Amiga Walker

[djbase]

I know there was a shop in Belgium, who selled these Walkers back in 1996/1997.

Cant be. They were never sold.

[PMC]

FastRobPlus wrote:

iamaboringperson wrote:
I think the Walker looked crap mostly because of the beige drives.

That.  Plus all the rest of it! :-)

Haha!  I actually liked the design in a kind of modernesque toaster crossed with a cylinder vacuum cleaner kind of a way.

Those beige drives ruined it though, had the Walker been given drive fascias to match the rest of the case and a slightly less cliff like front then the design would have worked much better IMHO.

It's only in the last few years that computer design seems to have advanced beyond the beige box school of architecture, so in this respect the Walker was way ahead of it's time.  

[PMC]

Argus wrote:
Whatever happened to the AmiJoe?  That was Dave Haynie's company (name?), formed out of the ashes of PiOS.  I remember seeing a prototype board in Amiga Format at the '99 WOA in Cologne, Germany.  It had a G3 on it and some SIMM or DRAM slots.  

I recall an interview with Dave Haynie when he said that Metabox went pop before they had the chance to develop the AmiJoe design.

It would have forced the development of a PPC native Amiga OS much sooner than OS4....

Good point though, it would be interesting to see if any old designs could be dusted off for OS4, but I guess the bottlenecks inherent in the classic Amiga design would hold things back somewhat.

[minator]

Does anybody has an A-Walker?

Yes.

Would you sell it?

No.

Unfortunately there's only one more and I doubt there's any chance the owner would sell it.

I put some pages up about it here.


As for looks, it is well, different.
The metallic grey paint is pretty awful though, it would look far better if it was black (and had matching drives).

That said I'd take a unique case over a boring PC case anyday.

--

It did boot off HD but running WinUAE in XP allowed me to do a backup of the HD but now the Walker refuses to see it anymore.  It will boot off floppy though.  I still want to get the ROM off it but I need HD toolbox on an FD or an Amiga-PC cable, unfortunately I have neither...

[odin]

minator wrote:
It did boot off HD but running WinUAE in XP allowed me to do a backup of the HD but now the Walker refuses to see it anymore.  It will boot off floppy though.  I still want to get the ROM off it but I need HD toolbox on an FD or an Amiga-PC cable, unfortunately I have neither...

Need a DMS version of the HD Install WB disk? Or do you need a physical version of said disk?

[Unit21]

In case any of you guys are interested...

I have a friend who is most likely able to produce "new" walker towers to house the motherboard of choice.
I would, however, need some more pics of the whole unit. If someone has schematics and complete sizes I can forward these to my friend and get a quote on the price for the case.

It will be produced in aluminum/brushed aluminum.

PM me if you are interested.

[Piru]

@minator

It did boot off HD but running WinUAE in XP allowed me to do a backup of the HD but now the Walker refuses to see it anymore.

Take a look at this:

IMPORTANT NOTE
==============
If you boot Windows 95 (don't know about 3.x, 98 and NT) while you have an Amiga harddisk connected to your PC, it will overwrite the bytes 0x00dc..0x00df of block 0 with garbage, thus invalidating the Rigid Disk Block. Sheer luck has it that this is an unused area of the RDB, so only the checksum doesn's match anymore. Linux will ignore this garbage and recognize the RDB anyway, but before you connect that drive to your Amiga again, you must restore or repair your RDB. So please do make a backup copy of it before booting Windows!

If the damage is already done, the following should fix the RDB (where is the device name).

DO AT YOUR OWN RISK:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
dd if=/dev/ of=rdb.tmp count=1
cp rdb.tmp rdb.fixed
dd if=/dev/zero of=rdb.fixed bs=1 seek=220 count=4
dd if=rdb.fixed of=/dev/

[PMC]

Unit21 wrote:
I have a friend who is most likely able to produce "new" walker towers to house the motherboard of choice.

How cool is that?

[JonoPike]

Quote:
-----------------------------------------------------------

I know there was a shop in Belgium, who selled these Walkers back in 1996/1997.

-----------------------------------------------------------

DJBase wrote:

Cant be. They were never sold.

At least one shop in Belgium advertised with it
in "Amiga-Magazine". Back then, I didn't know if
the Walker was gonna produced or not.
They made it look like if they where already in
production and selling them.

[JonoPike]

@minator

Thanks for the info+pictures of the Walker.
Very interesting!

[xeron]

At least one shop in Belgium advertised with it
in "Amiga-Magazine". Back then, I didn't know if
the Walker was gonna produced or not.
They made it look like if they where already in
production and selling them.

The Walker was NEVER sold to the public. The only cases in existance are flimsy plastic and obvious prototypes. Only very preliminary work was done on the "3.2" kickstart for it... as you can see fromGreg Donners site:

"Heinz Wrobel contributes a lot of notes:

Within Amiga Technologies/Amiga International no real work was done on a true Workbench v3.2. Talk is cheap; Walker ran with a v3.1 Workbench with minor tweaks.

The Walker contained a modified, mostly 3.1-based Kickstart ROM. Due to the hardware changes, a plain Amiga 1200 3.1 ROM would not have been working. The hardware, however, was prepared for a 1MB ROM.

Toni was the system controller and did, for example, implement the DRAM interface. The FPGA used on the prototypes had a few frequency problems and were not completely stable at 33MHz. Later investigation showed that CeBIT would have been easier by running the machines at 25MHz.

The motherboard contained a SuperIO chip and a Dallas Clock as major enhancements, aside from the "Toni" custom chip (really an FPGA). The original prototypes did not contain the Dallas clock due to some kind of hardware problem not found before CeBIT. No drivers were actually written for the new hardware. ESCOM died too fast.

Several Walker units were built. The three Walker units shown at CeBIT were put into the "fancy" case. One other machine exists in a standard PC case, which wasn't a problem as the Walker was intentionally a Baby AT like design. The prototypes were brought up in less than a week before CeBIT and were run at 33MHz.

Using a Coldfire was discussed for about a millisecond but the idea was dropped in another nanosecond due to basic Coldfire V2 68k compatibility issues. There never was a thought to use an '040 in the base design and a 50MHz '040 doesn't really exist anyway. The main discussion revolved around using a 33MHz '030 or a 40MHz EC '030. The decision was made against the MMU and for the higher speed even though for the prototypes chips with MMUs were used.".

[JonoPike]

xeron wrote:

The Walker was NEVER sold to the public.

Yes, we all know that by now! But like I said:
Back then we didn't know!