Captain's Log / star date 2009.0115
With the holidays over and everything back to normal I've had some more time to tinker with my Amigas. As you may (or may not) recall from one of my earlier posts, I originally had the idea to do a retro survival of sorts using just my A500. Basically the plan was to see how much I could do with an A500 without resorting to my modern day iMac. Unfortunately the time that was really left to play with my Amigas during the festive season was way less than I had originally anticipated which prompted me to delay the project.
Now that I have some more time I have started to slowly configure my A500. The A500 is actually an A500 Plus with 2 MB of Chip RAM. There's a Viper 530 accelerator inside which has a 68030 CPU clocked at 50 MHz which is very decent for an A500! The Viper 530 has an additional 16 MB of 32-bit Fast RAM mounted. I installed an IDE-Compact Flash adapter and hooked up a 1GB Compact Flash card to the 2.5-inch IDE port of the Viper 530 to serve as a hard drive. I partitioned the drive as follows:
DH0: 5MB for Workbench 1.3
DH1: 5MB for Workbench 2
DH2: 10MB for Workbench 3.1
DH3: 100MB for Apps
DH4: 100MB for Documents
DH5: 780MB for Storage
This is a scheme I've used for quite some time. The first three partitions are used for installations of Workbench 1.3, 2.04 and 3.1 respectively. The Viper 530 has a 68000 fallback mode which allows me to use the A500's onboard Kickstart, which is a 1.3 ROM. If I ever need WB2.x for any reason I'll soft kick it. To have the correct partition boot at startup I will place some code in the startup-sequence on DH0: which detects the current Kickstart and continues to boot from the appropriate partition (I will post the code here when done).
The other partitions are used for apps (and HD installable games), documents, downloads and other stuff. After I had installed Workbench 3.1 from floppy I proceeded to install and configure AmiTCP 3.0b2 and AmiPPP. I'm using a PPP connection over the A500's serial port. The serial port is connected via a null modem cable to a Mac Mini which has a PPP daemon running and acts as a gateway to Internet. My A500 is online! :-) It's slow as hell, because AmiPPP is unregistered and seems to cut the already abysmal effective speed in half. Unfortunately AmiPPP can't be registered anymore, so I'm going to see if I can replace it with an alternative in the near future that doesn't throttle the bandwidth.
After I got my A500 online I used ncFTP to download and install HippoPlayer off Aminet and downloaded a couple of my old Protracker mods from my network storage server. While listening to those delicious tunes I continued to install Tracksaver which is a nice ADF creator/writer, which always comes in handy. As soon as I get more time I'll be installing MUI (extra GUI functionality in Workbench), IBrowse (a browser) and more!
