Amithlon, AROS, X-Amiga or Winuae

[Mangar]

Good day everyone,

I've been getting that amiga itch lately where I just want to mess around with various amiga software and I have some questions regarding the above.

Ultimately, I'd like to boot my system into E-UAE, WinUAE, or some amiga-like environment. I've been in Amiga purgatory since Commodore went under. I have an A2000 and an A1200 but it's next to impossible to get any hardware over here in North America. I missed out on AmigaOne and any other hardware solutions. I can't find any Blizzard or Cyberstorm PPC cards at a reasonable price. I'd love to buy AmigaOS4 but there are no hardware solutions for me. So, until they come out with hardware or develop OS4 for x86 (which will never happen) I would like to at least try out some of the other offerings to whet my amiga appetite.

I've been doing research on AROS, Amithlon, and X-Amiga and I'm just getting frustrated. Here are the specs for my system:

Intel Core2 Duo E6600 Processor
2 GB 1000MHZ memory
Asus Striker Extreme motherboard
SATA HDD
Ac97 Sound
Nvidia 8800GTS video card

Do I have a hope in hell of running AROS, Amithlon, or X-amiga? Seems my biggest obstacle on all 3 is the SATA HDD. Which is unfortunate.

So, possible or should I just stick to WinUAE or a linux distro with E-UAE? And if this is the best solution is there a way I can launch Winuae fullscreen or E-UAE fullscreen upon startup.

Thanks for any assistance.

[Mangar]

Update:

I can't burn the Amithlon ISO. Returns an error.

I cannot boot to the AROS CD. Probably due to SATA issues.

Amiga-X boots fine but I cannot install it on my SATA drive. Doesn't see the HDD.

Amikit requries OS3.9

Amigasys craps out too much. Now there is a checksum error in the hardfile.

Not having much luck. Maybe the simple answer is to purchase some cheap hardware.

Meanwhile I saw OS4 running on a PPC. Looks real nice. Too bad they don't make an x86 version. Has a real nice feel to it.

[Charlie]

Sadly your nice modern system does limmit your options a bit - SATA being the main factor.
At this point I guess I should come clean & say of the options Amithlon is my preferred setup...

...having said that:
-Amithlon: Does support *some* SATA, not yours sadly. The main problem for you is your nice dual-core intel CPU & GFX card - If any can prove me wrong I'd be happy to hear but Amithlon won't run on multi-core CPU's. (slight lie here)
-X-Amiga: A great alternate to the above if you're after booting stright to AmigaOS. No SATA at the mo' but the author is working on it.
-KX-Light: (Cloanto's X-Amiga) Will probably work but isn't as 'good' as X-Amiga, is a bugger to HD-Install & the docs are non-existant. (another slight lie)
-AmigaXL: (part of the Amithlon package) May work on your system if QNX (the underlaying OS) supports it.
-AROS: It's gonna be great! But at this stage still a swine to install. Especially if you already have data you don't want to loose. (I didn't know about the lack of SATA support)
-OS4: I agree.
-WinUAE: Wonderful, but a problem if you don't want to boot 'doze first. (You can replace the explorer.exe 'shell' with winuae.exe for a more 'authentic' experience but there are issues...)

Which leaves:
-E-UAE+Linux: Currently your best bet given what you're after & your hardware. (TBH: I'm not a Linux fan but if you are...)

'Real Amiga'..?
As you've discovered getting hard to find & d*mn expensive.
FWIW: Nothing beats 'the real thing' but if it's been a while a max'd out miggy comes nowhere near any of the above in performance / convenience...
...run a good emulator for a while and when / if you set up a real one you may be a tad unhappy.

[Methanoid]

WinUAE is fine... OK so it takes 30 secs or whatever to boot Windows so strip it down using nLite.

Hmmm makes me wonder what a 98micro would be like booting in about 5 seconds or whatever and then loading WinUAE. Probably WinUAE doesnt run on 95/98? Not tried...

[Ed Cruse]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

WinUAE is fine... OK so it takes 30 secs or whatever to boot Windows so strip it down using nLite.

Hmmm makes me wonder what a 98micro would be like booting in about 5 seconds or whatever and then loading WinUAE. Probably WinUAE doesnt run on 95/98? Not tried...

I personally use WinUAE and like the heck out of it. I think waiting for Windows to boot is a small price to pay for a really good emulator. In fact I don't even have WinUAE start automatically, I wait until Windows is done horsing around and then I double click a short cut. WinUAE is complicated but if you start with QUICK-START and only change what you know about it's not to bad, it just takes a fair amount of experimenting and asking questions here.

I really like WinUAE because it basically makes the Amiga modern, the speed and things the emulated Amiga can do a real Amiga can only dream of. Just like the earlier message said, once you've used a WinUAE Amiga with a modern PC, a real one is pretty disappointing. Example, I have a A3000/060/50MHz, it used to be really fast, it's a slug now and can't do as much.

[paranoid]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

WinUAE is fine... OK so it takes 30 secs or whatever to boot Windows so strip it down using nLite.

Hmmm makes me wonder what a 98micro would be like booting in about 5 seconds or whatever and then loading WinUAE. Probably WinUAE doesnt run on 95/98? Not tried...

From a readme of a WinUAE beta I recently read, soon WinUAE will no longer run under 98 but need 2000+.

[Mangar]

Originally Posted by Charlie

Sadly your nice modern system does limmit your options a bit - SATA being the main factor.
At this point I guess I should come clean & say of the options Amithlon is my preferred setup...

...having said that:
-Amithlon: Does support *some* SATA, not yours sadly. The main problem for you is your nice dual-core intel CPU & GFX card - If any can prove me wrong I'd be happy to hear but Amithlon won't run on multi-core CPU's. (slight lie here)
-X-Amiga: A great alternate to the above if you're after booting stright to AmigaOS. No SATA at the mo' but the author is working on it.
-KX-Light: (Cloanto's X-Amiga) Will probably work but isn't as 'good' as X-Amiga, is a bugger to HD-Install & the docs are non-existant. (another slight lie)
-AmigaXL: (part of the Amithlon package) May work on your system if QNX (the underlaying OS) supports it.
-AROS: It's gonna be great! But at this stage still a swine to install. Especially if you already have data you don't want to loose. (I didn't know about the lack of SATA support)
-OS4: I agree.
-WinUAE: Wonderful, but a problem if you don't want to boot 'doze first. (You can replace the explorer.exe 'shell' with winuae.exe for a more 'authentic' experience but there are issues...)

Which leaves:
-E-UAE+Linux: Currently your best bet given what you're after & your hardware. (TBH: I'm not a Linux fan but if you are...)

'Real Amiga'..?
As you've discovered getting hard to find & d*mn expensive.
FWIW: Nothing beats 'the real thing' but if it's been a while a max'd out miggy comes nowhere near any of the above in performance / convenience...
...run a good emulator for a while and when / if you set up a real one you may be a tad unhappy.

Thanks for the reply. Amithlon does look real nice and I have the utmost respect for Bernd Meyer. Unfortunate but I may just have to get an older box just to check it out.

AROS does have an open bounty for SATA support. I would love to see it completed this year.

X-Amiga is done really well. I think I'll see SATA support here before any others as it uses a linux kernel. Not really sure why it doesn't support SATA as every linux distro I have tried recently does. I know it's based on Gentoo and I'm sure that supports SATA although I may be wrong.

Hopefully, something good comes out of the lawsuit between Hyperion and Amiga Inc. First thing would be to make OS4 available on any PPC. I'd prefer an x86 version but again I don't think it will ever happen.

I've used Winuae since Brian King worked on it and I love it. Having used it for so long I just wanted to try something different. Using Windows 3.1 since release I find it getting a little stale. For now, it's an excellent platform till I get one of these others working.

I'm not big on Linux. I've recently installed PCLinuxOS. It is probably the most user-friendly distro I have tried but it's just not my thing. Trying to figure out how to get e-uae running and launching at startup will probably frustrate me to no end.

Again, thanks for the comments.