Back for the future...

My AmigaONE 500 has been gathering dust for the best part of a year after moving house and the birth of our baby daughter. It has been a busy year with all the nappy changes and sleepless nights with the house needing more work than I initially thought. Finally now the renovation work on the house is slowing down as the bulk of the major work is done and my back account has dried up.

A few weeks ago my wife tasked me to ’sort out’ the corner of our bedroom where I had been stock piling all my ’junk’. Mostly DVDs and blu–rays, but amongst it all nestled my A1–500.  So got the A1–500 setup again but have only started using it in the past week really, prompted by the need to generate a registration key for someone who kindly ordered an Assist.

Disappearing SSD in Media Toolbox

A strange thing happened with my SSDs while the A1-500 was in 'storage', the larger of the two drives was not appearing on Workbench or in Media Toolbox. I checked all the SATA leads thinking something must have worked lose, but all looked fine. Not having time to investigate further I left it, but after a few more power ups it reappeared and has been there ever since.

Not sure what to make of the disappearing SSD as have little experience with them. Should I ditch the second SSD and squeeze everything on the primary drive for now? I’m a bit concerned it might disappear again and not return.

Amiga Workbench

Anyway, I’ve discovered a few half finsihed blog posts so I'm going to get them finished off and posted in the coming weeks. Watch this space!

AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Review

I recently updated my AmigaONE 500 to AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition (FE) and have decided to write this review giving my first impressions of this 'final' update of AmigaOS 4.1.

Installing AmigaOS 4.1 FE must be done as a fresh install, from scratch, there is no update option. With this in mind I backed up my existing system to a CD-ROM and made a start. Knowing that writing to JXFS formatted drives is no longer possible under FE I also backed up the rest of my SSD.

Having backed everything up I inserted the FE disc expecting it to boot automatically, no luck. I tried changing the boot priorities in U-Boot, but to no avail. Next I swapped around the optical and SSD drive's SATA cables and the problem was solved. It seems the optical drive must be plugged into the SATA port nearest the motherboard to work as a boot device. Before updating AmigaOS I also added an additional SSD to my AmigaONE 500 and while doing this I must have replugged the SATA cables in a different order.

The optical drive's SATA cable connected to the correct port

Finally...

After what seems like a long wait since pre-ordering back in December my copy of OS 4.1 Final Edition arrived today, as did the mouse mat and calendar I ordered at the same time. Looking forward to getting the A1-500 updated sometime over the next week!

CANDI Store

A few days ago I made my first AMIStore purchases, Workbench CANDI and the RadeonHD 2.4 driver.

AMIStore

I'll start with the RadeonHD driver. For me this was an upgrade from the 1.2 driver and I was pleased with the upgrade price which I felt was reasonable, however it was disappointing to find a transaction charge and VAT added at the PayPal checkout. As I understand from what I've read on the forums A-EON are currently looking at how they can incorporate these into the prices shown in AMIStore's 'shopfront'. I can appreciate that this may not be a straight forward task as different countries will have different sales taxes and I would guess PayPal makes these extras easier to manage. In terms of downloading the software AMIStore worked well and was very quick to notice that I had paid for the software through PayPal. It is nice to get such instant gratification without the usual wait for key files by email or CD-ROMs in the post. I can also see myself buying more AmigaOS software now with AMIStore making it so convenient.

In terms of the RadeonHD driver's features there is not much I can say until there is some software out that supports the driver's new features. I'm eagerly awaiting the new version of MPlayer and have fingers crossed for smooth playback of 720p video on the AmigaONE 500.

Dual Screens on the AmigaONE 500

I recently acquired an 'old' Dell LCD display from my dad who found it lurking in the back of a cupboard. I say 'old' because it doesn't seem to have been used and is suspected to have come with a PC some years ago and then for some reason was put away and forgotten about. I decided to put the screen to some use and hook it up to my AmigaONE 500.

I had heard of the possibility of running dual screens on the AmigaONE 500 and was curious to give it a try. My machine has a Radeon HD card connected to a more modern Philips LED display, leaving the motherboard's onboard graphics chip unused. So I connected the Dell display to the motherboard's VGA port and took a look at MUI to see if I could get one of the various MUI screens to use the onboard graphics chip rather than the Radeon HD. This turned out to be pretty simple and just a case of selecting one of the in-built graphics chip's screen modes (see below).

X500 Plus Mechanical Keyboard

I'm typing this post on my new X500 Plus mechanical keyboard which I picked up from the Post Office this morning. It's so good I felt compelled to write a review and post a few photos!

As you may be aware Loriano Pagni has produced a set of replacement keys for Cherry MX keyboards which he has designed to be the closest match to the Amiga's original keys possible. Loriano wanted a keyboard to complement his excellent X500 Plus computer case and he has done a great job! You can find out more about his keyboard project in this forum thread.

As I don't own an X500 Plus case myself I opted for a standalone USB keyboard to complement my AmigaONE 500. I really liked the look of Loriano's white and beige key set, which looks really authentic, unfortunately he didn't have any white keyboard shells and the black version also matchs my AmigaONE 500's case.

Updated Odyssey Web Browser

Earlier this week an updated version of the Odyssey Web Browser was released for AmigaOS 4.1 that includes HTML5 video and audio support! This means you can finally playback YouTube videos in the the web browser amongst other things. First impressions of Odyssey 1.23 are very good and despite the slow HTML5 video playback on my AmigaONE 500 it is certainly closer to being usable than Timberwolf. Apparently the speed of playback will improve once overlay support arrives, so for now I will still use getVideo but it's a step in the right direction all the same.

Odyssey 1.23 playing a YouTube video

Another nice 'feature' I just discovered is that Odyssey is able to upload photos to Blogger, something that previously wasn't working for me. Many thanks to all the developers involved, you're hard work is much appreciated!

M.A.C.E.

M.A.C.E. follows in the footsteps of classic shoot 'em ups like R-Type with the addition of high definition graphics and online scoreboards. I bought the game from amigakit in the summer and have been meaning to write a short review ever since!

As you can see from the photos I bought a Speedlink Competition Pro USB joystick to go with the game. Both arrived carefully packaged from amigakit and in good time.

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Kicklayout

Two weeks back I decided to have a go at shaving a few seconds of my AmigaONE 500's boot time. I did this by editing the the 'Kicklayout' file, a file which determines what kickstart modules are loaded at boot. I knew this process was hazardous, possibly resulting in the machine failing to boot if the wrong line was commented out, however having done this on my old Sam440flex I decided to have a go.

Playing DVDs on the AmigaONE 500

DvPlayer

I finally managed to play a DVD on an Amiga! So what?

Well, I bought DvPlayer, a video player for playing back DVDs amongst other formats, two years back and never successfully played a DVD with it on my Sam440flex. This all changed on Friday.

Battle of the Radeons

In the search for a suitable Radeon HD card for my new AmigaONE 500 I hunted for some of the recommended cards on eBay and found there were many to choose from. However, I soon discovered many Radeon HD cards are double height and although these might work they are not practical in the AmigaONE 500 as below the PCIe slot is the motherboard's one PCI slot occupied by a SATA board. Despite this I found a good selection of single height cards and ended up the winning bidder on two cards:

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5450 1 GB

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5550 1GB

First Impressions

A couple of months back I received an email from amigakit inviting me to to order an AmigaONE X1000. I had registered interest in the X1000 some time before and joined the queue for this flagship AmigaOS system. I was disappointed to discover the price had crept up, due to rising CPU prices, with the configuration I wanted now coming in at almost £2300. To be honest I think the long wait also took the shine off the prospect of an X1000 for me. Eventually I contacted amigakit to let them know I was going to pass on the offer and instead decided to take a second look at ACube's AmigaONE 500.

The AmigaONE 500 is a system based on ACube's Sam460ex motherboard. I already have a Sam440flex which I have had a lot of use out of over the last few years, but fancied an upgrade. I decided to order the AmigaONE 500 SSD edition which came in at less than half the price of the X1000. Although not as powerful as an X1000, and perhaps less 'future proof', the difference in cost ultimately swung the decision for me.

AmigaONE 500 Unboxing

This week my new AmigaONE 500 arrived from ACube. I will post some thoughts on the system soon, in the meantime here are a few unboxing photos. Enjoy!