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SnkBitten 
Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 14-Apr-2018 15:12:44
#1 ]
Member
Joined: 10-Apr-2018
Posts: 43
From: SC, US

I had posted some of this in the New Members area "My Introduction" but this is the more appropriate forum area so I thought I'd continue it here.

I'm a huge fan of Amithlon...a HUGE fan. I first found out about Amithlon back in 2015 (very late to the party) after starting to play with WinUAE (again late to the party for that). WinUAE made me want an Amiga again, and with no expectations of ever owning one (though I now have an A4000D and A4000T) I wanted a physical Amiga emulation setup and not just another system running WinUAE since I was doing that on my Win10 primary system. Reading about Amithlon and how fast it was on older hardware and lucky enough to have some compatible (partially) old hardware lying around, I started investigating Amithlon. An old powered off system had a compatible motherboard and compatible sound card so I set off to see how to install this. Amithlon CD booted.....great but how do you get it to boot off your HD without requiring the CD?

After numerous attempts, lots of cursing and frustration I started to understand a little better of what was occuring during the boot process of Amithlon and what files were needed to get it up and running. From there it became tracking down what hardware is compatible and how to get everything working from booting off my hard drive, Amithlon/AmigaOS booting and having all the functional hardware possible (USB, Audio, accelerated video, networking, etc..). Scouring the internet for Amithlon related info and gathering as much as I could together I then started buying off eBay old PC components, asking friends and family if they had any old hardware I could have and testing everything I could reasonably test that was "compatible" according to the internet.

This also lead me to writing my own guides as I wanted a complete walk-thru of installing, patching and configuring all the hardware from USB, Audio, Networking and configuring Picasso96mode screenmodes to my monitor/graphics card. This also lead me to writing additional guides on compatible hardware, modifying the kickstart (shape.rom), using Lightwave 3d and compiling the Amithlon kernel based off Milan's kernel4 tree.

I've spent crazy amounts of money trying to find what I would consider the "best of the best" Amithlon compatible hardware though I'm still seeing how far it can be pushed. Tracking down and purchasing an actual Amithlon retail CD was crazy enough but I did that too.

My site for Amithlon has published Google Docs that you can read online, as published docs as I make changes to them in Google Docs the changes are updated automatically so re-visiting them can occasionally find an update or addition. The docs have embedded links to all the mentioned patches and files as well as having them hosted on my site.

Amithlon - info/patches

Some prefer .pdf files and since I haven't made any changes lately, I exported the docs relevant to installing as .pdf files and uploaded the archive to aminet.net

Aminet - Installation Guides

My site also has links to my Amithlon blog as well as my Amithlon Google+ group (I did mention I'm a HUGE Amithlon fan), where I discuss changes I've made along the way and things I'm investigating or working on currently (like testing an i7 based motherboard).

I have a few more guides I'm working on, a new compiling guide based off Ubuntu 5.10 instead of CentOS, some miscellaneous stuff using setenv to change audio parameters, setconfig during boot and other things not completely related to installing. Not published as an online document yet but the Ubuntu guide is available to download as a .pdf.

Ubuntu5.10 Amithlon kernel guide

One of the challenges of getting Amithlon working on "newer" motherboards is the lack of PCI slots. Luckily there are a few PCI-e cards that work, the Matrox G550 PCI-e for accelerated video and the Intel Pro1000 PCI-e 10/100/1000 ethernet card. This can reduce the number of PCI slots needed to run a fully "enabled" setup with networking, accelerated graphics and sound, depending on what the motherboard can/can't provide (typically Audio and/or Network).

I also have Amithlon running on a laptop with wireless networking...again something which required testing a number of mini-pci wireless network cards....and buying old laptops off eBay. Don't tell my wife how much I've spent...... :)

My current setup:

Motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L - Socket LGA775 (3 PCI slots)
Chipset - Northbridge: Intel® P35 Express / Southbridge:Intel ICH9
Motherboard provided USB and NIC
CPU:
Intel Core2Duo (E8600) 3.3 Ghz overclocked to 4.0 Ghz
Video Card:
Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 PCI 64 MB
Sound Card:
Soundblaster Live PCI
Specialty Card:
CatWeasel MK4 PCI
(2) 512 MB Ram chips
(1) 20 GB SATA boot drive (FreeDOS, Amithlon boot kernel/files
(1) 256 GB SATA SSD drive (Amiga partitions)
(1) 3.5" PC Floppy
(1) 5.25" Slim slot load DVD RW drive *
(1) Front panel multi-card USB I/O *
*Slim DVD and Multi-card USB I/O fit in one 5.25" slot

I'm using my own custom kickstart and compiled kernel.
Kickstart:
Replaced modules:
exec_45.20 (A1200-A500)
bootmenu_447(A500)
console.device_44.8
filesystem.resource_45.10
filesystem_45.13
ram-handler_44.24_NoBss
shell_45.7
mathffp.library (HSML)
mathieeesingbas.library (HSML)
layer.library 45.27

Removed modules:
battclock.resource_39.3
scsi.device_40.5(A600-A1200)
workbench.library_40.5

battclock.resource is injected by Amithlon so not needed. scsi.device is not needed because Amithlon uses amithlon.device. workbench.library I use an updated version in libs. Setpatch is
SetPatch NOROMUPDATE NONSD >NIL:

For the kernel I removed all the devices not relevant to my hardware (IDE/SCSI), Audio and Networking as well as the VESA framebuffer. I use Amiga AHI drivers for the Soundblaster, a custom module for the motherboard RTL8111 nic (r1000.o) and video is handled by the riva-fb framebuffer in the kernel.
RTL8111 10/100/1000 module for Kernel 4

Here's a video of running E-UAE and playing FA18 Interceptor on my Amithlon
FA18 Interceptor on Amithlon

SysInfo (yes it's not accurate but it is consistent)




I'm always looking for more info about Amithlon and/or hardware that works with Amithlon I can add to my guides so if you have any please let me know.

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Hypex 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 14-Apr-2018 16:42:26
#2 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@SnkBitten

Quote:
I'm a huge fan of Amithlon...a HUGE fan.


I've met the author. When he was developing it. Came to my club.

And yes, 2015 is late. How did you find it at all?

Quote:
I wanted a physical Amiga emulation setup and not just another system running WinUAE since I was doing that on my Win10 primary system.


I'm not sure I understand this comment. Isn't WinUAE a physical Amiga emulation setup itself? UAE emulates the whole hardware of an Amiga.

Where as Amithlon does not. Amithlon is more an AmigaOS (3.9) on 68K emulator. It emulates only a subset of the hardware just enough to get it to boot AmigaOS.

Amithlon is similar in operation to AmigaOS4 on an AmigaOne. Real hardware banging applications won't be expected to work. OS friendly ones will be.

They were both being worked on at the same time. You're favourite won.

I don't use it myself but I'm sure the Amithlon community will be thankful for your hard efforts. Well done.

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SnkBitten 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 14-Apr-2018 17:04:55
#3 ]
Member
Joined: 10-Apr-2018
Posts: 43
From: SC, US

@Hypex

I wanted a machine that wasn't my current PC and I didn't want to setup another PC to run WinUAE or something to run FS-UAE, etc..

I wanted a physical system that had things talking to the hardware and not running through an abstraction layer to emulate hardware well...just because :) Want more HD space, actually add another HD. Want more ram, add more ram, etc.. To me a more realistic feeling Amiga than WinUAE. I love WinUAE too....I test a lot in it and then see if it works the same in Amithlon.

Reading threads about WinUAE when I started playing with that kept having references to Amithlon as "a much faster emulation without the custom chipset" so I wanted to try it. I was running RTG on my A4000D back in the early 90s so didn't mind something that would be only RTG. The more I played with it the more impressed I was with Amithlon so just kept going and going.

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Trekiej 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 14-Apr-2018 20:22:00
#4 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 17-Oct-2006
Posts: 890
From: Unknown

@SnkBitten

I hope to see this available once again.

_________________
John 3:16

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TJH132 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 4:47:17
#5 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 28-Mar-2004
Posts: 129
From: Salem, OR USA

@SnkBitten

That is a heck of a lot of work you've invested!

I was an Amithlon convert from the day it was released. My A4000 had died about a year prior and I was forced to use a roommate's PC as my main computer during that time. As soon as I could, I got the hardware together (800mhz AMD Duron) and built my first Amithlon machine. That computer would be my primary computer for well over a decade. I built two others since then, but only one is still working (barely hanging on). Each time I built a machine, it was quite a chore to round up compatible hardware and get the OS booting from HD. I know I've forgotten too much to try again.

As my Amithlon boxes have aged, I bought a MacMini and installed MorphOS, which runs quite well, but misses many of the uses my main machine could do: digital audio recording, SCSI scanning...

I now mainly use ChromeOS, since the majority of my computing activity is web-based anymore. I've recently discovered Audio Evolution for Android works beautifully on the Google Pixelbook!

I look forward to looking through your guides, even if I never build another Amithlon box.

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SnkBitten 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 5:30:57
#6 ]
Member
Joined: 10-Apr-2018
Posts: 43
From: SC, US

@TJH132

Compatible hardware these days is easy and cheap to find as long as you know what to get, one of the main reasons I put together my Hardware Compatibility Guide. $50 for my motherboard, $20 for my CPU, $20 for the video card, maybe $15 for the 1 GB of RAM, and I had the soundcard already. Case, PS, HDs and Optical drive (most I had lying around as well) and your good to go with a system that scores higher than WinUAE on my i7 32GB system (SysInfo).


The most expensive item was the Catweasel card.

With the guide and all needed files linked in it, it makes it pretty easy to get a nice setup going....again using compatible hardware :)

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umisef 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 6:28:46
#7 ]
Super Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 1714
From: Melbourne, Australia

@Trekiej

Quote:
I hope to see this available once again.


Let me just put this out there --- as far as my contribution is concerned, I have no problem with people finding a copy "somewhere". If you do, I'd suggest you make sure you either have licenses for the included third party contributions (mainly OS3.9 and Picasso96, plus, IIRC, the sound and network drivers hitting the hardware directly) or throw some money in the appropriate direction. For P96, that's either Tobias and Alexander (P96 authors), or Individual Computers (Jens Schoenfeld, possibly/supposedly current P96 IP owner?). For OS3.9, your guess is as good as mine. And then there is, of course, Harald Franck, formerly of VMC.DE. The website is gone, and I haven't had any contact with him in a very, very long time. If anyone knows how to send him money (and whether he still wants to be paid for Amithlon), please share.

So yes, I understand that "throwing in the appropriate direction" is a real challenge these days. If you find it impossible, I'd suggest putting some money into AROS bounties, or even just donating to the World Wildlife Fund, Amnesty International, or Medicines Sans Frontiers.

Just understand that all of that at best is morally OK, but definitely not legally.

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ak 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 12:23:28
#8 ]
New Member
Joined: 31-Dec-2003
Posts: 3
From: Unknown

@umisef

Its a very sad story that Amithlon isn´t updated or maintained by anyone. There is a growing interest again for 68k programs because of Vampire accelerators and also for porting various emulators such as snes9x to 68k amiga.

Amithlon would still make a great retro-platform for running various games and preserving legacy tradition related to Commodore.

Other than simply emulating game systems there is also AmikitX that can be made to run on Amithlon. You can look for youtube videos that shows its actually running on it very nicely.







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Hypex 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 15:16:02
#9 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@SnkBitten

Okay yes I understand, just missed that earlier. Given the vitualised world we live in, with ease of booting any OS with the touch of a button, I had forgot about dedicating a machine to it that booted into AmigaOS.

Being close to the hardware does help. And also the native feature apps can be compiled as x86. Can't beat that.

There is some UAE installer that does similar, running UAE on Linux, but still not as optimised.

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Hypex 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 15:22:42
#10 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@ak

I would have thought someone would have taken the idea and recreated it. I mean they've had long enough. Just take the guts out of UAE and compile it for modern Linux kernel and hardware.

But how does Amithlon help 68K? Amithlons point is on x86. It helps to run Amiga programs on x86.

Being it runs OS friendly 68k software faster with RTA and RTG I would say it has more in common with AmigaOS4 than a 68K Amiga.

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klx300r 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 16:45:29
#11 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 4-Mar-2008
Posts: 3833
From: Toronto, Canada

@SnkBitten

thanks for the awesome guide/website for Amithlon I tried years ago scrounging for compatible PC parts and eventually gave up

_________________
____________________________
c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
mancave-ramblings
X1000 I BELIEVE

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Wumpus 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 17:07:48
#12 ]
Member
Joined: 12-Apr-2018
Posts: 61
From: Unknown

@Hypex

In my opinion it comes down to focusing on running existing 68k applications rather than applications written for the new platform.

Without the old applications, what is the end user connection to the Amiga?

I'd say Amithlon is a lot closer to MorphOS than AROS for example.

MorphOS seamlessly runs most 68k software and adds PPC in addition to that.

AROS on a non-68k platform is more like a whole new platform that is neither 68k Amiga nor an established x86 platform and running 68k AOS binaries is an afterthought. It's somewhat compatible from a developer's view, but to end users? It's a new thing that sort of resembles Amiga.

Other than PPC vs x86, MorphOS seems more like what Amithlon would have become without all the greedy illegal interference prematurely killing it, AOS plus new stuff on faster commodity hardware.

Both are all but end of the line on hardware now though. You haven't been able to buy a compatible mass produced PPC system for some time and good luck configuring a DDR4 system for the 1GB RAM or less needed for Amithlon so that's limited to the last DDR3 systems (that's what I run on, an i7/ICH10).

I agree, we need a new one, but the majority of the best tricks used to make it so good aren't viable on current hardware and it's way more involved than just stripping UAE to make it run as half as well as Amithlon.

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Trekiej 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 17:40:56
#13 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 17-Oct-2006
Posts: 890
From: Unknown

@umisef

For what it is worth, I bought Amiga Forever 7.
I would love to see Amithlon on AF.
I hope it would have an installer to help in installation.

_________________
John 3:16

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SnkBitten 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 18:16:03
#14 ]
Member
Joined: 10-Apr-2018
Posts: 43
From: SC, US

@Trekiej

I not sure how that would work. Amiga Forever is a 68k emulation package. Amithlon contains it's own 68k emulation.

Virtualbox would be a more appropriate place to run Amithlon and it runs very well in that. It's significantly faster on my i7-4470k 3.5 GHz Win10 setup in Virtual box than it is on my physical Amithlon E8600 4.0 Ghz box. I've had audio, USB and networking functioning in Amithlon under Virtualbox (though networking is really hit or miss with mostly miss). The only "downside" is that graphics aren't accelerated which primarily shows in screen text scrolling. Directory listings of large volumes, scrolling text in an editor, etc... Other graphics functions are very speedy.

Here's a quick video I did a while back (recording using Virtualboxes recording function) of launching Shapeshifter in Amithlon running in VB.

Amithlon - VB - Shapeshifter

Here's one of using IBrowse in Amithon...in Virtualbox.

Amithlon - VB - IBrowse

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Trekiej 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 19:56:40
#15 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 17-Oct-2006
Posts: 890
From: Unknown

@SnkBitten

How about a Live Linux distribution?
After installation, remove the Linux disk and reboot.

_________________
John 3:16

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Wumpus 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 15-Apr-2018 21:52:32
#16 ]
Member
Joined: 12-Apr-2018
Posts: 61
From: Unknown

@Trekiej

You can replace the ROM and OS easily, along with the other parts that are in AF, but that's not enough.

I suspect that he main exe, linuxrc is probably his, so you might have leeway there but there are still a lot of required parts that you don't normally see on the surface.

The rest of us don't know the exact copyright on them but the names are certainly leading to a potentially bad result.

Hidden in the bin files are:
Amithlon Bootstrap 2.21 (c) VMC Harold Frank 1999-xxxx Emubox/BABE (c) 200-2001 Bernd Bernie Meyer

vmc_battclock 4.04 (09.08.2001)
vmc_battmem 40.2 (09.08.2001)
vmc_x86callback 1.6 (09.08.2001)
vmc_amithlon 1.6 (30.08.2001)
vmc_atirq 1.10 (04.09.2001) - I'm not sure this was used actually, but it's there

Lots of vmc references in there.

Some are relatively easy to rewrite, some are more difficult, especially while staying 100% compatible.

Then you've got all the nice little utilities to communicate with the x86 side. Some actually have source, some don't, but you'd want at least an equivalent for system maintenance and diagnostics.

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Trekiej 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 16-Apr-2018 0:36:31
#17 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 17-Oct-2006
Posts: 890
From: Unknown

@Wumpus

Okay, I will go with that.

_________________
John 3:16

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SnkBitten 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 17-Apr-2018 2:44:17
#18 ]
Member
Joined: 10-Apr-2018
Posts: 43
From: SC, US

I'm testing an i7 system (MSI X58M motherboard) that was donated with an i7-920 @ 2.6 GHz cpu. This was a very unimpressive setup scoring far below what I expected. It may have been a faulty i7-920 or perhaps the heatsink/thermal paste wasn't properly applied.....

I swapped in an i7-965 Extreme @ 3.2 GHz and the numbers jumped tremendously, bringing them much more inline with what I was expecting.

SysInfo scores 181 times an A4000, SysSpeed scores (MIPS and MFLOPS) doubled in comparison to the i7-920. In fact every test performed with SysSpeed showed significant gains.

While I was in the case I swapped out the nVidia FX5500 256MB card with an nVidia FX5200 128MB card. A small note about this particular motherboard, it support triple channel memory. I found 512MB modules so ordered three but had been using only two due to Amithlon's limitations. The board will drop to dual channel when using two, but I was curious if performance would be better with a triple channel configuration. I added the third module, pushing the motherboard to 1.5 GB of ram. Surprisingly the system booted though I had errors relating to pcisinmod not being able to load the r1000.o module for the NIC. Experimenting I was able to use mem=850M in the kernel init string and this allowed boot with the module being loaded. Swapping out the 256MB card for the 128MB card allowed me to move up to mem=896M. I know Amithlon maps the video card memory into Amiga address space so using a lesser sized card would free up additional fast ram space.


I'll have to re-visit dual vs. triple channel testing as I was using the i7-920 when testing and I'm sure results are off. Results were positive but I'll check them against the more stable running i7-965.

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SnkBitten 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 18-Apr-2018 2:03:16
#19 ]
Member
Joined: 10-Apr-2018
Posts: 43
From: SC, US

Well that was interesting....the system was booting and all looked good with the mem=896M statement. I started to test overclocking and noticed dragging the CLI window around was slow. I thought it was a by-product of incorrect overclock settings or such but even when reverting back to stock the screen updates were slow. I checked Screenmodes and I was still on my 1024x768 @ 32bit screen I was using on the spare monitor I had connected. I ran Picasso96Mode to check and my nvidia-1 board was now vesa-1. Hmm....I bet the PCI addresses are being pushed around and out of range because of the 1.5 GB onboard and the extra memory configured under the kernel init string.

I started backing it down....until I reached mem=850M and then all was well.

Oh well, still plenty of ram for AmigaOS :)

Overclocking the i7 to 4000 MHz resulted in SysInfo scores very close to my e8600 but still not enough to triumph over it. I score at 235-238 (compared to A4000) on my e8600 overclocked to 4000 MHz while the i7 reached 227 (compared to A4000). It also didn't stay up long at all, definitely need to look at better cooling.

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retro 
Re: Amithlon - Complete install guides and patches/info
Posted on 18-Apr-2018 22:52:59
#20 ]
Super Member
Joined: 16-Dec-2003
Posts: 1049
From: Unknown

so is it even possible to buy amithlon anymore, i remember that there was a new version that was much faster that was about to be released and then amiga inc, got greedy or just wanted to sabotage it. so did that released ever came out or ?? and what is the legal status now an days. i meen amiga inc is gone so should it not be possible to start op the projekt again and then just sell or redistribute the .roms from hyperion with some kind of deal that was beneficial to all party's ?

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