Rediscovering Amithlon

[amyren]

Thanks for the useful article about your Amithlon experiences. I was really positively surprised to read how well it performed. Also I just discovered the sourceforge website for Amithlon, and again I was surprised to see that there actually are recent updates (2011) for the project.
I thought that Amithlon died just after release due to the legal problems, but this was really pleasent reading

See the second link in my signature.

Thanks. Following that link led me to a turkish site, with further links to the documentation, which also was in turkish. Thanks to the google translate services it was quite readable. An english version would be nice though.

There was also a link to Amithlon v1.3 as well. Is this the most recent release?

That was useful, since I just broke my AmigaOS XL cd. I used it as a source for OS3.9 when installing AmiKit on my pc. The only issue was that the volumename for the resulting CD is "Amithlon", and the AmiKit installation program requires it to be "AmigaOS XL". But I used poweriso on a pc to rename the volumename before burning the CD, and then it worked good with AmiKit.
Sadly I couldnt get the Amithlon CD itself to boot. I selected the rescue options, but only got as far as the boingball bouncing and nothing more happened. I tried two different Dell P4 pc's, but they might be incompatible.
It is supposed to work as a LiveCD in resque mode, right? Or am I missing something..

[fishy_fiz]

In my experiences the biggest stumbling block with amithlon live booting is RAM. It simply doesnt work with more than 1gig/1.5gig (the latter is rare though). It is possible to set ram to a specified amount in the bootloader script, but even this doesnt always work. It's also not uncommon for amithlon not to boot without an updated kernel (which requires it to be installed to harddrive) on machines from after the athlon/athlonxp and latter half of the p4 era (later p4's arent too far removed from a different platform to earlier ones, even if they do share the same name).

BIOS settings can also be a bit of a stumbling block. Try setting harddrives to legacy mode if using sata for example.

I'd be lying if I said amithlon was always easy to get running, but more often than not with some perseverance it is possible, and once its up and running well worth the effort (in my opinion at least).

As for the status of Amithlon, it was, as you had thought discontinued for legal reasons. There is however a portion of it that is open source, and due to the way amithlon works under the hood the parts that arent dont really need touching.

[amyren]

The cpu is a P4 3.4Ghz (550 - prescott)with 1GB ram.

I havent tried to set the sata to legacy mode. Is this safe to try without risking to loose data on the drive?

Btw, what is your specs for setting up your computer for Amithlon?
(could be useful for anyone who wish to build one)

[fishy_fiz]

I used to dual boot between aros and amithlon on the same box, and had to swap between sata and legacy modes to get either system to boot (I used seperate drives for each os and just changed boot device in bios rather than using a bootloader). Never had a problem myself, but computers are funny creatures sometimes  

As for my amithlon box specs:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard, core2duo@3.86ghz, matrox g550 video card, sb audigy. Im using the pata connector to run both dvd-rom and hdd though, as while hdtoolbox will detect a drive running off sata it refuses to boot for me, even if I set up bootloader on a pata drive.

In theory most 945/965/p35/g31/g33 based motherboards should work (Ive also used a GA-945GZM-S2 and Asus P5KPL board for core2duo systems with amithlon, and a K8M800 athlon64 board). I dont have any of the other older systems still, so cant really give specifics to anything older than those.

[XDelusion]

Fishy: First off, thankx for your advice in our PM's.

Secondly, what Playstation Emulator are you using? Also does it have proper Joystick support?

The AROS PSX emulator is still buggy, and the one for MorphOS is polished, but...

...lacks Joystick support, and configuring a Joystick to use Keyboard and Mouse buttons within Trident is not as simple as the few tutorials out there make it to be.

[trekiej]

Has anyone tried Aros Kick-start yet?

[XDelusion]

I'm still trying to get my OS 3.9 install setup the way I like it.

I' not sure AROS 68k is ready for prime time yet anyhow.

[fishy_fiz]

@XDelusion

Im using FPSE on amithlon/aros and mos. Seems pretty much identical across the board (altough runs best on AROS obviously).
Also, I dont use a usb stack on amithlon. For data transfer I just use the network and for joysticks I use a ps2 joypad (the connector, not the console (although coincidently its much the same as a psx2 joypad . It's basically a joypad shaped keyboard, each button is a different key.

Edit: just reread your post, and yes youre right, AROS version doesnt work with joypads. It was compiled before some lowlevel.lib fixes where implemented. A recompile would be great, along with recompiles of plug-ins (hardware acceleration for example, which also didnt exist at the time of the port).