Amithlon Setup Guide

[Falke_34]

Amithlon and the new Amiga OS 3.2

[SnkBitten]

Nice, I haven't had time to build a 3.2 Amithlon ROM yet so it's cool to see someone doing a 3.2 install on Amithlon already...

Now if we could just get some coders to write some Amiga video drivers for Amithlon instead of using the kernel based ones and adding the screen dragging features and such the new P96 offers.

Amiga 68k based PCI video card drivers would be very cool to see....

[digaorj]

Hello to all.
I'm new on here.
I want to show my experiences with amithlon and doubts.
I have desktop and notebook running amitlhon.
Firts- core 2 duo p35 with kernel 4 all running nicely.
Second- ibm t42 kernel 3.10 all runing nicely too but my video card only work in vesa mode.
The question is. How can i turn on the accelerated video mode on my t42.
Thanks snkbitten for your amazing guide.
Amithlon Rocks!!!

[SnkBitten]

You can't turn on accelerated mode other than the kernel having support for your hardware graphics card.

If you've gone through the guides and installed all the patches and P96 software, if running Picasso96ScreenMode doesn't allow you to attach the graphics board (you only have VESA: as the available board), you can't get hardware acceleration.

[digaorj]

Thanks SnkBitten!!!
I changed the lines in startup sequence for video settings and picasso96mode give me board0=ati-1 on my ibm t42 and the same on desktop core 2 duo with radeon 9200 pci card. Only 320x240 resolution gone crashed in 2 mschines. 640x480, 800x600 and my actual resolution 1024x768 runs nicely!!!
Thanks a lot for help me!!!

[SLD-SNaKe]

Hello there. I've been testing OS3.2 during the last week too!

With the help of WinUAE and extracting all updates packages, I made a LHA file with the specific Amithlon files.
Maybe it could be a good idea to make an installer with all these files combined... I'll take a look at that.

I noticed a little weird things, some of them are hardware related... but now that I have an OS3.2 base for amithlon, I'll test the system in deep.

Here's a short video testing the system along with the new kickstart.
[ Show youtube player ]

[SLD-SNaKe]

Another quick testing inside Amithlon...

The CDFileSystem that came with OS3.2 doesn't seem to work with Amithlon's "cdrom.device". I have read at your blog @SnkBitten that this is happening from 3.1.4 too.

Comparing the two CD0 mountlists (the one from the Amithlon's 3.9 and the one from the 3.2) and doing some research at the helpfiles, I found out that a parameter "SCSIDirect=1" is needed. Now the CD0 from the 3.2 mountlist can read disks.

I have attached an image to this post showing my CD0 mount file with that SCSIDirect parameter.

However, this mountlist has a disadvantage: the unit cannot detect diskchanges, but it's possible to run a "diskchange CD0:" command from the shell and refresh the unit contents.

It seems that the CacheCDFS from 3.9 is using a "No ChangeInt" parameter for the disk changes, I wonder if this parameter is implemented in some way or another with the new CDFilesystem from 3.2, does anyone know anything about this?

[Falke_34]

@SLD-Snake: Perfect! I will test it later. I use on OS3.2 the CDFS Filesystem from Amithlon 3.9

[stefcep2]

I've just got Amithlon working on a P3-650 with a Geforce 256 32 MB AGP and SB128, and networking.

But I can't accelerated graphics screens. Currently I run 1280x1024 32 bit, which works well bit scrolling eg in Aweb is slow.

The odd thing I was using kern310 and I did have the nvidia screens running. But then I installed the latest AHI to get sound working, testing sound in AHI crashed AmigaOS and next reboot I had a 4 color low res workbench that couldn't complete booting.

So I know the Geforce 256 is supported for hardware acceleration.

I re-installed from scratch (thanks snkbitten) thinking it would be quickest way to fix the crash problem.

I've followed the guide on installing P96 2.1e

But I still cannot get accelerated graphics.

I tried Kernel4 and could not get accelerated graphics sound or networking working.

Any suggestions to get accelerated graphics?

[SnkBitten]

If the board is accelerated by kernel support it should just be accelerated. However to get custom screen modes you have to attach it in Picasso96Mode and create your screen resolution/color depths.

Also make sure you applied all the patches as listed in the guides.

[SLD-SNaKe]

I have two Geforce Fx5500 (AGP and PCI) and they have hardware acceleration right after the installation. As SnkBitten said, all the patches are needed and also the Picasso96Mode configuration. This last installation step is covered in the Part 2 of the Installation Guide (in the middle of the text, at the "Picasso96Mode" chapter).

A good tip to find out if the custom screen modes are configured is to check the display mode name: it has to start with the "nVidia-1:" text.

PD: there is also mentioned a SetConfig parameter to activate aceleration (for the Startup-sequence, but I didn't have to use this):
Setconfig >NIL: p96_accell 0xff ; all acceleration on

[stefcep2]

re-installed everything, even the Freedos installation, and am on Kernel310. I added the Setconfig as well.

Unfortunately I cannot get n-vidia-1 to show up in P96mode.

One thing I noticed was that my SB128 card is not installed by the kernel, where it should be. I had to edit S/pci_modules and uncomment the SB128 entry.

Perhaps my kernel is not fully loading?

I know accelerated graphics worked before because I did see the n-vidia option in P96 settings and I selected a screen mode for it, and i have not changed any hardware. It just crashed when installing AHI uodate.

OTOH I did install kernel 4 and kernel drivers and then went back to kernel3 because under kernel4 I had no sound or network,perhaps something happened there?

I did experiment with some of the settings in the "small" text file so maybe it was some combination there that got it to work per chance. ( 512M resulted in endless boot loop)

[stefcep2]

With Kernel4 I was getting this error:


Could not find/create /insmod on linuxside
Error code: 1
I applied drivers 4 and patch to 4

[SnkBitten]

You need to edit your init file as the guides instruct for using kernel4. Changing from ram=0 to ram=1 (something like that).

[SnkBitten]

Also you don't need to uncomment the Sound Blaster stuff from pci_modules.....the pci_modules file is for loading drivers that aren't in the kernel, kernel drivers are already compiled in the kernel, that file points to module files that were not in the kernel...which is why the sb modules were commented out.

With the right hardware choices you don't have to use pciinsmod because you don't need to load any modules, they are already in the kernel.

[stefcep2]

Originally Posted by SnkBitten

Also you don't need to uncomment the Sound Blaster stuff from pci_modules.....the pci_modules file is for loading drivers that aren't in the kernel, kernel drivers are already compiled in the kernel, that file points to module files that were not in the kernel...which is why the sb modules were commented out.

With the right hardware choices you don't have to use pciinsmod because you don't need to load any modules, they are already in the kernel.

Yes but if I don't uncomment the SB128 stuff, my SB128 card is not activated and there is only filesave in AHI preferrences. So it seems like for whatever reason the SB128 card is not being detected by the kernel, and perhaps the same with the GeForce256 card.


Its frustrating because I did have accelerated graphics on the same hardware.

[stefcep2]

SOLVED

This is what I did:

Installed all amithlon patches.

Booted with Kernel 4. Installed Drivers4 and drivers 4.1 and Drivers 4.1 patch. Result: no accelerated graphics. No sound.

Booted with Kern310. Installed driver90 by copying over top of Kernel4/Driver4.1patch system. Result no accelerated graphics

Booted with:

new_emubox.gz init=/linuxrc console_level=0 root/=dev/ram1 initrd=smallird.gz VGA=775 ramdisk_size=2310 leavepages 7400

Result: accelerated NVIDiA graphics, Amithlon AHI sound drivers, network ALL works

Happy Days!

[stefcep2]

Question: How do I set it up so I don't have to execute loadlin @small every cold boot? What is this autoexec.bat?

[SnkBitten]

Yes, edit/create an autoexec.bat file with your loadlin.exe @small command and save it.

[SnkBitten]

FYI, you'll never need to install driver modules for accelerated graphics, it's in the kernel or it's not. The driver modules are for USB, Network, Sound, etc. There are no modules you can install that will give you hardware acceleration.