Installing amiga forever on bootable HD

[demether]

Hi,

I' m currently working on installing amiga forever on a dedicated athlon 2400+ PC.

The goal is to achieve to build a "virtual" real amiga. I want to be able to boot it, and use it as a real classic amiga. That's the goal : transform my old PC into a virtual amiga, with as real as possible amiga experience.

I tried to install it this way :

http://www.amigaforever.com/kxlight/installation/


The installation went fine, but on reboot, the PC (I mean, the new amiga ) loaded the system correctly : grub, then amiga forever loading screen (with grey boing ball), once completed, then just a second the X window screen (I can see the X linux cursor and the amiga forver brown background), and then, once again the amiga forever loading screen...And then, nothing.

The system does not do anything more. I tried to type or click, nothing happen. The PC is not freezed since I can open the cd tray and put a cdrom into it. But nothing happens except this.


Any help will be very appreciated. I'm using a genuine amiga forever 2009 cd version.


Thank you for your help!

[demether]

I finally succeed to install my computer, following this topic :

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/...33069&forum=34

If I understand correctly, it's a problem of the install script of Amiga Forever. Is there any updated version available ? I may contact cloanto.

Now the PC starts into workbench, like the real thing. Programs works, sound also.



But problems still remains :

I don't know how to switch into picasso/rtg mode (1440x900, 32bit).

Some errors appears when I want to change the language (to french), it says that no such files exist.

I'll continue to investigate. Any help will be really appreciated.

[prowler]

Hi demether, and welcome to EAB!

Click on the 'Search' menu item at the top of the page and enter "Knoppix Light" (without the quotes) into the box.

You will be presented with a list of threads, starting with the most recent, which may help you with the installation.

[demether]

thanks,

I'll try to adapt this one :

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...=Knoppix+Light

to my own needs (I don't want multiple OS on the pc, only the amiga). I'll try tommorow and come back here to show results.

[ipp0]

Originally Posted by demether

thanks,

I'll try to adapt this one :

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...=Knoppix+Light

to my own needs (I don't want multiple OS on the pc, only the amiga). I'll try tommorow and come back here to show results.

You can do all the stuff I explained there without a second OS. Just inside Knoppix. Some basic linux-knowledge is needed. You have to work in textmode or you can do most things using a livecd with graphical enviroment.

[demether]

thanks !

This is week end so I'm working on that again. I'll post my results.

By the way, my goal is to simulate (as accuratly as possible) a 68060 AGA, with 2mg chip, 32mb fast ram, 66mhz (or so). I want to simulate a sort of amiga 1200 tower upgraded to 68060 processor.

The goal is to create a workstation for classic amiga AGA 68060 demomaking. I believe everything has to be set up in "hd_boot.uaerc" .

Is the any way to create a 68060 with accurate speed (since I want my demos to be the same speed on a real amiga) ?

Last question, how can I obtain 1280x1024px AGA screenmode ?


thanks

[demether]

Hi there,


I'm progressing quite well. I finally achieved to obtain a 1280x1024 resolution, editing the xorg.conf file. But there are some issues : even if I can save (I configured the permissions : chmod, chown, etc...) the resolution in the workbench, when I re-start the computer, it appears in 320x200 4colors...Strange. Maybe it's because I didn't find the way to properly shutdown the computer (I just push the ON/OFF button on the pc tower...oldschool ) .

Anyway, everything seems to work so far. I'm still using a 68040 ECS configuration, I'm not into fine tweaking stage for now (since my goal is to simulate a 68060 AGA amiga with accurate speed, for demomaking).


I used this tutorial and a amiga forever 2009 CDrom :

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...=Knoppix+Light


But the paths are not good, concerning this part :

cp /media/AmigaForever/Private/Linux/e-uae/e-uae /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-uae/
ln -s /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-readdisk /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-uae/e-readdisk

the good ones are :

cp /media/cdrom/Private/Linux/e-uae/e-uae /Amiga/e-uae/
ln -s /Amiga/e-readdisk /Amiga/e-uae/e-readdisk

Here's some screenshots of my current setup :

Boot sequence in native resolution (around 1minute...quite long for an amiga, but anyway) :




Good old workbench !





Internet is working ! SO great to see a 25years old OS running internet ! The only issue is the lack of CSS support, but...It's good enough to go on aminet, for example. (note : the brown stripe in back is my fault, I just made a screenmode config mistake when I took the photo).





I just used a 2009 amigaforever distribution (and a linux live cd to make config files editing easier) :




The screenmode mystery : sometimes it appears like that (16bit pc mode), sometimes it appears "BGRA" or something like that :





Still some ironing and work, but it's already working ! Any idea about screenmodes and configuration are welcome.



edit : screenmode is working now. the systeme boots up everytime on native 1280x1024 75hz 32bit BGRA ! For that result, I simply quit the system using UAE control software, and it saved my configuration.

[demether]

I resolved some problems, but (as usual) new ones appeared


First, when I launch demos, they are not displayed full screen, or to be more specific, they are not "stretched" to the entire screen. For example a 320x240 demo is displayed only on the top left corner of the screen, in a tiny little square. My boot sequence and workbench are running in 1280x1024px (I edited grub menu.lst and xorg.conf for that).


The other problem : the sound can be choppy during demo playing, especially during transitions or big graphic effects, when the "virtual" processor is very solicited. Any tip about it ?


thanks


edit : I tried to configure sound in uae rc config file. I added the option "sound_latency=150" but it didn't fixed the problem at all. So I believe the problem is not here.

[ipp0]

Originally Posted by demether

Hi there,


I'm progressing quite well. I finally achieved to obtain a 1280x1024 resolution, editing the xorg.conf file. But there are some issues : even if I can save (I configured the permissions : chmod, chown, etc...) the resolution in the workbench, when I re-start the computer, it appears in 320x200 4colors...Strange. Maybe it's because I didn't find the way to properly shutdown the computer (I just push the ON/OFF button on the pc tower...oldschool ) .

Try to shutdown X (CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE), change to another terminal (CTRL + ALT + F2 - F6) and then reboot (reboot) or shutdown (shutdown -h now)

I used this tutorial and a amiga forever 2009 CDrom :

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...=Knoppix+Light

But the paths are not good, concerning this part :

cp /media/AmigaForever/Private/Linux/e-uae/e-uae /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-uae/
ln -s /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-readdisk /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-uae/e-readdisk

/media is the place on my main linux system where th AF-CD is mounted and /mnt/amigaos/ the one where I mounted the KX-Light installation.
You have to change the path like

/whatever/Private/Linux/e-uae/e-uae /mnt/amigaos/Amiga/e-uae/
and
ln -s /whatever/Amiga/e-readdisk /Amiga/e-uae/e-readdisk

The parts which I titled "for example" or "example" may have to be changed.

greets

[demether]

Thanks. It was working pretty well, but I could not make the screenmodes I wanted (kxlight is running on VESA?). So I finally decided to use another trick for my installation.

I installed Lubuntu (lightweight ubuntu : all advantages of ubuntu, but not too hardware power consuming), nvidia proprietary drivers, and last version of e-uae (using amiga forever for roms and hard drives folders). The amiga system is much faster, full screen "almost" works, And no more sound glitches.



Now, new issues

It's seems that vsync is not that good. I can see glitches during scrollings, in demos. I saw a vsync option in uae.rc, but it doesn't seem to do any good (not implemented?). Another related problem is that fullscreen mode is sometimes out of range of my LCD screen. I believe it cannot handle low resolutions.


Any idea of what I should do ? I believe it 's something related to the "tricks" uae uses to adapt amiga native pal graphic size to modern screens. Maybe a CRT PC screen should do the trick ? My goal is to be as near as possible as real display (= if a demo is in 640x256, it should be displayed that way).






ANother issue is that I can see (even if I cannot heard) sound bugs in the terminal when I launch e-uae :

alsa lib pcm.c:7316:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occured

That error appears a lot of times (when a transition occurs in a demo, for example). I don't heard any sound glitches, but I don't like errors



SO that's all the things I need to fix. Once it will be done, I'll work (with your help I hope ) on "hiding" the linux part to boot directly on amiga (linux hosted amiga kind of).

thanks

[demether]

BUMP


I'm trying another time, using amiga forever live distribution again. I made new tests with livecd, the performances are good, except I think KXlight is using VESA mode instead of a accelerated hardware mode. So if you're not able to do full screen scaled displaying, for example (not speaking of overall performance).

Is there any way to install nvidia proprietary drivers on the kxlight side of a amiga forever installation, since kxlight is debian based.


thanks !

[ipp0]

Hi demether,

i don't have any clue abt that alsa stuff. sorry. Maybe you can install "Alsa Mixer" to configure. I think there was a textmode version, but I have no clue in knoppix for that. Further I think that it's impossible to run demos in their original resolution and in fullscreen in any UAE. If your demo is 640x480, you have to use the same res in UAE. I've tried the same with some old games. No luck

Greets

[demether]

thanks!

Yes, I believe it's certainly a lack of E-uae concerning "screen strechting" (don't remember the correct english name), an option we have into winuae for example.