Help me build an amithlon machine? Please?

[haywirepc]

For a long time now I have wanted to build an amithlon machine. I suppose because I have a dedicated emulated amiga booting straight to os3.x on a spare pc I have never gotten around to it.(This setup replaced my real amigas some time ago) For most things, the dedicated emulated amiga does everything I want, but I'm really interested in seeing the difference with amithlon, from all I heard is sounds really great, and I'm really excited to get an amithlon machine working.
 
Some time ago I got a supported video and soundcard on ebay. At least I think these are supported, I believe someone here made some suggestions, and from those suggestions, I got these :
 
AOPEN NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440-SE
Sound Blaster PCI 128 Sound Card CT4750
 
Whats left is that I need an amithlon supported network card for internet. Can someone who has an amithlon machine working with networking working for internet PLEASE tell me what network card you
are using and what steps you need to take once amithlon is booting to
have internet working?
 
 
I have a couple of spare pc's that are 2ghz or so. I'd like to get amithlon going on one of them and if it works out, I will get a faster pc to use for this... One of my friends has a few 3.4ghz dells that would be great for this I think, but funds are tight so I want to try it first on the stuff I already have around.
 
Also, for those of you who already have amithlon working well, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. From what I've seen, its not
so simple to get amithlon installed and running from anything other than the cd boot.
 
Also, I have some general questions :
 
I think several people mentioned that usb does not work or is not fully supported on amithlon, so I was wondering what you do for a joystick?
Are joysticks supported, and if so, can you suggest one that works easily with amithlon? I guess you can use the keyboard, but thats kind of lame.I'd really like to be able to play games with a joystick.
 
What about USB pen drives? I use these on all my other systems for transferring data around. No go?
 
How about dvd drives and playing dvds on your machine with amithlon?
Cd/dvd burning?
 
Does Octamed sound studio work well and can you use 16 bit samples and mixdown to 16 bit masters?
 
What about dual or triple booting linux/windowsxp/aros?
 
Anyone using one of these amigakit keyboards/mice? :
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=985
Is it better to go ps2 or usb for amithlon? Same for mice they have with boingball?
 
I'm hoping an amithlon machine can replace my current setup, which is just a dedicated pc running amigaforever but with windows shell removed so it just boots up straight to os3.x. Like I said, this seems to work okay for most things, and I like being able to run all applications that bang the hardware, I play alot of games on this box, and I also have it set up next to my main pc running demos alot. Its 2ghz but some of the more demanding aga games and demos lag and don't play very well on it.
 
Any help or advice from people already running an amithlon machine would be very much appreciated. I will update this thread as I go so maybe others can benefit from my experiences here and the advice I'm hoping to get along the way.
 
Thanks,
 
Steven

[haywirepc]

Fishy, I sent you a pm with two network cards I found on ebay. Let me know which you think would be best to buy... I'll buy them both if necessary...
 
Once I get the network card, I will have all the parts I need to give an installation a go...
 
Thanks for everyones help so far!

Steven

[haywirepc]

I have ordered a realtek 8129 network card. Once that arrives I should have everything I need to complete the build. Does anyone have links to any guides for installing amithlon to the hard drive?

Steven

[haywirepc]

Thanks does anyone have a link to an amithlon install guide? Other than booting from the cd I have no idea...
Steven

[haywirepc]

Yeah seems kind of complicated getting amithlon installed. Would be alot more amithlon users around if this wasn't so involved.

Steven

[haywirepc]

Thanks for everyone chiming in and giving me some advice. I really hope I can get this to work! Thanks especially to Fishy, but I'm still not sure I understand your instructions for installing amithlon to boot from the hard drive....
 
Two drives gives the advantage of being able to dedicated a drive to rdb
What is rdb? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by rdb?
I also don't understand whats with the small fat drives, why? And are you saying I can use an aros (or do you mean icaros) live cd and make the fat partiotions with hd toolbox? OR a win98 floppy/fdisk will work for this? I used win98se for years too long, so I definitely know how to use fdisk and windows/dos to set up drives. So I suppose that would be easier for me. I never used hdtoolbox much.
 
So I'm sure I understand, I suppose your using the fat drive just to boot to the amithlon install? Because just the isos I have (Two cd-roms) are like 600-700 megs each. So first I setup the fat partition first, then boot
with the amithlon cd and use hdtoolbox for format/partition the rest of the
drive? What filesystem should I use for this?(I'm pretty sure I will just be using one hard drive) So I set up the fat drive, boot to amithlon cd, setup the rest of the hardrive as the rest of the drive being the amithlonvirtualdisk partition...Install amiga os3.9 with the amigaos installer onto the amithlon partition,reboot setup autoexec.bat on fat drive...
 
Question, I don't think I've ever used loadlin on any dos/windows pc before, what is that? It just runs the kernelscript for amithlon? And do I have to modify the kernal script so it knows where the amithlon partition is or is named or what? Also, how to I make sure I apply the boot tag to the amigaos partition, is that done in hdtoolbox and do I need a seperate partition for amigaos3.9 and amithlon or can't I just put them both on the amithlon partition, which will be the entire drive except for the fat partition in my case.
 
Also, on the fat partitions, it has to be made a bootable partition and boot to lets say windows98 in my case, (format c:/s/v/u) ?
 
Also, am I right in that the machine will boot dos first then boot to the
amithlon install? Argh, my head hurts. There is something to be said for AROS. I wish there were a simpler way to install this.
 
Sorry this is a bit confusing and I want to try and make sure I understand.
New network card should be here this week and I'm going to build the computer first and then give the full installation a try.
 
Thanks for trying to explain this to me Fishy, I think I understand, but its a bit perplexing. I really hope I can get this to work!
 
Steven

[haywirepc]

Sorry this message will be so winded, but I wanted to be sure I explain whats wrong, what I tried to fix my problems and so on.
 
Today my realtek 8029 network card arrived, so I put together the system I intended for amithlon testing. It is an amd3000 sempro 1800mhz compaq machine with 1 gig of ram. In installed the sb128 pci and a nvidia agp geoforce4 mx4 video card with 64 megs of ram in in. I disabled the onboard sound and onboard lan in the bios.
 
When I turn on the machine I see the compaq splash screen, and I can then edit the bios. I have the machine set to boot from cd first. When I let it boot (using the amithlonv1.3 part 1 ISO on cd)  i get the  amithlon selection screen where you can select the boot you want. When I select VGA, Vesa, or matrox I get the gfxcard reset message then I get a screen with hmmm... like a screen which looks like the horizontal hold is off or something, wavy lines like the monitor can't handle something. I am using a very old crt 20 inch monitor. I tried also using a 15 inch led lcd and I get the same wavy lines. I also tried a 17 inch lcd and a 15 inch crt monitor, on all of them I get the same wavy lines after boot.
 
On the garbled bad/screen
Just to check, I tried standard vga, same thing, force vesa, same thing, matrox, same thing, nvidia vga same thing. When I try nvidia tft, I get invalid sync on all 3 or 4 monitors I tried it on. The 20 inch crt can do 1600x1200 on windows or linux, so I'm not sure why it wouldn't work?
 
When I boot it with the  1.3 rescue option, it boots to os3.x low res desktop.  When I use 3.10 rescue option, again it boots to workbench screen at low res. When I use 4b rescue option, it seems to have the screen problems again. When I use 4b+sata I get the same garbled screen where it looks like horizontal or verical hold is screwed up. Using the 1.3 or 3.10 rescue option, I do get a workbench screen, but if I try and edit the screen prefs it gives me the same wavy lines/bad screen.
 
I'm not sure what is causing this, I would think a geoforce 4mx with 64 megs of ram is supported, I bought this video card specifically because I was told it worked with amithlon. Just a side question, but does anyone know if that card works with AROS, or linux/compiz? I suppose if it won't work for amithlon and I'm forced to buy another video card for amithlon I can use it for linux or aros.
 
Does anyone have any idea what is causing this screen problem? Booting to the rescue thing, in screen prefs it only allows 640x480, which kind of sucks. Also, I don't know if maybe it will work if I do the complete install? but I don't want to do all this to find out the video card won't work and have to do all that again. Installing amithlon to hard disk appears to quite quite alot more involved than aros or linux/haiku or any other alternative os that I have tried. I tried two other nvida cards I have around. One is a newer nvidia card with 512 megs ram and two heads. I don't have a newer to older vga adapter but I think on that card it was assuming the monitor was on the bigger newer monitor connection and its not, it was connected to the head with the older vga connection. After boot, I get a blank screen. I also tried another nvida card I had around that has an older vga connection, not sure what the card has but works in linux/compiz. On that card I get the same wavy lines after boot when selecting nvidia vga. When selecting nvidia tft I get a blank screen/nothing. With that card selecting vesa or vga, and I get the wavy lines.
 
I'm not sure what is causing the video problems. I also tried selecting pci and agp in bios settings with the same results on all video cards/monitors.
To be honest, I think a couple years ago I had similar problems just like this and promptly gave up on amithlon after trying it on like 4 or 5 different computers. I'd really like to get this working but I have no idea why the video would not be working at more than 640x480 in the rescue option. Its really frustrating especially when I bought hardware right off the supported list.
 
For testing purposes, I loaded the latest puppy linux iso on a cdrom and tried booting that with both the old nvidia card I have, and the geoforce 4mx. Sound, video, and network all work fine in puppy linux, and video wise, I can set the screen to 1600x1200 on the big crt monitor I intended to use for this amithlon machine.
 
I'm willing to keep trying, but does anyone know if the geoforce mx4 works with AROS? If I can't get this going, this box will become an AROS box. I have a soundblaster emu10k, and I think the realtek 8029 network card works with AROS, but I'm not sure. Anyone know if the realtek 8029 works with AROS?
 
I haven't given up yet, but I don't know what else to try. Any ideas?
 
I'm about out of hair pulling for today, I can try some new things tomorrow I suppose.
 
Steven

[haywirepc]

If the fx5200 will work fine, I'm fine with buying it... I think AROS also supports that video card if I'm not mistaken. Ideally, I'd like to have video/network and sound that both amithlon and aros fully support, so I can dual boot AROS and Amithlon...
 
And if someone has a link to a better amithlon ISO file that I should be using, instad of the ISO's I got from another amithlon thread here on amiga.org, I'd sincerely appreciate it....
 
Steven

[haywirepc]

I checked the AROS hardware compatibility info on AROS.ORG realtek 8029 is fully supported on AROS, and I think the geoforce 4 is but no open gl...?

The fx5200 is supported on AROS, but I think that IS the older agp NVDIA card I already have and tried with amithlon, (Looks very similar to the fx5200's with 128 megs of ram I saw on ebay, it has just a vga out and svideo out.

I'd be happy to buy an fx5200 if it is sure it to work, but I don't have a spare monitor that uses the newer monitor connection so I'd prefer to avoid a dual head card that has both newer and older style monitor connections because I think the older vga connection on the dual head cards is the second monitor and amithlon and AROS as I recall don't figure out like okay the only monitor is plugged into the older VGA port... And you just get a blank screen. I wish I had an adapter for newer to older style monitor plug so I can see if this newer nvidia dual head card I have is working....

Steven

[haywirepc]

I checked and the nvidia older card I tried IS a nvidia 5200 with 128 megs of ram. It gives the same garbled screen on amithlon that the others do.
 
I think the newer nvidia card I have here that i tried IS an fx5500 dual head with 512 megs ram, and it too does not work right, but I suspect it may be sending the video to the newer monitor connection and I don't have a spare monitor with a newer connection. I wish I had an adapter so I could tell for sure. It would be a huge pain in my ass to try and test that on my main monitor.

EDIT - The newer one,Its actually an fx 6200 dual head nvidia card with 512 megs.

So thats an fx6200 card, an fx5200 card with 128 megs ram, and a geoforce4 with64 megs of ram, none working with amithlon, but all seem fine with linux.

I may just give up and turn this box into a spare aros box.

Amithlon sounds fun, but I already have a pc running winuae that is fine for most things and works great, with almost anything I use it for.
 
Steven

[haywirepc]

Allrighty then, I suppose I will give it a go at a full installtion tomorrow then and see what happens. I think the fx5200 would be best video card option since it is supposed to be supported by amithlon and it is also supported by AROS. I can always just reformat the hard drive for AROS only if it really dosn't work out after I give it a shot.

If amithlon DOES work after full installation,
For the simplest dual booting I can put a second harddrive in for AROS and just disable the first drive if I want to boot to AROS.
 
Steven

[haywirepc]

Fishy, I do appreciate the time you took to try and help me get it going thank you. Today I spent all day trying to install amithlon to the drive as you described but no go. I'm beginning to think there is some kind of hardware problem with this pc or its ram or something not set correctly in the BIOS perhaps? When I try and boot this pc aros (icaros desktop) live dvd, when I select native screen modes I get a very low res looking screen with a big mouse cursor and looks low color. When I move the mouse the machine freezes and then reboots itself. It did that with all 3 video cards.
 
Since I happen to see the ram test on the amithlon boot cd, I ran that and the memory passed. I'm not sure what else the problem could be. I didn't try to do much with the computer when I booted to puppy linux and I think thats just vesa graphics... So no way to tell if there is some disconnect between the computer and the graphics cards?
 
Ordinarily, I just just buy a couple of spare pcs from ebay but I'm laid off my job right now and broke so I can't afford more spare parts or ram.
I don't know why I keep thinking there may be a problem with the ram but I had a very strange problem like this with a pc before and it turned out to be bad ram. I don't have another memory test program, but I did run the amithlon memory test and the memory passed, both when I tried each 1gig by itself in the machine individually, and when I put them both in at the same time.
 
Right now, I just booted AROS to vesa 1024x768 and I am waiting while it installs to the hard drive. (I forgot how long that takes in AROS!) I'll let you know what happens. If AROS won't work in native modes, there is definitely something wrong, I am using the nvidia 6200, but can pull and replace with the other two video cards once aros is installed I think...

Otherwise I will try pulling and replacing the video cards and re-install aros with each of the other two video cards.
 
Steven