I didn't know if it would be correct to stick this into "Classic hardware" or elsewhere... so I am putting it here.



So, what's inside? The guts of an Asus EEE-Box 1501EB, so basically a dual core 1.6ghz atom - low power consumption, almost silent operation with Nvidia Chipset (DX11 compliant, 1080p decoding etc.). Since the picture I replaced the 160gb hdd with a 32gb SSD, and replace the 1gb ram stick with 2x2gb. I am thinking about moving the multicard reader so that it lines up with the floppy drive hole but unglueing it (industrial class glue) could prove disruptive.

It could be an excellent AROS machine, but for now it runs a heavily modified version of Windows xp. Windows has been carefully hacked to remove everything - from the boot logos and messages to every logon/logoff screen, desktop explorer, taskbar, visual element etc. A slightly modified version of Winuae runs as Win32 shell, so in the end what happens - is that you power the machine on, and in a few seconds you're into Workbench 3.1 (for now)

Carefully remapped all the numpad keys to various emulator functions, for example [+] inserts a floppy, [-] removes it, etc. - so that you never have to see the gui. This little pastime proved me something:
When my hands are on beige, 80ish keyboard computer, my eyes are on gui which has the amiga os layout, drawers, menus, screen dragging etc., and my ears aren't hearing any screaming fan - I completely forget that inside that machine there's X86 hardware. If I ever had any doubt, now it's totally clear to me that I can't care the less about ng amiga hardware.

Anyway, to further enhance, the experience, on with the next project.... :)

@resle

it's not silly at all: it's brilliant! this is exactly what i want to do with my SAM, although in my build i'll need an amiga 500 case modified with an amiga 1200 keyboard for use with keyrah. my SAM is a flex-ATX board and would not fit in the A1200 with 'room to spare' as would a mini-ITX board.

i love this. nice job!

-- eliyahu

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@resle

good job! congratulations

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@resle

That looks a nice neat job

What are the temps like in it? Seems to be plenty of space for airflow. Yet that power brick is what has me worried.

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Thanks everyone for the support :)
It still needs a lot of work, though. There is no backplate and I have to smoothen a lot of parts (having no dremel, I used a heavily heathened blade to cut through the case)

And now I have to figure out how to transfer the mouse clicks to the two little actuators on the bluetooth mouse circuit board... because of couse they don't line up at all with the amiga mouse casing :)

@CritAnime

I have no idea of the temperatures, but the thing has been running 24/7 for three days, most of the time with an idle Workbench 3.1 I must say - and I had no problems. Also, the case never got hot. The power brick never gets that hot too! It's a 65w one, for a machine that barely hits 35w at 100% cpu usage (peripherals included).

Quite a nice version of this type thing.
I did it myself about 5 years ago. The problem with using Windows as a host though is it takes a while to boot, even when stripped down to the nth degree. I got my install down to about 80meg installed (most of these things are based on MicroXP and are more than twice this size). The more you add the slower the boot process is. By the time youve got latest dx/video/sound/networking drivers installed (even when stripped back) it takes a good 25-30 seconds until you see Workbench. Not to mention the fact that replacing explorere with Winuae causes some problems of its own (like having to reboot the computer entirely everytime Winuae crashes (which is does more often than Id like these days). With no Explorer there's no way to relaunch WinUAE without pressing the power button.

As for the hardware you said it has DX11 gfx? Just curious what hardware it contains. Unless its a dedicated graphics card the highest end gpu intergrated into core logic for s775+ATOM is what's in an ION system, which is DX10.

Anyway, nice effort, but some of the details youve written are stretching the truth more than a little, and omitting other details. I dont say this to discredit you, but rather to fill in the gaps for others interested.

@fishy_fis

On the DX11 thing you're right, it's actually DX10, just a little bit of confusion. In the beginning I intended using an E35M1 deluxe - which I am quite sure is DX11, which I ended up using for my media center instead.

As for having to relaunch WinUae, it's not necessary to reboot the machine. I added a little program I did myself, which offers some stupid but useful functionality:
- intercepts the proper shutdown of Winuae, and in that case sends the shutdown signal to windows
- in case Winuae closes, but with an error code, relaunches it

edit: with no explorer running, you can still go through ctrl+alt+canc and from the task manager, Run -> c:\whatever\winuae.exe btw

Just for curiosity, what stretches the truth and whose details did I omit? Both things, I did unintentionally - and/or because I am all but a hardware expert :)

Last edited by resle on 30-Jan-2012 at 03:57 PM.

@resle

Sorry, almost 3am here at the moment so Im probably not as articulate and concise as I'd like :)

I simply meant that its not quite as smooth sailing, nor is it as flawless an illusion as it might sound from what youve written. There's always some provisoes and other little details that show youre actually running Winuae on a Windows box. Mind you your version is taken a little further than most and only the fussiest of people would have problems with the little incosistancies.

That said though, a catweasel could make a nice addition if you chose to take the idea further :)

Another route a person could take is to run Winuae on a super streamlined Linux + WINE setup. Could be both smaller as a host, and could remove a few of the remaining "Windows-isms".

There's also another, better option again, but it hasnt been announced publicly yet, so I'll wait until its finished and announced before I talk about it (Im looking forward to it though) :)

Last edited by fishy_fis on 30-Jan-2012 at 04:10 PM.

@fishy_fis

Owww now you are making me VERY curious!

As for the windowsisms, I will take a video showcasing what's possible to obtain if one is willing to skip enough sleeping hours ;) It's all a matter of resource hacking and making lots (lots) of bitmaps completely transparent to push windows' gui out of the picture.

If I was good enough with Linux, I would have attempted the Linux + Puae way! Years ago (2004? 2005 maybe?) I discussed the thing with another oldbie of the forums, FractalLyte, and he actually made something out of it: X-Amiga (now dead - http://web.archive.org/web/20110112191342/http://xamiga.net/ )

Then, there's DOS Uae. Ah, DOS Uae! If only it was kept alive - I was able to boot an emulated Workbench 1.3 in 6 seconds on a Pentium II notebook.

Finally, AROS. What about AROS? If AMIBridge gets better, easier, more... hidden, and able to run games on a separate draggable screen just by double-clicking the relative ADF image... that could be a great option.

But the thing you're teasing... well, my bet is on some kind of big return of Amithlon :)

@resle

Amibridge is basically just euae-load slightly modified as far as I know. It even uses the same icons when adding extra software. My personal preference for a fast "68k" amiga os machine is amithlon + euae_load, so Ive noticed that they (amibridge/euae_load) seem more similar than Id expect of a coincidence.

It's not quite perfect yet, but janus uae 1.1 running on a streamlined aros has potential. 15 meg or less for the host, very easy to customise the host (aros), super quick booting, jit cpu emulation and so on and so forth. The main thing that'd stop me using it thus far is that janus uae's "core" isnt much more advanced than euae 0.8.29-wip4. Yes it has the intergration options, but apart from that there's few advances vs euae. Still more than usable, but not quite there yet enough to chose it vs. winuae.

And I agree about DosUAE. It's be super simple to use, plus great boot times. I looked into updating it, or even running winuae or euae via some of the DX wrappers for DOS, but from my experiences the wrappers dont contain all required functionality.

As for what Im keeping under my hat, its not exactly a secret and I do believe has been mentioned a few places, but to my knowledge there's been no public announcements about it so I'll wait until the developer decides to announce it himself. Lets just say its something akin to the (in my opinion) best possible combination of the things we've mentioned and I expect it'll be what people who like having dedicated emulated amiga systems will probably use :)

@resle

I've done something similar in the past. I used an HP instead, stripping down Windows and integrating WinUAE into the Windows system.
I used Amikit. Was really nice to launch directly the ADF files, either by double click or choosing a proper configuration with the right mouse button menu.

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@resle

That mouse is not authentic unless you have to make 3 attempts to select any menu-item.

I want to see you attempt a tricky sub-menu and post photos of your bruised finger as proof.

Otherwise you might as well gut a Naksha and be done with it!

Chris

@resle

I also tried to install a "boot directly into WinUAE" System on my Dell Notebook. But somehow I couldn't strip down windows in order to boot fast. So Basically I do have a WinXP Partition for WinXP and a WinXP Partition (tried to strip a few things with NLite) for UAE. Besides long boot times, I tried to get rid of Login Screen, but I only could, if I autolog in as Admin. Said this, I donnot have a log in screen, but a wellcome screen, which is also annoying. Plus it is a security issue as I can access all my data on my other drives... (without login).

Therefor ideas how to boot fast into UAE from a second win partition would be very wellcome (incl. Network, USB and GFX)

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@clebin

:) Yes, well, the wireless "original amiga" mouse thing is probably a bit excessive in terms of design over usability. Nonetheless, I don't remember having particular problems selecting stuff, back in the days - mind well I never had to deal with higher resolutions and small menus, I was a 500 + wb 1.3 user. The only hi-res thing I used was Deluxe Paint IV and still, no problems with that! (ps: voted for you, sorry you didn't make it as new moderator!)

@gerograph

I stripped windows so that it would be completely hidden. But it doesn't boot fast at all. There's just no way of doing that, even stopping most of the services: I've got a very rare "windows 2000 for embedded systems" which I got from MSDN centuries ago, it installs in 110 mb on disk and uses 16mb ram at startup - but it still boots in 30 seconds. DOS is the way, here, with its boot time of 4 seconds on a SSD (tested with MsDOS 7.1).

I am... let's say 90% sure, that WinUAE relies on the Windows architecture mostly for graphics and sound output, but pure emulation and in general everything that comes before the output layer, could be easily backported to DOS. PUAE is there to prove it, I think - if WinUAE was deeply entangled with the Win32 architecture, it wouldn't have been possible to keep a *nix version almost in sync with it. Let's start a bounty :)

@resle

The worst difficulty selecting things in menus doesn't actually come from resolution but from the fact that the buttons inside are more made for clicking than holding. Holding over longer time means more force which destroys the microswitches. I have an A1200 mouse that got the second replacement back in 2003. Hasn't been used much since, due to my Access deciding it had been buggered once too many and just died on me.

Last edited by olegil on 31-Jan-2012 at 10:24 AM.

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Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@olegil

My tank mouse is not healthy at the moment for exactly the same reasons. I need to replace it ASAP.

@resle
That's a really neat design then. My worry was that you were gonna cook it with the power brick. But it's obvious that you have factored that in. So looks good and now get your UAE on ;)

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@resle

I used to "collect" A1000 mice. At first for repair parts, then later because they were built a little better than the later ones. I have a box of shells, and I just might try to do what you did.
I did buy a bag of replacement switches a while back, I'm sure they can be bought at DigiKey or Mouser . The easiest way to connect them would definitely be to replace the original switches in the Amiga mouse, then run wires over to the bluetooth board. You'll need a soldering iron, but I'm guessing that won't be a problem.

It's very tempting, but I think I'd miss my scroll wheel.
Still, it's something to think about.

LyleHaze

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@resle

great work! i love a nice clean mod job

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Great job.

Can I ask what the internal dimensions are with the KB in place? I am wondering if a standard ITX board fits nicely as that has to be cheaper than gutting an expensive EeeBox!

FYI, if someone used a D945 based board or Eee you should be able to install Amithlon too...

An i-RAM "drive" could be pretty useful for this sort of project. Especially with a streamlined OS it'd bood in a few seconds. Check out youtube vids, it boots in a few seconds on older hardware with full OS installs. The limited capacity neednt be an issue either.
If I wasnt broke, and if they werent uncommon Id buy one just to give it a try :)