Hello from Chicago, IL (USA) / Hallo aus Chicago, IL (USA)

[codenetfx]

Hello everyone,

Two decades ago, I wrote a lot of 68K assembler, lots of Aztec-C and Lattice-C C-code, played a lot of great games and truly enjoyed the Amiga hardware platform. It was so cool to control the electron beam on the TV with a few 68K assembler commands. I don't quite remember how I did that back then, but remember that I spent several days with my head "inside" Amiga Hardware Manual, ROM Kernel Manual and then it just happened I used to have quite an extensive collection of demos (and sources!) but that somehow got lost over the years.

Recently, I decided to "rebuild" my Amiga collection and now I have A500 with 1MB RAM, GVP hard drive that goes with it, A1200 with a 25GB hard drive and 5MB RAM (maybe even 6MB - I have to double-check , A2000 with the Toaster and A2500 with 2630 accelerator card, Toaster and Genlock. Even after all these years, Amiga did not lose its appeal and I am looking forward to sharing the Amiga enthusiasm here in the forum.

Also, I am looking for some software such as Disney Animation Studio, Soundprobe (sound sequencing software), so if anyone knows where I can get those, please let me know.

Another topic I am interested in, just like everyone in this forum is the Amiga OS 4 and how to get it to work on some readily available platform. Since PPC cards are unavailable, it looks like some kind of a "hack" would be in order (Mac Mini seems promising, maybe even one of the Dual G4 machines) to get it to work. However, since hardware requirements for OS4 are somewhat unclear (graphics card, ram required, memory, things of that nature), maybe we should find that out first

I have a designated Amiga gmail address and if anyone wants to get in touch, feel free to contact me: amigafx.at.gmail dott.kom. - in either English or German. Other languages are also welcome, as long as I can translate them with online translators.

Best,

Sam

- Amigas, PCs, Macs, Linuxes, all under one roof

[codenetfx]

@rednova: thank you for your suggestions. I just checked ebay but cannot find the auction. I know that there was an auction which ended on Sunday but I missed that one (sigh). Then I found a demo disk for Disney Animation Studio on ebay.co.uk but that's not what I want to play with

This brings up an interesting question: aside from ebay, are there any good sources of software out there? I am familiar with Softhut, but wondering if there are more.

[codenetfx]

@koaftder: same here. First (serious) C coding experience on Amiga with Aztec-C and Lattice-C.

I continued to use C/C++ as a consultant in the early 90s on the Intel DVI platform (video codec card with i860 processor for real time video). It was fun to work with custom video overlays programmed in C and "mixed" over live video. It took Intel almost 5 years to catch up with graphics capabilities built into A500. There was no other system out there to catch up with, so I am just going to say that Intel "copied" Amiga.

In fact, I decided to revisit Amiga (from all angles) after seeing Apple's "March 6th" event when iPhone SDK was announced. My first reaction was "they copied this from Amiga". Can't wait to see the details on custom chip set they are using.

[codenetfx]

Too much Guiness (Tension!) and quite a few Chicagoans here. I am often in Toronto (not very often, but often). Very nice to see the span of users from Spain, Greece, Ireland and all the way to the USA and Canada - all in one day.

I feel like I have outnumbered all of my other machines with Amigas. Now I am thinking about networking them. So far, I have a clear picture (=working setup) with A1200 which has a cool PCMCIA card. Not a wireless card, but I have a bridge which came in very handy in making the leap to wireless with Amiga. Connection is there but I have not had a lot of time to move a lot of data around to see if I am going to run into some issues. Hopefully not. Part of the problem is that other Amigas are not networked .

Logical next step now is to figure out how to network the rest: A2000, A2500 and maybe even A500. Moving files around seems like essential feature of any system worth playing with.

Also, I have a crazy idea to download Firefox source code and (try) to port it for release slated in, say, 2010 (2011?) . Maybe this has been done already, maybe not. Let me know.

With the A500 I got on ebay a while back (with a bunch of disks), I also got a Processor Accelerator from Creative Microsystems. I guess dude I got it from did not know what to do with it: I have two crystals (16MHz) and two MC68881 sticking in the antistatic foam (yeah!) and a little board with an almighty MC68000 and two empty sockets, one for MC68881 and one for the crystal. Now, last time I fired up the soldering iron was a while ago but I do remember that the notch (dot) on the socket/component designates Pin #1. Thankfully, no soldering will be required here.

We will see how that goes. Steady hands and good light should get this done. The biggest question is actually where to plug in this thing ("CMI REV 3" on the board) on the A500 but maybe I will figure it out when I open it. Should be easy, right?

Anyone has this mighty accelerator working? Why do I have two crystals/MC68881?

I have read that thread where Georg (from A1K) described how he rolled his own A1K motherboard. That was way, way too cool. I am going to start with easy stuff until I get going.

It would be the coolest thing if we could figure out how to roll our own PPC boards but that seems a bit far-fetched, given that *somebody* owns that non-existing product. Maybe I should ask Georg or Matthias Muench (he maintains the phase5 site which is FYI only, from what I understand).

UPDATE: I found a web site which explains how to network amigas via parallel port (which then acts as Ethernet). I will post links here shortly.

Here are the links related to networking Amigas:

http://mylinuxisp.com/~jdbaker/oldsite/SmallSys/JDBAmiga.html
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/networkfaq.html
http://www.cs.rose-hulman.edu/~gunnbr/enetAmiga.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/amiga/networking-faq/part1/
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/amiga/networking-faq/part2/
http://www.jeacle.ie/pub/articles/netbsd/


Best,

Sam
A500+GVP Hard drive, A1200, A2000, A2500, two video Toasters, two G4 Macs, Macintosh Classic, Macintosh SE, five IBM T40s, IBM X41, DELL Inspiron running Freespire, Windows 2003+SharePoint in a VM, MacBook Pro

[codenetfx]

@ Wain: Are you saying you don't need that monitor and the PSU?

What happened to the Amiga? We can do two things here: find you an Amiga or find an Amiga for these two items to go to

Best,

Sam

[codenetfx]

I think we have a "critical mass" of Amigans in Chicagoland (and vicinity). Most of my "Amiga" time is spent configuring the machines and figuring out how to move files around, write little programs (with DevPac) and wonder what I could *do* with the Video Toaster. Anyone out there *using* the Toaster?

Of course, I play some games (on WinUAE and *real* Amiga). Some games suck because they are asking me to enter words from the manual which I do not have anymore.

For A500, I think I am going to get the ParNet cable to move files around. I have an external hard drive (GVP) and copy stuff from disks but that's extremely slow. Over time, I want to get away from disks entirely and figure out a way to keep a repository of programs for Amiga on an USB drive which would be connected to a PC, which in turn would be connected to Amiga over ParNet. I suspect that I will need some software for it. I know that Cloanto offers an Amiga Explorer which works with a null-modem cable?

Ah, the null modem cable... Anyone ever used RS232 for Guru Meditating, debugging over serial? LOL That was fun.

Did anyone use either of those two networking solutions?

Sam

[codenetfx]

@bloodline:

Ins Kaffeehaus gehen zum Kaffeklatsch und Amiga-Plauderei!

[codenetfx]

@klx300r

Thank you for reminding me of WHDLOAD tool. That tool is a must for managing an ever-growing archive of ADFs.