Wednesday, March 27, 2013

A600: Fun AmigaSYS testing and some recent OS additions

Hey peepz,

After my latest video (thanks for the nice comments btw), I decided to try more stuff to my system.
First of all and just for FUN purposes I decided to convert AmigaSYS 4 AGA to ECS :P
I really think that AmigaSYS is a nice compilation which has it's follower although, I'm not of them.
Sorry folks, ClassicWB all teh way! So... WHO said that AmigaSYS can't run on ECS machines? :D

This is what my custom AmigaSYS 4 AGA for my ECS environment looks like (it is also upgraded to latest version and ofc OS3.9).

This is the custom BootPic that I created @ 640x512 resolution, which was remapped to the standard 8 colors MagicWB palette via ImageStudio and saved as IFF-ILBM format, that replaced the original AGA ones for A1200/4000.



...and this is the custom environment that works just fine under ECS. Wallpapers, titlebar, along with some changes on TinyMeter and MCP occured and as always system runs on a custom Kickstart 3.9 with all recent modules.



Despite I'm not gonna keep the AmigaSYS environment as I really LOVE ClassicWB 3.9, I thought about implementing some things that I liked like the Boot Picture+Sound plus the custom titlebar via MCP.
So... I installed Play16 and PicBoot, I created a custom 640x512 image like the one I did on AmigaSYS and made the required changes to the startup files :)
Also I installed MCP which I never actually used, using only some of it's patches and hacks so my systems is acting just fine and it's responsive and stable as before.

Here you can see the PicBoot image that I created...



...and this is what the Workbench screen looks like with the new titlebar info :)
A lot nicer than the standard look (Workbench, Chip RAM, Fast RAM). You can also notice a nice custom icon for ToolsManager made for HippoPlayer hehe.



As always, I wanted to make the new options fully customizable so I can Enable/Disable them whenever I wanted, so I used the awesome Bloodwych menus and settings based on BMX (ButtonMenu).
Here you can see the custom mouse menu that leads to Settings ---> Components and from there to MCP and PicBoot settings. Pressing one of the buttons, gives a new Enable/Disable option like the other settings from Bloodwych :)



You can't imagine how much I'm enjoying my A600 with all these beefed optiond. Fun times for sure.

EDIT: Some days ago I thought of shooting a video about a fellow Amigan (Retrofan from EAB) to show him how MAS-Player can stream Internet Radio via AmigaAMP. As you can see from the follow video bellow it does that nicely :)



Stay tuned for more stuff soon \o/


Saturday, March 16, 2013

A600: Some minor overclock plus some new video

Hey guys, long time no see :)

I've been tinkering a lot my A600's environment all this time plus making some efforts for my GREX 4000 but that will come in a different article in the following weeks.

So... hardware-wise I ordered an full ceramic MC68030@50MHz CPU from Amibay having the latest mask in order to replace my ACA's plastic MC68030@33MHz.
Not a big deal but I had to try :)

I removed the old CPU, putted the new one and this is how it looked without the heatsink on.



I used the 80MHz oscillator that I had, in case I managed to use it @ 40MHz and system booted just fine.
I also made some nice benchmarks etc... but after 3-4 minutes system crashed so I can say with certainty that on my accelerator 40MHz overclocking is not an option.

I changed the oscillator to an 72MHz one (thanks to Fitzsteve who send me one spare of his) and it worked like a charm! After hours of keeping my A600 on... I NEVER had a single crash or Guru!!! \o/
Not bad having an 15% speed increase by all means :)
If in the future I manage to find an 75MHz oscillator I will try that as well in case it works and that's it.
Btw... EVEN after many hours... the original heatsink (that I re-attached with a new thermal pad) gets only a bit warm. With the previous CPU even @ 30MHz the heatsink was very hot alas I had put a fan for safety. Now @ 36MHz hot is not an issue and ofc I removed the fan as it had no meaning :)

Some of the new stuff I tinkered on my Workbench installation was to install PeterK's 46.4.279 icon.library which give a nice 15-20% speed increase from what I can tell. Really shows nicely when I open PNG etc icons but I will let you be the judge of that :)
I also made some changes in the VisualPrefs skins and settings plus I also installed X-bEnCH and made some nice changes in scripts/startup-scripts and custom BMenu entries to support it.

To conclude this article...this is a new video that I put today on YouTube that has a small revision of what my system boots and acts like. I hope you like it :)
(I suggest you to see it on YouTube's website and change the resolution to 720p as I uploaded it in HD for better viewing).



Stay tuned...