Amithlon Setup Guide

[XDelusion]

Alright, go my sound working.

Now if only there was a guide for setting up OpenGL and USB...

Milanca, my previously mentioned Asus motherboard had to be re-dedicated to the daily home computer. Thus I need to get something new for my Amithlon experimentation. I was considering the Gigabyte GA-P45T-ES3G. It has the following features: northbridge = P45. southbridge = ICH10. up to 1600mhz FSB. DDR3 Ram up to 1600mhz. great pci setup, a couple of pci-e but 5 standard pci slots! SATAx6. PATA. Realtek ALC892 audio. Realtek 8111D Ethernet. PS2 keys. PS2 mouse. Serial. Parallel. USBx6.

It has been a while since I have been close to kernel4. I am trying to ascertain if this motherboard is a good candidate. Any opinions? As far as audio I will use SB Live!. As far as video I have no idea yet.

Thanks in advance!

Rodomoc

[fishyfish]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Does this install on Core2Duo CPUs yet? I now have an unused laptop that would make a great "Amiga"

D.

Ive been using Amithlon on a core2duo off and on for about 3 years, so it definately does Whether or not it works on your particular laptop or not may be another thing though The type of CPU is pretty much inconsequential (Ive run amithlon on an i5 even). The rest of the hardware seems to be he bigger issue.

edit: only one core will be active, however this also means that the active core inherrits entire l2/l3 cache assuming the cpu uses a shared cache architecture (which a c2d does).

Originally Posted by XDelusion

Alright, go my sound working.

Now if only there was a guide for setting up OpenGL and USB...

OpenGL is only available via wazp3d (ie. software rendered). Given enough grunt though and its quite useable. I run payback for example at 800x600 at good framerates with lots of eye candy enabled (antialiasing, texture filtering, gl coloring, fog, etc.). Quake however I had to drop back to 640x512 using wazp3d/mesa and even then I only get about 55fps.

Granted I am running a core2duo that is just shy of 4ghz, but even something like an old p4 or athlon64 copes fine if you drop the resolution back a little. Software rendering is much faster (I get about 180 fps in quake @640x512 using normal s/w renderer vs. about 55 using wazp3d).

P96mode (in prefs) is very handy when using a soley rtg based OS3.x system. Not only can you make lower resolution screenmodes for when your system doesnt quite cope, but its very handy for making screenmodes for using uae, mame, etc.

As for USB, poseidon is the way to go. I personally have no need for it, but that's how it'd be done (along with arrackattack (or however its spelled)). Hopefully someone with an inclination may recompile it (now that its open source under APL).

[Methanoid]

Originally Posted by milanca

@Methanoid,

To be honest, i haven't even tried highmem support. I wanted to test the functionality first, to see if it works as the previous kernels with all the same settings. Memory allocating is a bit different so i had to slightly change and adopt it to make it work first. Absolutely i will try enabling it. Now it's still for <1gb.

I suppose, at least the few of us with working amithlon boxes, have it running on ide drives. So please test it only on ide, not sata drives.

Hi

I never read your reply carefully and I dont think you read my question either

Amithlon wont even BOOT on machines with 4Gb (even with MEM=512) with older kernels. What I want is a kernel that WILL boot when the machine has 4/8Gb Ram (but can limit the Ram to Amithlon to 512/1gb correctly). I don't need Amithlon to have loads of Ram but if I run Windows on the same machine I do need loads of Ram!

Does Kernel4 work in that respect? is SATA ok now? I want Amithlon on my quad core i5!

regards
Meth

[Methanoid]

Anyone compared VGA performance in Amithlon

eg

Is an accelerated (but slow) Geforce FX5200 faster than a an unaccelerated VESA-toting but mega fast Radeon HD5750 or whatever.

The modern card would be many times faster in say Windoze but with VESA slowing it down would it STILL outpace the FX5200 in Amithlon usage?

[milanca]

Yes, it could be possible to gain good performance from vesa on new and ultra fast video cards. As a software renderer it will add some more load to the cpu but it won't affect much the overall performance i am sure. It is better of course to have the gpu do all the staff. If such the card in vesa mode can outperform hw accelerated card, i am not sure about that but could be also possible. FX5200 ain't much of a card, for amithlon it is great but in general 'old and slow'. You can make some tests after all using p96speed test and compare fx5200 or any other hw accelerated card and some fast card in vesa mode.

I did some tests on my new amithlon laptop using p96 and i'm attaching it. Not bad. I wasnt;t that active myself and didn't have a dedicated amithlon computer. Recently got myself an older acer aspire with 1.5ghz pentium M and ati mobility radeon 9700. Oh yes, almost to forget, got that card working with hardware acceleration with modified kernel 4. I will share it of course soon just to add something more so that pci-x 5300 can be tested at the same time. Mobility Radeon 9700 is working beautifully, no side effects (garbage on the screen or chunks) for this time i have been testing it.

[fishyfish]

A fast card running in vesa mode vs. an older fully supported card is a mixed bag, but overall I'd go for the supported card. Using my matrox g550 (supported) is overall a noticably nicer experience than the gf 9600gt (vesa) I did tests with.

As for the PCX 5300, I almost wish Id not given mine away now, especially if its potentially supported in amithlon (was limited to vesa when I bought it much to my disappointment, which is why I gave it away)

[milanca]

Hi,

I have released the latest kernel 4 with newer hardware added. As i said before there is ati mobility radeon 9600/9700 (with partial hw acceleration, fill_rect and copy_rect) as well as pcx5300, pcx5750 and pcx5900. Pci-e cards are not tested yet but i expect full hardware acceleration on these video cards. Feedback is required. There are some potential cards i wish to include in later kernel versions. I am asking for donation so i can buy a few of them. These are pretty cheap cards and working blindly on hw acceleration without testing on actual hardware is not an option so small donations for kernel 4 is highly required to support future development. Thank you guys.

Place as usual:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/amithlon/files/

There are 3 versions, just smaller in size. If you have ide drives and no sata you can use kernel with ide controllers. There is a version with both ide and sata controllers and a kernel with ide, sata and additional third party scsi controllers. Also linux side amithlon drivers included for sound, ethernet and serial.

Enjoy!

[NMI]

Great work!

Had to dust of my Amithlon test system and try it with my PCX5300 card.
Unfortunately the new kernel does not work with the PCX5300, it shows half a boingball together with some garbage and hangs.

I will try and set console_level=4 and see if it prints anything usefull. Anything else I can do to help debug the issue?

[milanca]

Hello,

Thanks a lot for testing pcx5300 on kernel 4. We are going to switch over to PM/email to try to do some tests and bring support for these cards hopefully.

We are going to inform the community with the results later of course as we will need to exchange several posts here before we actually have something.

Best regards!

[XDelusion]

I am trying to boot the Amithlon CD on a newer system, same hardware as Fish is using in fact.

The problem I am facing though is that after the initial start up screen, everything goes black right before you go to the bouncing boing ball screen.

My question is this. I know that I would have to use Kernal 3 or 4 in order to run Amithlon on this hardware (GeForce 5200), but do I need to inject them into the original Amithlon ISO and tell the SMALL to use one of them instead of the EMU*.gz file?

How do you guys get your CD to boot on unsupported systems in the first place?

I prepared my hard drive and edited SMALL to use Kernel 3 and later 4, but when the CD boots, it seems as if it ignores all that.

[arti]

Which PCI (not PCI-e) card with DVI will be the best for amithlon ?

What about VooDoo 3, will it work with 3d acceleration ?

[NMI]

I can confirm that the GeForce FX5600 PCI works with Amithlon, Full HW acceleration and DVI-port. It is absolutely one of the best graphic cards for Amithlon currently.

My only grief is that it has a fan. Since Amithlon only support 2D acceleration a GF3 card is almost as fast as a Geforce FX. So my pick for best PCI+DVI card for Amithlon would probably be a fanless FX5200!

[arti]

Found, but it's quite expensive.

What about Radeon 7000? It's 3 times cheaper on ebay.

[milanca]

Radeon cards (all of them currently supported) have partial hw. acceleration. If you are picking a card for amithlon, I would go with Geforce. As NMI said, 5200 or 5700. You can buy fx5500 on dealextreme for 30eur, 256MB 128bit card. I am personally looking for pci fx5200 but low profile, for my mini-itx board. Haven't find it yet.

Best regards!

[Methanoid]

Originally Posted by milanca

Radeon cards (all of them currently supported) have partial hw. acceleration. If you are picking a card for amithlon, I would go with Geforce. As NMI said, 5200 or 5700. You can buy fx5500 on dealextreme for 30eur, 256MB 128bit card. I am personally looking for pci fx5200 but low profile, for my mini-itx board. Haven't find it yet.

Best regards!

Milanca

I was feeling helpful since you've done so much for Amithlon users....

One here

And one here

Not cheap but they are both PCI and Low Profile (if you change the bracket yourself)

[arti]

Alright, got gfx working with fx 5200, now I only miss sound...
I have got Sound Blaster Audigy.
When loading module ice1724 I get unresolved symbols ...

[milanca]

Originally Posted by arti

Alright, got gfx working with fx 5200, now I only miss sound...
I have got Sound Blaster Audigy.
When loading module ice1724 I get unresolved symbols ...

Is the system auto-loading that modules for your card? ice1724 is for cards for example based on envy24x chip. What is the vendor and device id of your card?

[arti]

Originally Posted by milanca

Is the system auto-loading that modules for your card? ice1724 is for cards for example based on envy24x chip. What is the vendor and device id of your card?

No it isn't.
PCI Vendor:

1102 0007

Do I need pci_vendors.txt to be in S: ?
Where can I get newest?

Edit: Clarify pci vendor.

[milanca]

Hi arti,

No, you don't need vendors.txt, all you need is is pci_modules. But in this case you don't need it either. Well i don;t know why you decided to use ice1724, not required for this sound card, maybe you thought it will work with it but never mind now. That card should work natively in amithlon, at least devices with ids (vendor 1102, 002 and 004) do. If you take a look in pci_modules you can find it commented out, because there is internal support for them ( in amithlon's core itself). Did you try it without modules to see if it can work natively? If it doesn;t that device with id 007 is not supported internally. You can try to add 1102 0007 above 1102 004, uncomment all the other lines to see if emu10k can make it work.

best reards