Questions about Amithlon and AmigaOS XL

[AmigaEd]

Greetings,
I have been trying to find out more about just what exactly Amithlon and AmigaOS XL is.

From what I can gather Amithlon is a software solution for running and Amiga environment on PC hardware. Am I on the right track with this?

So then , what is AmigaOS XL is this some variation of AmigaOS like AmigaOS3.9?

Lastly, where might I find the Amithlon software? I tried some tlinks that I found, but they all seem dead :-(

Regards,
AmigaEd

[seer]

Amithlon is a stand alone Amiga emulator for I386 and more.  IE,  IIR  it could run Amiga I386 programs.

AmigXL is an emulator but needs QNX to run.

Both products are dead, you might have some luck on ebay.

[coldfish]

You could try Amiga In a Box if you just want to run a good WB environment on the PC.  

http://aiab.emuunlim.com/

...its good!

[AmigaEd]

by coldfish on 2005/3/16 3:22:24
You could try Amiga In a Box if you just want to run a good WB environment on the PC.

Yes, I have been using AIAB, it is quite good. I have been using AmigaSys also and I like that as well.

I thought that Amithlon might be faster and more stable. I like the idea of booting up directly into the Amiga environment. I had also heard that Amithlon was quite fast.

-AmigaEd

[coldfish]

What about AROS, its still early days, but looks quite promising.

[Methuselas]

@ AmigaED

Amithlon SCREAMS. It's fast as hell on my 1.3 and even faster on my 2.2 Barton. If you want to use it for applications that don't bang the hardware and games that do not as well, you're set. I was happy with my purchase, but *PISSED* about how they did Bernie. Sadly, Amithlon died WAY before it's time.

If you want to play old games, stick to UAE. I have been unsuccessful in getting AUAE to run. EUAE gives better results but I only recently started playing with it.

Nothing, IMHO, compares to Amithlon, other than a Peg or an A1. :-D

[Floid]

Methuselas wrote:
@ AmigaED

Amithlon SCREAMS. It's fast as hell on my 1.3 and even faster on my 2.2 Barton. If you want to use it for applications that don't bang the hardware and games that do not as well, you're set.

Yep, and that was the reason for "AmigaOS XL" as a concept; with a (presumably optimized?) UAE under QNX6, you could run the hardware-banging stuff.  I'd also heard an IPC mechanism (or at least, potential-standard) was in place to allow native QNX stuff to talk to things emulated and vice-versa.

That was, theoretically, the rationale for their brief packaging together; Amithlon got tagged as "the fastest," and XL could claim "most compatible" for being based on the straight emulation you get from regular UAE or whatever.

I was happy with my purchase, but *PISSED* about how they did Bernie. Sadly, Amithlon died WAY before it's time.

Yep, as did the chance for the XL concept to go anywhere, by association with the mess.  The idea wasn't bad, in terms of basically being what Gatemiga had promised way back when.

---

AROS (on x86) only runs programs targeting x86 AROS for now, but if what you want to run has an AROS build...

[AmigaEd]

Hmmmm....well, perhaps this is somewhat of a stupid question, but I'll pose it anyway.

As Amithlon has been killed off is there still any development for third party drivers, etc. going on?

I'm not even sure as an answer matters as I think I'm unlikely to find the Amithlon software anyway.

It sure sounds like it was awesome though...

-AmigaEd

[Methuselas]

@ Ed,

Sadly, I think Haage and Partner are still selling it though they shouldn't, but there are still drivers in development for Amithlon. In fact, I just installed PCIInfo 2.0 and the updated library last night.

As it stands, it's great for what it is, but that's all it really ever will be. If you can find it, I highly recommend getting it, as it's wonderful software, but AROS is really the way to go using PC hardware. AROS is coming around nicely and once it becomes more stable, more robust, I'll swap my Amithlon box for an AROS one.

Or, until I get my A1 or PegII. ^_~

[AmigaEd]

@Methuselas,

I have been looking around on Haage and Partner's website and I can't seem to find Amithlon on there.

Maybe I'll have to look at AROS more closely. I don't really see my self getting an A1 anytime soon unless there is a 50% price drop. Heck, it took me 17 years to get an A2000!

Regards,
AmigaEd

[stefcep]

I just got winuae set up om my P3-650 with Win98SE and I found the speed in RTG mode really quick.  I did some test renders with  Cinema4D and found the emulator was 4 times faster than my A4000 68060.  Hard drive access on the Amiga side was also much quicker.  Going back to the A4000 felt like going from the A4000 to an A1200 '030. And I was impressed with compatabilty:  i even got AGA demos running as fast as my A4000. Napalm ran really well as did Amidoom (as good as A4000 with CV64)

But you say that Amithlon "screamed"; do you mean it was faster than winuae in rtg emulation?  It sounds logical as I understand that amithlon doesn't run Windows so this would free up the processor to run the amiga emulation.

One other question: having tried both P96 and CGX4 on my A4000. I preferred CGX because the mouse pointer moved smoother, icon dragging was smoother and the whole thing felt more responsive on my A4000 CV64.  The winuae emulation is so accurate thet it emulates the stuff i don't like about P96.  Sooo.. is there a way to use CGX as instead of P96 in winuae?

[rhino]

Hi,

But you say that Amithlon "screamed"; do you mean it was faster than winuae in rtg emulation? It sounds logical as I understand that amithlon doesn't run Windows so this would free up the processor to run the amiga emulation.

I use Amithlon as my main Amiga system at the moment and have tried WinUAE with RTG as part of the Amiga Forever package. In my experience Amithlon is definitely faster than UAE on the same hardware and has a much more Amiga-like feel (hard to describe).

is there a way to use CGX as instead of P96 in winuae?

As I understand it, WinUAE has a special Picasso 96 driver which can access the a DirectX display as if it were a graphics card. As CyberGraphX has no such driver, it could not be used.

If you're interested, I wrote a feature on the various emulation options (Amiga Forever (UAE), AmigaXL and Amithlon) in Total Amiga issue 11. You can download this in PDF format from:
Roberthttp://www.totalamiga.org/backissues3.html

HTH

Robert

[wobbly]

Sorry to bring up an old thread.

Am I risking anything [beyond normal reason - afterall, my Amiga hard drives must be >10 years old..] - namely my data on my hard drives - if i connect them up to a pc, one that i intend to run Amithlon on?

I guess i'm asking if is it safe to plug in my Amiga hard drives!

Is anyone using their old Amiga hard drives with Amithlon?

[Mark]

wobbly wrote:
Sorry to bring up an old thread.

Am I risking anything [beyond normal reason - afterall, my Amiga hard drives must be >10 years old..] - namely my data on my hard drives - if i connect them up to a pc, one that i intend to run Amithlon on?

I guess i'm asking if is it safe to plug in my Amiga hard drives!

Absolutely not, if you also use Windows.  Apparently, Windows writes to the first block of any disk drive it doesn't understand.  This damages the RDB of an Amiga formatted drive so it can't be read by a real Amiga anymore.  The problem is discussed here,

http://www-d0.fnal.gov/D0Code/source/l3xsbc_distrib/linux/Documentation/filesystems/affs.txt#L154

and here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=9933

[wobbly]

Whoaa! Thankfully I asked and you replied!

Thanks for the heads up!


But, I guess its okay if I have no Windows hard drives attached I can just plug-in the Amiga hard drives without worry..