A600: Some RTG love and recent ClassicWB 3.9 enchancements

Hi my friends.

So many things, so little time but hopefully I'll try and post more stuff from now on.

All this time I'm tinkering my lovely Vampire and my beloved ClassicWB 3.9 system.

I made many changes so I might not remember all but here are some highlights:

• Updated a lot of libs, utilities and programs to latest versions
• Changed whole iconset from MagicWB to Ken's Icons (OMG only that alone is TONZ of work)
• Added "Theme Support". This includes the following options:
• <None>
• VisualPrefs (with a new OS4.0 theme edited by myself)
• AfA OS (it still doesn't work since it requires FPU but if you mount the system to WinUAE and add FPU then it works just fine). Also it's ready for when FPU implementation is done on the Vampire.
• Updated a lot my Startup-Sequence cleverly so I can mount my CF card both on Amiga and my PC (via WinUAE) using the same system without any changes. IT ROX so much having the same environment without having to change monitor, screenmode, settings etc, and what's best... either in real A600 or WinUAE every change is saved in each environment!
• Changed many options on ToolPrefs menu adding stuff like:
• Converting images to icons (thumbnails)
• Replacing backdrops on the fly either on windows or workbench screen
• Replaced ToolsManager Dock with WBDock by Thomas Rapp
• Added many utilities and tools. Some I remember are:
• SwazInfo that replaced RawWBInfo (I like it more)
• PowerWindows (for moving windows wherever I want on the screen)
• ReqAttack for changing all requesters
• Changed all my assigns from all places to be managed by MCP
• Installed Clould Handlers (after also registering them just for the support)
• Made a lot of new backdrops with Vampire theme (lol) which I will put at the end of the post for anyone that wants to grab any :)

You can check the video bellow that shows some of these features live. I suggest to open it on YouTube where you can also view it up to HD (1080p) quality.

Here are the backdrops that you can grab :)

   

    

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...

A600: Recent updates and a new video

Hey peepz just thought of sharing my latest updates since lately I've been tinkering my A600 a lot softwarewise :)
It's going really stable all this time, and I'm enjoying it very much.

Listening to music while I chat, or making custom Kickstarts is so enjoyable, and I run it on daily basis without a single crash.

Latest updates were:

• Attaching a silent 40x40x10 Scythe/Kaze fan on ACA630 (just for safety)

• Upgrading an NetGear MA401 PCMCIA Wi-Fi NIC (firmware+station) in order to be able to support WPA2 encryption that my home network uses! No delay at all :) There is an awesome guide by a guy Hiddenevil (over A.org) on his blog here.
• Tinkering my OS as much as possible. Also with the help of PeterK (author of the newest Icon.library) I managed to be able displaying all possible icons under WB3.1 like GlowIcons, NewIcons, OS4 icons and even DualPNG Ken's Icons. Ofc colors aren't that great (since my WB only uses 8color palette) but still quite impressive. The thread concerning changes of some ClassicWB files can be found over EAB here.

I also made a quick video last night to see how my system is going on :)
I converted it to 480p (from FullHD) this time in case it looks a bit better so probably it's nicer than the previous ones (better use full screen, or change to the native YouTube page that has more options on resolutions).

I hope you like it :)

Stay tuned \o/

A1200: Checking out my former lady :)

Hi peepz and I wish a good year to everyone :)

Last week was kinda painful cause I didn't have my A4000 to tinker, since I sent it's motherboard to Cosmos for general repairs (that will be covered in another thread though).
That's why I had time to check out the former lady that was sitting patiently in my office after I sold it's powerful heart (BPPC+BVision).

I thought about removing all components to clean them up and take some photos in case I decide to split and sell every part individually.

Those components are...

My modded Idefix Express

My loved Slim IDE DVD-RW with 44pin JAE to IDE adapter and 3way 44pin ribbon cable

My old and trusty Subway USB (Serial No. 13!)

...and one of the Clockport Expanders by DJBase and an EZkey PS/2 adapter

I was very sad to see these go so I decided for now to keep and re-install to my A1200.
The problem existed with Ian's ATX adapter and PicoPSU that for some reason, didn't work as intended. It worked but power button needed pushing A LOT of times which made me rethink about the whole idea of Push-On switch.

After fiddling around Ian's website and some schematics about ATX to Amiga Pinout... I removed Ian's ATX adapter (that took some time as I soldered PicoPSU directly to the adapter - you need to check some older posts to see it) and soldered the appropriate cables into it directly :)
After that, I only needed to wire Pin 13 and Pin 14 of PicoPSU into a simple On/Off switch and that was it.

That's one white nice switch I had on my stash for quite some time (which replaced my old switch that was mounted on Ratte's Auto AGA/RTG switch).

...and here is how I mounted PicoPSU now (without it's connector) into a plastic custom stand

Working really well I might add :)
Check the following 2 photos to get a better general look.

You can also check a quick video I grabbed showing how fast it boots ClassicWB 68k.

Not feeling bad about keeping the lot in the end (at least for now).
Only thing missing right now is an 030 I think... Oh well, ACA1231 is close :)

Stay tuned \o/

A600: Testing my new arrived "Furia S628"

Hi my friends.
Long time no see I know... but after fiddling along with other hardware platform over the weeks I thought of giving a bit of rest to my beloved Amigas :)

So, yesterday I received my very own "Furia S628" accelerator with 2MB Fast RAM and connector for future Fast RAM board.
This was a board that was discussed over EAB at some point. I already have gotten the excellent ACA630@30MHz from Individual Computers but I really wanted to support such an effort so I made a small donation to Boboo just for supporting him a bit :)

Some time ago he completed testing his board so I was given the chance of ordering such a lovely unit!
To follow the whole original thread on AmigaPortal.cz follow this link.
Enough for the long talk... Time for some pr0n :)

So here's the package that arrived yesterday.

Yes it had a 3-wire cable to solder to 3 points in the motherboard... but that will be seen next :)

This is the front side of the PCB with the ceramic (I think) heatsink and the SmartBUS connector.

This is the back side of the PCB with the PLCC connector, the 3-wire connector and the Donators names! (Thanks a lot for this honor Boboo mate) /respect

This was a folded print page that explained where to solder the 3-wire cable onto the A600 motherboard. Not so hard to spot :)

...and this is the actual soldering of my own cables into my A600 Rev.1.5 mobo.

Most awesome part is that the classic El'Cheapo angled female 44pin CF2IDE adapters fit like a glove with "Furia S628" (not to mention it holds the accelerator in place better).

Well, I present you with a video that I uploaded on YouTube that shows a mini test performance of "Furia S628".
The test was made using Bloodwych's ClassicWB 68k and it's test without and with the Furia in place.

As you can see from the video, the results are MORE than impressive and Furia seems to work really well with many WHDLoad games that I tested :)
It's a really nice addition and the future FastRAM module that will be attached to the SmartBUS connector would be even better!
The installation is really straightforward and Plug&Play (once you solder the 3-wires).

The memory lacks 512KB of memory that can be added by using the AutoAddRAM command using the following file that was taken from the AmigaPortal.cz Furia thread:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939939/Furia/FuriaS628_AddRAM.lha
Just adding the following command before SetPatch in Startup-Sequence is enough :)
C:AutoAddRAM >NIL:

Also a better resolution connector photo can be downloaded from here as well:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939939/Furia/FuriaS628_Connector.pdf

That wasn't such a thorough review, but a test of this amazing accelerator which really gives a nice boost to our beloved A600's!
Once the extra memory module will be ready, it will be a LOT better than the A608 :)

Boboo mate, great job! Keep up the good work \o/

A4000: Custom circuit for Auto AGA/RTG switch

Hey my friends,

It's not have been a long time since my previous post but trust me... I was waiting some things to arrive alas I couldn't write without having stuff in my hands :)

Anyway, since a long time I was wondering what I was gonna do with the manual switch that Ratte's Auto AGA/RTG switch had. Don't get me wrong I love my Auto switch but I really dislike the classic stick switches.
Sadly On/Off/On switches don't have a great variety and for a round one... the smallest I could find had a diameter of 21mm which is really big to mount.
Then it struck me... Why wouldn't I put an awesome momentary Push-On switch that has an embedded LED on it and mount it on the obsolete position if the keylock switch???

Well I ordered the switch and voila... IT REALLY fits like a glove...

In the previous photos I just supplied voltage to the LED to test it out.

So... I had the switch... so now I needed the circuit that would make my Push-On click... to transform to On/Off/On states (and loop back). I made a thread on Amibay about it but on the meantime I asked a good electronic friend of mine (Mike) to bring an idea about that.
After searching a bit he told me he has done something similar in the past with an CD4017 IC. After getting the PinOuts we designed a circuit that was simple enough.
The IC used was indeed an CD4017 that has 10 outputs. Since I only wanted 3 outputs (On/Off/On) we fed the 4th output into the RESET on IC so it loops back to the start once the 3 output switches :)

You can check it out in case you wanna try something like this in the future :)
So... after getting the parts that was needed, and after 2-3 hours of assembling the prototype board, there was it. You can see the sockets for the IC and the relays plus the headers.

I soldered a couple of LEDS to female headers to be able to try out the output LEDS on the PCB

...and the first TEST (after some troubleshooting) was successful!!!

• Left LED = ON
• No LED = OFF
• Right LED = ON

 

Since everything worked fine, I needed to cut the remaining unused veroboard and mount the PCB inside A4000's faceplate :)

I used some dual foamy sticky tape that insulated and hold the veroboard solid as a rock inside A4000's faceplate. Wires from Push-On button on header plus a custom Molex to Fan+12V power for my PCB was made :)

And that's about it!!!

Because I'm sure you're pretty weird how that thing works... how about a little video about it?
(I'm also testing Line-In of Delfina because some peepz requested it).

Enjoy :)


Edit:
You can check out also a really clever and nice implementation using Arduino by my Amiga friend Claes. Check out his solution on his blog here.

A1200: Playing Crysis... :)

Some time ago I thought of doing something cool cause I was curious how will it look :)

I got a clip of 1280x1024 of Crysis and based on it I made the following steps:

• Exported pictures from video (527 pics for about 1min of video)
• Downsized all pictures to 640x512 (Original /2)
• Converted all pictures to 16 color IFF format including Floyd-Steinberg dithering (using ImageStudio and Rebel's Palette). For not doing that 527 times (not a good way to suicide) I created a script in ImageStudio and all was great :)
• Putted all pictures to an 527 pictures animation file under PPaint (one-by-one. Ok that suxed a bit but it wasn't so painful)

Result is really cool if you imagine that is only 16 colors!!!

OFC don't expect for it to run ok on 030. You can see that even in my 060@60MHz it's a bit slow (despite loading the animation file to RAM!)

File size of the animation file is ~54MB for 1.07min of video LOL!
I uploaded the anim to my Dropbox for anyone's wanna check it out on WinUAE or 060 Amiga.
Link here.

I hope you like it :)

A1200: Booting OS4.1 + Debian videos

As I haven't made in a past any video of my A1200 booting alternative OSes, I thought about making a couple more vids of the beasty running:

- Amiga OS4.1:

- Debian PPC:

Not anything fancy but stock boot and some fiddling around.

Enjoy

A1200: OS upgrade + more

Well not an actual hardware upgrade... But a software one that is

I was tinkering the last days with a custom ClassicWB 3.9 installation on my beasty.

So atm the system is working on a special Bloodwych's ClassicWB 3.9 version that contains BB1 through BB4, CGX4, AfAOS 4.7 (+Ken's Icons+Antialiased fonts), WarpDT, HSMathLibs, Oxypatcher plus lotsa Programs and Internet applications.
It has installed drivers for my Delfina and Subway USB along with Remus, Genesis and all is running @ 1360x768 resolution that is the native resolution of my Samsung 23" LCD/TV (tinkering CGX mode to get the best result took me more than 30mins).



Ofc that wouldn't be so perfect if it wasn't running on uber Custom Kickstart 3.9 EPROM that contains all the BB4 modules, plus Cosmos latest SCSI.device, PeterK's latest Icon.library plus some extra modules like BPPCFix, Morelibspace (from AfA OS).

Rebootless loading as fast as possible was needed for this elegant beast that now works like a charm having the goods from all worlds
- Bloodwych's awesome environment and l33t DOpus configuration
- RTG + DualPNG Icons + Antialiased fonts
- Many proggies for all taste and custom making (Remus, ImageStudio + Rebel's palette etc).


System runs stable and quick and I'm really happy with it. You can check a quick video I took some minutes ago here:

I just wish I had an A4000 with Deneb to be able to make custom ROMage along with Guides and How-To's... Oh well who knows... I might get lucky @ some point

Cheers