Amithlon Setup Guide - Page 73

pcotter · 17 April 2020, 15:22

Good news from the Ibrowse/amissl team!
AmiSSL 4.6 will be Amithlon compatible ;-)

SnkBitten · 17 April 2020, 15:24

That's great news!

pcotter · 09 June 2020, 07:16

it is working for me.
http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/AmiSSL-4.6

SLD-SNaKe · 09 June 2020, 12:39

I was goint to post the new version too

Time to test it! Although the workaround posted by @pcotter is working for me too: http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...postcount=1438
It looks like AmiSSL uses some similar fix:

Quote:

https://github.com/jens-maus/amissl/releases/4.6
Changes:

Tweaks to allow and force Amithlon to use the 68060 target, due to 64-bit integer math emulation being broken in Amithlon (68080 and MorphOS should continue to use the more optimal 68020-40 target).

milanca · 13 June 2020, 15:12

Hello guys, all the amithlon lovers!

Old-time user here. It's been a long long time since I have been here, many years ago. I am sorry about some of the pm's I haven't replied to. Although I don't have any amithlon machine and not being an actual user, sometimes `old spirits` wake up, like this very moment. Oh i loved amithlon. Nostalgia, I would say.
I am so glad the scene is still very much active and many users are still using and I am sure, enjoying it like I did back in the days.

Best wishes to all of you Amithlon guys !

SnkBitten · 13 June 2020, 15:17

Hey milanca! Great to see you stop by. Thanks so much for the kernel4 work you did as well as making your source available.

Posts under Amithlon seem to come and go in waves.....it'll be silent for a while and then someone pops in with something new or interesting and a lot of replies keep it going for a while before it goes silent again for awhile.

Quote:

Originally Posted by milanca

Hello guys, all the amithlon lovers!

Old-time user here. It's been a long long time since I have been here, many years ago. I am sorry about some of the pm's I haven't replied to. Although I don't have any amithlon machine and not being an actual user, sometimes `old spirits` wake up, like this very moment. Oh i loved amithlon. Nostalgia, I would say.
I am so glad the scene is still very much active and many users are still using and I am sure, enjoying it like I did back in the days.

Best wishes to all of you Amithlon guys !

milanca · 13 June 2020, 15:51

Hey SnkBitten! Thank you. Nothing big I’d say, that was my small contribution to the community and the amithlon project (being limited in many ways there is not much left anyways to work on).
Yes, you’re right, the topic lives in waves but I guess that’s normal. Anyways, it still lives and from time to time something new comes in.

milanca · 14 June 2020, 22:45

@SnkBitten, @all

Do you know please, or anyone else, is it possible to boot amithlon under VirtualBox (linux)? Or did anyone successfully booted it and if so how does it look like, usable, smooth? It should be probably running in vesa mode. VirtualBox is doing a great job these days and processor should be running fine. I am just asking, more like advise, could it be something that we can use as amithlon hardware replacement machine, if we had all the virtual hardware fully supported under amithlon? It is an emulator within an emulator, how much sense does it make, I am just curious about the speed.

SnkBitten · 14 June 2020, 23:08

Amithlon works great in Virtualbox, USB, Audio and Networking all function. I have a number of Amithlon VM's that I like to test things on before applying to my physical Amithlon system.

It's only downside in VESA mode for displays.....it's fast for all operations except text scrolling (possibly other scrolling as well). I'm rewriting my installations guides and plan to include a section just for running it under Virtualbox.

A quick config:
Operating system - DOS
Memory 1024 MB
Display 16 MB
Storage IDE Primary Master/Slave (HD's), IDE Secondary Master Optical drive
Audio ICH AC97
Network Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop) set to bridged against my host network card.
USB OHCI, EHCI

You need to add nosleep to the end of the line in the "amithlon" or "small" text file used in intializing the boot process, ie...
loadlin.exe @amithlon
loadlin.exe @small
depending on which you are using. This makes booting from the CD difficult. Amithlon is looking for an interrupt that isn't generated in Virtualbox and never returns while waiting. nosleep will allow Amithlon to ignore this and continue booting.

Quote:

Originally Posted by milanca

@SnkBitten, @all

Do you know please, or anyone else, is it possible to boot amithlon under VirtualBox (linux)? Or did anyone successfully booted it and if so how does it look like, usable, smooth? It should be probably running in vesa mode. VirtualBox is doing a great job these days and processor should be running fine. I am just asking, more like advise, could it be something that we can use as amithlon hardware replacement machine, if we had all the virtual hardware fully supported under amithlon? It is an emulator within an emulator, how much sense does it make, I am just curious about the speed.

milanca · 14 June 2020, 23:31

That's great, thanks a lot. So it just runs fine except the vesa mode (as i thought). Have you tried kernel4 under VirtualBox maybe, is it working?

SnkBitten · 14 June 2020, 23:34

Yes, I've used both Gary's and your kernels in VirtualBox. I use yours because it has the nic drivers for what I listed in the VB config choices. For Gary's kernel I have to select a different nic, PCnet-FAST III (am79c973).

SnkBitten · 14 June 2020, 23:37

Let me state, I've used VirtualBox on my Win10 pc, using an environment for other/dos in configuring a VM. I have not done anything under Linux so can't speak for it working under that host OS. Sorry, I had missed that in your earlier post.

milanca · 14 June 2020, 23:47

Thanks. I am asking you this, as I said I just had a small idea, I was just not sure if its running fine under VB or is it working at all. From what you said it looks like very much usable. I'd like to advise with you how smart will it be to bring graphical support to VirtualBox. I think vbox framebuffer driver is open source and it is with acceleration. I will have to do a little research. If it is available then a little work on it could make it work natively under amithlon in VirtualBox.

SnkBitten · 14 June 2020, 23:55

That would be great, having accelerated graphics under Virtualbox would be an impressive accomplishment

I have a Virtualbox VM configured for ubuntu 5.10 setup to compile your kernel4 from the source tree you had made available.

Quote:

Originally Posted by milanca

Thanks. I am asking you this, as I said I just had a small idea, I was just not sure if its running fine under VB or is it working at all. From what you said it looks like very much usable. I'd like to advise with you how smart will it be to bring graphical support to VirtualBox. I think vbox framebuffer driver is open source and it is with acceleration. I will have to do a little research. If it is available then a little work on it could make it work natively under amithlon in VirtualBox.

milanca · 15 June 2020, 00:16

Yes, that was my idea. I don't have a dedicated amithlon machine. I was never a big fan of WinUAE and if I ever feel like running Amiga OS then I am out of options. UAE is there but I never felt like using amiga under uae. For Amithlon, on the other hand, I always had an impression of working on real amiga. I was thinking VirtualBox could jump in as a link between.
There is actually a vmware-fb driver. I think thats the same driver virtualbox is using. Still little reasearch is needed on this. I remember, back in the days, I was using puppy-linux while working on the kernel. When I have a little time I will try to setup the dev environment then try to get the driver into the kernel first. If its working we'll try moving amithlon functions into it.

milanca · 21 June 2020, 14:30

After many hours of work in the past days trying to add gfx support to virtualbox it turned out to be a complete failure. I will simply have to give up because it is really not worth it. Having accelerated graphics could be a good thing (generally amithlon is best to run on real hardware) but from this point it is way too complicated. Actually I did have some success. I managed to boot amithlon with vmware fb (no acceleration added) but it is useless. Let me tell you what happened.
VirtualBox has its VMSVGA video card which is VMWARE Inc [VMWARE SVGA II] PCI Display Adapter. I patched the kernel and added its fb driver into 2.4 kernel. Amithlon does boot with it but with black screen. I managed to boot with some changes but its distorted, no color map, like monochrome green (scrambled) screen. At first I thought it is the framebuffer driver; that's the only driver i found and it is for kernel 2.4. I compiled regular x86 2.4 kernel with it, same thing, linux doesn't boot properly. All these tests were done in VirtualBox 6.1 under Linux. As kernel 2.4 is pretty old and the vmsvga framebuffer driver is also old, the only thing that could break things is a change in VMSVGA virtualbox driver (virtual hardware driver inside virtualbox). I installed VirtualBox 4 (inside Ubuntu 10) just to give it a try. Amithlon started fine with video=vmware, in vesa mode though but vmware fb driver loaded fine. Thats the point when I decided that it is just not worth it. There is really no point to make it work and be limited to virtualbox 4 only. I couldn't even start it under Windows and for Linux we'd be limited to old distros only. It is just a pitty for us and the amithlon but it is what it is.

SnkBitten · 29 June 2020, 00:16

Thanks for making the effort. Overall it's still fast in Virtualbox.

SLD-SNaKe · 20 July 2020, 23:50

Thanks for your work @milanca. Although vmware has no acceleration, it's good for some quick tests, for example: testing a new custom ROM for Amithlon. Thanks again, but now for the kernel4! A nice update for the Amithlon.

I'm testing Amithlon from time to time and I noticed some issue. I had to remove the "GUARD" parameter from the run_elf line at the user-startup, leaving it like this:

run <>NIL: run_elf PATCH

I was experiencing some crashes with the GUARD parameter: sometimes the emulation freezed after a second or third "Amiga reboot" with Ctrl+A+A. I didn't saw any reference to this issue.

@SnkBitten I'm also testing a P35-DS3L motherboard, I'm seeing at your blog entries : "My Amithlon System", "Current Setup", that you have a DVD Drive, even a video showing the BIOS booting. Is it an IDE drive? Can you mount the IDE Drive in AmigaOS? I have tried several configurations at the BIOS but I cannot mount an IDE drive inside the Amiga. I have tested the CDX mountfile with the cdrom.device and units from 0 to 5. I tried the FindCD utility from the IDEfix pack, to check detected unit drives using the several .device drivers. But the Amiga doesn't seem to find any CD unit.

DavidT · 20 July 2020, 23:59

If I boot with @amithlon the video works and everything is grand,
but booting with @small I get some way jacked up video...I have
everything setup just as it is described in the documents...

(Sorry for the video, I hope you will be able to help me...)

SnkBitten · 21 July 2020, 00:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by SLD-SNaKe

@SnkBitten I'm also testing a P35-DS3L motherboard, I'm seeing at your blog entries : "My Amithlon System", "Current Setup", that you have a DVD Drive, even a video showing the BIOS booting. Is it an IDE drive? Can you mount the IDE Drive in AmigaOS? I have tried several configurations at the BIOS but I cannot mount an IDE drive inside the Amiga. I have tested the CDX mountfile with the cdrom.device and units from 0 to 5. I tried the FindCD utility from the IDEfix pack, to check detected unit drives using the several .device drivers. But the Amiga doesn't seem to find any CD unit.

Yes, IDE dvd r/w drive, SATA hard drives. The SATA drives (AHCI) show up as devices 1 and 2 on the IDE channels (in BIOS) and the IDE cd drive is on 5 I think.

My CDrom mounts in AmigaOS just fine. cdrom.device or amithlon.device should work for the CD drive.

Code:

/***************************************************************/
/*  CacheCDFS mountlist entry © 1993 Elaborate Bytes, O. Kastl */
/***************************************************************/
    FileSystem     = L:CacheCDFS /* The name of the game */
    Device         = "cdrom.device" /* Name of exec device driver */
    Unit           = 0 /* exec device unit */
    Flags          = 0 /* OpenDevice flags */
    BlocksPerTrack = 351000 /* Unused */
    BlockSize      = 2048 /* True, but unused */
    Mask           = 0x7ffffffe /* Memory mask for direct read */
    MaxTransfer    = 0x1000000 /* Maximum amount of bytes for direct read */
    Reserved       = 0 /* Unused */
    Interleave     = 0 /* Unused */
    LowCyl         = 0 /* Unused */
    HighCyl        = 0 /* Unused */
    Surfaces       = 1 /* Unused */
    Buffers        = 50 /* Number of cache lines */
    BufMemType     = 513 /* MEMF_PUBLIC|MEMF_24BITDMA */
    GlobVec        = -1 /* Do not change! */
    Mount          = 1 /* Mount it immediately */
    Priority       = 10 /* Priority of FileSystem task */
    DosType        = 0x43443031 /* Currently unused */
    StackSize      = 3000 /* Minimum stack required is 3000! */
    Control        = "MD=0 LC=1 DC=8 L LV AL LFC=1 S NC"
   /* The Control field is for special adjustments */
   /* L/S convert all file/volume names to lowercase */
   /* LV/S convert volume names to lowercase */
   /* AL/S Auto-Lower converts only non-Amiga CDs */
   /* LFC/N start converting at this character */
   /* LC/N/A number of blocks per cache line */
   /* DC/N/A number of cache lines for the data cache */
   /* MD/N/A number of blocks, when starting direct read, not using */
   /* the cache. 0 will be a reasonable default (LC*DC+1) */
   /* S/S Do SCSI direct commands, no Trackdisk like commands! */
   /* NC/S Do NOT use TD_ADDCHANGEINT, poll for DiskChange! */
   /* M/S Issue a TD_MOTOR (OFF) command after read */

14 June 2020, 23:34	#1451
SnkBitten Amithlon Fanatic Join Date: Aug 2015 Location: Lexington, SC / US Posts: 783	Yes, I've used both Gary's and your kernels in VirtualBox. I use yours because it has the nic drivers for what I listed in the VB config choices. For Gary's kernel I have to select a different nic, PCnet-FAST III (am79c973). Last edited by SnkBitten; 14 June 2020 at 23:43.

14 June 2020, 23:37	#1452
SnkBitten Amithlon Fanatic Join Date: Aug 2015 Location: Lexington, SC / US Posts: 783	Let me state, I've used VirtualBox on my Win10 pc, using an environment for other/dos in configuring a VM. I have not done anything under Linux so can't speak for it working under that host OS. Sorry, I had missed that in your earlier post. Last edited by SnkBitten; 14 June 2020 at 23:43.

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17 April 2020, 15:22	#1441
pcotter Registered User Join Date: Aug 2016 Location: Germany Posts: 122	Good news from the Ibrowse/amissl team! AmiSSL 4.6 will be Amithlon compatible ;-)

17 April 2020, 15:24	#1442
SnkBitten Amithlon Fanatic Join Date: Aug 2015 Location: Lexington, SC / US Posts: 783	That's great news!

09 June 2020, 07:16	#1443
pcotter Registered User Join Date: Aug 2016 Location: Germany Posts: 122	it is working for me. http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/AmiSSL-4.6

13 June 2020, 15:12	#1445
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	Hello guys, all the amithlon lovers! Old-time user here. It's been a long long time since I have been here, many years ago. I am sorry about some of the pm's I haven't replied to. Although I don't have any amithlon machine and not being an actual user, sometimes `old spirits` wake up, like this very moment. Oh i loved amithlon. Nostalgia, I would say. I am so glad the scene is still very much active and many users are still using and I am sure, enjoying it like I did back in the days. Best wishes to all of you Amithlon guys !

13 June 2020, 15:51	#1447
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	Hey SnkBitten! Thank you. Nothing big I’d say, that was my small contribution to the community and the amithlon project (being limited in many ways there is not much left anyways to work on). Yes, you’re right, the topic lives in waves but I guess that’s normal. Anyways, it still lives and from time to time something new comes in.

14 June 2020, 22:45	#1448
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	@SnkBitten, @all Do you know please, or anyone else, is it possible to boot amithlon under VirtualBox (linux)? Or did anyone successfully booted it and if so how does it look like, usable, smooth? It should be probably running in vesa mode. VirtualBox is doing a great job these days and processor should be running fine. I am just asking, more like advise, could it be something that we can use as amithlon hardware replacement machine, if we had all the virtual hardware fully supported under amithlon? It is an emulator within an emulator, how much sense does it make, I am just curious about the speed.

14 June 2020, 23:31	#1450
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	That's great, thanks a lot. So it just runs fine except the vesa mode (as i thought). Have you tried kernel4 under VirtualBox maybe, is it working?

14 June 2020, 23:47	#1453
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	Thanks. I am asking you this, as I said I just had a small idea, I was just not sure if its running fine under VB or is it working at all. From what you said it looks like very much usable. I'd like to advise with you how smart will it be to bring graphical support to VirtualBox. I think vbox framebuffer driver is open source and it is with acceleration. I will have to do a little research. If it is available then a little work on it could make it work natively under amithlon in VirtualBox.

15 June 2020, 00:16	#1455
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	Yes, that was my idea. I don't have a dedicated amithlon machine. I was never a big fan of WinUAE and if I ever feel like running Amiga OS then I am out of options. UAE is there but I never felt like using amiga under uae. For Amithlon, on the other hand, I always had an impression of working on real amiga. I was thinking VirtualBox could jump in as a link between. There is actually a vmware-fb driver. I think thats the same driver virtualbox is using. Still little reasearch is needed on this. I remember, back in the days, I was using puppy-linux while working on the kernel. When I have a little time I will try to setup the dev environment then try to get the driver into the kernel first. If its working we'll try moving amithlon functions into it.

21 June 2020, 14:30	#1456
milanca Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Serbia and Montenegro Posts: 124	After many hours of work in the past days trying to add gfx support to virtualbox it turned out to be a complete failure. I will simply have to give up because it is really not worth it. Having accelerated graphics could be a good thing (generally amithlon is best to run on real hardware) but from this point it is way too complicated. Actually I did have some success. I managed to boot amithlon with vmware fb (no acceleration added) but it is useless. Let me tell you what happened. VirtualBox has its VMSVGA video card which is VMWARE Inc [VMWARE SVGA II] PCI Display Adapter. I patched the kernel and added its fb driver into 2.4 kernel. Amithlon does boot with it but with black screen. I managed to boot with some changes but its distorted, no color map, like monochrome green (scrambled) screen. At first I thought it is the framebuffer driver; that's the only driver i found and it is for kernel 2.4. I compiled regular x86 2.4 kernel with it, same thing, linux doesn't boot properly. All these tests were done in VirtualBox 6.1 under Linux. As kernel 2.4 is pretty old and the vmsvga framebuffer driver is also old, the only thing that could break things is a change in VMSVGA virtualbox driver (virtual hardware driver inside virtualbox). I installed VirtualBox 4 (inside Ubuntu 10) just to give it a try. Amithlon started fine with video=vmware, in vesa mode though but vmware fb driver loaded fine. Thats the point when I decided that it is just not worth it. There is really no point to make it work and be limited to virtualbox 4 only. I couldn't even start it under Windows and for Linux we'd be limited to old distros only. It is just a pitty for us and the amithlon but it is what it is.

29 June 2020, 00:16	#1457
SnkBitten Amithlon Fanatic Join Date: Aug 2015 Location: Lexington, SC / US Posts: 783	Thanks for making the effort. Overall it's still fast in Virtualbox.

20 July 2020, 23:50	#1458
SLD-SNaKe Registered User Join Date: Mar 2019 Location: Spain Posts: 22	Thanks for your work @milanca. Although vmware has no acceleration, it's good for some quick tests, for example: testing a new custom ROM for Amithlon. Thanks again, but now for the kernel4! A nice update for the Amithlon. I'm testing Amithlon from time to time and I noticed some issue. I had to remove the "GUARD" parameter from the run_elf line at the user-startup, leaving it like this: run <>NIL: run_elf PATCH I was experiencing some crashes with the GUARD parameter: sometimes the emulation freezed after a second or third "Amiga reboot" with Ctrl+A+A. I didn't saw any reference to this issue. @SnkBitten I'm also testing a P35-DS3L motherboard, I'm seeing at your blog entries : "My Amithlon System", "Current Setup", that you have a DVD Drive, even a video showing the BIOS booting. Is it an IDE drive? Can you mount the IDE Drive in AmigaOS? I have tried several configurations at the BIOS but I cannot mount an IDE drive inside the Amiga. I have tested the CDX mountfile with the cdrom.device and units from 0 to 5. I tried the FindCD utility from the IDEfix pack, to check detected unit drives using the several .device drivers. But the Amiga doesn't seem to find any CD unit.

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