Back to amiga...

[ravnen]

Hi all.

Well. In 2000 a lot of things happend in my life.
Among other things, my thrustworthy A4k died (with smoke and everything).
It had been a wonderfull computer. Mounted in an aopen tower, with a 060@50Mhz accellerator with scsii, 96 megs of memory, picasso IV with soundcard, tvtunercard and networkcard addon, 40 gigs of harddrive space (scsii), internal zip drive and cdburner...

Well, that was it for me, I sold off the remains and started life as a Linux user on the x86 platform, and a year ago, when I wanted a laptop, I went Mac.

I was visiting my parents not long ago, and found a lot of old amiga disc (a lot of old games, and a few old amos games I've made, and never completed ofcourse), and even a pcmcia squirrel scsi card.
One thing led to another, and I ended up here, again.
And after browsing this site I found myself at amigakit.com and with a placed order for a a1200...

So I guess Im back in the game...

The only difference is that my "Amiga will never die, and will take over the marked" spirit is "non existing" now, but that does not prevent my for having a great time with old games, and the joy of seeing old hardware perform...

[ravnen]

Well, since I was used to the picasso IV card I guess going to AGA is a pain.

I remember a friend of mine had a ppc card with a gfx card as an addon. Not that it would fit in the original case?!

But is there any way to get a gfx upgrade without an pci extention?
Or is this the only way to go?

[ravnen]

As I imagined.


How about ppc cpu expantion? Is there some way to add this nowdays, thru the pci ?

[ravnen]

Whats the fun with emulation?

Getting old hardware do things it's creators never chould imagine is what I like

[ravnen]

well, since i have a macbook for serious (and dull?) computer stuff, this is just for the fun of it.

[ravnen]

Hmm,
ASB Computer (in spain) seems to have blizzard ppc cards avaiable.

How is the support for ppc nowdays? I remember back in 2000 that the only thing using the ppc was quake

If os4.0 ever comes to a release this will only work with ppc, right?


And I have to agree with what someone said in another "back to amiga" thread.
Back in the good amiga days I had no money to buy hardware with, but now when I have the money, I lack the time to use it

*edit*
seemed like they had it in stock, until I tried to add it to my shopping cart.

Never mind

[ravnen]

I guess people play around with amigas for different reasons.

As mentioned before, for me the fun is the hardware. My macbook with osx is a nice computer, with all the power of unix. All the good old games can be played thru uae, or simpler with scummvm and other engines.

But thats not why I started beeing interested in amiga again,

[ravnen]

Got my a1200 from amigakit yesterday. It took 1 month to get here, but it was NOT amigakits fault. The customs was just a pain.

Anyway.
I am waiting to get my hands on a blizzard card, so until then I am stuck with the original 2 Mb of ram.
Os3.9 + internet was almost impossible to get up and running with that amount of memory, but textmode works.
Had to pull down the pcmcia 3com driver from aminet, drive off to work to find a pc with a floppydrive, transfer the driver (and a executable lha), drive on home again. And wuhu, I was online. Incredible!
Got irc working by telneting my server and running irssi on it Tried {bleep}X localy, but it was nagging me about not enought memory (as everything else).
Lynx worked fine too, in the sshell that was included with {bleep}x.
Also got my hands on a few libs i needed thru ftp to aminet (ncftp).
Looks like I remember a bit about amiga, even if it has been 7 years since I last touched one.

Great fun.

And I even have a Pegasos on it's way. But that has to do with my work (we want to use the efika in some instalations, and then I convinced my boss that I needed a pegasos to play around with )

[ravnen]

Hehe, well I blame the word censoring thingy, but you never know

[ravnen]

Well, one amiga... two amigas....

I just recieved a "new" amiga today.

- A4000D ec030
- Picasso IV (you just have to love that card)
- Cyberstorm 060 + cyberscsi
- 50'ich mb ram
- and a lot of original software and games.

I have a os3.9 cd lying around (and an xsurf), I just have to get my hands on 3.1 roms first, since the miggy only has 3.0 (I guss that it's not possible to use the a1200 roms?)

[ravnen]

So I managed to get the system up and running yesterday (did I mention that the first thing I did when I got it was to open it up and removing the battery? It was a real mess. I cleaned the motherboard a bit to. A new ni-mh is waiting for me at the post office. Right now it is without a battery, and looks happy with that.).

The accelleratorboard had ofcourse come loose on the long trip, and it looks like the connector has taken a beating. But reseating the card twice did the trick.
I installed wb3.0 (in the lack of 3.1 roms), and after a lot of trying (and a lot of failing) I got the scsi cdrom up and running, and the picasso.

Oh joy.
But a friend of mine told me that by installing blizkick and loading a 3.1 rom file, I woulde be able to install OS3.9.  
It looked promising, the picasso installer allowed me to install it (while it use to quit saying that I need 3.1 roms).
When I click the os3.9 installer icon it loads up the funky background, and the installer box appears at the bottom right. Ajiff starts loading top left, but when that is done the box where the welcome image is supposed to go is blank and the system crashes giving me a guru.

Guru also appears if I try to boot of the emergency disk or os 3.1 install disk.

So I guess blizkick is not a good option after all, and that I need to order some real roms today?

If someone has a pair of spares they would like to sell, please send me a message. If not I'll order from amigakit.

Will the os3.9 emergency disk be able to use my scsi cdrom (cybscsi.device) automagical? Or do I first need to install os 3.1 and fix this myself first?

[ravnen]

is the cybscsi.device in the scsi's rom?
So thats why I was unable to find the file in devs when I looked for it

[ravnen]

WUHU!!!!

I am typing this on my a4k, I got it online!!!

Did a fresh install of os 3.0 (I am waiting for 3.1 roms from amigakit), got the picasso driver up and running (after using blizkick), got the scsi cdrom up and the xsurf card.

The only problem I have no is the scsi harddrive, but thats just a mather of finding the jumper settings for it... I have two other scsi drives (80 gb), but they are widescsi, so I must get my hands on an adapter. But thats in the future...

Now I`ll jump into aminet and fetch all the tings I need.

Any tips on how to freshen up wb 3.0 is appriciated.

[ravnen]

Thanks for the help.

It is coming along nicely.

I have installed visualprefs and played around with the settings, also got newicons in. and png datatype for a nice background.

But how about all thouse non-newicon icons, is there a way to get them to be in displayed without weird colors. Or do I need to replace the icons for them with new one?

I got Yam and ibrowser running, but amirc is complaining about missing tcpip stack.
I had this problem on my a1200 too, but a reinstall of amirc did the trick. But not here. Any ideas? I am using Easynet from amikit (amitcp based). And is there a way to get easynet online without using the gui? I want to place it in the user-startup, since it is always connected.


Also, can anyone give me a name for a nice osx`ish dock thingy?

[ravnen]

Hmm, you know what? BlizKick did do the trick!

I am now running os 3.9 on 3.0 roms.
Works very well. I had to do something, my 40 Gig drive was unavaiable in wb 3.0.

But I have some icon trouble.

The glowicons looks terrible. The colors are all wrong.
the Newicons looks good, and now the magicwb icons looks good to.

Any ideas? I am running 1024x768 16M colors.

And what "hack/patch" can I use to change the menubar?