Amithlon - anyone still using it?

[BitSeeker]

I have an old PC (HP Compaq, small [for the time] form factor, P4, 2Gb RAM) lying around that I was going to dump but have been wondering whether to re-purpose it for an emulating an Amiga.


I understand that Amithlon was initially supported by Amiga.Inc but quickly abandoned, now some years ago, due to a spat between Amiga Inc, Haage&Partner and some interferance by Hyperion Entertainment. This sadly resulted the project being dropped by the original author in disgust. It seems that the history of Commodore and Amiga has been plagued with self-destructive actions and strategies and this appears to be another example!


Nevertheless, code still survives and I was wondering whether anyone still uses is and whether it is still worth the time and effort to use it?


I have recently set up FS-UAE on a Linux box, but have already been reminded on another forum of the legal requirement to use Kickstart. The seems to be at present some legal controversy over who is the legal owner of the Amiga name and who has the right to distribute Kickstart licences, although apparently these are available from Cloanto, Hyperion while Haage &Partners supply a version of the OSS without Kickstart. Each vendor has its own versions and platform support which all seems to add up to a confusing mess. Would any licence I purchase actually be legal and whether anyone would anyone even care?

I understand that the legality of Amithlon, despite originally having the backing of Amiga.Inc, is also questionable at best, so I am rather uncertain as to which approach to take or whether like the author of Amithlon, to drop my interest in Amiga entirely in disgust!

[malko]

I would say that SnkBitten is the one to ask
This thread, is worth the reading :
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...light=amithlon
also
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...30#post1277630

Not using it actually but planning to find a compatible laptop to run it in a near future.

[SnkBitten]

Yeah, I still use Amithlon and am a HUGE fan of it. It by far gives the most "real" feel of using an Amiga other than using a real Amiga

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/ has the guides I developed to install and configure it after working with it for a while. Amithlon is a pain to install and get functional, but with the right hardware selections and working through the install and configurations it is a total beast of a system. It's biggest limitation is going to be the lack of any support for the native chipsets, so no games or hardware pinging software. On the other hand, software that works with the system will fly like nothing else. Some software can be easily promoted to the Amithlon screenmodes as well, opening up even more Amiga software.

You'll also find on my site links to my blog where I discuss a lot of the install aspects and things I've added to make it better. I even have guides for compiling your own kernel (though still limited to Linux 2.4). Compatible hardware is also listed and overall the guides will walk you through installing Amithlon, updating/patching it, getting USB, Audio, Picasso96 and Network functioning.

You can also find my guides on Aminet if you like, they are current to the last 'export to .pdf' from my Google Doc pages on my website.

http://aminet.net/package/docs/help/Amithlon-Guides

[Pyromania]

Can Amithon be used in a Virtual machine like Virtial Box or VMware?

[SnkBitten]

Virtual box yes ...though with some limitations. Hardware accelerated graphics aren't possible. It'll still be fast for graphics but text scrolling will be much slower without HW acceleration. Networking has been hit and miss as well, working just fine on my Win10 laptop but not on my Win10 desktop. Other than that, if you have a really fast host system, Amithlon on VB will scream. Just configure a dos setup as close to supported Amithlon hardware.

1 CPU, 1 GB ram, ac97 audio, ide hd and CD, 16mb video, USB 1.1.

[Pyromania]

Cool, thanx!

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

I understand that Amithlon was initially supported by Amiga.Inc but quickly abandoned, now some years ago, due to a spat between Amiga Inc, Haage&Partner and some interferance by Hyperion Entertainment. This sadly resulted the project being dropped by the original author in disgust. It seems that the history of Commodore and Amiga has been plagued with self-destructive actions and strategies and this appears to be another example!

As I see it, the most important consequence was H&P leaving the Amiga market in disgust, due to an unjustified campaign of harassment and vilification. I don't recall Hyperion having any role; it was somewhat before Hyperion became officially involved in the OS development, and in fact H&P were the ones who were originally intended to write OS4.

Would any licence I purchase actually be legal?

I suppose we will have to wait a year or so for the court case, to be sure, but I think Hyperion have the stronger case.

[Anubis]

I fail to see purpose of using it, since it does not run any of legacy amiga software / games.

[malko]

Originally Posted by Anubis

I fail to see purpose of using it, since it does not run any of legacy amiga software / games.

It's not a gaming environment, but as SnkBitten mentioned it

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

[...] On the other hand, software that works with the system will fly like nothing else. Some software can be easily promoted to the Amithlon screenmodes as well, opening up even more Amiga software. [...]

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by Anubis

I fail to see purpose of using it, since it does not run any of legacy amiga software / games.

It runs most Amiga software that was written to use the OS. It doesn't run software that bangs the Amiga hardware directly. If your Amithlon system is fast enough, you can run the E-UAE 68K emulator software and run a basic A500 to A1200 system for gaming.

[Dunny]

If you want the gaming environment then Amilator is what you need. It runs very well indeed.

[BitSeeker]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

It's biggest limitation is going to be the lack of any support for the native chipsets, so no games or hardware pinging software. On the other hand, software that works with the system will fly like nothing else. Some software can be easily promoted to the Amithlon screenmodes as well, opening up even more Amiga software.

Well when I saw it described as providing closest to the feel of a "real" Amiga and talk of a JIT compiler, I assumed that it would run any Amiga software just like a real Amiga. However, this limitation is understandable. I guess had development been allowed to continue, emulation features to deal with this might have been built in eventually.

Originally Posted by Dunny

If you want the gaming environment then Amilator is what you need. It runs very well indeed.

Thanks for pointing this out. Yet another part of the fragmented Amiga scene that I had not yet come across. Digging into this a little, it seems that this is actually FS-UAE running on Debian Linux with a few tweaks and I presume packaged into an installable CD. I found very little in the way of information and downloads for this and the picture on one particular thread got a bit fuzzy with the discussion of an Aros kernel. I presume then, in uses the Kickstart budled with Aros. The question I now have is, apart from being cut-down to focus on running FS-UAE, what really is the difference between this and running FS-UAE on a current Linux distro?

[SnkBitten]

I'm not sure it would have gained chipset support, it was designed to be as fast as possible and geared less towards the gamer and more towards the professional user. Eliminating the need for timing restrictions imposed by supporting the native chipset stuff, even through emulation, helped with it's speed and performance. It's development was focused on AmigaOS with RTG graphics and AHI audio. I'd suspect if "Amiga" continued, this would have been their direction as well. Bernie hoped that Amithlon would help pave the way for development of more native x86 code to slowly move away from depending on 68k code and make AmigaOS run fully on more easily available and less expensive hardware.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

Thanks for pointing this out. Yet another part of the fragmented Amiga scene that I had not yet come across. Digging into this a little, it seems that this is actually FS-UAE running on Debian Linux with a few tweaks and I presume packaged into an installable CD. I found very little in the way of information and downloads for this and the picture on one particular thread got a bit fuzzy with the discussion of an Aros kernel. I presume then, in uses the Kickstart budled with Aros. The question I now have is, apart from being cut-down to focus on running FS-UAE, what really is the difference between this and running FS-UAE on a current Linux distro?

Yes, it's a stripped-down Debian install running FS-UAE. When configured to use a directory as HDD, you get to use the storage natively and it boots in less than 30 seconds. Soft-reboot is on the order of less than a second from TFDG to Workbench. And of course it's fast AF - with the emulation running at full speed, and JIT enabled or disabled for WHDLoad, there's no faster Amiga. Full RTG support too. I have an old Core-i5 laptop I use specifically for this and it's wonderful.

Of course you really want to switch from the bundled AROS ROM to a proper Kickstart or you're not going to get far, especially with games.

The only drawback is that FS-UAE has no "ADF chooser" built in, you have to add disks to the configuration file and use the disk swapper on the F12 menu. You can use UAE-Ctrl for that though, so I've on and off been writing a utility to handle it in Amiga-E - I'll release it when I get time to finish it off.

All in all, it suits my purposes better than Amithlon for a few reasons - firstly it runs on my hardware which Amithlon never has without major issues; Amithlon has hardware requirements for components that are getting harder to source these days.

Secondly, the compatibility with Amiga software is much, much better.

And thirdly, it was a breeze to get running.

All of which apply to AROS both in hosted and native at present too. I've never gotten that to run to a satisfactory level, either, and when it does run it looks ugly as hell, which can be rectified but I simply can't be bothered with the hassle of trying to get it to look like 3.1 + MWB.

[BitSeeker]

Yes, I tried using the built-in AROS ROM in FS-UAE on my main PC that runs Linux MINT 19, and found that some games will not run.

The PC that I am thinking of re-purposing is an old HP Compaq box with a late P4 (hyperthreaded) processor with 2Gb of RAM. This is much older and has far less processing power than your i5. Is this still adequate enough to run Amilator?

I have managed to find a download for 4.15.0.2. Is this the latest version?

BTW, I can download Debian and install FS-UAE on there myself. Any advantages/disadvantages to doing so? Just thinking that way I would have the latest versions of everything?

[Dunny]

Debian running FS-UAE would probably be very similar, depending on what else you have running - Amilator is stripped down barring the essentials for USB, graphics and network access.

As for performance, the P4 should be pretty good. My i5 is pretty old now (I got it around 2012 maybe?) and it's a laptop mobile CPU so won't be that much faster.

Upgrading the internal FS-UAE (should any future versions come out) is harder in Amilator if you don't understand the Linux terminal but not really much of a bother to those that do.

[BitSeeker]

I have set it up an a USB stick as in the guide and it boots OK into workbench on my main PC. I know F12 gets you into the FS-UAE setup, I can get to the Linux terminal via Ctrl-Alt-F1 and back again to the GUI with Ctrl-Alt-F7, but I can't see any option to add floppy disk images as the UAE Launcher does not appear to be included? Perhaps there are hot keys, but I'm rather working in the dark here.... I guessed that maybe I should copy the .adfs into the folder named 'floppies' but only one of them shows and is not listed in the FS-UAE select list.

Can I add FS-UAE-Launcher by downloading and copying over the .deb file? Will it run from the terminal? I guess that there is probably a text config file somewhere where adding floppies to the swap list can be done manually but all information I have found so far references the Launcher.

BTW, not tried it on the target PC yet. Just wanting to make sure everything is set up properly and works first.

[malko]

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

[...] but I can't see any option to add floppy disk images as the UAE Launcher does not appear to be included? Perhaps there are hot keys, but I'm rather working in the dark here.... I guessed that maybe I should copy the .adfs into the folder named 'floppies' but only one of them shows and is not listed in the FS-UAE select list.[...]

As far as I am aware (and others are more expert in the Amilator field as I am ) the only way to have floppy is to insert them in the configuration file.
I was never able to make the auto-mount facility to work. So I added manually all the floppies on the configuration like this :

floppy_image_0 = <adf/ipf file name>
floppy_image_1 = <adf/ipf file name>
floppy_image_2 = <adf/ipf file name> ....

I have noticed that a maximum of 15 floppy are displayed when you press F12.
Here is the configuration I am using.

[BitSeeker]

Thanks for that. I did figure that bit out by looking at the FS-UAE config files on my main PC after adding disks and doing the multi-select thing. I added the floppy_image lines to the wrong config file though. I eventually found that the config for FS-UAE to use is set in host-props. Once I added the lines to the correct one, it worked, but not without issue.

I found that disks need to be loaded and then a soft reboot of the emulator is required. You can't just click on the floppy in workbench to open it or anything. However, some disks get ejected instead and games do not load. in fact, I have found very few games that will actually load and run. Most give some form of error.

Running FS-UAE on my main PC does not seem to have so many problems, athough for any games that do not work I can switch to the A500 and then they usually work. However on amilator, so far, I have not found a means to restart the emulator after editing the config.

Unfortunately, the bad news is that the PC I want to run this on refuses to boot the USB stick. I'm not sure why, but this means that I will have to attempt an install to the hard disk.

[malko]

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

[...] I found that disks need to be loaded and then a soft reboot of the emulator is required. You can't just click on the floppy in workbench to open it or anything. However, some disks get ejected instead and games do not load. in fact, I have found very few games that will actually load and run. Most give some form of error.

I am not sure I understand what you mean.
When your floppies are available under the F12 menu interface, it's like in a real Amiga. If the screen is displaying the 1.3 ROM hand picture (or 2+ floppy drive) the inserted disk in DF0: will boot.
If you have booted to WB and insert a disk it is straight available for use. No need to reset or 'soft reboot'.
I never encountered any kind of 'wild eject'.

On my side, new releases of Amilator (4.12+) leaded my laptop to have unexpected crash. Thus I still use 4.9.3 'non pae' release. It's working like a charm and is really stable .

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

Running FS-UAE on my main PC does not seem to have so many problems, athough for any games that do not work I can switch to the A500 and then they usually work.

On my side, all the tested disks worked. No 'non working' games (and I did tried several ).
Thus difficult to help you. Maybe you can give more info. Which game disk ? Did you check the FS-UAE site to validate your config file ?

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

However on amilator, so far, I have not found a means to restart the emulator after editing the config.

If you didn't see this thread, you can give it a reading. Maybe nobody is the one to ask as I usually edit the Amilator config file on a different PC.
I have to say that I miss a facility to multi boot Amilator with different ROM (like choosing to boot between a basic A500 1.3 config or a more advances A1200 3.1 one)

Originally Posted by BitSeeker

Unfortunately, the bad news is that the PC I want to run this on refuses to boot the USB stick. I'm not sure why, but this means that I will have to attempt an install to the hard disk.

On rebellious PC, usually 'plop boot manager' was of good help as it has a boot on USB facility .


PS: I know it's your thread but you are more speaking about Amilator than Amithlon actually .