Amithlon Setup Guide

[dr.zeissler]

Sorry, I always use real machines, so I can't help you with any kind of virtualisation settings.

In terms of gpu compatibilty the G550 has issues on getting a sharp and stable image on lowres 320x240 screens. I never get that straight, but mga-mystique is fine here. I am not a big fan of Nvidia cards, but my SN45Gv2 Nforce2 PC has an GF3-ti200 with kernel 2x (silver bouncing ball ) and it works good. Soundquality is worse than on SB128 though.

Still hoping that milanca get's RageII /RageLTpro/i810(815e) working...that would be a big thing in terms of compatible retro-machines with onboard-gpu.

Doc

[SnkBitten]

Originally Posted by jdog320

@snkbitten
Here's amithlon working on the latest build of VirtualBox as of this writing. Almost everything works except for networking once again. I tried Nat, NatNetwork and Bridged but it doesn't work. Also tried MiamiDX and Genesis and no dice. It gets the DNS Servers from my router, but that's about it.

Use an older version of Virtualbox if you want networking. 6.0.22 works with networking, I had a working Amithlon setup and upgraded to 7.x Virtualbox and all networking stopped. I uninstalled the 7.x version and reinstalled 6.0.22 and I had networking again in my Amithlon/VB setup.

[dr.zeissler]

I am checking another machine (FSC E600) because I put a catweasel mk4plus with 3,5"+5,25" Floppys and a SB128 in that machine I am not able to have a CD-Drive in that machine. So no slot free, no bay and no tray.

If I activate legacy-mode in the bios the external usb-cd is bootable. Amithlon boots but then I get "emulator-crash".
I have to find another solution or another PC that still has IDE-cdrom.

[dr.zeissler]

OK=> https://amithlonblog.snkbitten.com/amithlonfaq/

Lists ATAPI+SCSI....so I will put out my SB128PCI and will install a SCSI Controller. Hopefully the external SCSI-CDROM will be found. Kernel 310 will hopefully support my AC97 codec of the P4/i865 chipset.

[dr.zeissler]

Can confirm PCI 2940UW working with amithlon

[dr.zeissler]

Originally Posted by dr.zeissler

Kernel 310 will hopefully support my AC97 codec of the P4/i865 chipset.

Seems so, but sound is muted or routed wrong. Same issue in plain Dos with SBEMU or DOSSOUND...currently investigating.

Beside that on that machine (E600/D1534) amithlon is freezing right on boot with every kernel if the Bios is set on "top of the base memory", it's working with the setting "Expansion ROM Area" this directly effects OS/2 Warp4 on WINOS/2 window not working, so either no amithlon or winos2/window...because os2 offers winos2 fullscreen that's not a big deal to lose winos2window.

But the muted AC97 is a problem.

Main machine:
FSC E600 D1534
P4 2.26AGhz 533Mhz
512MB RAM
80GB IDE-HDD
3,5" 1,44MB
5,25 360KB
PCI1 2940UW (external SCSI-CDROM)
PCI2 CWMK4Plus (for both floppys)
AGP Matrox G550/32MB

Multiboot:
- OS/2 WARP
- AMIGA (and MSDOS)
- WIN2K
- LINUX

*edit: the FSC engineers seem to have concepted this case for the SCSI-Controller...this is indeed a PERFECT fit

[Deremon]

Sorry for the very very, very late response

Originally Posted by dr.zeissler

Very fast and mordern machines you have.

Have you limited your RAM to 1GB ? Takeout everything that is more than that.

On AGP matrox cards you don't need "video=matrox and video= vesa" that is only needed on the very early Mystique/Millenium PCI cards. G550 was supported directly in the newkernel and that is best used with 131. I only have the G550 AGP and it works good. The later and therefore unsupported chipsets will most likly only use pio mode on HDD access but that does not care because the machines are so fast.

I see no real benefit in playing whdload-games in amithlon, but if this is your goal then go for it. My main focus is native amiga software that does not need the custom-chipset and runs direct on amithlon...though there is not so much stuff for this niche, but for everything else I can game on that thing... [ Show youtube player ]

The suggestion using 1G of RAM worked!!
WHDLoad games works very very well using double lines with 640x480 resolution with G550


Also I discovered that, no matter what processor I'm using (I've recovered two athlon64 3200+/3500+ and a core 2 Quad Q9550), if I'm not using the Matrox G550 card WHDLoad games slow down a lot and audio stutters, the other video card is the nvdia FX5700 PCI as I said in the other post.

I don't know if this was already discussed here, these processor ranges from 2000+ (athlon64 3200+) to 3000+ (core2quad) sysinfo scores, even with the fastest, WHDLoad games performs terrible with nvidia... I think is related to the p96 acceleration...

Originally Posted by vk3heg

I have a working PCIe G550 in my machine. My loadlin command line:

kernel4 init=/linuxrc console_level=0 root=/dev/ram1 inittrd=smallird.gz ramdisk_size=2310 leavepages=7460 video=matrox:dfp,vesa:0x12

I then have my amiga screen set to "Matrox: 1024x768 16bit"

Thanks! Matrox: 1024x768 16bit works very well!

[AngelClaw]

Hi all!

I was wondering if there is small/bigird with latest 3.2.2.1 ROM around? I've found 3.2.1 and tried to swap shape.rom but it stucks so it definitely need some work, but it requires skills and knowledge I don't have

Thanks in advance.

[SnkBitten]

I haven't configured a 3.2.2.1 ROM yet, I did 3.1.4 and there were some components that would not work and required the 3.1 versions. I haven't tried doing 3.2 and up yet as I've liked the 3.9 OS environment of Amithlon and it's a bit of an effort to get the components of Amithlon mixed in with the OS vs. just installing Amithlon/OS3.9.

Others may have done this

[AngelClaw]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

I haven't configured a 3.2.2.1 ROM yet, I did 3.1.4 and there were some components that would not work and required the 3.1 versions. I haven't tried doing 3.2 and up yet as I've liked the 3.9 OS environment of Amithlon and it's a bit of an effort to get the components of Amithlon mixed in with the OS vs. just installing Amithlon/OS3.9.

Others may have done this

Thanks for reply SnkBitten!

You're right, I've tried 3.2.1 smallird with AOS3.2 but Amithlon crashes very frequent even when there is no or little activity. Looks like 3.9 is a way to go with stable setup.

Its a big loss that Amithlon/Umilator was not continued at that time. Can't imagine what it could look like and work nowadays with current hardware avaialble....

p.s.
Is Umialtor demo CD available somewhere or it is still "holy grail" only few have seen running?

[dr.zeissler]

I think I saw it on Archive.org

[AngelClaw]

Originally Posted by dr.zeissler

I think I saw it on Archive.org

I suspect at least few tried (including me) to find it on archive.org but failed

[dr.zeissler]

you are right must be somewhere else...to bad I don't have it.

features looked promising:
http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahi...r_feature.html

[Falke_34]

I currently have several Thinkpad R51s here: https://thinkwiki.de/R51

- CPU Intel Pentium M 1500Mhz
- Graphics Mobile Radeon 7500 and 9000
- RAM 1024MB RAM

All work great with Amithlon Kernel 3.10... (except network)

APPEND console_level=0 init=/linuxrc root=/dev/ram0 mem=490M vga=769 ramdisk_size=2310 leavepages=5200 cachesize=65536 video=radeon:640x480 initrd=/Boot/smallird.gz

What's strange here is that with 1024MB of RAM I can only allocate about 500MB, anything more than that is acknowledged with the LEDs not booting and flashing immediately
(on other notebooks like the Dell C640 I can allocate almost 800MB)

Kernel 4 completely refuses to work (LEDs flashing immediately after startup)
Whatever the reason, maybe someone here has a tip

Now my question would be: Is there anyone else who has a 3.10 source code that can also be compiled?

[Korban]

Heh...
Just got Amithlon running on an i9-13900k
Graphics are VESA only and there's no sound, but Im REALLY surprised it works.

Going to have to go through my hardware now and see if I can get it to run on anything better than what Im already using. Until now Id thought what I was using was close to the fastest machine Amithlon will run on (core2quad 9550 overclocked to 4.6ghz/ddr2@1200, pci express gforce5200 (these are rare as hens teeth, normally the 5x00 series on a pci express interface are called pcx5300 or pcx5000).
I did have to disable the efficiency cores and most of the performance cores though.

This is my main workstation so Im not going to sacrifice it for Amithlon, but I think I'll have to buy a cheaper similar system (lower end raptor lake will do, I dont need the cores for Amithlon).

This discovery has opened up a can of worms and I know Im going to get obsessed with finding what is the best Amithlon system that can be put together again.

[Methanoid]

How did you get down to 1gbnof ram.om a DDR4/5 system?

[Korban]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

How did you get down to 1gbnof ram.om a DDR4/5 system?

Physically I didnt. System still had 64GB RAM, but I just changed the kernel line arguements to only allow access to 896MB (fails when higher).

[Methanoid]

Originally Posted by Korban

Physically I didnt. System still had 64GB RAM, but I just changed the kernel line arguements to only allow access to 896MB (fails when higher).

Lol. I often asked about that in the past and "experts" always said it didn't work. So, can you share what exactly you did? Changed a cfg file or a grub line (been years so I forget how now)

[dr.zeissler]

Is it possible to get a ESS-Solo1 PCI Soundcard working in Amithlon?
It is supported in AHI, but if I install the latest V6 I don't see that card and I don't have any sound. In AHI v6 only EMU10K (SBLive ec.) has a driver.
I think I made a mistake or the ess-solo1 is supported in AHI but not in Amithlon. I currently don't get it.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/(all,faq,f...)/ahi/v4-site/

Currently supported sound hardware

AmigaXL (QNX-based UAE)
Aura (sampling only)
Clarity (sampling only)
Concierto
Delfina
DraCo Motion
ESS Solo-1
ForteMedia FM801
Maestro Pro
Melody
Paula (standard Amiga)
Prelude
Repulse
SoundBlaster 128
SoundBlaster Live!
Sunrize
Terratec 128i PCI
Terratec 512i digital
Toccata
UAE
Umilator
VIA AC97
Vivanco
Wavetools

Planned support or in works

C-Media
VSS

A M I T H L O N X L P R E M I E R A T O A S E 2
Sept. 14, 2002 AmithlonXL world premiere at O.A.S.E.2 event in Graz

The O.A.S.E.2 event, which will be held this weekend in Graz, will see the first public demonstration of AmithlonXL components. Some of the parts shown would regularly be first available only with the release of the announced OS4 operating system.

The new stuff demonstrated there, will include Audio drivers for SBLive, TerraTec Solo1, TerraTec 512i, CMedia and many many others. However, because of the short time we had, we were unable to get all the hardware to demonstrate all new Audio drivers.

The Network connection will be established trough a RealTek 100Mbit card controlled by the brandnew TCP/IP-Stack RoadShow from well known Olaf Barthel. The features of RoadShow will include great services as PPPoE, firewall and extended routing possibilities. The system will be presented by Mr. Schober on his AthlonXP 1800. This machine will be equipped with SoundBlasterLive, RealTek 100Mbit Network Adapter and Matrox DualHead graphics card. If possible, some benchmarks with the new FFS2 file sytem will be made, but if time should prove to be short for those, we will deliver their results on our Amithlon product home page later. More information about AmithlonXL and AmigaOS XL Updates will be available shortly on the usual web sites of our distributor Haage&Partner. Naturally these will also contain information about pricing and availability.

[SnkBitten]

I don't even see the drivers for ESS Solo-1 in the AHI package so assume it would be relying on kernel drivers in Amithlon supporting the card.

When you do pciinsmod on your Amithlon, what audio driver modules are being loaded if any?