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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: DrDekker on April 27, 2006, 10:20:58 PM
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I'm interested in upgrading my A1200 to 3.1 ROMs and OS3.5 or 3.9, and was wondering if anyone could enlighten me as to what the main advantages are over 3.0 ROMs and WB 3.0?
Also, what hardware spec will be required to run such an upgrade? At the moment my A1200 has an M-Tech 1230 accelerator (at 28MHz), with 8Mb RAM and SCSI interface. Would this be sufficient?
Many thanks in advance.
Dekker
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What I can tell you is that its definatly worth while to upgrade to 3.1 roms.
First of all its not nearly as slow as 3.0 was and has a better interface. Coupled with OS3.9 you will love the "new" look that it gives you. OS3.5 is not worth it unless you can find it cheep. I'm using it and it works fine for me but if you dont have it already go for the 3.9. It will also suport your accelerator better then what you are using now and alow you to use larger hard drives (over 4 gig)
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@tonyvdb
What I can tell you is that its definatly worth while to upgrade to 3.1 roms. First of all its not nearly as slow as 3.0 was and has a better interface.
Say what?
Could you detail what is faster in 3.1 compared to 3.0, and what interface changes it has?
alow you to use larger hard drives (over 4 gig)
This is well possible with AmigaOS 3.0 (idefix, scsi.device 43.x, p5/dce accelerator with scsi...).
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Its been awhile but when I upgraded to 3.1 from 3.0 I noticed faster boot times and the Boot menu was better layed out with more options.
As far as looks the windows had nicer looking drag bars and the colour options were nicer. Plus if I remeber right they fixed som bugs that were in 3.0.
OS3.9 dose away with all the patchwork needed for using larger drives atached to the amigas drive inerface (not accelerator)
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Its been awhile but when I upgraded to 3.1 from 3.0 I noticed faster boot times
Actually KS 3.1 has longer boot delay when scanning for IDE devices. Other than that it's exactly as fast as 3.0. Couple of gfx operations are faster in 3.1, though, but only marginally, and only for apps using the OS anyway.
and the Boot menu was better layed out with more options.
That's quite funny, considering the boot menus are identical.
As far as looks the windows had nicer looking drag bars
The drag bars are identical.
and the colour options were nicer.
There are some changes in wb pattern prefs iirc, but that's just software. They work the same on KS 3.0 and KS 3.1.
IMHO the only real reason to get 3.1 over 3.0 is to be able to use WB 3.9, and even that is just artificial limit. WB 3.5/3.9 could have easily allowed booting from KS 3.0 (with expense of using more system memory than booting from 3.1).
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Well, I recall that the 'Execute Command' and 'Icon Information' user interfaces are font sensitive under KS3.1, whereas they will use the default Topaz/8 under KS3.0.
However, as far as actual interface rendering/drawing speed is concerned, I believe they are identical.
Cheers,
James
x
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@jmbattle
Well, I recall that the 'Execute Command' and 'Icon Information' user interfaces are font sensitive under KS3.1, whereas they will use the default Topaz/8 under KS3.0.
Not quite, this is Workbench 3.1 vs Workbench 3.0. They're font sensitive with KS 3.0 and WB 3.1 aswell.
[EDIT]
Update: I was wrong there, indeed this is font sensitive with KS 3.1 only.
[/EDIT]
Anyway, here are pretty informative pages of AmigaOS 3.0 and 3.1:
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.html
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31.html
Even the WB 3.1 review (http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31rev.txt) was made on system with KS 3.0... ;-)
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Thanks for the responses guys.
Does OS 3.5 also support >4Gb HD's or is it only OS 3.9?
Also, what is the largest size of partition that can be used?
At the minute I'm messing about with a 512Mb Kingston CF card to hold the OS as this is twice as big as the original HD. However, I've got a relatively new 2.5" Toshiba 60Gb HD that I'll use if I decide to upgrade. Any ideas how long it would take to format?
Cheers.
Dekker
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yes 3.5 support >4gb too.
@Piru: if you where happy with any workbench from 3.0 to 3.9 you probably didn't jump (finaly) to morphos, or not?
(it's not a question for fight, just curiosity)
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At the minute I'm messing about with a 512Mb Kingston CF card to hold the OS
The only drawback with using a CF card is that they are not as reliable as a good hard drive you may want to have a backup of it.
what is the largest size of partition that can be used?
Its not recomended to go above 2 gig per partition in OS3.5 or 3.9.
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Its not recomended to go above 2 gig per partition in OS3.5 or 3.9.
it's nor recomended a bootable partition more than 2gb. i have a 12gb partition and some 6gb on a 27gb hd and all working fine.(with sfs) :-)
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what is the largest size of partition that can be used?
Barring the filesystem limits, 2TB.
For pfs3 the limit is about 96GB, not sure about SFS or FFS 44.x/45.x.
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at the minute I'm messing about with a 512Mb Kingston CF card to hold the OS
I have bizzare problems when i used my CF card as my boot device, in particular with blizkick, when i swapped the CF card with my 10 gb hard drive i had no problems. It could indicate some incompatabilities with the amiga..
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Piru wrote:
Not quite, this is Workbench 3.1 vs Workbench 3.0. They're font sensitive with KS 3.0 and WB 3.1 aswell.
No, you're wrong about that one. I run WB 3.1 with 3.0 ROMs and "Execute Command" and "Icon Information" use Topaz. When I run WB 3.1 with 3.1 ROM, they use the System font.
Besides WB 3.9 (and programs written using the annoying Reaction GUI), there are only two programs I know of that have problems with the 3.0 ROM (vs. 3.1): The Matrix screensaver (the required WriteChunkyPixels is only in 3.1) and graphics corruption using the latest SystemPatch quicklayers.library. (so I just use the older quicklayers.library and run AFA-OS before running The Matrix)
I use scsi.device 43.35 to access partitions >4Gb with Workbench 3.1 and 3.0 ROMs. Also, there is a program to convert WB 3.9 colouricons for use in WB 3.1.
The only 3.9 advantage I can think of (Amigas without graphics cards) is the 3.9 BB2 HDtoolbox when installing new drives. This is the only version of HDtoolbox that actually reads the correct information from large harddrives.
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@amije
if you where happy with any workbench from 3.0 to 3.9 you probably didn't jump (finaly) to morphos, or not?
AmigaOS versions I've used:
AmigaOS 1.3 (KS 1.3, WB 1.3.3)
AmigaOS 2.1 (KS 2.04, WB 2.1)
AmigaOS 3.0 (KS 3.0, WB 3.0)
AmigaOS 3.1 (KS 3.1, WB 3.1)
AmigaOS 3.5 (KS 3.1, WB 3.5)
Out of these only AmigaOS 3.5 was bit of a disappointment (mainly because it didn't deliver what was promised, and because it was hideously buggy).
Regarding the MorphOS bit: I've been developing MorphOS since about end of 1999 (iirc, it's a bit hazy either end of 99 or early 2000). The transition to full MorphOS system was gradual, basically it started with combination of OS 3.5 and MorphOS on the BPPC. Eventually I used less and less AmigaOS components until finally there were none (this process was quite necessary as MorphOS lacked many components initially). The final switch to pure MorphOS only occured when I switched to peg1 development system.
Today I don't have any AmigaOS installation in use. I still have my AmigaOS 3.5 box somewhere stored though. ;-)
Anyway, my argument was that KS 3.0 and KS 3.1 aren't really that different, and that if you're not going to use WB 3.5/3.9 it doesn't really matter much whether you have KS 3.0 or KS 3.1.
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@Piru: you are right about 3.5, i was disappoint too about it, mainly because i had a very good 3.1 setup that i blow it out as a lot of stuff i was using, with 3.5 was obsolet, but the new (at the time) os didn't cover the functionality (at least for me) of the old similar stuff. some stuff fixed in 3.9 but not all...
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What's AFA do?
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may this help you: latest afa (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=46456)
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AFA-OS is Aros For Amiga. It is a back port of AROS (Amiga Research Operating System ...kind of makes the -OS redundant in "AFA-OS" ;-)) for 68K Amigas. I think it is meant for Amigas with graphics card because nothing really works on my A500 - except setting graphics.library as version 45, allowing me to run The Matrix (which looks for graphics.library 40+).
I think some people here use AFA-OS on their Amigas with graphics cards to get anti-aliased text.
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The big advantage that I remember for moving over to KS3.1 was that it was required for the spectrum analyiser on one of the WinAmp clones to work.
WooYAY! :afro:
I've just dropped back to KS3.1 and WB3.0, after using 3.9 for the nearly 5 years (I think it was 2001 when i got it). My old 3.0+goodies set-up was much nicer, especially when used on TV (like I have to now due to lack of space).
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I originally upgraded to 3.1 roms because Eyetech were doing a decent rom swap deal and they said 3.1 roms would be needed to fit the forthcoming AmigaOne card to my 1200. :( As you know, this sadly did not come to pass.
With 3.1 I found the booting a bit slower, and very occasionally it seemed to get a bit confused because of the delay and tried to boot from floppy - I think.
Anyway, later I decided as a serious Amiga fan I should get OS3.9, and although I had some difficulty getting it all up and running properly - my Blizzard 1260 has never co-operated with Blizkick - it now all works very nicely, and I can tell myself, that at least in classic Amiga terms, I am "current". :)
Probably my favourite thing is that it comes with its own professional TCP stack, Genesis, oh yes and big Hard drives work with no messing about.
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I've just dropped back to KS3.1 and WB3.0, after using 3.9 for the nearly 5 years (I think it was 2001 when i got it). My old 3.0+goodies set-up was much nicer, especially when used on TV (like I have to now due to lack of space).
Why WB 3.0? Why not 3.1?
I dropped back to WB3.1 after using WB3.9 for 2 months. I also had a much better setup than 3.9 and when I tried to reproduce my 3.1 setup in 3.9, I found that I couldn't.
The main problem was the stupid 3.9 picture.datatype. It always tries to remap and dither images that are already perfectly mapped - making image display 3X slower than the 3.1 picture.datatype and making all my WB images look like crap. There's no way to tell it "do not remap and dither images". I think the options are the lamely labelled "Best, Good, and Worst". (Worst still dithers and remaps!)
Maybe the 3.9 picture.datatype is great if you've got a graphics card, but if you've got an ECS Amiga, don't get WB3.9. Other ECS problems - no colourwheel for palette, annoying 256-step palette sliders - painful for ECS (what's 16x9 again?)...
Oh, and I think the 3.9 icon editor is total garbage. It is unbelievably badly made. It is extremely slow and jerky, painful to use, missing basic tools, remaps incorrectly and crashed on me many times. (the problem: is there another icon editor for colouricons?)
Now that I think of it (painful memories coming back), I think I was most digusted about what was NOT in 3.9. There were about 50 things that bothered me in 3.1 and I fixed them with excellent stuff from Aminet. When I got 3.9, I had expected that at least some of the major ones would be fixed. Instead, they just added some of the Aminet stuff I already had, other Aminet stuff that was worse than what I already had and left some of the major ones unfixed. Then they added more bugs and other things that needed fixing (by other programmers of Aminet stuff).
Well, I ended up stripping out the one or two useful things (like scsi.device 43.35) and using them in 3.1 and said "Hasta la vista" to 3.9. (...except when checking correct Cylinder counts on new harddrives ;-))
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mr_a500 wrote:
Why WB 3.0? Why not 3.1?
I only bought the 3.1 ROMs not the complete set, just so I could use OS3.9
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Since I almost never use my Amiga these days (I occasionally boot into it to use PPaint - but very rarely), I was thinking of 'downgrading' (to some: upgrading) from 3.5 to 3.1, since it takes so much longer to boot, and since I basically only use the one app, there seems to be no advantage to me using 3.5.
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Thanks again for all the responses folks - plenty of food for thought.
Would it be true to say that whilst there's a real advantage in upgrading the ROMs to 3.1, there's little advantage in upgrading the OS beyond 3.1?
Is OS3.9 still available?
When considering hardware/software support for printers, scanners, wireless devices, internet, etc., what version of OS will provide a good level of connectivity? (i.e. Epson R300 printer, Epson 1200 SCSI scanner, wireless mouse/keyboard/ADSL 'modem').
Cheers
Dekker
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you can find oe3.9 here: vesalia (http://www.vesalia.de/?V02b0f145051431a765d5d565209514e01101f0046414752050140090a1e31115579633a223c6373744e03263f2a2a76610539626a6325687c2e347d40190a63754c5a1f726a4b594d585358425d5c17444c6a505d16525) but in most cases 3.1 is enough.
@amigakit: i thought you had os3.9 once...