IBM ThinkCentre M50 + Amithlon

[nyteschayde]

So last week, one of my co-workers threw out their old IBM ThinkCentre M50 8189. I took it home on the off chance that it would run my purchased copy of Amithlon. The CD had been collecting dust since I've bought it and all my current machines are simply WAAAAY too new (i.e. Quad Core Intel Core i7, 24GB RAM, GTX 580, etc...).

Turns out this machine is perfect! The only complaints I have with it is that I can't seem to get the floppy to activate once Amithlon boots (even with Kernel4) and that if I put more than 1.5GB of physical RAM in the machine it fails to load Amithlon despite what the mem= settings is at; which is sad because I went out and bought 4GB (it's maximum) of new PC2700 DDR RAM. Hahaha, I said 'new'; I'm more surprised that Fry's still sold the stuff.

I was also fortunate to have an old AGP Geforce 2 MX 400 lying around. This coupled with a weekend of working on it has landed me with the perfect sweet spot of older hardware. The machine now tripple boots Windows XP SP3, Haiku and of course Amithlon. With all the updates I could find online, the Amithlon system is faster than any other Amiga I own.

This includes my Amiga OS 4.1 Classic capable A1200T. So much so in fact, that I'll have to force myself to fire them up over the Amithlon system. I never was able to get seemingly hardware accelerated Geforce2 support on the Amithlon (at least in a way I could figure out how to test).

It really is a shame that Amithlon went the route it did. If I could have the modern updates of OS4 and an Amithlon kernel that worked flawlessly on newer hardware I just don't know how I could be happier (Amiga-wise).

I don't have the technical know how, but it would be interesting if there were a way to get PearPC's PPC emulation core working on an Amithlon box in a way where Amiga OS 4.x for Classic machines (or otherwise) would work. Again, pipe dream, but still...

Was the kernel source code ever released to the public for Amithlon? How do others modify and update it? Doe they painstakingly deassemble it? Would be great if Bernd could be convinced to release the Umilator in a fashion (likely on a USB thumb drive) where we supply a OS3.9 CD and together the system installs and works with modern hardware.

I won't open the X86 vs. PPC vs. ARM vs. (insert architecture here) wars, but just lamenting what could be because of many varied and sometimes petty reasons and issues the bright and talented programmers for the Amiga have.

[fishy_fiz]

Congrats on your freebie. Im still a big fan of amithlon as well.

I still find it strange that people are so quick to believe that it only works on older hardware though. The 2 best (fully supported) amithlon machines Ive ever had were an athlon64 (bit old now, but at the time I used it with amithlon is was a brand new, cutting edge machine), and more recently a 3.86ghz core2duo machine. Sure, not exactly cutting edge these days, but Ive been using it with amithlon for at least 3 years now.

Ive even used amithlon on an i5 and i7 machine, although never dedicated either to amithlon as the core2duo works great. 68k performance on that box is vastly superior to a sam460 that is running native ppc code, and even beats my 1.5ghz mac mini/mos system running 68k code vs. mos running ppc code most of the time (the exception being when altivec is heavily used, but amithlon itself has untapped ways to counter that (x86 native code)).

Not that I have any interest in a vs. debate, but it (amithlon) is a great system, one that only gets better the more power you throw at it. 300fps in quake2, over 1000 fps in duke3d, runs any mame game that 68k mame will run flawlessly, nice quick compile times (especially when compiling in a rad disc (ram bandwidth on amithlon is unrivalled anywhere in amiga world apart from aros)), 720p video playback at full speed/framerate, and so on and so forth.

[nyteschayde]

I have no lack of hardware to test with (although some needs building) but most of my machines won't boot with any kernel I've tried. How much ram did your more modern machines have? It'd be interesting to hear both Amiga allocated RAM vs total installed system RAM. I've noticed that when I add more than 1.5gb it simply will not boot even if my ram= amount remains the same.