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).

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