Building PC Box for Amiga Emulation - Amithlon or Amiga Forever

[magnetic]

Hello

I'm thinking of building an Athlon XP based x86 computer. I want to be able to run Amithlon and/or Amiga Forever. I'd like to pick the brains of you all here if I could.

1. What sort of spec do I need for Amithlon (i'm looking at like a 1.7ghz Athlon CPu with ASUS Motherboard and Radeon 9000 gfx card) do I need to use Nvidia cards or something? What compatiblity is there?

2. I'm looking at Amiga Forever - how is the latest version? Can I run Graphics PUblisher from the Turbo Print package and print? Also will programs like Pixel Pro work?

3. Any other feedback/suggestions is appreciated. Thank you

I'm also debating going XP or Win2k...

magnetic

[CaptChaos]

2. Amiga Forever is basically just a front end for Winuae with    comm tools and kickstart images... Get the latest WinUae for free from here: http://www.winuae.net/frames/download.html Runs nice in XP I'm pretty sure I heard printing has been implemetned but not positive.

[bloodline]

magnetic wrote:
Hello

I'm thinking of building an Athlon XP based x86 computer. I want to be able to run Amithlon and/or Amiga Forever. I'd like to pick the brains of you all here if I could.

1. What sort of spec do I need for Amithlon (i'm looking at like a 1.7ghz Athlon CPu with ASUS Motherboard and Radeon 9000 gfx card) do I need to use Nvidia cards or something? What compatiblity is there?

2. I'm looking at Amiga Forever - how is the latest version? Can I run Graphics PUblisher from the Turbo Print package and print? Also will programs like Pixel Pro work?

3. Any other feedback/suggestions is appreciated. Thank you

I'm also debating going XP or Win2k...

magnetic

I run WinUAE on my 3Ghz Laptop with a Radeon 9000 Gfx chip and WinXP. It is able to emulate an 040 CPU and Full AGA with sound (no glitches or stutters) perfectly, and much faster than any real hardware.

My old 600Mhz Athlon is able to emulate the above at least as fast as a real Amiga, but the sound glitches.

[estik]

i was just about to post the same question! :-)

i work with a pc (1GB ram, p4 2.8, ati radeon 9600,bla, bla, bla).

Does anyone think it's better to run WinUAE on this PC, or do go and upgrade my plain a1200?

i was thinking in purchasing an acellarator board for it, but i don´t know if it is worth the money.

haven´t tried WinUAE, though...

[bloodline]

estik wrote:
i was just about to post the same question! :-)

i work with a pc (1GB ram, p4 2.8, ati radeon 9600,bla, bla, bla).

Does anyone think it's better to run WinUAE on this PC, or do go and upgrade my plain a1200?

i was thinking in purchasing an acellarator board for it, but i don´t know if it is worth the money.

haven´t tried WinUAE, though...

Just run WinUAE. Don't bother getting an acellarator.

[Fade]

I am running Amithlon on a homebuilt Gigabyte MB Athlon 2400 and Nvidia card and it does great. Amithlon can be had on Ebay and other places but it is no longer produced. I have also installed a Trios II hard drive selector so I can boot from 3 different drives/OS's  (2 IDEs and a SCSI in my case). Amithlon seems to run just about anything that doesn't hit the hardware but there may be stuff that I don't know about.

Programs I do use with Amithlon:
Samba & SMB-Net
DirOpus
Miami & MiamiDX
iBrowse
Yam
AdPro & Pro Control
Photogenics
PPage
SuperBase
and tons of other stuff.
Printing has been a problem for me, so I just network my files over to a PC, and print from there.
I have had sound working, but one of the Amithlon builds broke it, and I haven't gone to the trouble to sort it out.

Lots of help can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amithlon/
An easy Amithlon installer can be found at  http://www.sci.fi/~vjouppi/amithlon/
Some updates can be found at WWW.VMC.de, but not much.
The newest kernel and other stuff at  http://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/aminetbin/find?Amithlon

With a hard drive selector I guess you could say I have the best of all options for an OS, but I find that I run the Amithlon/Amiga OS3.9 over the Win2000 OS about 80% of the time.

[Dan]

@estik
You get RTG to, WinUAE is much cheaper than Accelerator+graphicboard.
My crappy Duron runs 3times faster than my A1200 060-50Mhz without RTG and 6 times faster with RTG, thats when clocking some graphicsprograms, one is a thumbnailprogram.
That´s without sound.

[Holley]

Ditto to that, on a 1.2GHz P3 WinUAE under XP can do operations on large pictures at '060 speeds, the RTG is at full PC speed, and AGA runs fast enough to have Breathless at full quality.

I wouldn't blame someone to build a high-spec PC into an old A3000 case (could have a slimline slot-loading CD where the floppies are with minimal cutting) and just use WinUAE as a replacement Windows shell.

[blobrana]

Hum,
well i was real pleased with my custom WinUae computer:

Check out the hardware i used  (Warning, big webpage - you need to have a fast computer to view it!  :-)  )

Runs like a 300MHz 060 amiga...

[Dan]

Holley wrote:
I wouldn't blame someone to build a high-spec PC into an old A3000 case (could have a slimline slot-loading CD where the floppies are with minimal cutting) and just use WinUAE as a replacement Windows shell.

Why cut a A3000 case when one can use a A2000 or A4000 case without cutting?

[SamuraiCrow]

Just a few notes:
In order to read real Amiga floppies you'll need a Catweasel PCI controller (unless you already have adf files for all your software).

Amithlon is not available anymore due to use of Amiga's OS without permission or licencing so you'll have to go with AmigaForever.  If you already have a kickstart ROM image you can get WinUAE and not bother with the AmigaForever CD-ROM although you'll need to buy AmigaOS 3.x CD-ROM separately if you don't go with AmigaForever.

If you want to install over Linux instead of Windows you can get E-UAE instead of WinUAE but presently WinUAE is better supported.

You don't have to worry about GFX card compatability if you install over Windows becuase WinUAE use DirectX 8.x drivers to access the hardware.  You only need to worry about GFX card compatability if you get an AmigaOne, Pegasos, AROS, or Amithlon setup.

[amigamad]

Get the best cpu you can afford even a 2400 athlon xp like i have in my pc is very cheap now for best results stick to the basics nvidia graphics card creative sound card most other pc software work best with these no reason why the radeon would not work just as well .

windows 2000 is more stable than xp i have not had to reinstall for more than a year on my heavily used machine where freinds and family have nothing but trouble and crashes with xp i have never seen a blue screen of death in 2000 but have seen it a few times in xp. :-)

[Holley]

@Dan: Because the A2000 is the size of an aircraft hanger, and the A4000 case is really cheaply made, but the A3000 is a slim good looking machine :-)

Plenty of dead ones out there that can be used ...

@Mad: Any 16-bit soundcard should sound exactly the same through WinUAE, the graphics is only on 2D performance, so an 8x AGP card would give only slightly more performance over a 4x one (ie. an ATI XPert98 is 99% as good as a much newer card) - ATI cards all run cooler than NVidia ones, which may infuence your choice.

For UAE performance the performance is better spent on a faster processor rather than fancy graphics/sound ...

[Dan]

Holley wrote:
@Dan: Because the A2000 is the size of an aircraft hanger, and the A4000 case is really cheaply made, but the A3000 is a slim good looking machine :-)

Plenty of dead ones out there that can be used ...

I have been think about that too but I think I rather go for a A2000 case for a x86 AROS/UAE machine. And A2000 is easier to find here in Sweden.

[Holley]

Certainly wouldn't be short of space in there! I've always liked compact cases, but thats just my preference ;-)