Suggestions for putting together an X-Amiga System

[techie]

Greetings all,
I had an old clunker of a PC that I was planning to put X-Amiga on but when I tried to turn it on this morning it wouldn't even boot. I eventually managed to get it running again but only to discover that 3 of the 4 Ram slots were no longer registering, neither was the CD drive nor one of the two hard drives. I think it's safe to say that this motherboard has had it's day and it's time to start looking for a replacement.

I remembered that Amiga Roundtable mentioned something about setting up a gOS development kit motherboard and I even found a site that is selling these boards here. A quick search on the web seems to say that this is a good retailer (or at least according to this anyway) but I can't seem to find much on the board itself.

So I was just wondering what all your thoughts are on this setup? Would it be good enough to run X-Amiga and maybe Kubuntu linux? Would it be worth also picking up a cheap PCI (I assume that's a PCI slot and not PCI Express) video card to use instead of the on board video?

Thanks for the advice, I'll be sure to let you all know what I think of the system if I do end up building it. :-)

[Fraccy]

The board on which X-Amiga was developed is a much lower-spec VIA Epia ME6000 running at 600MHz... E-UAE works very nicely on this.

[Debaser]

@Fraccy

That is good to know - via boards are quite linux-friendly and that was why I was thinking about the new gOS dev. motherboards as being a pretty cool idea to build an X-amiga system around.Hmmm

[dbrads]

techie wrote:
I eventually managed to get it running again but only to discover that 3 of the 4 Ram slots were no longer registering, neither was the CD drive nor one of the two hard drives.

 How many Amigas go this way after years of non-use? very few!

No wonder we love em.  :lol:

[Trev]

Don't worry. Years of being mishandled and photographed on shag and plush carpet for eBay ads will eventually send all Amiga components to their end.

Trev

[Speelgoedmannetje]

techie wrote:

I remembered that Amiga Roundtable mentioned something about setting up a gOS development kit motherboard and I even found a site that is selling these boards here. A quick search on the web seems to say that this is a good retailer (or at least according to this anyway) but I can't seem to find much on the board itself.
:-)

As far as I can see, there's no onboard gfx card.
I got my mobo destroyed when I did put a PCI gfx card in it, which apparently conflicted with the onboard gfx card. :-S

[Trev]

Fry's Electronics in the US (and perhaps their online storefront http://www.outpost.com) often have complete systems available for $250, which include and are capable of running Windows Vista Home Basic (i.e. they're decent systems for the price). They ship internationally.

That said, Fry's is renowned for their liberal and sometimes scary return policy. Returned and possibily defective items are usually discounted and put back on the store floor. Not sure if they do similar things for their mail-order business.

Trev

[techie]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
As far as I can see, there's no onboard gfx card.
I got my mobo destroyed when I did put a PCI gfx card in it, which apparently conflicted with the onboard gfx card. :-S

According to one website the mobo comes with

The VIA CN700 digital media chipset features the VIA UniChrome™ IGP Pro integrated 2D/3D graphics processor
(up to 1600 x 1200 with 128MB shared memory)

I was just wondering if this would work for X-Amiga or if getting a cheap PCI video card would be worth the extra money.