Amiga Forever 2016 with PPC support!

[Aegis]

From Cloanto:

If a single, gorgeous image could tell the story of almost two years of work made possible with your past support, it might be here:

http://www.amigaforever.com/screenshots/

The new 2016 Amiga Forever and C64 Forever versions, which have been released in the past few hours, at last merge more than 35 years of Commodore/Amiga computing history into a single player experience, inclusive of stunning high-DPI (4K, "retina", etc.) display support.

And yes, that includes a PowerPC Amiga (with 1+ GB of RAM, preconfigured PCI bridge, Picasso IV, Ethernet and more).

Installing your favorite PPC OS from CD or ISO image (not included) takes only a few mouse clicks.

Instructions for upgraders are here: http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/15-121

And a more detailed list of new features: http://www.amigaforever.com/whatsnew/

You can now also participate in beta updates by enabling the option in the About dialog. Or send feedback directly from the Help menu. We love to hear from you!

Thank you again for your generous support, and feel free to post, tweet or otherwise promote our effort, or let me know directly what we can do to better meet your needs.

Regards,

Mike and Your Amiga & C64 Forever Team

http://www.amigaforever.com
http://www.c64forever.com

[Aegis]

I'm really thrilled to see Michael continuing to update Amiga Forever (and of course incredibly grateful for Toni's continuing work on UAE) - I asked Michael a while back (when PPC support was in beta for UAE) if he'd make a version of AF that supported AmigaOS 4.1 and it's great to see it finally come to fruition

As kreciu mentions, some of us (myself included) simply can't justify the investment required for a hardware PPC system and and least now we have an officially supported software alternative so we can join in the fun - it's great for OS4 developers and publishers like Amigakit too.

[Aegis]

Cool! Now a cvppc emulation and done we are! Btw its catapultem habeo not habea

Haha! Thanks Midway! Corrected

[Aegis]

Hmm... I've noticed quite a speedup if you take the time to set up an SFS file system (rather than FFS as suggested by Cloanto) - nifty!

BTW, Gryfon - here's how you do it:

1) Start with Cloanto's 'Amiga 4000 PPC' template.

2) Create an appropriate size external .hdf

3) Boot with the AOS4.1 .iso

4) Start the Media/Hard Disk Toolbox in 'Expert' mode.

5) Pick your .hdf and click 'Edit RDB/Reinstall'.

6) Select 'Install/read configuration' at the top.

7) Click on 'OK/Accept Changes' - you don't need to change anything

Go into 'Edit Partitions'

9) Click 'Add/edit filesystems' then 'Add new FS'

10) Select 'smartfilesystem' and change the 'DosType' to 53465300

11) Hit Ok then Ok again and create a partition if you need to (make sure it's bootable).

12) Click 'Select filesystem/edit details'

13) Chose 'SFS' and change the 'Blocksize' to 512

14) Hit OK then OK again then save your changes to disk.

15) You're done! You can get on to formatting/installing now

[Aegis]

Good stuff Gryfon - glad you got it working!

Two more tips for AF2016 users:

1) I couldn't get extended Zorro RAM (for swap) working with 1/1.5GB using WinUAE x64 (Workbench kept loading without Picasso screenmodes) so I tried 768MB - this is currently bugged in AF and doesn't work - 512MB will correctly show a Zorro RAM board (Michael's working on a fix).

2) AF doesn't seem to recognise additional SFS .hdf files properly so adding extra SFS drives is problematic (HD undo wasn't working for me) - it's better to create one big .hdf and partition it to your needs.

[Aegis]

Anyone else getting this with the latest version of AF2016 (2016.0.24.0)?



Clicking 'OK' boots the .HDF just fine..?

I'm happy to see the Z3 768MB bug's fixed in the latest version though

[Aegis]

Hmm... it looks like AF doesn't recognise .HDFs that've had the RDB re-written (i.e. SFS disks) as bootable - if you add an unaltered AF-created disk the message goes away:



Note that AF is showing my boot partition as non-bootable (even though it boots fine) weird.

[Aegis]

Well that puts the cat amongst the pigeons doesn't it?