Very unexpected Amiga birthday surprise

[eightbit]

6 hours ago, Daedalus2097 said:

Yeah, that's a pretty common story for most users it seems. I'm one of the outliers, using my Amiga non-stop since the '90s until today, and as my main machine well into the '00s when the PC slowly started taking over more and more tasks.

 

3.5 and 3.9 were great upgrades, but were aimed at significantly expanded machines so 3.1.4 and 3.2 are a better fit for modern users with more modest upgrades, while still keeping many of the core improvements from 3.9.

 

The problem in my area was that I never saw anything beyond the A500/A2000/A2000HD. Stores in my area moved to PC and honestly I never knew anything more existed until MANY years later. I never even knew an Amiga 600 existed! What I wouldn't give to own an A1200, A3000 or that A4000 which would have been a holy grail for me.

 

Maybe one day I will be graced with an AGA chipset machine, but prices are now too wild. Unless I get very lucky I don't think it'll ever happen sadly

 

But, on a lighter note, the TF536 came in and is installed. Still waiting on KS 3.2 and WB 3.2, so it'll run at 7MHz for now

 

Edited June 15 by eightbit

[eightbit]

Been playing with the TF536 today since the 3.1 KS ROM I had ordered weeks ago arrived. Wow, this card is FAST! 

 

I did find out rather quickly that you have to install MMULib in order to obtain the disk read speed. It makes a massive difference as it eliminates 16-bit accesses to the ROM chip. 

 

https://aminet.net/package/util/libs/MMULib.lha

 

Before install I was getting under 1MB disk access. After, 6-7MB

[phoenixdownita]

On 6/15/2024 at 9:24 PM, eightbit said:

Been playing with the TF536 today since the 3.1 KS ROM I had ordered weeks ago arrived. Wow, this card is FAST! 

 

I did find out rather quickly that you have to install MMULib in order to obtain the disk read speed. It makes a massive difference as it eliminates 16-bit accesses to the ROM chip. 

 

https://aminet.net/package/util/libs/MMULib.lha

 

Before install I was getting under 1MB disk access. After, 6-7MB

Yeah, nice upgrade and you have gold top ceramic full 030@50, which should allow relokick. I have an 50mhz overclocked ec030@40 never really understood if the mmu did anything I would miss given the Amiga itself doesn’t use it and I just fire it up to play some games (which afaik do not benefit from kickstart in fast ram or even faster IDE) … my CFs all came prepared with mmu lib already.

 

This was the CRG video I mentioned:

and it’s before an update firmware that made it even faster

granted the CD32 is an AGA machine, not sure how it compares wrt to an A500 when both are accelerated.

Edited June 17 by phoenixdownita

[eightbit]

On 6/17/2024 at 1:18 PM, phoenixdownita said:

Yeah, nice upgrade and you have gold top ceramic full 030@50, which should allow relokick.

 

 

Relokick, that is not something I have heard in a long time. 

 

But wasn't that a floppy soft kick into previous versions of Kickstart? Not sure why I would need to do that as I am using WHDLoad for games. I've modded the system to use the trapdoor ram as chip, so I have 1MB of chipram on this now. It allows nearly every WHDLoad game to run. I think the only game I had come across was Cannon Fodder that required 2MB, but the CD32 WHDLoad version works

 

I should probably add that I am now running WB 3.2.2.1 and Kickstart 3.2.2 on a pretty well packed 32GB Sandisk CF now. HDToolBox on the 3.2 install disk has had a facelift and completely understands large hard disks which is great. I could have used FFS, but I chose PFS3-AIO because it is still faster.

Edited June 19 by eightbit

[phoenixdownita]

2 hours ago, eightbit said:

 

Relokick, that is not something I have heard in a long time. 

 

But wasn't that a floppy soft kick into previous versions of Kickstart? 

My bad, I meant the process that copies kickstart from rom to fast ram, seems mmulib supports it (not sure the name of the tool).

Read somewhere that it makes workbench much snappier due to fast ram being much faster than rom.

 

A few accelerators had custom minimal "mmu" and tools to support exactly that.

 

The terrible fire line has nothing of the kind and in my case on top of that an ec030 cannot use the mmu to protect such area.

Other than that I don't believe any game benefits from an mmu.

Thank god for whdl and all the people who wrote the slaves (not sure they have now a better name) so that they play on accelerated systems of all kinds.

Edited June 19 by phoenixdownita

[CPUWIZ]

On 6/14/2024 at 8:14 PM, eightbit said:

Maybe one day I will be graced with an AGA chipset machine, but prices are now too wild. Unless I get very lucky I don't think it'll ever happen sadly

 

 

We should chat, I have a couple Amiga's that were decked out, one has a video toaster as well.  

[Daedalus2097]

Yep, many low-level OS operations are faster when run from fast RAM compared to from ROM. AIBB is a good benchmarking tool to see the difference, however most games don't use the OS very much so it's more likely to be noticeable when using system-friendly software. Having said that, there are some system-friendly games that will benefit also.

 

Kickstart remapping can be done a few different ways:

 

An MMU is the gold standard, where the fast RAM it's in is protected from being overwritten. MuMapROM (from MuLibs) does it this way.

 

Simple accelerator logic can also achieve this, though maybe not write protect it. In that case the fast RAM wouldn't be in the system pool so any writes to it are nasty bugs that are liable to cause a crash regardless. Blizkick does it this way.

 

The OS can be patched to redirect calls to a different address range. This doesn't need any additional hardware or MMU, just reset-proof RAM. Relokick does this, as does SKick, and WHDLoad in a way.

 

Then you also have the OS itself loading modules from disk. This has been the case since OS 3.5, so disk-based parts are already in fast RAM and there's no advantage to remapping the ROM for those parts. If you install 3.5, 3.9, 3.1.4 or 3.2 on a system with a 3.1 ROM installed, the core OS components will be loaded in from the hard drive and run from fast RAM instead.

 

One area that benefits significantly from an MMU is Mac emulation. If you're not using a graphics card, an MMU can be used to make redrawing the screen much more efficient, resulting in games that actually run faster under the Mac emulation than natively on the Amiga. Sim City 2000 is one such example.

[eightbit]

There's a switch in WHDLoad to use the MMU on the 68030. I've enabled it. Not sure how it is benefiting however as the games run fine with it either on or off

 

I also found last night that WHDLoad was updated to v19 just last Tuesday after not having an update for a year (v18.9 in May of 2023). Checked my version and I was running v18.3. Updated and it is really working great.

 

It's quite amazing to use an Amiga 500 and have it be so responsive and "peppy". The TF536 is truly a wonderful accelerator option for the A500 and the price is right too. 

 

So, it looks like I am nearly done with this machine. I had considered a 2MB chip upgrade, but for what I am doing it doesn't seem very necessary. It would certainly be useful (mandatory) for an AGA machine, but 1MB chip on an ECS machine is just fine. 

 

The only thing left is a replacement memory expansion. While the original I have works (the memory side) the clock battery area is severely damaged. I know keeping time is not necessary, but I like to have it. So, I ordered one of these:

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155392720442

 

I remember prices on these expansions being a whole lot more expensive than this. Around $40 shipped with a modern battery for the clock? I'm sold.

[+OLD CS1]

8 hours ago, eightbit said:

I also found last night that WHDLoad was updated to v19 just last Tuesday after not having an update for a year (v18.9 in May of 2023). Checked my version and I was running v18.3. Updated and it is really working great.

Time to upgrade my own installation, too!

[eightbit]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

Time to upgrade my own installation, too!

It's actually a beta pre-release, but I have been using it all day with no issues at all:

 

https://www.whdload.de/whdload/whd190.lha

 

Just extract over your current release and you are good to go!

 

Edited June 20 by eightbit

[phoenixdownita]

I don’t think I’ve seen an Amiga thread with this engagement in a while.

By any chance do you have any other young-you system coming back through time so we can do this again?

[eightbit]

1 hour ago, phoenixdownita said:

I don’t think I’ve seen an Amiga thread with this engagement in a while.

By any chance do you have any other young-you system coming back through time so we can do this again?

 

I can only pray something like this happens to me again, however I find it highly unlikely!

[CPUWIZ]

On 6/20/2024 at 12:01 PM, eightbit said:

 

I can only pray something like this happens to me again, however I find it highly unlikely!

 

Something else good might happen to you.  😜

[eightbit]

2 hours ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

Something else good might happen to you.  😜

 

WOW!

[phoenixdownita]

4 hours ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

Something else good might happen to you.  😜

That’s pure Amiga pr0n … I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an A3000 “on top” of an A4000/040 … actually I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one of them even stand alone.

Heard a story once from an A3000 owner that his Amiga went ballistic once they turned on a cell tower nearby … that’s the extent.

 

PS:the A3000 has a style, the A4000 looks just like any other beige box of the time, but it’s pretty inside so …

Edited Saturday at 10:21 PM by phoenixdownita

[+OLD CS1]

2 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

PS:the A3000 has a style, the A4000 looks just like any other beige box of the time, but it’s pretty inside so …

Indeed.  I was told once that it looked like a sexier PS/2 or Mac.  My 4000D looks like a slimmer version of the 2000, and feels that way inside, too.  One of these days I am going to spend some time to get it back up and running, and catch up on all the software I have been missing (OS3.2, newer versions of Picasso96 and Roadshow.)  Might even upgrade to whatever the new version of the MNT VA2000 video is (though, I am loathe to eject my Picasso IV.)

[eightbit]

I've always loved the look of desktop machines of the era. So nice and tidy with the monitor sitting on top. The only desktop machine I ever owned was an IBM PS2 with a 386SX16. After that everything was some sort of tower.

[phoenixdownita]

3 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Indeed.  I was told once that it looked like a sexier PS/2 or Mac.  My 4000D looks like a slimmer version of the 2000, and feels that way inside, too.  One of these days I am going to spend some time to get it back up and running, and catch up on all the software I have been missing (OS3.2, newer versions of Picasso96 and Roadshow.)  Might even upgrade to whatever the new version of the MNT VA2000 video is (though, I am loathe to eject my Picasso IV.)

My Amiga driver is a CD32, I am really trying to stay away from old computers and stick to consoles.

But consoles derived from computers (aside being generally bad as consoles compared to their competitors) end up eating some cash due to "modern peripherals". Consoles proper only have to deal with flashcarts or ODEs and the occasional video out upgrade, but not so for these hybrids.

 

I had an xegs with keyboard and gun that quickly got myide ii, then u1mb, then side 2, then sio2sd ... a money pit that I eventually sold to avoid getting even more stuff.

Luckily the gx4000 is not that expandable so its being hybrid is under control, plus I don't dig the cpc stuff much tbh.

But the CD32 ... that got keyboard, mouse, tf3xx (all 3 of them because I had more expendable resources than brain) ... it's fun and terrifying the extent I went to see Frontier II Elite opening sequence... 🤣

 

Thankfully a MiSTer made me stop pursuing an Atari STE here in the forums  ... that would have opened the gates for "old computers invasion" and a likely path to divorce.

Edited Sunday at 04:31 AM by phoenixdownita

[CPUWIZ]

16 hours ago, eightbit said:

 

WOW!

 

A3000 is cleaned, I am not opening it, single user (as I told you).  Enjoy the pics for now, I did a mediocre job cleaning it, I'll do the 4000 later.  

 

Why does it say 25 of 50?  Are you telling me there are only 50 of these?  

[phoenixdownita]

43 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

A3000 is cleaned, I am not opening it, single user (as I told you).  Enjoy the pics for now, I did a mediocre job cleaning it, I'll do the 4000 later.  

…

[CPUWIZ]

Minor rust damage, but I got it pretty clean and the inside is mint.  Looks like a fairly new card in there. 

 

 

[phoenixdownita]

1 hour ago, CPUWIZ said:

Minor rust damage, but I got it pretty clean and the inside is mint.  Looks like a fairly new card in there. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the duct tape covering?

 

Also according to https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1153 the octagon needs rom 6.10+ to run on a 68060 (due to movep)… just saying … given the tf4060 is almost out 😜 but I guess that’s a problem for the lucky receiver.

[CPUWIZ]

1 hour ago, phoenixdownita said:

What’s the duct tape covering?

 

Also according to https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1153 the octagon needs rom 6.10+ to run on a 68060 (due to movep)… just saying … given the tf4060 is almost out 😜 but I guess that’s a problem for the lucky receiver.

 

Another port, old man didn't want to accidentally plug shit into the wrong port would be my guess.

[eightbit]

These look amazing!! 

[eightbit]

2 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Also according to https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1153 the octagon needs rom 6.10+ to run on a 68060 (due to movep)… just saying … given the tf4060 is almost out 😜 but I guess that’s a problem for the lucky receiver.

 

Shouldn't be too much of an issue. After a little Aminet digging I found the 6.10 ROM to allow the 68060 play nice with the card:

 

https://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/oktagon

 

Edited Sunday at 06:51 PM by eightbit