amithlon scsi and usb options

[fishy_fiz]

Although I think Winuae is an impressive program for what it does, I can never enjoy the amiga experience with it like I do with amithlon. Even with my customised super stripped down WinXP Pro install (boots in literally 5 seconds with next to no visible signs of Windows being involed) it just doesnt "feel" right and Windows still on occasion rears its ugly head in one way or another. Now this is fine for some people, but personally I like to have dedicated machines for specific purposes, and as far as a dedicated "amiga" pc goes, Winuae just doesnt do it for me despite having all the pieces of the puzzle well supported. Because of this Ive opted for good ol' trusty Amithlon once more (I think this is probably true of most people who have had luck with amithlon,... its hard to go back to another solution(in regards to "serious" amiga emulation)), however there are 2 main things I'd like to address before I do so and was hoping someone might be able to give me the answers Im after.
    Firstly, scsi drives...... I have a reasonably nice machine set aside for amithlon, c2d@3.86ghz, 1 gig ram, sblive, g400 matrox video card, etc. All fully supported and working well, however being that modern hardware support is minimal in amithlon I have no dma for hard drive access which makes things like watching videos, or other heavy i/o type stuff somewhat of an imperfect experience. The only workaround for this (unless I want to downgrade the hardware (my old athlon64 system I used to run amithlon on for example, despite being somewhat slower ran videos fine (well, dvd reolution rips at least))) is to use a scsi drive. The question I guess is, does anyone know what scsi cards are supported in amiga os, or amithlon ? I used an adaptec 2091 (iirc) in amithlon in an athlonxp system I used before the a64 even, but dont have it anymore, and I'll be darned if I can find another. Im sure there's others that are supported, but I have no idea what. Any info, thoughts, or suggestions here would be appreciated.
    The remaining issue isnt as essential, but still would be useful, and that is USB. Can anyone tell me please what the story with poseidon and amithlon is? Support was dropped if I recall in an earlyish version of amithlon. Is there any work around for this? Are there any USB pci cards that poseidon (or any other 68k usb stack) will support? Additionally, and slightly off topic, but now that poseidon is open source, is amithlon support once again possible?
    These few issues are stopping me having a 68k based Amiga system that Im perfectly content with. Sure, there's no custom chipset support, but 68k euae + setting up deftypes for adf images (ie. just double click an adf image and have it launch via euae) plays a large part in redeeming this, and there's other, slightly more elaborate methods to fill in any other custom chipset based voids (speed is great by the way in 68k euae under amithlon, although my experiments with it made me realise that breathless, while a nice engine, is a crap game:))
Anyway, thanks in advance.

[CSixx]

Ouch, what a mess...
You may want to format your post for readability.

[fishy_fiz]

Yes, because we all know how vital formatting is on a forum. Having said that though it reads fine, and is gramatically correct, and that's all that really matters. Someone who is willing to help rather than criticise pointless "flaws" (from thier own perspective) will overlook the fact that formatting on one persons monitor can be different than others. I decided to humor you anyway and make a few adjustments, but weirdly nothing changed, despite there now being a "last editted" note in the post.

All this aside though is anyone able to help me with the information Im after please ?

[Heiroglyph]

I'm a big fan of Amithlon too, but I can't really answer your question so I apologize in advance for going off topic.

I know that my Amithlon machine is using IDE, an Nvidia 5200 and a newer kernel that I found online and it performs reasonably well.  The CPU is an AMD XP2400+ I think.

I've been doing a lot of preliminary research on Amithlon lately, but I can't tell you exactly what is supported without a good deal of digging.

I'm looking at more of a replacement/upgrade than I am at what is supported in the shipping version.

As far as I can tell, the only part of Amithlon that doesn't have source code available is the library for exposing x86 to AmigaOS, Amithlon.resource and the PCI library.  The UAE tweaks and the kernel are open.  Luckily that lib didn't do a huge amount of work that can't be replaced.

Right now I'm looking at pros and cons of which parts should be exposed natively to the 68k side, how much should be handled on the Linux side and what parts of the OS respond well to x86 replacements.

The USB stack would be a good example of mixed 68k/x86.  The UI could be kept 68k and compile all the working parts to x86 either as elf files in AmigaOS or built as a resource of the emulator itself.

I'm not sure that having zero chipset emulation is even needed these days.  It's not that big of a load on recent CPUs and has huge benefits.

Then again Aros keeps getting better and better, but has none of my old software.

Keep in touch and if I get something usable I'll hook you up if you are interested.

[fishy_fiz]

The thing with the custom chipset emulation though isnt so much the resources that are needed to emulate them, but with the fact that keeping timing in synch is necessary, and that's a big part of where the resources are "wasted". Additionally custom chipset emulation also removes the possibility of having direct access to the the hardware, which is a big part of why amithlon is faster and "feels" better. UAE and its variants need to emulate things like memory and so on as well, amithlon is more "native" to the hardware it runs on. I actually have my old athlon 64 3400+ machine that I used to run amithlon on, which all works nicely, its just somewhat slower than the core2duo machine I now have set aside for amithlon. It's only really for more intensive emulators (euae, dosbox, pctask, fpse, etc.), higher than dvd resolution videos, and compile speeds that the extra speed comes in handy, but being that these are some of the uses I have, it's good to have. 68k EUAE for example struggles to play aga games at full framerate with sound using the athlon64, whereas the core2duo machine happily runs aga games full speed, even those typically requiring upgraded 68k machines to run well.
As for AROS, Im a big fan, and have done quite a bit of development for it (aros archives has lots of my AROS work for example), and I have a dedicated machine for it as well, but part of the fun with amithlon for me is making a nice os3.x system (lots of resources to spare, so can add lots of extras over a default os3.9 install), as well as, as you mention the fact there's a lot of 68k software that doesnt exist for AROS. There is janus uae, and the intergration works pretty nicely for the most part, but theyre different systems, and I like to have a dedicated machine per OS (apart from Windows/linux/etc., where Im content to use virtual machines).

[dr.zeissler]

Hi there, has anyone ever got a USB soundcard working in amithlon.
Some guys told me that it could perhaps be possible to get USB with poseidon and arakattack working in amithlon.
But the drivers must have "isochron transfer" support.

Doc

[Boing-ball]

Hi there, has anyone ever got a USB soundcard working in amithlon.
Some guys told me that it could perhaps be possible to get USB with poseidon and arakattack working in amithlon.
But the drivers must have "isochron transfer" support.

Doc

Does Poseidon work on Amithlon?  I know Arackattack is needed.