Amithlon Setup Guide

[SnkBitten]

Anyone have a decent E-UAE setup on their Amithlon system that would share their config?

I have E-UAE-0.8.29-wp4 and it will boot a hardfile I created in WinUAE and installed OS 3.1 on. Just wondering if there is an optimal setup on an Amithlon system?

I'm currently configured as:
68040
2 MB chip
32 MB Z3
32 MB GFX
AHI sound
hardfile - OS 3.1 boot
filesystem2 - folder on my Amithlon system

It boots, I installed LHA using lha.run I had copied to the shared folder and extracted and ran Sysinfo_4.0.lha from the same folder. Audio works, haven't tried install P96 drivers as I still need to copy Installer to the system.....

Any techniques or tips to get it to run faster/better? Reduce some of the settings? This of course is just goofing around and having chipset emulation on my Amithlon setup. The above runs a little faster than an A600 testing with Sysinfo4.

Maybe a better way to configure?

[milanca]

Hello gentlemen,

@SnkBitten,
Congrats on your latest amithlon config! Isn't it a beast once everything installed? I miss my amithlon days (and amiga days of course), i hope i will have a little more time soon. Most of your problems, as long as i can see from your posts, were kernel modules related, module mismatch. When you update from previous version just make sure you remove them all. Simply extract drivers from 3.10 and see which files at which locations have to be removed not to cause version mismatch. Simple as that.
C/Devs/pcidrivers is the location of kernel drivers.

Kernel 3.10 is a great kernel. People usually start with it or with default amithlon kernel and then update to 3.10. If the system is stable and there are no hardware problems there is basically no real need to update to 4. On the other side, kernel 4 is generally several years newer kernel. I picked the latest version available when i decided to port amithlon patches. Hardware wise, it can support newer hardware, contains numerous improvements and fixes found during the years. Remember, difference is measured in years, six or seven. With that said it is good to update, not crucial but definitely good move.

Any valid links or files for Amithlon people are aware of, please post them. I've searched and found many many invalid links (I know...this is an old product..).
Looking for kernel compiling info, primarily.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/amithlon/files/Archive/

Here is the link where i uploaded everything. I am pointing you to Archive folder because there is a kernel diff file you asked for. What kind of compiling info you are asking about? I will be glad to help if i can. If your intention is to customize the kernel for a particular machine, to strip it down, trust me it's not worth it. It won't be drastically smaller than the base version currently is, maybe a couple of kilobytes. Although it can increase boot time a little bit. If your plan is more `coding` related then definitely it is a good place to start.

Best regards,
-milanca.

[SnkBitten]

Yes, definitely coding related. More curiosity at this point than actually producing a new(er) kernel, but the possibility of adding new(er) mb chipsets and gfx card drivers, etc...

[SnkBitten]

Gifted an old PC from a friend. Giving this one a shot as it's a smaller form factor than the full size towers I currently have running Amithlon.

It's all SATA and USB (no PS2 ports) so a tad more interesting getting it going. Booting off my modified CD worked fine (it boots Kernel 3.10) so I've now installed it to HD and have begun the patching/tweaking process.

SnkBitten - I am jealous of your wealth of Amithlon knowledge. Hopefully when I get home next summer you can impart some of that on me.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by esc

SnkBitten - I am jealous of your wealth of Amithlon knowledge. Hopefully when I get home next summer you can impart some of that on me.

Just a LOT of reading/searching and experimenting

Having multiple PC's around that house that weren't doing anything, and quite a few being very close to meeting Amithlon requirements, made it much easier.

[themamboman]

Has anyone had success running multi-monitors on Amithlon? I thought I'd heard that some Matrox cards could do dual monitor output, but I was thinking something higher end, like later nvidia cards. Even if it required more than one graphics card installed to support it.
Thanks!

[SnkBitten]

I haven't looked at dual monitor setups....though from what I've read I believe it's like you mentioned, limited to a few Matrox cards. I've got three Amithlon systems, a Windows 10 and Windows 7 WMC system but only two monitors so I'm already switching connections around. I also only have nvidia cards in two of my Amithlon setups and a Radeon ATI card in the other.

[themamboman]

I was thinking about how to set up a dual monitor system under Amiga OS even if we had either a dual head card or 2 cards. I can imaging being able to set up a screen mode using Picasso96Mode and attach to two separate cards but I don't know how to get Amiga OS to display both, especially if two separate resolutions.

I may try putting the PCI gfx card from one Amithlon machine into the other one (that has an AGP card). Hopefully, BIOS settings won't get into the way.

Maybe I can figure it out and write up a guide.

I think Amithlon is the coolest thing I've ever played with in the Amiga world. I've started digging into the smallird.gz file and the ramdisk image used to launch things. I tried setting up a kernel dev system, but getting the version of gcc installed that Milanca used proved problematic and my time is limited. I'd love to see this program expanded.

This is by far the easiest and cheapest way to get a full PCI-enabled Amiga working. And it's general faster than using an 1200 or other Amiga with a PCI busboard.

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by themamboman

I think Amithlon is the coolest thing I've ever played with in the Amiga world. I've started digging into the smallird.gz file and the ramdisk image used to launch things. I tried setting up a kernel dev system, but getting the version of gcc installed that Milanca used proved problematic and my time is limited. I'd love to see this program expanded.

I completely agree.

[Methanoid]

Has anyone run or been able to run Amithlon as a VM?

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

Has anyone run or been able to run Amithlon as a VM?

I got it running in Virtualbox though it was a pain. I believe I was using Kernel 3.10 or possibly new_emubox.gz and it was tricky getting it to boot. Restarting and it was back to trying to get it to boot. I'd say maybe 1 out of 30 attempts and it would boot. Once I had it up I just saved state on the VM and would recall it that way. Internal AmigaOS reboots (Cntrl-Amiga-Amiga) were fine...just down to restarting the Amiga host boot setup was the issue.

I used a win95b.img boot img to boot to DOS and used XFdisk to partition out the Amiga partition and a DOS boot partition. The win95b.img had cdrom drivers in the config.sys/autoexec.bat so I was able to copy over the smallird.gz, bigird.gz and different kernels then edited the "small" and "amithlon" files to use either kernel 3.10 or new_emubox.gz (not sure...and I lost the drive that had the VM on it and haven't recreated it). I "boot" the bigird.gz (Amithlon file) first and then use the CD to install 3.9 to the Amiga partition, then restart and "boot" the smallird.gz to run my HD installed 3.9)

Never got networking working...I used 1 GB ram setup, and had 1280x1024x32bit working (built-in mode).

It was fast.. (running on a i5 Laptop with 8 GB ram).

[SnkBitten]

Setup Virtualbox again on my laptop and cannot get it to boot Amithlon Remote accessed my home system and matched the config but still could not get it to boot (I have it in a save state at home so can just restore that session). It'll boot smallird.gz showing the "out of sync" Kickstart "insert disk" animation, but I cannot get bigird.gz to boot. It's a slightly newer version of Virtualbox on this machine but I doubt that's the issue. emubox.gz, new_emub.gz, kern310 or kernel4 w root=/dev/ram1 ....not booting bigird.gz.

I haven't tried Virtual PC or VMWare....

[Methanoid]

I think that was a "challenge accepted" moment for you... I'm rebuilding my PC from scratch so cannot try but will try with KVM on Ubuntu later

[SnkBitten]

Virtual PC and VMWare Player were worse than VirtualBox. I started working on VirtualBox again and got it to boot the CD (this CD has kernel 3.10 as the kernel used).

Formatted and installed to System: (DH0) and rebooted (Cntrl+Amiga+Amiga). Haven't tried shutting down and booting.



EDIT:
Bonus....seems to boot every time. Ram is at 768 MB as 1024 MB does nothing. Installed some updates and now have higher resolution/color screen modes available (running 1024x768x32bit currently).

[Methanoid]

Well done. I'm in the process of migrating my monster PC with 40Tb of data from Windows to Linux. When done I intend to be using Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run a variety of OS's on top of Ubuntu... Amithlon should be one. Hopefully that will work!

[SnkBitten]

Interestingly.....trying to repeat what I did at work at home....once I shut down the complete VM and tried to bring it up, it would not advance beyond the bouncing ball. Edited "small" to use kernel4 instead of kern310 and it booted just fine. Also I was able to use 1024 as the RAM setting. Completely repeatable boots.....though it does require some interaction. When the bouncing ball is on it's second trip to the right, I need to press enter on the keyboard right around the time it touches the edge of the screen....otherwise it'll continue bouncing forever. This applies to both my work laptop (Kern310) and my home desktop (Kernel4).

[SnkBitten]

Finally got networking functioning on Amithlon running in VirtualBox on my Windows 7 laptop.

Actually posting this from IBrowse.

VirtualBox Preferences - Network - NAT Networks - Create one (I just used the default settings).
Virtualbox Machine - Settings - Network - NAT Network - NatNetwork (the default one created above)
- Advanced - PCnet-FAST III (Am79C973) (defaults).

Amiga Genesis settings using network information from the default "NAT Network" created in VirutalBox

Using the amithlon1_net.device (PCIINSMOD will load drivers for the PCnet-FAST III (Am79C973) device)
IP - 10.0.2.15
Gateway - 10.0.2.1
Netmask - 255.255.255.0
router - 10.0.2.1 (resolv "Domain name servers")

Aweb seemed to hang but IBrowse seems to be working well.

[Arnie]

Impressive, well done

If you ever feel like sharing the VB box files then drop me a PM.

Originally Posted by Arnie

Impressive, well done

If you ever feel like sharing the VB box files then drop me a PM.

Yes please, me too, and this wouldn't be the first time SnkBitten has shared info with me via pm. Very helpful guy.