AMIX installation made easy...no tape drive!

[LocalH]

As a side note, when the 3000UX with the large HD failed to boot (described in the instructions) it came up with a weird boot screen, it said "Version 1.4 Beta, do not distribute" with the animated floppy drive. I had never seen that before.

That's the one Kickstart image I've been trying to find for quite a long time, incidentally. I've acquired a copy of several other 1.4 and 2.0 betas, but this particular build has window gadgets that I haven't seen in any other build, and I'm curious what else is different. Perhaps you should try to get a copy of the ROM dumped (would a standard Kick grabber work? I don't know if this particular 1.4 build included the bonus code or not). I'm not asking you for a copy of the ROM image here, since that's technically illegal. If nothing else, it should be dumped for preservation, even if it's not distributed, since several A3000's have hardware 2.0 ROMs or later (such as mine).

This ROM is also accessible on the earlier A3000s that came with both 1.3 and 2.0 - if you fudge around where a close gadget would be on the OS selection screen, it should eventually boot to the 1.4 hardware ROM.

[LocalH]

I just want to say very good work on the part of all of those involved - I can remember when the only info one could find on AMIX, was a JPG photograph of the install media, and nowhere was there a dumped version available.

Then, I (as did many others) came across mmhart's site, which was the first place I actually saw AMIX for download. And now, we actually have people who have gotten it installed. Perhaps if I can get my A3000 to recognize all its RAM (right now it only sees it's 1MB chip, none of the fast), I'll attempt to get this stuff set up. Too bad that X doesn't seem to support more than 1-bit color (as I am completely unfamiliar with non-XF86 X servers, I would have no idea where the equivalent of XF86Config is located). Still, this is quite interesting. I wonder if that MMU-enabled version of UAE might be sufficient to install it...unlikely, but who knows.

Once again, congrats to all, you're preserving history, and I applaud you for it.

A question - has anyone tried to see if standard SCSI CD-ROM drives work, either for use as an install medium (unlikely, I would think), or simply after a successful install?

[LocalH]

@Trev:
Good luck on your MMU work, it's possible that this might enable the 3000's 1.4 boot ROM to work as well - currently, all I get is a flashing grey or white screen with 020/040, JIT or not, and a solid grey screen with 000/010. The ROM I have is 512KB, I don't know if there's supposed to be bonus code or not.

Also, if I can get my A3000 to recognize it's fast RAM, or get another one, I might attempt to install AMIX using a CD-ROM drive instead of the single- or dual-hard drive methods. I would imagine the main difficulty would be burning the CD in the same raw fashion - perhaps using the cpio file as a bin, and writing a cuesheet for it, will work. As I have no way to burn CDs from my Amiga, I'd be burning the CD on my PC, but if I can get it to burn as a bin/cue, then it might work.

[LocalH]

@Trev:
Well, as I mentioned, I do have a copy of the 1.4 ROM, and it does not work within WinUAE currently. The ROM is a solid 512K and lacks bonus code, unless the 1.4 ROM was relinked and the bonus code is within the first 512K (this is plausible, as the end of the ROM has text dealing with the OS boot screen), and thus the ROM doesn't need to be larger than 512K as the later ROMs with bonus code do.

WinUAE lacks emulation of one or more A3000 hardware components that this particular 1.4 ROM requires, I believe. Since it was dumped with a regular Kickstart dumper, it should reside at $F80000, whether in the physical memory map (as I would likely believe), or via MMU. Without investigating, I am thinking that MMU emulation might allow the ROM to boot. I will try setting up some hardfiles and name them correctly, but I doubt that will work, as even without the HD partitions I should at least see the purple 'insert disk' screen.