Amithlon - anyone still using it?

[Dunny]

When Amilator first appeared on EAB:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=88707

Contains info on how to get it to run.

Personally I don't use floppies much (until I get my util finished) and prefer WHDLoad installs instead. That said, I've never had any issues with floppies - just F12 to insert the disk image and then reboot.

[BitSeeker]

Thank for the link to the config parameters. I copied the floppy_image_xx entries from my main PC that were added by the Launcher so the format of the spelling should be correct. I only had to add the path and ensure that when I copied and pasted the lines that I updated the image numbers and kept them all in sequence.

For example, I tried ProjectX. There are 4 floppies which I was able to select after F12 and load into the 4 virtual floppy bays. When I soft or hard reset the emulator, the drives were empty again.

Other games like Lotus, Mickey Mouse, Suzuki, Street Racer, did not run. Some dropped out to a AmigaDOS window and then nothing happened. I waited to give each one a chance. Some would load the opening credits or instructions and crash on going to the next stage throw an error in red text.

BTW I also saw the other thread you mention but couldn’t see anything about re-loading the emulator after a config change other than a full reboot of Amilator. No harm looking again in case I missed something I guess.

Dunny, I will have a look at the thread you mention as well. Not tried anything with WHDload yet. The database Launcher also seems to provide links to files in IPF format. Not tried using those yet either but my next poit of research was going to be about ruing games from HD instead of loading floppies.

[malko]

Maybe give a try with the config from post #18 by just adding your games' disks on it (save your config first) and let us know...

[BitSeeker]

malko, that is exactly what I was doing. However, I think I have found what was causing the issue. When you download games, some of the files names are very descriptive and extremely long and contain characters like ( ) + - as well as underscores and spaces. I can't rule out possible typos, but I found that removing any of these characters and shortening the names solved the problem of the disk files being jettisoned from the virtual drives after a reboot of the emulator.

I also found that the file names haver to be pretty short otherwise they just show up as 'DISK'. I'm not sure what the maximum Amiga file name length is (will do some research) but I had to shorten for example my renamed Project-X-Disk-1-1.adf further to ProjectX1.adf. It then showed up with a sensible name in the emulator.

You will also see from the first screenshot the sort of error I'm getting when I run this game and some others. I have also attached my config. Pretty much the default with my disk images added in at the end. In this case the error crops up after the opening credits and after the first space themed screen with the planet and before it finishes loading the next stage of the game.

This is, at present, running on my main PC, which has an i7 processor and 8Gb RAM. I am booting with the >3Gb option. I haven't been able to run the emulator on the older PC yet as I have been rather under the weather these last couple of days and have not had chance to install it to HD yet.

BTW, I appreciate the feedback from everyone on here.

EDIT:
The config failed to attach so I have pated it in here:

# FS-UAE configuration saved by FS-UAE Launcher
# Last saved: 2016-12-17 21:11:11

[fs-uae]
amiga_model = A1200
bsdsocket_library = 1
#cdrom_drive_count = 1
#cdrom_drive_0 = /amiga/cd-roms/AmigaOS 4.1 FE Classic v53.71.iso
#cdrom_image_0 = /amiga/cd-roms/AmigaOS 4.1 FE Classic v53.71.iso
chip_memory = 2048
cpu = 68040-NOMMU
graphics_card = uaegfx-z3
graphics_memory = 32768
hard_drive_0 = /amiga/harddirs/Workbench
hard_drive_1 = /amiga/harddirs/Work
hard_drive_2= /amiga/harddirs/WHDload
hard_drive_3= /mnt/auto/autofs/cdrom
hard_drive_4= /amiga/floppies
hard_drive_3_read_only=1
jit_compiler = 1
kickstart_file = /amiga/roms/kick.rom
zorro_iii_memory = 262144
keep_aspect = 1
floppies_dir=/amiga/floppies/mount/
floppy_drive_count = 4
floppy_drive_volume = 0
mouse_speed=75
mouse_integration=0
base_dir=/root/Documents/FS-UAE
fullscreen_mode=window
uaem_write_flags=0
screenshots_output_dir=/amiga/Screenshots	

floppy_image_0 = /amiga/Games/Mickey.adf
floppy_image_1 = /amiga/Games/Celica.adf
floppy_image_2 = /amiga/Games/StreetRacer.adf
floppy_image_3 = /amiga/Games/ProjectX1.adf
floppy_image_4 = /amiga/Games/ProjectX2.adf
floppy_image_5 = /amiga/Games/ProjectX3.adf
floppy_image_6 = /amiga/Games/ProjectX4.adf
floppy_image_7 = /amiga/Games/K240-1.adf
floppy_image_8 = /amiga/Games/K240-2.adf
floppy_image_9 = /amiga/Games/K240-3.adf
floppy_image_10 = /amiga/Games/Combora1.adf
floppy_image_11 = /amiga/Games/Combora2.adf
floppy_image_12 = /amiga/Games/DizzyDice.adf
floppy_image_13 = /amiga/Games/F17-Challenge-World Championship-Disk-1-2.adf
floppy_image_14 = /amiga/Games/F17-Challenge-World Championship-Disk-1-2.adf

[malko]

Now that you mention it, it's possible that I have also renamed some of the disks files before using them. Not because I was facing any issue, only for readability But not sure, will have to check.

[BitSeeker]

Well, the good news is that I have the emulator working on the old HP Compaq machine. Since it has only 2GB RAM, I'm using the <3Gb option and everything seems to load up OK. When installing to hard disk you have to add a -f to the command that installs syslinux. Networking seems to work as the machine gets an IP address from the router. The next step is to set up some way to transfer files across. There is no SSH as far as I can see so will probably have to be installed manually. Sound also seems to work as evidenced by the annoying floppy drive click which I have now turned off!

The games that do work seem to run OK. For example F17 Challenge World Championship ran without any lag or hiccups. Some games still do run into that 'Software Error' message in red writing fail to fully load. Anyway, it seems that the project is at least viable on this PC and slowly getting there. I can experiment with tweaking settings to see whether I can get those other games to load and run and later on also try some WHDload games.

Since I would also like to run a C64 and other vintage machine emulators, I think that I may ultimately have to go down the route of installing a basic Debian distro into the second partition and running the individual emulators from there, but for now, I am happy enough with the Amilator which has given an old PC a new lease of life! There are a couple of things on it that need sorting such as replacing the BIOS battery and maybe re-capping the power supply but other than that the hardware seems to be adequate. I will also need to find a monitor. Maybe an old CRT job perhaps?

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Minuous

in fact H&P were the ones who were originally intended to write OS4.

Huh, I have seen OS4 plans from 1996, long before H&P was involved in doing OS development, Though they at some point were a candidate for writing OS4, that line of companies is rather long, and H&P were certainly not the "original" ones.

[BitSeeker]

Having thought about the best way to run other emulators such as VICE, DOSemu etc on this old PC, I decided to go with a dual boot setup. This means I can run Amilator, which is optimised for running FS-UAE, in one partition, while having a Linux distro on the other partition to run the other emulators. This does mean an additional step to the boot-up process, but since both partitions would be available to the Linux distro, this would also provide me with the means to manage FS-UAE configuration and ROMs on the Amilator partition with FS-UAE-Launcher..

I initially installed Debian, but ran into a couple of issues. Firstly, GRUB did not recognize that the Amilator partition had a bootable OS on it. I figured that this could probably be fixed manually but the tools I needed, including grub-customizer and the VICE emulator are not available in the Debian repository. Furthermore, although I was able to add the grub-customizer PPA to Debian, there was no valid download available for the Debian platform. I needed to be using Ubuntu. Taking these factors into consideration, I decided to wipe Debian and install Linux Mint, which makes use of the Ubuntu 18.04LTS repository, instead. Mint is a rather larger distro but I had to weigh up easy access to the programs I needed and deleting non-essentials aftwerwards, versus manually wrestling with GRUB and install a development environment to compile the other bits that were missing. I chose the more convenient option and I removed LibreOffice and Thunderbird after installation. To be sure, there are probably still more things I could remove such as VLC, GIMP, Xsane and others, but that’s a task for another day.

Having installed grub-customizer, it was then quite simple to set up a boot menu entry to chain load the Syslinux bootloader and I get the familiar Amithlon boot menu when I select that entry. Adding a new menu entry, selecting to chainload the bootloader on the Amithlon partition and saving with presented default options just worked. It does also ocurr to me that it might be possible to boot the Linux OS from the Syslinux loader on the Amithlon partition. Will have to experiment with that at some point.

It ocurred to me that it might be rather nice to run an Amiga based OS such as Aros in the other partition instead of Linux as it would keep everything in keeping with the Amiga theme. However, can the C64, Vic and PET be emulated on Aros? Had great fun trying out some PET programs the other night. Are there other emulators such as DOSemu or PCemu available on this platform?

[plg3d]

Regarding Amithlon.Some online information says this works with Intel CPU. Has anyone tried AMD CPU? I have two old PCs one with an AMD K6 2 500Mhz and another with AMD Athlon 2000. I also have some old Matrox & nVidia graphics cards I can use. I own Cinema 4D 4 & Lightwave 3D 4 for the Amiga so interested in running these in Amithlon.

Due to the age of the computers I'm limited on what versions of WinUAE I can run and what Amiga systems I can emulate.

[croupier]

Yes, it works also with AMD....for my cases (PCs that I tries with Amithlon) it is more an issue of the Motherboard and RAM than anything else...

[plg3d]

Originally Posted by croupier

Yes, it works also with AMD....for my cases (PCs that I tries with Amithlon) it is more an issue of the Motherboard and RAM than anything else...

Thanks for the reply.

I still have all my cover discs/CDs from Amiga magazines with what free software that came with them I'd like to try also.

[croupier]

CDs are OK for Amithlon....with Floppies it's another story....unless you find a way how to connect an Amiga floppy drive to the PC running Amithlon you will have no use of your floppies...


Disk images of the floppies (.adf) is the closest you will get to 'using a floppy' (Amiga formatted one!)....PC formatted floppies are OK for Amithlon...just mount a 'PC0' on your WorkBench and your PCs drive will read PC formatted floppies....

[plg3d]

I have a Greaseweazle V4 board for reading Amiga disks in a PC floppy drive. Maybe that will work in Amithlon.

Also out of curiosity I tried booting up from Amithlon CD on my 2006 Intel Core Duo Mac Mini but only loaded as far as the animated bouncing ball screen. It did boot up into Amiga OS from an Amiga Forever disc.

[SnkBitten]

I'm not sure how the Greaseweazle works so I'm not sure it'll work with Amithlon without someone coding driver/software for it. Doesn't it connect to a USB port on a PC?

Out of the box Amithlon can use the PC's floppy drive as a PC drive, accessing PC formatted disk with the PC0: drive.

I have a Catweasel interface that plugs between the PC motherboard floppy controller and the Floppy drive, this allows me to mount both PC formatted floppies (DD and HD) and Amiga formatted floppies (DD and HD). However these are quite rare and really aren't needed. If you get USB working it's so easy to move data over by using PC formatted USB sticks.....move everything over as .adf and just mount those files as needed.

Amithlon is very dependent on the motherboard chipset, a chipset that is supported by linux 2.4. This limits you to older hardware and pretty specific chipsets that control the hardware on the motherboard. This is probably why the Intel based Mac Mini couldn't boot it. Once Amithlon boots, the stripped down linux kernel controls the hardware I/O and it probably couldn't talk to the hardware.

My site has as much detailed info you can find about Amithlon including all the patches, how to compile the kernel, how to install/configure Amithlon, etc.... https://amithlon.snkbitten.com/

[plg3d]

The Geaseweazle board does connect to a USB port.
Looks like the Catweasel maybe a discontinued product.
I have been looking at https://amithlon.snkbitten.com/ also watching the videos by Chris Edwards Restoration on Youtube.
Not had chance to get started on the project as yet. I think I have all the necessary files put on to discs ready to use.

[plg3d]

I tested my AMD K6 2 500Mhz PC with 256Mb of RAM. Boots into Amithlon from the CD OK.
Once I found a PS2 mouse to plug in I could navigate the system opening folders etc. It didn't recognise a serial port mouse. Also got it to work with a USB mouse via USB to PS2 adapter. I have 7.5Mb graphics memory and 203Mb other memory. It has a 3DFX Voodoo3 graphics card installed.

[plg3d]

As the weather has been poor where I am recently I decided to try and set up the computer with Amithlon. I must have done something wrong as when it starts up I just get "GRUB _" with flashing cursor. I created the drives OK. Installed the drives within the software and formatted and installed OS 3.9 OK. I'll have another go later today.


Nope 2nd attempt ended in the same situation. After setting up the drive, copying Freedos files over, copying files over from Amithlon CD, copying the Kernel files over. I then edit the Small & Amithlon to add Kern310 and reboot I just get "GRUB _" with flashing cursor and can type nothing in.

[plg3d]

Turns out it was the HDD I was using. I'd previously had an Icaros installation on it and even though it has been formatted and partitioned I think still had something on the drive from that install. So I tried a different HDD. The Kern310 when I try and use it causes the system to crash and reboot. Seems to work OK with default emubox.gz. I can get OS 3.9 up and running when I type "loadlin @small" at the DOS prompt. I think I might change the 3DFX Voodoo3 card for a Matrox G200 card (when I find it) or I do have a GeForce 2 MX400 card. Still need to do the OS3.9 updates.

[plg3d]

I had to redo the system. AmithlonUpdate131 caused the OS display to corrupt with a load of lines across the screen.

Up and running again. Avoided using the above update this time.
Still have to do Picasso, Sound & USB installs.
Still using emubox.gz as kern310 & kernel4 just cause the PC to reboot.
Haven't tried new_emubox.gz yet.