The Ultimate Amithlon Hardware?

[XDelusion]

Since my Amigas all need work and I'm too broke to afford it all at the moment, I decided to give the latest WinUAE another go for all my OctaMED S.S./MIDI needs.
 Well as I expected UAE still sucks in that department. Sample is triggered in the sequencer, and a second later you hear it. NO GO.
 WinUAE is too slow for my needs anyhow, why settle with a 200 something MIP virtual Amiga when I could have a 1 plus Ghz Amithlon machine? So I quickly dug my candidate PC out of storage, dusted it off, and began to set up Amithlon straight from memory... which led me back to Charlie's Guide once I had everything installed and running. Vesa and No sounds just wasn't doing it for me.

https://app.box.com/shared/hisnu6o4lc

While I was reading Charlie's guide I decided to do a search for an ASUS motherboard that fits the specs that he mentions. My searches led me to the "ASUS A8N32"

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/ASUS-A8N32-SLI-Deluxe--nForce-4-SLI-X16-Unleashed/

 It would appear that this motherboard not only features the nForce4 chipset, but also uses the AC97 codec! Amithlon is supposed to support SATA now, but if not, turn it off in BIOS (maybe required) and run off IDE. The only downside is no AGP, but you can probably get by with a PCI card assuming the hardware will allow it.
 Mind you, I have not tested this mother board, can't afford to atm, but for someone who has spare cash laying around, or perhaps a spare ASUS A8N32, then here's your chance to dive in and maybe end up with one of the best Amithlon hardware set ups that you could ask for.

Another motherboard I noticed is the Gigabyte "GA-K8NS" which would appear to have everything, AGP too!

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2275

[XDelusion]

If you guys know of mother boards with better specs that you've tested with Amithlon, by all means feel free to list them, would be interested to have a list.

[XDelusion]

Thanks for the links in the PM, how cool is that?!

Maybe I'll grab one in a couple of weeks and give it a spin, I'd love to have a Amithlon Sun machine, and if Amithlon doesn't work, then a Sun Mint box.

I'm not sure if all the drivers would be available, but I know where there is a Sun nforce4 based PCI-E/PCI system for sale for under $50 with a 2.2 GHz Opteron processor and shipping is only about $20.

You would probably want to replace the video card and i don't think it has a hard drive (I can probably send you one of those (it uses SATA II drives).

Edit - Correction, there are two, one as stated above and a second for under $51 with free shipping.
They don't have memory or hard drives (but I have both).

Jim

On a side note, using a FreeDOS loaded USB stick to boot from really comes in handy when you are not dual booting with Windows! I've been wrestling, trying to figure out how to mount my DOS partition inside of Amithlon, but now I don't have to and I can run OpenGEM too!

I think I might re-do my drive and make a 3rd partition to dedicate to DOS games since I've already got a Sound Blaster installed.

[XDelusion]

I'll admit, I'm not an Amithlon expert and I've never tinkered with "Setconfig dosmount """, Ramithlon, or DMA settings. Can you guys elaborate some more?

Thanks!


Fish, yes UAE is useless for things such as OctaMED, so overkill is now the name of the game, though I'm sure I'll find plenty more to do with my  box, especially if I get Nova's ZDOOM port working in it...

I'm not sure anyone understands what ZDOOM is, no one's talking about it here, strange.