AmigaOS 4.1 Classic Available To Buy

[JurassicCamper]

@Nearly-Right

For whats its worth I personally felt OS4.0 for classic should have had some more updates. Some beta testers were running hybrid 4.0 / 4.1 beta installs.

So in June 2009 I decided I would volenteer to update the distribution. This was before update one was released for the AmigaOne, SAM and PEG2. The very first ISO was created by myself in ~June 2009 and was a 4.0 hybrid with a few items taken from the AmigaOne 4.1 CD as a proof of concept nothing more.

In theory OS4.1 classic could have been released with an update1 baseline at roughly the same time as the other platforms, but it just wasn't mature enough and hadn't had enough of a testing cycle.

After ~2 years of working on this in our spare time and bugging developers to the point that they have probably taken us of their christmas card list it got to the point where it could be released with an update 2 baseline and utilitise the current driver base bar a few exceptions namely the drivers which use DMA.

Its not been abbandoned. The distribution iso is activly maintained now by myself, and is on par with the other platforms.
We ares still working hard raising bugs accross all the platforms and bugging the developers (excuse the pun). The classic will benefit from the developments being made to the A1, SAM, PEG2 and potentially future platforms.

Dont ask me about time scales / release dates thats for management to decided and comment on but update 3 will be on the classic.

If you have any A1200 specific questions about OS4.1 Classic, I'll do my best to answer them.

[JurassicCamper]

Thanks for that, nice to hear it as a developer's opinion, and I'm sure a lot of other people who bought Classic OS4.0 think the same, and maybe that's the main reason many owners of PPC boards are reluctant to purchase Classic OS4.1, as that is certainly one of mine. The upgrade option should be pursued, and Hyperion should relent on that front, as it is only fair. I wouldn't mind paying 50-60% of the current asking price, but full price is a bit extreme, IMHO.

Firstly I'm not one of the developers but just one of the OS4 Beta testers like Darren and Karlos, since around late 2003.
As for an upgrade option thats down to Hyperion and Amigakit. Your question would be best put to Amigakit.

That is very reassuring, but is it likely that more hardware is going to be supported directly in the Mediator?

There are lots of things as an Amiga user I'd like to see supported in the Mediator.
But thats down to the development team.
I would suggest emailing Elbox to see if are willing to update some of their drivers. The AmigaOS4.1 SDK is also available for free download.

Particularly the USB side of things, as that is a major drawback if you don't have a Subway in an A1200, or another type of USB card in any of the big-box Amigas, as there is no USB2 possible for the Classic A1200 without owning the Spider card at this time, and the other main OS's have USB3 at the very least thesedays.

At this time on the A1200 USB is limited to:-

Desktop PPC A1200 (No Expansion Bus) - Subway on Clockport / Poseidon 4.4
Tower PPC A1200 (No Expansion Bus) - Subway on Clockport / Poseidon 4.4
Tower PPC A1200 Mediator - Subway on Clockport / Poseidon 4.4
Tower PPC A1200 Zorro2 - Subway on Clockport or XSURF-3CC Clockport / Poseidon 4.4
Tower PPC A1200 Zorro2 - Deneb in Zorro2 slot / Poseidon 4.4

A native Deneb driver was mentioned in the press release but this would only be benifical to PPC Amigas with Zorro slots.

Is there no-one who can/will write the USB sub-system that will allow the Sirion stack to utilise a generic/specific chipset from a readily available PCI USB card in the computing marketplace to function for Classic OS4.1?

It would require implementing Elbox's DMA Hack into the kernel as PCI EHCI cards require DMA and don't work in PIO mode AFAIK

Again, that's good news, but do you have the A1200 BPPC running OS4.1?

Yes in various config I also move my ppc to the Z2 machine when needed. See Sig :-)

Have you done a clean install of it yourself onto a HDD

Hundreds and Hundreds. I had the job of creating the installer and putting the iso together.
It was made on an A1200, no PC's were harmed during the creation of this product ;-)

to give some information as to the ease of the install, problems to watch out for, any hardware from the 68k/OS3.x side of things that will affect the functionality of it, or just lock-up the hardware, and won't work until it's removed, such as the Subway driver has to use the Sirion driver I believe, but any other hardware that causes known conflicts?

The install is a breeze.

Firstly the bootfloppy load residents a new 68K scsi.device and then mounts CDfilesystem and then boots the OS4.1 kickstart modules off the CD.
The Amiga then soft reset and is running on the PPC as with OS4.0.

If you have replaced your floppy drive with a HxC2000 floppy emulator don't worry because there is an adf of the boot floppy on the CD to use with those SDCard based emulators.

If you have removed your floppy you can boot into 3.x and start the install from there.

A lot of work has gone into the installer as it support AGA, Zorro and PCI solutions.

If your running on a mediator with a pci voodoo / Radeon the installer will open on 1024x768.

Zorro2 installer opens on a 800x600 screen for legacy z2 cards.

AGA opens on a PAL or NTSC screen depending on your base 1200.

BVision / Cvision is a special case too.
CVision / Bvision in PPC cards flashed with the GREX firmware are not autodetectable so the installer will use its fall back AGA mode.
 
Obviously AGA installer is used if there is no graphics card.

AGA also has a special theme akin to 3.1 look which vastly frees up chip RAM. This can be used on 2MB Zorro cards as well to free up some of their video RAM and is simply accessed by clicking on a icon in the amidock. You can then save this setting as default if you wish.

Anyway back to the Installer

Your a presented with a menu system that allows you to select your locale, prep your HD, install the OS or boot to WB using the CD as a LIVECD.

Once installed reboot and remove the CD and your presented with the post install that sets up some softlinks and creates the font cache for applications like timberwolf.
Also you can then change your screenmode, locale, ahi prefs etc before exiting into WB for the first time.

As for removing hardware. You can keep the subway in you don't need to disable anything as only the highway is supported by sirion on classics.
You can keep your squirelscsi in that doesn't interfere with the install.
You can keep your IDEFix-Express in that doesn't interfere either.
MK3 powerflyer is supported by a new driver supplied by Elbox
As for Z2 I have a Multiface3, DENEB, XSURF3CC, CV643D squirrel scsi and none of that  needs to be removed on that for the install.

Weve put together a large FAQ that covers all the things that came up during testing its included with CD. There is also a 28 Page Manual covering the install procedure and the FAQ is 16 Pages.
A lot of which is on the hyperion blog at hyperion-etertainment.biz

What 68k OS3.x programs are you aware of that will definitely run on Classic OS4.1?

The ones I still use off the top of my head:-

FinalWriter 5 / 97
MakeCD 3.2
TVPaint
PPaint 8
Photogenics 4.4
IBrowse 2.4
Term 4.8
Ftpd
TurboCalc
CodeAudio


But have migrated to OS4.X equivalents for most other things like pic viewers, mp3 players

Will there be Mediator PCI SCSI support under Classic OS4.1, as I use my SCSI scanner a lot, and I don't want to be having a dual boot system, with all the problems that it may cause.

Dual boot is easy you just need two partitions under the first 4GB on your harddrive
For example DH0 and DH1

OS 4.1 on DH0 and OS3.X on DH1, make them both bootable one with a higher boot priority than the other. Your Amiga will boot from the partition with the highest boot priority. Just swap the priorities around in hdtoolbox or mediatoolbox and save then reboot.
Just make sure that the 68K l:fastfilesystem and l:smartfilesystem are in the RDB on your HD. The ones from l: not the ppc ones from kickstart

I am told the Squirrel SCSI can be used with Classic OS4.1, and as the Blizzard SCSI is not
available under Classic OS4.1 this is a real drawback for me. Any hope you can give, such as any contact you have had, or contact you might consider to get Darren Stevens persuaded/helped to get his Mediator SCSI driver adapted to Classic OS4.1 would be a start? It's not a bootable SCSI system as yet, well not under OS3.x it isn't.

I have mounted a CDROM with the squirrel, but have not SCSI HD to test a HD.
I have also added the device to the kicklayout as a default kickstartmodule and the system booted ok.
With regards to the BlizzPPC.device I read that Karlos might pick this up after he's finished updating warp3D.

As for the SCSI in the mediator Amiga OS4.1 has an LSI scsi driver already but again it would require implementing Elbox's DMA hack as its DMA based.

Thanks for your reply, it's been better to understand some of the background to why Classic OS4.1 has seen the light of day, and I for one am PROUD of you for going to all the trouble for all of the remaining Amiga devotees.

No Problem. Its a team effort.

I have been thought of, in this thread, as being one of those people who is just slamming the development for the sake of it, but I am not. I want Classic OS4.1 to be viable for me, and for others. I know it's been done basically on a shoestring but please support the more serious side of Amiga computing, and not just the gaming side of things. I saw the Quake demo, but I'd much rather see the PageStream, ImageFX, and Scanquix side of things than games, but maybe that's just me.

[/Quote]

I'll get back to you on Pagestream I have V3 and V2 ImageFX. I'll also try my Epson SCSI scanner with the squirrel scsi and report back. Give me a few day. V busy at the mo.

Few 68K apps shown running here:-

http://www.amibay.com/showpost.php?p=171132&postcount=149

[JurassicCamper]

@Nearly-Right

OK small update based on some quick tests for you

I can scan on my EPSON GT7000 scsi scanner using a Hisoft PCMCIA squirrel.

Betascan

You need to add squirrelscsi.device, betascan and the epson scanner driver to JIT Blacklist in compatibility prefs. The Betascan espon scanner driver will DSI on first use, as its buggy, but you can choose to ignore the DSI error in Grim Reaper and you can start scanning.

Scanquix

The config Scanner application crashes under OS4.1 but the scanner program works as long as you add GTLayout libs to the blacklist in compatability prefs.
I Imagine if you can set it up under 3.x there is no need to run the config utility under 4.1 as the config file will be valid.

FXScan (68K/WarpOS)

Works but you get the DSI if you choose the use the Betascan drivers. Again Ignore the DSI and away you go.
I managed to make a photocopy to a HP LaserJet 1100

ImageFX2

Sucessfully opened on a AGA screen I swapped it ro CV643D 1024x768 screen and then quit OK

[JurassicCamper]

One thing I am a little annoyed about with Classic OS4.1 is that there does not appear to have been any work done to support more modern printers under the OS, which really is a poor situation. Will Turboprint (any version) work under OS4.1?

Turbo Print 7 works here. You will have to copy over your 3.x installation and duplicate the turboprint: assign. The 1st floppy disk has a version of unlzx that crashes.

I was looking on EAB and saw one new user for Classic OS4.1 have trouble starting his system with the Fast ATA card installed, and had to go to the trouble of fitting a 4xIDE interface to get his PPC system to boot-up. Is that situation a regular problem?

It depends on the FAST ATA Cards in use. My understanding is The MK1 FAST ATA is supported directly by scsi.device.
SCSI.Device is still 68K and needs to be to allow the CD to be booted from 3.x
Myself I don't have a Elbox IDE addaptor.
I have a DCE 4 Way Buffered IDE splitter and an IDEFIX Express, both work fine.
To be fair I only uses the native IDE now to boot the kickstart files off a CF card and my sys: partition, dvd +/-rw and other drives are all sata.
There is a article coming soon on how to go just SATA and use the onboard IDE for booting the kickstart only.

I have a Fast ATA Mk3 in my machine, and the release info states that it runs as a native Classic OS4.1 driver, so why isn't it working in that person's machine, which it seems to work for them under OS3.9?

It indeed does have a new driver and prefs program provided by Elbox.
Could be that its not a MK3.
Darren is updating his hd-zone soon with some more info about IDE controllers.