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The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Amiga Emulation => Topic started by: lelezetec on September 27, 2009, 10:25:17 AM

Title: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: lelezetec on September 27, 2009, 10:25:17 AM
Hello my friends!

I made that small guide for all Amiga users around the world.

Enjoy!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XSUD2RLE
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: Atariflops on September 27, 2009, 12:43:44 PM
Great stuff! Will try this on a spare slimline PC when I get the time! Thanks!
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: amigadave on September 27, 2009, 02:26:29 PM
That is a poor site to upload your file to.  Who wants to waste their time waiting for the file to be able to download it and look at all that advertising.  Couldn't you just upload it to a real Amiga website instead?

Edit:  That is a really excellent guide!  Thanks for taking the time to write it all out so that anyone can follow the simple instructions.  I will have to give it a try on one of my PC's and get back to you on how well it worked out.  I think I will use a separate hard drive just for the Amiga installation w/ minimum WinXP Pro underneath of it, and then just use the BIOS to choose which hard drive to boot from.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: Pyromania on September 27, 2009, 04:52:48 PM
We are willing to host it for free with no Ads. Download would be fast from our site too.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: haywirepc on September 29, 2009, 01:49:25 AM
This is a great guide, and I will be using this for an emulated pc project.
 
See my other thread, I all but gave up on the kxlight installation of amiga forever, which is a shame because it seemed to work nicely. I just didn't want to be stuck at 800x600.
 
I tried a faster pc, an amd1400mhz with 512megs ram, with windows xp installed as the host. Video works up to 1600x1200, but the video updating seems slow. This may be because I'm using the built in video
card. I will be purchasing an accellerated pci video card and hopefully,
the speed of the system will be much improved.
 
How did you get the commodore symbol and the amiga logo on that case?

Steven
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: Firedawg on September 29, 2009, 03:00:43 AM
Quote from: lelezetec;524068
Hello my friends!

I made that small guide for all Amiga users around the world.

Enjoy!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XSUD2RLE


Thanks Lelezetec, the download was painless and the guide was an excellent read.  I will muster up some old hardware and put this guide to the test.

Thanks,
The Dawg
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: lelezetec on September 29, 2009, 10:11:43 AM
First of: thank you guy for your support!

Second, I saw that on some machines my procedure to eliminate windows combos ALT-TAB, CTRL-ALT-DEL and F12, won't work so i suggest you to use a little software freeware called mapkeyboard to eliminate the ALT and ALTGR keys and the F12 key. So since I can't remember the last time I used ALT on Amiga I think is not a great loss. In that way you can ssing the ALT function to F11 and F12 so if you mnemonically hit ALT, nothing will happen :)

@ Steven: to make the C= on my Amiga 2400 I used the stiencil technique by first painting the part in blue, then I applied the C and the upper part of "=" and painted it in red. Once everything was dry I applied the lower part of the "=" and then painted in white. Once the white paint dried I removed the C= and this is the result. :)
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: gertsy on September 29, 2009, 01:44:31 PM
Sforzo superbo. Well done!  Your Amiga XP PC looks fantastic too. The Chicken lives...!
Gertsy.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: haywirepc on September 29, 2009, 01:52:40 PM
You don't happen to have a .jpg file or something for the stencil?
I was hoping you made the template on a pc.

I guess I could make my own, but figured I'd ask. I really like that, and can put it on each side of the case, since its tower case. Can you tell more details about your system, like the video card your using?

How well does it play most software? Games?

I played with this amd1400 and the setup you described, though I didn't get rid of the windows shell just yet. The video seems to be very slow updating, like if you open the system folder, takes what seems like too long (compared to my main windows pc)
 
My main windows pc has a good accelerated video card with gpu and winuae/os3.9 runs just great on that.
 
I'm wondering, is that what I need for this amiga x86 machine so
it has faster video? Any opinions on this guys, would be greatly appreciated.
 
I also considered that an amd1400 may just not have enough horsepower.
 
I tried loading wbasteroids and its so slow, its unplayable really, that pretty much tells me most things I'd like to use would run like crap.
I'm really hoping its just the video card.
 
Any ideas how to improve the speed of this? I'm very excited by this dedicated emulation pc, and I'd even buy myself a catweasel pci if I could get the rest of it working.
 
Ahhh, dumping all the old amiga floppies I have to hard drive would be great! It would be even greater if I could use some of that stuff again.
 
I wanted to buy a pimped out a1200 tower system, but I just can't afford
paying that much, this would be great if I could get it going.
 
Thanks for your guide, I'm halfway there now, I really hope I can get this
working.

Steven
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: lelezetec on September 29, 2009, 10:36:41 PM
Hello everyone again. Let's talk about my Amiga 2400 configuration.
This summer I decided to get the rid of my Athlon 64 x2 4200+ and give it to my father since I didn't use my computer to play anymore. So I made a small computer by myself using an Intel Little Falls 2 motherboard with everything embedded, 160Gb SATA 2.5" 5400rpm Hard Disk and a Wireless Netgear USB Board. I used that computer just to run MSN Messenger and browsing some sites since when I want to play I use my Xbox360. But I felt alone again because I missed my good old 2D/3D software. Imagine, Lightwave, Image FX, Scala MM 400... all things that made my Amiga 1200 great. I missed them so much so, since I work as Microsoft System Administrator and I understand very little about Linux, I tried to make my own version of AmigaOS on x86 by ripping off Windows.
I tried with virtual machines and when it was ready, I erased my windows installation in place of the ripped off version for AmigaOS.
Then I must say that I'm pretty satisfied. For a short period of time I owned an Amiga 4000/040 with Powerchanger and 68040 28MHz, Retina 24, Flicker fixer et all but man...my Amiga 2400 is a totally different thing! It's fast, it can run all the softwares I used to run at a totally different level. I can send by mail to the one that are interested my benchmarks with AIBB so you can see how fast it is! Right about now, I had no problems in running games or applications and I even made heavy rendering with Imagine v5. No problems at all. The Workbench is running on 1680 x 1050 and I still have plenty of RAM (512Mb) to run lot of applications at the same time.
The only bad side? Hard Disk speed during booting. Maybe it's because it's a 5400rpm hard disk but it took about 40 seconds from turning on the machine to having an usable Workbench, I will put the video on youtube as soon as possible. However I tried the same configuration over a more powerfull machine (Pentium D 3.0GHz) and it's definitely a warhead!
Maybe in the future I will upgrade to another, faster computer and I will of course, mod the case as well making, I don't know, the Amiga 4500... but right now, until NatAMI will be available for the masses I will continue using my Amiga 2400.
After 13 years without Amiga (I left it in May 1996) now I feel alive again.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: haywirepc on September 30, 2009, 02:41:15 AM
You are not using an accellerated graphics card with gpu? I hoped that was all I needed, but I suppose not.

Man, must be that this athon 1400 is a celleron equivelant or something...
I gotta try this install on a 2ghz or faster real intel cpu, and see what happens. Very frustrating!

Steven
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: cicero790 on September 30, 2009, 08:18:39 AM
Great work thank you. Very nice customization too. I wonder how much a totally non working 2000 or 4000 would go for? Just to buy it for the casing.

Does anyone know if this guide will be valid on reactOS ? Could a special WinUae distro be made for just this purpose, with reactOS being open source and all. In theory?
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: ognix on September 30, 2009, 10:03:52 AM
Thanks a lot for the hints and the nice guide.
Davvero un buon lavoro! :)
Italians are not so far behind! :D
Ciao!
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: lelezetec on September 30, 2009, 12:46:28 PM
@haywirepc: No I use the all embedded board. Maybe it's because the board you're using is aged and don't have some performance upgrade like mine one. However if you want to give it a try, the Intel Little Falls 2 is worth about $90. So you may think about it. There are new Mini-ITX boards that can be equipped with Core Duo processors. This will give a real big boost to the Amiga XP performances!

@Cicero: On the Amiga 2000 is possible and very easy to do. On the 4000 you have to use a mini-itx board like mine one but it's pretty more complicated.

@Ognix: Thanks my friend :)

Well guys what can I say to all of you? Thank you very much! I feel part of the community now.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: haywirepc on October 05, 2009, 07:22:04 AM
Just a quick note to say that my AMD1400 is running great after installing an agp accellerated graphics card. Its only a 32meg card but it made a HUGE difference.
 
I guess having the GPU is what matters alot. WBasteroids and everything else I tried ran great. So in building your emulation machine, the lesson is that you should care just as much about an accellerated video card as you do about the cpu.
 
Before the new video card, the machine seemed to crawl when loading any games.
Now it flies, so what do you know, 1400mhz is plenty fast as an emulated amiga.
 
Steven
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: lelezetec on October 05, 2009, 01:30:51 PM
Quote from: haywirepc;524745
Just a quick note to say that my AMD1400 is running great after installing an agp accellerated graphics card. Its only a 32meg card but it made a HUGE difference.
 
I guess having the GPU is what matters alot. WBasteroids and everything else I tried ran great. So in building your emulation machine, the lesson is that you should care just as much about an accellerated video card as you do about the cpu.
 
Before the new video card, the machine seemed to crawl when loading any games.
Now it flies, so what do you know, 1400mhz is plenty fast as an emulated amiga.
 
Steven


Good to hear that! Now build your own Amiga case :)
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: Hell Labs on October 05, 2009, 05:21:32 PM
Isn't this just AmigaOS XL homebrew?

 You know, I never understood why that never became the accepted solution. I mean, if the emulator ran on extremely stripped down linux, used a separate Hard Disk or partition for the amigaOS, and could use something like a catweasel to read floppy disks as if they are natively supported, what would the difference be? It's not impossible to make. Just needs someone who can program who wants to do it.

More specifics:

Multithreaded emulator. Each chip, graphics, sound, 68kcpu can be it's own thread. that way, each real cpu core emulates a different chip. Very good performance boost. some kind of passthrough to the real graphics card?

Almost unchanging amiga hardware. The emulator can do, say, an a1200 060 with P96. Perhaps, the emulator will do generic 3d cards, maybe 1 new design per year. This would make it easier for the actual amigaOS developers, as they would not have to learn about new hardware standards much.

Movable amiga environment? Could the amigaOS install be moved to another computer with the emulatorOS installed without problems? Probably. This would be a great help with buying new hardware and moving files.

I really don't see why not. Linux could deal with hardware drivers and rubbish, amiga still thinks it's an 1200 with a really high clock speed. Could be ported to new hardware with almost no effort. The only peice of needed hardware could be a catweasel, and that could be included with the software?
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: danwood on May 13, 2010, 07:54:08 PM
Anyone got a copy of this ?  The megashare link won't work for me, been saying
"We have detected an elevated number of requests from your IP address." for the last week.

Can someone upload it somewhere else?  Just got a mini Acer atom PC, would be cool to turn it into a nice classic os 3 machine.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: Zac67 on May 13, 2010, 08:30:36 PM
I've mirrored the file on
http://wowohl.de/Amiga_XP_x86.pdf (http://wowohl.de/Amiga_XP_x86.pdf)

Have fun!
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: danwood on May 13, 2010, 09:51:18 PM
Quote from: Zac67;558324
I've mirrored the file on
http://wowohl.de/Amiga_XP_x86.pdf (http://wowohl.de/Amiga_XP_x86.pdf)

Have fun!


Thanks :D
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: trekiej on May 13, 2010, 11:16:42 PM
Very nice indeed.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: hardlink on May 13, 2010, 11:38:00 PM
Nice!

What about using a windblows 98 core for this?
Is it possible, and would it be any smaller or faster?
Serious question, really.
Title: Re: The Amiga XP x86 guide
Post by: Duce on March 25, 2011, 05:05:53 AM
Bumping an extremely old thread, but just setup another old AMD X2/nVidia 7800 gfx card PC according to this guide (WB 3.1, fairly stock).  Highly recommended for anyone that wants a seamless emulated Amiga experience.  As for the Win 98 question, might be doable with an older version of WinUAE.  Newer versions don't support anything older than WinXP, which I found out with the aforementioned above AMD PC when I tried to use Windows 2000.  The AMD X2 system is running just super following this Amiga XP x86 .pdf guide under Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition (nLite stripped install, services disabled).