AmigaOS on x86

This article will guide you through the process of installing Amithlon (a system which allows near-full use of computer's resources by using linux kernel to boot a modified version of UAE emulating an Amiga) and AmigaOS 3.9 for software development, creative work and nostalgia.

21st April 2005

Contents
1. Introduction
2. Preperation
3. Installation
4. Additional Information

Part 1 - Introduction

The Amithlon project was designed to allow users to run AmigaOS 3.9 on cheap, x86 hardware. Distributed on a bootable CD, it is comprised of a custom Linux kernel, modified version of UAE (UNIX Amiga Emulator) with WinUAE sources (iirc) which allows AmigaOS run near-natively. Kernel modules can be inserted into the Kernel using tools written for AmigaOS (which, strangely enough - have been compiled for x86-Amithlon/AmigaOS using a custom GCC tool-chain.

Amithlon allows direct access to the x86 hardware through the Linux kernel, which means any hardware which the Kernel supports - Amithlon will also (assuming you have AmigaOS-side code to support it).

The full history of the Commodore Amiga is a long and complicated one (and exceeds the scope of this tutorial), but anyone who has ever owned an Amiga will know how popular and great these machines were.

In 1985, Commodore released the first finished Amiga (the A1000) at the Lincoln Centre in New York. It boasted a Motorola 68000 CPU (running at 7mhz), 256k Chip RAM and custom graphics and sound chips. It was a monster of a computer for it's time, and beat Atari's 8-bit computers. Being 8-Bit, 4 channel stereo sound and the amazing graphics power - it was certainly impressive. Unfortunately, costing £1,500 discouraged people from purchasing an Amiga, so many people went for the Atari 8-Bits

The A1000 was more of a business/office computer, so the people who could afford it probably bought it for business use. It wasn't until 1987 when Commodore realeased the A500, which had all the great features of the A1000 plus 256k extra chip RAM, it was smaller, had an RF Modulator (to allow use of a Television instead of a monitor) and best of all was affordable. It was the most powerful and portable all-in-one computer of its day, and had many uses including graphics work, gaming, office work, programming and even had it's uses in the music industry.

Since the A500, Commodore released more computers in two different lines: Business and Multipurpose. The most recent multipurpose computer being the A1200 released in 1992, which sported a whopping Motorola 68EC020 (16Mhz) CPU, 2MB chip RAM, AGA chipset, 16-bit sound and a PCMCIA slot. Nowadays, you can get allsorts of expansions/upgrades including 680{3,4,6}0 and PPC Accelerator cards etc

So, "Why would I want to run an OS for an old computer on my box?" I hear you ask. Well, ofcourse if you wanted to play Amiga games you could just install an emulator in Windows, Linux or *BSD... But it's not very practical for "serious" work. After a long and bumpy ride/wait, Eyetech Ltd and Hyperion Entertainment have kicked Amiga into the present with modern motherboards, modern PPC CPUs and the long-awaited AmigaOS 4.0. Currently, (like most PPC hardware) it's still quite expensive, but not much more than what Amiga 1200s were back in 1992. The cheapest at the moment is the MicroA1 Mk2 for £222 (being released for this price exclusivly for Amiga developers). It has an 800Mhz IBM 750FX (G3) CPU, 256MB SO-DIMM RAM, 16Bit CMI8738 5.1 sound, 32MB Radeon 7000, 3COM 100Mbit/s NIC, USB, Parallel port and a serial port. The operating system itself should be fully released in the near future (Only the pre-release + patches are currently available as of April 2005).

The AmigaOne has great potential... It can be used to do anything you would want to do on Windows and MacOS, and the UNIX Emulation Library greatly improves porting existing Open Source Software to AmigaOS/PPC. At present, the main advantage/development prospects are in the Games Industry but due to the hard work and interest from the Amiga Community, many software titles have already been written or ported.

Amithlon

Part 2 - Preperation

To install AmigaOS near-nativly, you will need the following (Please login to access files):

- Amithlon/AmigaOS-XL CD

(thepiratebay.org::AmigaOS_Amithlon_for_x86)

- A i686-based system (recommended)

- A HardDrive (Atleast 50MB FAT partition, and a 500MB Amiga part.)

- This bootdisk (or this one For SCSI CDROM drives on Adaptec card)

Kernel source is available on request

Your first step should be to make sure that you can boot the Amithlon kernel and AmigaOS on the computer you've chosen to install it on. Try booting from the Amithlon CD; This will not only let you know if it will run OK, but also give you a hint of what to expect. ;)

Luckily, this procedure will be alot easier for you with the bootdisk mentioned above especially if you are going to dedicate your whole drive to AmigaOS (When I first installed Amithlon, everything had to be done manually - It isn't difficult, just a bit of a pain).

Once you have written the floppy image(or remastered the CD, creating a Bootable CD with the image), insert it into your target computer and switch it on. After a short period of time, you should see a menu. If you are wanting to use all of your drive for AmigaOS/Amithlon, select Automatic. This will delete all partitions from your disk, and create 1 FAT partition (for booting from) and our main partition for AmigaOS (Partition type 118 / $76).

If you do not want the installation script to wipe your drive, select Manual from the menu. Run 'fdisk' from the DOS prompt, and create a primary partition (10mb minimum, but 50-100mb recommended as you might need/want to store files there to transfer to AmigaOS later). Now create your AmigaOS partition in the same way you did the DOS partition. You will need to modify the AmigaOS partition type, change it to '118'. The partition should now appear as an "unknown" type, or Amithlon vhd.

At this point you should have atleast 2 new partitions, reboot your computer. One the menu re-appears, select Manual and then format C: drive('format C:' will suffice). And to copy the DOS bootfiles from the floppy to your newly formatted drive, run "sys C:".

Amithlon uses loadlin to boot the Linux kernel which will run the cutomized/modded version of UAE (you didn't expect to be able to run 68k code nativly on an x86, did you?). Insert your Amithlon CD into the drive, and do the following:

copy x:\\syslinux\\* C:\\.
copy x:\\syslinux\\*.gz C:\\
copy x:\\syslinux\\loadlin.exe C:\\
echo @loadlin @small > C:\\autoexec.bat

Linux Users:

If you are installing AmigaOS next to your current Linux installation, just copy the above-mentioned files to your /boot/ partition and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (if using Grub):

title AmigaOS

kernel (hd0,5)/boot/emubox.gz init=/linuxrc
   console_level=0 root=/dev/ram0 vga=769
   ramdisk_size=2310 leavepages=5000

initrd=(hd0,5)/boot/smallird.gz

To tweak the kernel settings, edit the 'small' file if using DOS, or the Grub entry:

console_level
If you would like to see all Kernel and Emulator messages, set this to 4.

leavepages
This dictates how much memory you will give to Amithlon for disk read-caching. Each page is equal to 4k. Never decrease this value(5000).

vga

If you are using the VESA driver for Amithlon, the value here will be the display mode that will be used.*

You are now ready to boot into and install AmigaOS!

Part 3 - Installing

Boot from your Amithlon CD. Once booted, run the HDToolBox... You should notice a virtual drive which name contains "VirtDsk". You should now partition this virtual drive, I suggest having a partition for system files/software and a 2nd for all your other data(archives, documents etc). You should ensure the value of BootPri is higher than that of the BootCD/Ramdisk. AmigaOS will need to reboot after this, and if you followed my advice re: BootPri, AmigaOS should boot. If you get an error, you will have to hold down the Left and Right mouse buttons during boot to enter the Early Startup menu:

From this screen, select "Boot Options..." and modify the boot priority of your drives/devices so that the CD-Rom's disk image will boot before your uninitialised partition.

(N.b. If you don't want to have a lower BootPri value for your virtual disk, leave it as it is and use this menu screen)

Once you are back in AmigaOS, Intuition will prompt you to Format/Initialise your partitions. Do that now, and give them suitable names ('System' and 'Work' are quite traditional ;). Once that has completed, look for the AmigaOS install directory/file on the Amithlon CD, and execute the installer. Most of the steps are simple enough, just remember to select/specify your new system partition as the target. Once installed, you should reboot and remove the install CD. If all has went well, loadlin/Grub will boot the kernel and you will see the Amiga Boing-ball bouncing around the screen, then soon-after, AmigaOS will start. Congratulations, you're now able to use AmigaOS semi-nativly.

Part 4 - Additional Information

A number of patches and a couple of updated kernels have been released since Amithlon was born, some of these are available from the torrent. Each set of patches/updates are accompanied with a ReadMe file which describes the technical details and installation instructions for each.

If you want to access your FAT partition, or need drivers for some other hardware (for Networking, Sound etc), you will need to install atleast one of the newer kernels, and the updates/patches. If you would like to remaster your Amithlon CD with the updated kernel, download this file. You may want to compile your own kernel to use with Amithlon, the source for the "newkernel" kernel is available on request.

The torrent for Amithlon is provided for AmigaROM 3.1 owners who would like to run OS3.9 on their x86 machines. Anyone who doesn't own the 3.1 ROMs "should" buy a set from an Amiga dealer or Ebay.