What are you doing with your Efika?

[thanos]

OK, so what is everybody doing with these things?

I had quite a lot of fun making a case for my project, but that seems to have been the best part.

I tried a few linux distros, but I could never get the sound working.  I was hoping that these distros would work like something like Damn small linux, which was a tonne of fun even on really old hardware with even less resources.

I picked this kit up because it was reasonably priced, and available PPC hardware.  I thought I could get my feet wet with this alternate architecture, but so far the thing has spent a lot of time collecting dust.

Anybody have any suggestions?

[Hell Labs]

I'm doing literally nothing with it. I might eventaully get the keyfile to work, then install a load of 3.1-era programs. Or I might just use the CF card in my much more useful pentium-1 laptop.

There's really not much use for a computer that will run out of memory looking at a single web page.

[pyrre]

I am building a case for it...

anyone have a template for the backside of the efika?

[yakumo9275]

right now nothing because its ram is way to limited but for $99 its cool to play with. Not worth registering morphos on it tho.

I am hoping haiku gets ported to it, but again ram is an issue no matter what you do.

combined with the ATA/IDE bugs in the chipset that give piss poor thruput to the hard drive... shame it could have been so much more with 2x the ram and no bugs on the ata chipset...

[gleng]

Where can you get them these days? I wouldn't mind picking one up to mess about with. I doubt I'd bother with MorphOS on it, as I already have it on my G4 Mac mini, but some sort of lightweight Linux install might be OK.

[zylesea]

I use it for stupid forum posts.
And for this: http://via.i-networx.de/eframe/eframe.htm

[thanos]

I have to admit the zylesea's eframe is pretty cool.

I agree with gleng about the cost of a Morphos key.

OK, looks like I made a lame purchase.

Well, I guess its back to the basement for this thing, heh.  At least I'm not alone, perhaps we could all put our machines together and create a cluster to collect dust with?

The "Duster cluster"?

[Tension]

Making LEDs flash.

[Hell Labs]

OK, looks like I made a lame purchase.

It might make a good retro game only system. Actual amiga game emulation is asking a bit much, but it should be enough for snes, megadrive/genesis, and all the gameboys, and the maybe three PPC rtg games in existance. In fact I'm eventually going to use it to power a half-hight arcade cabinet (bottom half isn't gonna happen, I'll put the top half on my desk so I can sit down).

Can an efika actually run A500 games as fast as a real one?

[save2600]

Too bad you can't install AmigaOS3.9 and take advantage of the PPC support on an Efika. Not thinking you could run Amiga games and such, just apps - but that would have really helped considering how lame the RAM scenario is on that machine.

[Kronos]

Well if you really want you can install AmigaOS3.9, atleast the part that was delivered with 3.9 that is (read everything but the Kick-ROM).

Back in the days of MorphOS 1.1 I accidently managed to boot my Peg1 into my A4000's 3.9 install when I had the 4000's HD installed to transfer data (back than there was no USB-support).

"3.9-apps" as in SW written for use with CPUs <= 68060 should really fly on the Efika both in CPU-power as in RAM available. Feel free to install IBrowse,AWeb,fxPaint etc.

Why one would want to replace Ambient with ancient, crippled and Hacked&Patched Workbench is beyond me, but even that can be done.

[Hell Labs]

Back in the days of MorphOS 1.1 I accidently managed to boot my Peg1 into my A4000's 3.9 install when I had the 4000's HD installed

what

[Kronos]

What what ??

MorphOS is rather AmigaOS-compatible and apperatly I had the MorphOS-HD containing the boot.img still installed, so MorphOS got booted till a point similar to when an Amiga starts booting from HD. Just like any Amiga the Peg/MorphOS now searched for partitions with "boot" enabled and started the one with the highest priority which was DH0: on the A4000's HD. SetPatch probraly got ignored and don't ask me where and how it found drivers for the Radeon (surely not one the A4000's HD) but yes I was prompted with a more or less standard 3.9 WB.


Btw. most Peg1 of that time only had 128MB which wasn't really a problem back then.

[Hell Labs]

So 3.9 doesn't talk to the chipset at all then?

I think I understand now, 68k emu is started extremely early, and the morphos kernel probably handles drivers... Actually I think that's a great idea for a youtube video.

But if the 68K emu is so early, why didn't they do the chipset too?:confused:

[Golem!dk]

So 3.9 doesn't talk to the chipset at all then?

I think I understand now, 68k emu is started extremely early, and the morphos kernel probably handles drivers... Actually I think that's a great idea for a youtube video.

But if the 68K emu is so early, why didn't they do the chipset too?:confused:

They weren't trying to recreate UAE.