I sincerely hope we can see more regular NG Amiga software releases in the future. I know there is plenty of interesting software in the pipeline, but it is taking a long time to get to market.

A-EON Technology is well aware of this and has many projects ongoing as I write this and of course now has an AMIStore Application platform for selling Amiga software directly to the NG Amiga community from their systems. Indeed they are even running a DevCon this very week.

But I think we still really need more developers and a genuine pipeline of development activity to get a constant stream of new releases for Amiga out there.

In my view, the ongoing sales of the AmigaOne X5000 and upcoming AmigaOne A1222 really do depend on a regular release of interesting NG Amiga software to keep people interested and engaged in the future of our favourite OS.

The tools are clearly there, the App store (AMIStore), the AmigaOS/MorphOS SDK, Development environment and IDE's, and even simpler entry level cross-platform software development tools like Hollywood 7 (released in 2017) run on our NG systems.

The Classic Amiga area (on the other hand) after being quiet for a number of years is booming right now for software and hardware in 2017.

Things like ACA500(Plus), Prisma Megamix, Vampire 500/600, Rapid Road USB, HDMI output Zorro graphics cards like VA2000, and Gotek USB floppy drives are great new developments and there is so much more than that too!

We even have Google Drive and Dropbox client software on Classic and NG Amigas!

Emulation has made a lot of progress in the last five years, especially with the introduction of PowerPC emulation under WinUAE, which has enabled PowerPC support under OS 3.x and also allows us to run AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition under our Windows/Linux PC's and Macs!

FPGA too has made massive strides recently in recreating our Classic Amiga systems through Minimig ECS and AGA cores running on inexpensive MIST FPGA, FPGA Arcade and Chameleon64.

The hardware and software developments in particular give the Classic Amiga systems new features they could never of dreamed of when they were original built.

The Apollo team Vampire 68080 accelerator of course being the real talk of the community this year. Performance speeds never seen on an Classic Amiga 500/600, with HDMI RTG video out and plenty of ongoing active and public accessible information about progress keeping people very engaged!

This presents an interesting issue though. Is it better for the community to focus attention on Classic Amiga only, and forget about developing NG AmigaOS, keeping Amiga firmly in the Retro system hobby camp, or should we focus on pushing the boundaries of AmigaOS on NG platforms (AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS) to see what we can do with it?

Ideally we can do both as a community, resourced sufficiently by passionate people, without one direction affecting the other or pointless fighting of one approach over the other draining enthusiasm to keep things moving forward.

And more transparent Amiga community engaged development of the NG operating systems (AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS) to keep the remaining community interested and get them more engaged in actively improving the systems for our ultimate benefit.

In my view vendors and developers shouldn't need to hide behind restrictive NDA's and closed development cycles in 2017 for a hobby based system platform like the Amiga.

You only have to see what is happening with the Apollo Team Vampire project with their ongoing core development work to see what is possible when you engage openly and positively with the community through social media, irc, forums and so on.

No one is expecting perfect software, but I think we all want to be part of the progress, and most importantly to know that there is actually progress being made!

This is what I hope for anyway! Probably dreaming but worth putting it out there!

And as you have seen, the Amiga scene is still very much making progress:

AmigaOS 3.9 BB2 with Vampire 500 68080 Gold 2 Core on Amiga 2000 (2016)

AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 on AmigaOne X1000 (2017)

MorphOS 3.9 on Apple Powerbook G4 (2016)

Icaros Desktop v2.2 (AROS) on Acer AspireOne x86 netbook (2016)

AmiKit X (WinUAE) Classic Amiga Emulation on x64 PC (2017)

So much has been achieved in the past 5 years and I look forward to what comes next!

As mentioned I have shared a lot of setup and build information along the way to show how great Amigas still are and how to make the most of them! I hope this has been useful for you, or at least you could have a good laugh at my (lack of) skills!

I feel that I have reached a kind of peak in 2017, where all my Next Gen and Classic Amiga systems are where I want them to be upgrade and build wise, with all the functionality that I need from them to enjoy using them daily.

Mind you I have said this before and then bought a bunch of stuff so who knows...

I still want to find new Amiga mountains to climb though!

Earlier this year I was debating stopping the blog altogether once I had upgraded all my systems to where I wanted them (which I have now done!). But, I still enjoying blogging about Amiga, and I still believe there is still more good stuff to come on Amiga!

Libre Office, Tower 57, Wings Remastered, Final Writer new version, Octamed new version, just to name a few...

Meeting and talking all things Amiga with other Amiga crazy fans here in Adelaide and elsewhere has done wonders for my motivation too!

Who knows, maybe I take up Amiga programming or something as a new challenge and continue this blog in a new direction to create some new software!!

In summary, I really hope you have enjoyed this blog for the past 5 years. It has been quite a ride and a lot of fun for my personally.

A little off-topic I have finally weakened and created an Instagram account to share my photos of computers, trains and other things of interest. I also share some of these photos to my Facebook page and Twitter account from time to time too. I did this because I don't have time to blog about everything of interest these days and not everything fits my blog subjects either, so this is my easy way to share stuff I enjoy! If you want to follow me on Instagram, search for epsilon2012. I will still blog too of course!

In the meantime keep playing with your Amiga systems and upgrading them, whether it is Classic, Next Gen, FPGA or via emulation! Support the developers who keep our platform moving forward by buying their products when you can.

I don't know how long I will continue blogging about all things Amiga (I never thought in 2012 that I would still be blogging about Amiga in 2017!), but I will continue as long as I continue to enjoy doing it! :-)