Amithlon Setup Guide

[jdog320]

Wth happened with the supportedhw page on your site? Its now about lightwave3d!

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by jdog320

Wth happened with the supportedhw page on your site? Its now about lightwave3d!

Oops....I forgot that was a published page and cleared it to use as a template for Lightwave.

Let me take care of that....

Okay, I corrected my error and the Supported Hardware page is back up.

[SnkBitten]

I did some testing with SysSpeed and P96Speed and it seems that as long as your graphics card is supported in the kernel you'll get hardware acceleration regardless of the screenmode being used. This includes FakeNative, Built-in and of course your card name (examples...FakeNative:640x480, Built-in:640x480, nVidia-1:640x480, etc..). This is great news if you don't need to define any specific resolutions as the built-in are based on the standard vesa monitor definitions for various resolutions. If you need to define your own, of course creating it in Picasso96Mode is necessary, like the 1280x720 I use.

I ran multiple tests at 640x480x8bit between FakeNative and nVidia-1 and multiple tests at 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 at 8bit, 16bit and 32bit between Built-in and nVidia-1. Results were near identical, what ever difference there was in one function would be made up for with another, and so on. 

[SnkBitten]

Decided to play around with the settings in GenesisPrefs to see if I could squeeze some more speed out of the ethernet connection. A few google searches gave me some ideas and I tried them plus a few other changes that seems to have helped. I have not had time to continue raising the amounts to see if it continued to improve or started to degrade performance. For me, downloads are significantly faster over the internet and opening and viewing "show all files" on my 1 TB network drives are tremendously quicker.

Before the changes I was averaging around 167,000 CPS in IBrowse downloading a file from Aminet. With the changes in the image attached, I'm averaging around 240,000 CPS on the same file.

Changes are in Options, Advanced in the Kernel memory management section and the TCP buffer size section.

[pcotter]

Hello all,

Can someone confirm that the Powerfb driver is limited to 16 Mb?

Is there a way to overpass this limit? Env setting perhaps?
On my Matrox its even limited to 4mb.
On the Nvidia, 16 mb


Thx

[pcotter]

Originally Posted by pcotter

Hello all,

Can someone confirm that the Powerfb driver is limited to 16 Mb?

Is there a way to overpass this limit? Env setting perhaps?
On my Matrox its even limited to 4mb.
On the Nvidia, 16 mb


Thx

Well, Setconfig p96_memsize "Value" is the answer but with the Matrox I can only reduce the memory amount... I'm stuck with 4mb. ..

[SnkBitten]

Yes it's limited, my nVidia 5500 256MB card only shows 16 MB

using availp96 executable

AvailP96 1.1 by David Gerber <zapek@meanmachine.ch>

Using Picasso96API 0.2.
1 board found.

Board 1: nVidia-1 : (12669280/16777216) Bytes

I know of no way to increase the video ram Amithlon allocates from the graphic card.

[jdog320]

Maybe it's a limitation of the emulator itself? Try poking around the source and see if you can find something interesting.

[SnkBitten]

After numerous and frustrating attempts at E-UAE running on my Amithlon it seems there is some conflict with E-UAE-0.8.29-WIP4 and my system. This version causes a hard lock on the computer 99.9% of the time, the other .1% seems to run ok, though I haven't had much chance of testing.

Using version 0.8.28-RC2 and it runs 100% of the time. I'd like to test versions between 0.8.28-RC2 and 0.8.29-WIP4 to see what change is making it fail on my system. When I was able to test, 0.8.29-WIP4 was slightly faster than 0.8.28-RC2.

Does anyone have the release version of 0.8.28 or any of the 0.8.29-WIP (1,2 or 3).
aminet has 0.8.28-rc2

UAE-828-AOS68k.lha misc/emu 1107 824K 2005-08-27 m68k-amigaos E-UAE_0.8.28-RC2 for Amiga 68k OS - (readme)

[prowler]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Does anyone have the release version of 0.8.28 or any of the 0.8.29-WIP (1,2 or 3).
aminet has 0.8.28-rc2

I may have 0.8.28 lurking on an old hard drive. I'll have a look for you tomorrow.

[pcotter]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

After numerous and frustrating attempts at E-UAE running on my Amithlon it seems there is some conflict with E-UAE-0.8.29-WIP4 and my system. This version causes a hard lock on the computer 99.9% of the time, the other .1% seems to run ok, though I haven't had much chance of testing.

I had/have the same problem with the Nvidia FX 5200 PCI. Never got it to work with 8.29Wip4. Previous versions would run too slow. tried everything i could remember with PVC settings/Picasso96 but no go.

Works satisfactory with Matrox G550 PCIe. 99% runs ok!

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by prowler

I may have 0.8.28 lurking on an old hard drive. I'll have a look for you tomorrow.

Thanks!

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by pcotter

I had/have the same problem with the Nvidia FX 5200 PCI. Never got it to work with 8.29Wip4. Previous versions would run too slow. tried everything i could remember with PVC settings/Picasso96 but no go.

Works satisfactory with Matrox G550 PCIe. 99% runs ok!

Interesting. I may have to try a different video card to see if that makes a difference for me as well.

[SnkBitten]

Well I found another reason why E-UAE 0.8.28-RC2 was running slower than 0.8.29-WIP4....my motherboard wasn't running at the overclocked settings (4.0 Ghz) and was running at the stock CPU (3.33 Ghz) setting. Changes in BIOS made no difference (up or down). I had to basically short the bios memory to reset it and then reconfigure. I went for a slightly less aggressive speed (3.90 Ghz) and 8.28 is about the same as 8.29 now, would probably be near identical if overclocked to 4.0 Ghz.

[SnkBitten]

Playing a bit with Amithlon now.

Here's a little video of E-UAE-0.8.28-RC2 running FA 18 Interceptor.

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/files/Vids/E-UAE-FA18.mp4

And after installing Wazp3D and grabbing the demos from WarpUP_V40.lha (VoxelSpace in this example).

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/files/Vids/VoxelSpace.mp4

[jdog320]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Playing a bit with Amithlon now.

Here's a little video of E-UAE-0.8.28-RC2 running FA 18 Interceptor.

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/files/Vids/E-UAE-FA18.mp4

And after installing Wazp3D and grabbing the demos from WarpUP_V40.lha (VoxelSpace in this example).

http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/files/Vids/VoxelSpace.mp4

Play freespace if you want to flex amithlon's muscles. It works very well even on virtualbox inside an atom pc. Do note that if your mouse doesn't work properly in game you may need to disable joystick. Or else you'll pull your hair out figuring why mouse only works properly in menus.

[SnkBitten]

Following up on this.....I decided to try Roadshow again since I bought it and run it on my A4000T. I had tried previously but it just locked my system on running the S:Network-Startup script that is added to S:User-startup.

I figured it had to be something I was doing wrong with the NetInterface so I spent some time configuring the file for the NetInterfaces folder Roadshow uses. I already had the amithlon1_net.device driver which uses the RTL8169 10/100/1000 driver compiled in my kernel. The closest card I figured would be the RTL8139 so I copied that to a new file "AmithlonNet" and changed the driver to "amithlon1_net.device". It didn't pick up a DHCP address so I'll have to spend some time working on that but it didn't lock my system either. Changing it to a static address (same I was using in Genesis) and all was good. Speeds for downloading average in the 330,000 CPS using IBrowse.

I think the reason it failed the first attempt I made a while ago was that I had the RTL8139 file open and did a "save as" and just saved it to "AmithlonNet" with the device changes. This time I looked at the information of the icon and it had c:mount as the default tool so I changed it to AddNetworkInterface like the others. I don't believe I looked at the icon "information" the last time I did this which was making it fail.

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Decided to play around with the settings in GenesisPrefs to see if I could squeeze some more speed out of the ethernet connection. A few google searches gave me some ideas and I tried them plus a few other changes that seems to have helped. I have not had time to continue raising the amounts to see if it continued to improve or started to degrade performance. For me, downloads are significantly faster over the internet and opening and viewing "show all files" on my 1 TB network drives are tremendously quicker.

Before the changes I was averaging around 167,000 CPS in IBrowse downloading a file from Aminet. With the changes in the image attached, I'm averaging around 240,000 CPS on the same file.

Changes are in Options, Advanced in the Kernel memory management section and the TCP buffer size section.

Attachment 53260

[SnkBitten]

What I've added to the guide so far. I should take a few screenshots of the different folders and files but this works for now...

Networking (Roadshow)
You could instead use Roadshow if you have purchased this. Installation is done via an Installer but configuration changes are made editing text files that Roadshow uses. These will need to be edited after installing to reflect your network card, network addresses, name servers, hosts and routes.

Install Roadshow using the installer, once installation is complete, browse to your DEVS:Storage/NetInterfaces folder and make a copy of the RTL8139 text file and name it AmithlonNET, then copy it to DEVS:NetInterfaces/ . Edit this file to use the device driver of your Amithlon system, most likely the same as used for Genesis, the amithlon1_net.device. I had issues with it obtaining an IP address via dhcp so I commented out the line for dhcp and uncommented the lines for address and subnet and modified those for my network. You may also want to change these two lines:
#iprequests=32
#writerequests=32
To
iprequests=64
writerequests=64
As it will improve the performance of the network interface (faster transfers)

Next you’ll edit the ‘name_resoltuion’ file under DEVS:Internet changing the line:
#nameserver 192.168.0.1
Removing the “#” to uncomment it and modifying the address to match that of your router which is typically the name server you use. You can add additional name servers by uncommenting the other lines and modifying those if you also point to Google’ DNS servers, etc..

In the same folder (DEVS:Internet) edit the file ‘routes’ and change the line:
#default localhost to remove the “#” and change “localhost” to your router’s IP address (again this is a typical configuration).

If you have any devices you communicate with on your local LAN, it would be a good idea to add those to the ‘hosts’ file. Ad the bottom of the file, just add your devices IP and what you call them. I have a NAS box for storage so I add it’s IP address, press tab and then add the name MyNAS. This allows me to reference MyNAS instead of the IP when using SMBFS or FTP, etc..

Reboot and your Amithlon should start up with networking enabled and running. I will look into the DHCP issue I was having and see if it can be easily resolved. I use DHCP (with an IP reservation on my A4000T so I expect it should work just as well on my Amithlon system.

When using DHCP you should only edit the AmithlonNET file to uncomment the ‘iprequest’ and ‘writerequest’ and bump them to 64 and edit the ‘name-resolution’ file to add your router’s IP address as the nameserver. If you have local devices you want to reference by name, editing the ‘hosts’ file is still needed.

[SnkBitten]

Played the Descent Freespace demo, plays very well. I need to do some rearranging of my computer desk to make using my Amithlon system a little less difficult (no room for keyboard and extremely limited space for the mouse).

Just added Odamex (Doom) to my system and at 1280x720 it plays a bit too fast. I may have to bump the resolution up a bit or look at some of the other options.

Duke Nuke'm 3d plays extremely well, one of my favorites from back in the day and one of the games that made me not miss my Amiga's as much.

[SnkBitten]

Finally, i686be-amithlon-ahiusr.lha installed and functioning. I just wanted to get it working vs. the m68k-amigaos-ahiusr.lha version. More of a challenge I guess since I kept hearing it was much more difficult to do than the 68k version.

Bernie stated there really isn't much of a difference, the i686 will be ever so slightly faster, but use it for bragging rights or something

You need run_elf in your user-startup to let it interpret the x86 binary.

run <>NIL: run_elf GUARD PATCH

I'll add the note to my guides and include run_elf 1.8c.tar.gz file.

You'll need both run_elf and run_elf86 copied to C: or C:amithlonc/