Amiga A1222 Plus box …

Is it a render… is it the real deal… time will tell….. (now bring on the boards)

In an exciting collaboration of Amiga technology companies, ACube Systems, AAA Technology and A-EON Technology have come together to announce the production version of the long awaited A1222+ computer. This joint effort brings a new era of collaborative computing for Amiga enthusiasts by leveraging the expertise and resources of the three companies. The A1222+ is custom designed to run AmigaOS 4.x and also supports compatible Linux PowerPC operating systems as well as AmigaOS 3.x under emulation. The motherboard’s compact and robust design is powered by NXP’s QorIQ P1022 dual-core PowerPC processor running at 1.2 GHz. It is supplied with version 2.3 of A-EON’s Enhancer software package which includes advanced video and graphics drivers and a whole host of updated applications, utilities and datatypes. ACube Systems have already successfully produced updated A1222+ v1.3 prototypes and will manage the new motherboard production and testing while AAA Technology will act as the main distributor for the new Amiga machine

 

Browservice Linux Setup and usage with AmigaOne X5000

Browservice: Browser as a Service

A web “proxy” server that enables browsing the modern web on historical browsers. It works by rendering the browser viewport into images, which are then shown by a JavaScript application running on the client browser.

STEP 1:

SSH into your linux box (as root) and add a user for the use of Browservice.

sudo adduser browservice

When done SSH into you linux box as the user you just created. In my case it is the user browservice

I create a Browservice directory in the homedir of the browservice user called Browservice

mkdir Browservice

STEP 2:

Cd into the Browservice directory

cd Browservice

Download the latest version of Browservice.

wget https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice/releases/download/v0.9.6.5/browservice-v0.9.6.5-x86_64.AppImage

chmod +x browservice-v0.9.6.5-x86_64.AppImage

STEP 3:

Run browservice using the following command: (use the IP of your own browservice machine in the command.

./browservice-v0.9.6.5-x86_64.AppImage –vice-opt-http-listen-addr=192.168.22.36:8080

Let install the Verdana Font as requested

./browservice-v0.9.6.5-x86_64.AppImage –install-verdana

Ready for Action

Now fire up Odessey browser on your Amiga and navigate to http://(ip.of.your.browservice):8080

The first time you navigate to this IP nothing might happen. The second time you will see the Browservice navigation bar appear.

Have Fun!

 

 

My X5000 with AMD RX570 and HD5450 graphics

As you could have read in one of my previous posts is my AmigaOne X5000 equipped with an AMD RX570 graphics card. The use of the RX line of cards allows us to use the VA library. The Video Acceleration Library has been created to support hardware video decoding on Radeon Polaris (RX) cards. For us AmigaOS4.x users this is a very welcome addition to the use of our beloved OS and X5000.

The downside to switching to an RX based graphics card is not having support in the Linux kernel for this. This results in losing the ability to use LInux on the X5000. The only option I could think of was adding a second graphics card to bring Linux back to the machine.

As there are some posts on the hyperion forum referring to the setup of two graphics cards in the X5000 I thought it would be nice to write about my own setup.

Choosing what card to use.
Since the PCIe X16 slot is already in use for the RX570 card it leaves us with the PCI and PCIe X1 slots to choose from. The PCIe X4 slot in the X5000 is due to bad design blocked by the PCIe X16 graphics card so cannot be used. As PCI graphic cards are hard to find and very outdated (like Radeon 9250) a PCIeX1 card would be the better choice . Finding a PCIe X1 radeon/amd based graphics card is an option, but I tried using a PCIe X16 to X1 converter as those converters are easy to find and cheap due to the whole crypto mining landscape these days. As having a usable linux system for me is more important than the ability of playing games, the performance is not a big issue and a PCIe X1 slot would be good enough.

By using a converter you have many cards to choose from. I started with a Firepro RV620 based normal size graphics card but eventually got it replaced. I could not find a decent way to fit the card in my X5000 case.

For me the best way was to use a low profile Radeon graphics card (MSI HD5450), as this card leaves us the space we need for use of the converter board.
This card also has DVI and HDMI outputs so any monitor can be used, and the connectors are where I want them to be, on the back of the machine.

The monitor.
I first made the choice of attaching both graphic cards to the same monitor. As this is usable, the downside is having to switch input when starting up Linux. As my Philips monitor does not have great buttons and an OSD menu to do the switching, I am using a second monitor attached to the new graphics card just for Linux use.

The result.
So there we have it. The AmigaOne X5000 with RX card for the best OS4 experience and the option to run Linux by using a second graphics card. All stuffed away in the X5000 case and ready for action.

To do.
At the moment the Linux graphics card (HD5450) is using the FBdev (driver) in the Xorg.conf so hardware acceleration is limited… (i think there is a way to make use of hardware acceleration by using the GPU) The other thing will be making use of just on big Linux drive with several partitions instead of two drives.

Thanks.
Big thanks go to the captain of the Amiga Linux Development community, Christian Zigotzky and of course all forum members who keep the scene going. Thank you!

17/2/2022 UPDATE!

As mentioned before the FBdev issue has now been solved. This means that we now have Hardware 3D support. YEAH!!! It was hard to find the correct xorg.conf values needed to get things going…

 

GLXINFO!
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: AMD CEDAR (DRM 2.50.0 / 5.17.0-rc4_A-EON_X5000, LLVM 12.0.1)
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.2 (Core Profile) Mesa 21.3.3
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 1.50
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 3.1 Mesa 21.3.3
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL extensions:
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 2.0 Mesa 21.3.3
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0.16
OpenGL ES profile extensions:
My Xorg.conf to get it up and running!
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Monitor0”
EndSection
Section “Device”
Identifier “Device1”
Driver “radeon”
EndSection
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AIGLX” “on”
EndSectionSection “Module”
Load “dri”
Load “dri2”
Load “dbe”
Load “glx”
Load “type1”
Load “freetype”
Load “record”
EndSection

Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “Enable”
Option “RENDER” “Enable”
Option “RANDR” “Enable”
Option “DAMAGE” “Enable”

Option “GLX” “Enable”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0”
Device “Device0”
Monitor “Monitor0”
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Viewport 0 0
EndSubSection
EndSection

Amiga X5000 Maintenance and Upgrade 2022

Since 2017 my AmigaOne X5000 has been running with the same Gelid Silent 6 Fan. Since a few days, that Silent became Noisy so it was time to replace the fan. I already bought two new Silent 6 fans just in case a thing like this would happen. I also had a MSI RX 570 4GB card ready to replace the R7 250 card the X5000 came shipped with. With the RX series we can use the GPU for hardware decoding things like movies to ofload the CPU.

     

SUCCESS!! 🙂

GfxBench2D 2.9 (27.1.2022)
A benchmark tool for graphics cards.
Written by Hans de Ruiter.

Copyright (C) 2011, by Hans de Ruiter, all rights reserved
————————————————————

System Information:
OS: AmigaOS Release 4.1 – Final Edition Update 2
Motherboard: AmigaOne X5000/20
CPU: Freescale P5020 (E5500 core), 1.2 @ 1.995 GHz
L1 Cache Size: 32768, L2 Cache Size: 524288, L3 Cache Size: 0
Total RAM: 2 GiB
External Bus (FSB) Speed: 798 MHz
Exec.library version: 54.30
Graphics.library version: 54.248
Intuition.library version: 54.28
Picasso96API.library version: 54.18
Rtg.library version: 54.90

Opening screen: RTG-0:Board 0:1920×1080

Board name: Radeon RX Polaris10
Product ID: 0x67df Vendor ID: 0x1002 SubProduct ID: 0x3416 SubVendor ID: 0x1462
Board driver: PCIGraphics.card (53, 18)
Chip driver: RadeonRX.chip (2, 5)
VRAM: 4 GiB
Display mode: 1920×1080@61 (32 bpp)