New Amithlon Kernel available !!!

[Zetr0]

okies charlie sounds like a big plan.. ( and something to do after my current project is complete )

if all is okay then PM me costs etc.

insofar as QNX goes...

I went to the developers convention in london 2000(or lahndon as i call it) way back when the neutrino core was being established as a potential embedded kernal to run on what we now called Point of Sale(POS) and other industry standard components. if anyone has had the opportunity to run bluecat os on POS or PRIMUS (not transformers that are cool i'm afraid) systems i can safely say they *ahem* were drastically influenced by the QNX neutrino.

you can get an x86 client for a bit of fun.

http://www.qnx.com/products/eval/index.html

now i wonder if my develoer license is still valid lol...


... and in my opinion it has and always will be RTOS awsome!

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by bippym

If this turns into a proper functional and useable OS (working on more system setups) then I'll definately consider purchasing it.

Needs to run all OS legal 68k code and also perhaps code that hits the hardware (in the future)

Amiga on x86 could be good

I completely agree with you. It already does most of what you suggest. Sadly it's now a dead project but for the open-source bits that the likes if Gary work on...

Why?
The usual mess that seems to infect all things Amiga:

Bernie Meyer in conjunction with Harld Frank ( I think ) of Haage+Partner wrote it using some Amiga.inc ip ( ks-rom + a few other bits ). It was then marketed by H+P as a package with AmigaXL ( similar to Amithlon ).
Initially it had offical support from A.inc until they noticed H+P did not have all the required licences for the ip included in the package. H+P do not agree with this point.

Negotiations quicky turned to arguments & then legal threats at which point Bernie Meyer withdrew his support for its continued marketing as legal action may well have involved him & cost him millions despite his only involvement being to write most of the code & trust the other parties!

Whatever the rights or wrongs of this situation H+P continued to sell Amithlon despite the withdrawn support of a key developer ( Bernie ) and so ensuring that further development of the non-opensource & disputed parts would no longer be legally possible.

Bernie had almost finished an update of Amithlon ( Umilator ) which not only solved many of Amithlon's issues, but from what I've seen was so good that if it had been released would have solved the upgrade & compatability problems for all AOS users. No need for PPC, 68k would be fine for any task as a form of virtual assembler running on top of cheap x86 hardware!

Sadly this could not be released because it contained ip from H+P that was under dispute & though I'm sure Bernie could have replaced them with his own code, by that point had lost interest in the project.

Further sad fallout is I understand Bernie was planning a new jit-core based on Amd64 which would have been several orders of magnitude faster that the current one while having fewer comatability + timing issues. If he is still working on this it is not now for 68k...

For anyone interested I hope I've given a ballanced view of what happned. Please don't flame me if you disagree - polite correction is fine.

bippym:
Taking into account the above would you be happy for me to use this forum to post a demo-copy to any interested in my sending the original?

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by _ThEcRoW

Is this new kernel to replace the one on the bootdisk? I want to boot with an updated kernel if it's possible.

Yes:

To get the most out of Amithlon it needs to be HDD installed rather than boot off CD. The various updates/patches can then be used.
This is a pain to do & quite involved but guides exist - if you can't find one googling let me know.

[_ThEcRoW]

Thanks for the reply charlie, also another question that has been bothering me since y heard of it: Is the umilator kernel still out there, i mean, i know it was almost finished when bernie drop it off, could it be possible to get it now?.
Maybe we could ask bernie to give it to all Amithlon fans out there.

[Charlie]

_ThEcRoW:

I would dearly love to be proved wrong, but I don't think there is any chance.

The legal/moral situation that I have outlined has not changed so it can't be released.
Also various comments I've seen from Bernie hint strongly that at one point he was so pi**ed off he made no attempt to preserve the code for Umilator and it now no-longer exists.

If true, a genuine pitty - but understandable considering the position he found himself in...

Hmmm...
There is a book called 'On The Edge - The Spectacular rise & fall of C='. Quite a few people on this forum have enjoyed it. ( inc. me )
A sequel could be written about events surrounding the Amiga since C= folded.

[BippyM]

I don't mind anything being posted (demo copies etc) as long as it doesn't put the eab and it's associated web sites in any danger.

[Doc Mindie]

Haha, "Amiga - the neverending story of buyouts and downfalls"

:rofl

[mihcael]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

*pouts* why cant they just bloddy well open source it!!!!!!!!!

Are you aware of AROS?
Opensource x86 amiga, not quite as functional as amithlon, but is still being developed! (albeit slowy)

http://www.aros.org/
http://aros-exec.org/modules/news/

Is on need of some serious developers!

bit of cash up for grabs too!
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/

[Zetr0]

thanks for the linkies mihcael,

i overviewed them with much interest... i shall take more time with them later...

[Ultron]

I'd wish every competent programmer out there who shares a love for the Amiga would cooperate with AROS.org

It's currently the only light at the end of the tunnel i see. The only option who isn't marred by sickening legal disputes and corporate fraudsters.

They are well organized and have bounties for certain programming jobs. Unfortunately they lack programmers. Lack of programmers means slow progress, and slow progress means slower contributions to the money bounties, which in turn leads to... even slower progress.

I think because unfortunately either people aren't informed, or who are just plain dupped by the ever changing so called corporate saviours of the Amiga, all work and efforts get shifted into failed projects.

At this point most people cooperate with an "AmigaOne" that doesn't exist, and an "Amiga OS4" that has no hardware to exist on and no legal license to exist anywhere else.

In the meanwhile, the only light at the end of the tunnel, AROS, gets no support from the community's programmers. What's worse, most programmers that leave Amiga Inc's "Amiga One" and other projects connected to it such as even the Amithlon\Umiliator, leave for good, out of the Amiga platform, instead of joining the only light out there at the end of it all, most times, just out of psychologic exhaustion.

I'm not a particular fan of Open-Source, and, yet, it's pretty clear, to me, this is the only possible way into which the Amiga spirit might survive, in portable code, open-contributed, and available in majority hardware platforms such as x86.

[Charlie]

Ultron:
I largely agree with your sentiment...

If it's 68k you're interested in, fine, invest in a classic Amiga, or get a copy of Amithlon - if you can find one! Failing that (Win)UAE is great.

The future..?
AROS is the only real possibility, sadly all the alternates seem now to be failed opportunities - victims of the seemingly endless C= & Amiga curse.
For those who invested in AOS4 & MorphOS - lucky you - I genuinely hope you get many years of use/enjoyment, but I can't help feeling they are now sadly dead-ends...

For myself I hope AROS gets to the point of being a usable general OS before its momentum runs out. ( pref with an integrated 68k emu ) If there were some useful distro's available it would make an interesting alternate to Linux - For those who appreciate AmigaOS & have no use for all the baggage Linux brings to the home user.

[amiga]

Originally Posted by Charlie

Ultron:
...
For myself I hope AROS gets to the point of being a usable general OS...

Selling the amiga as a general-purpose OS, brought Commodore down!

[Doc Mindie]

I would say the lack of vision and thus lack of evoleing the hardware was what brought BigC= down. The AmigaOs is general..... in todays world, the only thing lacking is proper 3Dsupport, which is only used in games anyways.

I would however believe that on those A1-boards out there, games like WoW would run at decent speeds, if the system itself supports the 3D thingies properly. (and of course, if Blizzard fancies making an AmigaOne port of Wow..... :P )

This is great but how do I install this kernel?

I have Amithlon with updates (amithlon 1.29 and amiga osxl update 1) natively installed on a harddisk. It runs from DOS into Linux and so into Amithlon. I already replaced the original emubox.gz with the one from Aminet: http://de5.aminet.net/hard/drivr/newkernel.readme but the kernel listed in this topic contains no .gz file whatsoever.

Could someone please help me with updating? I'd really like to have Amithlon fully working (still problems with sound and networking although I have the latest AHI and stuff)...

actually it's easy, rename the "kern310" file to "emubox.gz" and there you go

[Methanoid]

I have a spare GF6150 mobo lying around, some Ram and a case etc... just need a cheapo S939 CPU and I'll give this a go. Have a look at the website and you can see what hardware is supported. You need to do some extrapolation (ie the NF4 chipset is supported so GF6150 also, the ALC850 sound codec on the Asus NF4 mobo is supported so will work on the ALC 850 on the mobo I have and so on....).

And use E-UAE for running games withing Amithlon yes?

[dframeli]

Does the v3.10 kernal support all GeForce FX series video cards, or just the 5xxx series?

For example, does it support the GeForce FX 6xxx and GeForce FX 7xxx series?

Thanks!

[Charlie]

Ooo, I nearly wet myself with excitement when I saw the thread title...

...Ho, hum.

Back to reality:
To my knowledge the most 'modern' GeForce chipset supported by v3.10 is 5xxx...
...I've had a 7600GT running fine with Amithlon - without acceleration.
...My 7800GS (yes, I was one of the dumb-asses who bought one) won't work at all.
(both AGP cards of course)

Hope that helps a bit.

[dframeli]

Charlie,

After reading "alot" of messages, I came to the conclusion that the 5xxx series might be the most modern card supported.

I did alot of searching... Wow, you can't hardly find any of the supported cards on the market! Not even used. There was hardly anything on ebay....

I found several "new' Geforce FX 5200's in PCI and AGP flavors, some as low as $18 USD. However since I'll be using an ASUS A8N-SLI SE for my motherboard, I elected to go with a PCI-e based card instead. In my case, I picked up an "EVGA GeForce PCX5750 128MB PCI Express x16" video card.

I saw in the forums that some 57xx series cards have issues. I hope that is not the case with this one, but if it is, at least I didn't have to give much for it. I picked up a factory reconditioned card from www.newegg.com for just $25 USD.

Thanks,
Dale

[amiga]

@Dframeli:

Or you can give AROS a go.
It's got to the point that is very usable nowadays; it supports more modern hardware and it's currently actively developed (unlike amithlon).

Here's an exceptional AROS distro to get u going:
http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/

Also, a modern web browser is near completion (actually it's already made, the author has just to finalize some things before releasing it).
So once the browser is out, it will have a further boost in user base (and developers).

You can even run legacy Amiga apps & games; it's all included in the distro above.

If u need help about AROS go to the official forum:
http://aros-exec.org