How to make a FAST Amiga using Amithlon from old PC hardware

E477: in December 2023 I attended the World of Commodore show. During this event I was gifted a boxed copy of Amithlon OS3.9xl from Mr Ranko from minimig.ca , i also was able to pick up a AMD Athlon XP circa 1999 on the Free table. Today we build a basic Amithlon machine from it. Any old pc can do this, it can be picky with QNX for the "XL" , but the AMD Athlon XP around 1999-2007 work great. i have purchased many on eBay for less than 50$
Its Dangerous to go alone, take this!
Amithlon -
archive.org/de...
get Freedos 1.0 here :
archive.org/de...
snkbittens blog files , patches, alt instructions -
amithlon.snkbi...
Amithlon Facebooger group
/ amithlon
Amithlon on Aminet:
aminet.net/sea...
e-uae
aminet.net/pack...
euaeload -
aminet.net/pack...
whdload -
www.whdload.de
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/ chrisedwardsrestoration
Or a one time Paypal donation at paypal.me/macp... you should see a irish captain picard. holding a green beer.
(you will see)

[@proteque]

I thought this was the future at one point! Buildt myself a PC with all hardware supported. Sadly it was not the future. A fun revisit.

[@Dettol68]

Chris we love you, and the production quality, never improve it, it is perfect right now!

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

I think i could do better but i am just one old dude

[@pkf4124]

This is why I collected up all the 2000. Era PC crap when I was in charge of the recycling of old systems where I used to work. Those old Cheiftech cases are excellent for Amithlon builds.

[@MrLukealbanese]

You know how to excite a man Chris. Amithlon.... aaaahhhhh

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

wait till next weeks cover, you will be excited. then you will see me and be like damn....

[@dMasterOfMayhem]

Dr is in the house! Love these amithlon builds from Dr Chris. Did one last year.

[@skideric]

DAMN! You the Amithlon KING Chris !!

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

well Tom (snkbitten) is the king, i am but a mere Amiga servant.

[@HivernaalChannel]

Thank you ! I made one for my old A4000T (empty) tower and now it's great !

[@jjock3239]

Excellent! Thank you.

[@LukeAGuest]

First time seeing Amithlon, never had it bitd.

[@psteier]

A classic CS601 case - damn memories... ;)

[@LeftoverBeefcake]

Yeah it's kinda nostalgic to see an old case I had pop up on KZbin. Although mine was tricked out with cold cathode lights, red plexiglass cover on the power supply, red rounded IDE and floppy cables and a big Dodge Viper logo sticker on the big plexiglass door. It was the early 2000's and case modding was all the rage, that's my excuse... :)

[@DarrenJCrawford]

At one point in this video I could hear Chris Tucker, Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth. 😄 Thanks for the info, that will come in handy. Take care

[@JamesHalfHorse]

Ahh the classic Chieftec case used by basically everyone to build gaming rigs and servers at the time. I think even Alienware used them at one time. I might still have some partial ones around the shop.

[@chipsnfishnl]

Another nice one Chris. For Kernel 4, it seems it needs root=/dev/ram1 instead of root=/dev/ram0 like kernel310. I'm still trying to set my Amithlon up. Got all working except for AHI sound from my soundblaster so far. I was so picky with my components, going of snkbittens list and you just seem to grab any AMD board and just go with it :)

[@evilbobbins]

Damn I used to have that Chieftech case in green, its the same as the early (pre Dell) Alienwear ones :)

[@chaoticsystem2211]

aaaaw! a rattler case... i have ptsd from them also, i didn't know that noctua made cases in the past...

[@danielktdoranie]

I need to try this m. I have a bunch of old 32-bit and 64-bit PCs in storage. I understand the IBM ThinkPad T-42 2373 works well with Amiga XL with all the hardware supported. Sadly one in good condition goes for like $200 on eBay and I am not paying that LOL

[@Supercruiser5000]

Nice work :)

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@Supercruiser5000]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration I actually like the speed in which you crank through it. No farking about 👍. Oh and that you know your shit ;)

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

@@Supercruiser5000 yeah mona says im full of it!

[@ms-ex8em]

this is really good wow !!!!!!!!!

[@endotherm]

Bernd "Bernie" Meyer periodically graced us with his appearance, and attended our two Amiga User Groups in Melbourne Australia where he was based. He was still active on various Amithlon message boards and support forums, and provided us with a number of "boing bag" patches/upgrades. I admit I haven't kept up with the Amithlon scene and I haven't heard from him for a while, though he is probably still kicking around working on something or other. Amithlon was based around the Athlon processor and interest sort of died out with the popularity of the chip which would explain why you haven't heard from him or the announcement of a V2 successor. There was a bit of bad blood and politics involved with his partners at the time Amithlon was first released.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

yes i know all the stories. i just wish i could find him and talk with him. maybe some interview. but im a hell of a ways away from AU.

[@endotherm]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration Let me ask around and put the feelers out...

[@martinandroid2538]

Those Cheiftec cases will outlast humans. I'm sitting next to an older BH version that I use for Windows 7. Thankfully it doesn't have the nonsense transparent door...

[@E5150.]

Last year I was throwing away some old stuff and this case was among them. I tried to break it and it destroyed my shoe and cut me :D

[@Mrflash222006]

A ChiefTec Dragon not seen one of them in many a moon I build in a few of these, Lian-li and the CM wavemaster were the in thing

[@jzarfas]

I still have this case in green with a window in the side its a chieftech.

[@BerndFelsche]

In the first decade of this century, I built a lot of backroom servers using cases like that, but with a bronze finish. Nice hardware. Almost every mainboard of that era has bulging caps 😢 A few server grade boards escaped the fake formulation cap market. BTW: the Firewire should come up as SCSI. I have an external 5.25 drive case for IDE with Firewire (fast) and USB (slow). The other use for Firewire is for tape backups using mini-DV video cameras. Most present the tape media as a conventional tape drive to Firewire. For backups or downloading old digital video directly.

[@artype211]

hello. i'm the french guy. and i'm so happy you continue to amithlon but now i think you have to challenge a little. a) how configure a radeon card with acceleration (look at cosmos a french guy) b) change kernel to use the last amiga os 3.2.2. (with remus. look at Sdl-sNake a spanish man) If you do this, you will be a Boss and i patreon you 😁

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Haha it involves editing the gz file and replacing the 3.1 w something else or you csn always map rom in the startup sequence

[@cullmaster7361]

Another great Vid Dr Chris 👍🏻 I’m tempted to build one of these… But not sure what I would do with it. The Original Amiga systems I own I use for everything, from Internet to Gaming on WhdLoad plus RTG gaming. From the videos I’ve seen you can’t do Whdload.. 😔

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

you can whdload, you need to install EUAE, this is just a base build. ive played diablo and many other things bad ass on the other amithlon builds, (one is a dual processor Abit-VP6) i have a whole playlist of these things. i need to do more with the custom chipset emulation. it works well. a bit confusing for my old brain. but works

[@cullmaster7361]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration That’s good to know Dr Chris 👍🏻 Now I’m interested 😉 Cheers 🍻

[@sla73d]

Great video - does audio work on this release and could I use music creation apps like OctaMED?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

I once you setup ahi yes

[@SuperVstech]

I hope you have the hard drive bay trays… if not, I have dozens of those cases.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

i have a similar internal case, i showed i had a case from it in my other machine i borrowed

[@SuperVstech]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration yeah, but that one is steel, I have several aluminum ones if you need hem.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

i think shes aluminimububum

[@danielktdoranie]

Ya know, if you built these and sold them on eBay people would buy them. I would buy one… especially if you used IDE SSD storage or an SSD drive using IDE to SATA adapter.

[@martinandroid2538]

But would it be profitable enough for someone to bother? Anyway I'm off to Ebay to see what I can pick up.

[@danielktdoranie]

@@martinandroid2538 you’re better off going to your local PC recycler. Profitable? Have you seen what 32-bit machines sell for on eBay yet?

[@rickhparker1274]

Emulator invariably crashes when RAM > 1 GB. Two out of three machines I was able to reduce RAM to 1GB or less now boot the CD to the Workbench.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Amiga only can address 1g ram

[@rickhparker1274]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration And Amithlon will crash if it detects then 1GB RAM. Put that up there so people would not bypass hardware that will work just because the CD will not boot to the live Workbench.

[@martinandroid2538]

I'll watch this later. I am thinking about building a Windows 95 computer for retro 95 games, but it needs to be small because I've already got a Win 11, Win 7, Linux computers as well as 4 Raspberry Pi 4s.

[@AndrewAHayes]

Can you only run it on an AMD processor? I have a few old desktops from around 2008 - 2010 that I would like to set up with an Amiga OS. Can it run as a 68060? I had an Amiga 1000 in 1989 and then upgraded to an A500 in 1992 and then a 2000 in 1993, I was thinking about getting a 4000 but at the same time Commodore went bust and I thought there would be very little software getting released, and so I bought a 486 DX.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Yea athalon processors Were the main thing it was made To use

[@Acthungbaby]

I had athlon cd ages ago I gave up using it again as chould not get drivers for my mb chould u help me I have old PC I built for my nephew

[@jda4887]

possible to VM our way into the Amithlon bliss insteasd of using old hardware ?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

never tried but possibly why not!

[@jda4887]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration pcem would be a likely candidate.

[@bamdadkhan]

good doctor, do you have recommendations about what (semi-) modern hardware to run amithlon on?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Check out the links in the extended desc, Mr Tom aka snkbitten has a blog that lists all sorts of things and patches and fixes. He is the one who would know whats the newest . As for myself i have had it on 2012-2014 era hp towers. I even did a video on it with a pentium4

[@bobweiram6321]

How do these modern Amigas achieve the same functionality found in the custom ASICs?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

overwhelming power superceding the max 60-100 mhz of the motorola 680x lines.

[@Ffinity]

Also, Amithlon doesn't emulate the Amiga's custon chips.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

theres ways around that.

[@Ffinity]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration He asked how it achieved the same functionality, the correct answer is that it doesn't, it only achieves AmigaOS compatibility.

[@another3997]

​@@FfinityTechnically, AmigaOS XL achieved the same functionality via UAE, which is why it was included alongside Amithlon. Amithlon itself could have been adapted to transparently run legacy Amiga chipset emulation. Would it have had any practical benefits over running Windows and WinUAE on the same hardware instead of Amithlon, or indeed UAE on Linux or MacOS? It's all moot, the 68K architecture was dead, the Amiga's chipsets had become obsolete and commercial developers had moved on.

[@toneycassel4448]

So…. Is this just a different virtualization method? Running a Linux kernel with an emulator on top, maybe? I need to dig into this some more. I just happen to have an AMD X2 pc sitting behind me holding up a pile of paper…

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

sort of, it has direct access to the PC hardware, it uses a linux kernel to load the Amiga roms and then the os loads from the PC type76 partitions. further deep dives or my prev Amithlon vids can explain more. i have more stuff running on my super dual cpu rig from back in the day. cdr's pci networking, usb, rtg, games and more. sound on a soundblaster live, etc...

[@toneycassel4448]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration Well... I went thru five old PCs laying around here before I got one that sorta worked. But my luck, being as it is, it is an old Dell Optiplex GX520 that has the FreeDOS usb keyboard problem. So after it gets booted up into Amithlon, the keyboard doesn't work. I broke out the old PS/2 kbd and mouse only to find the old Dell had no PS/2 ports. So I gave up. :🤣

[@paulisthebest3uk]

Going to try this in a bit with a no-longer used Emachines laptop from 2008 i have. The celeron cpu is slow and barely runs anything above windowsXP so im hoping i can turn it into an amiga :) Just awaiting now (as of 16:28 uk time) for the very slow archive org isos to download. The hdd is bigger though than in your example, its 60GB, would i have to limit it down to 20GB for the second partitoin when partitioning in freedos?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

check out Tom's blog, the snkbitten links in the extended desc. he lists the hardware he has gotten it working on, there are more to try with the newer kernel 4 and sata drivers.

[@Giljrg]

I wonder if it would work on a p200, or too old? 😅

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

4, 400 or 5, or any uefi intel booting pc or intel mac

[@slaapliedje]

I swear I saw this video before. Is reality just catching up to my brain. Hate it when that happens...

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

i do many of them

[@alanhaynes4576]

Chris, a pity that Bernie Meyer got shafted with this, so it was not still being updated today to run on modern Intel Architecture.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

theres some patches out there but they are old. w kernel 4 we have sata ability at least. but its picky

[@another3997]

Yes, although the problem was always going to be one of keeping Amithlon up to date with the latest Linux kernels. As a commercial product, the dwindling Amiga market would make Amithlon hard to justify continued support after a while. Amiga developers were already moving to other platforms, so new x86 based "Amiga" software wasn't going to appear, and who would develop new 68K software for a dead CPU, just so it can be run under emulation? As an open source project, it might have survived and been continually developed, if back then it had got dedicated developers on board, as did WINUAE and it's cousins.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

@@another3997 boy you are just full of joy arent you.

[@dejannikolic7121]

Do you maybe know if Geforce Fx 5200 AGP is hardware accelerated? I saw on snkbitten's site that PCI version works but, there no info about AGP version.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Allot of my cards are agp. Works fine

[@Evilslayer73]

Hi Chris i got another newbie question= is it possible to build a Amithlon os dual boot with win98SE?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

I guess? Never did it myself

[@Evilslayer73]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration Ok :)

[@Evilslayer73]

Chris its me again an again :) another newbie question= how do you burn the kernal on cd ? is there any img allready made for this?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

@Evilslayer73 it’s just a normal data CD with those raw files on it. That’s why I have a stack of discs because I had to learn this and needed additional things so if I would’ve burned one disc with all of the drivers the colonel files and everything I would’ve only had to swap one time

[@Evilslayer73]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration Thanks a lot for your help Chris !i managed to copy the both kernels files and all is good except my ps2/ optical mous is actin like a Fentanyl addict and acting very eraticly do i need an old mouse with a ball under it?i mean a mechanical mouse ?

[@jediknight2350]

they should have made an amiga pc based off this then it could have ran dos games ported to amiga had awesome 3D like pc would have been awesome.

[@another3997]

Amithlon was a brilliant piece of technical wizardry, and deserved far more succes. But sadly by the time Amithlon and AmigaXL came out, the Amiga's destiny was already written... and it wasn't going to be improved by turning it in to an x86 box running partial Amiga emulation running on the Linux kernel. You could get native high end 3D graphics on a cheap PC, or an Apple, along with all the other things that the Amiga couldn't provide, and who was going to write all the new, super powerful Amiga games and apps?

[@المبرمج-د3ر]

Can I run Amiga 500 programs on it?

[@another3997]

Amithlon wasn't a full Amiga hardware emulator, so anything using the Amiga custom chips or bypassing the Amiga OS wouldn't work. Amiga XL was essentially the UAE emulator running on top of the QNX real time OS, so that would run A500 software. But today you're better off running WinUAE on a cheap PC.

[@ferrellsl]

Amithlon was great 25+ years ago but it doesn't support newer CPUs/GPUs or large amounts of RAM without some serious kernel patching. I toyed with it back in the early 2000's and even then it needed patches. It was easier and I got better performance from simply using WinUAE.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

at least we have so many options!

[@ferrellsl]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration Amithlon is only an option if you literally have ancient hardware to run it on, circa 1998. Most people got rid of such hardware years ago and even if you can find it now, the prices have skyrocketed due to retro collectors and scarcity.

[@jecajSudbine]

Would haikuOS work on that hardware?

[@LukeAGuest]

Most likely.

[@eizomonitor6003]

That is not a 2.8 GHz CPU. It is rated and compared to the original Athlon. I had a Barton running at 2.7 GHz on air and it was fast(with OC). The real freq is 2083 or 2.13 for your CPU(AMD Athlon XP 2800+)

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

ah close enough hahah

[@memadmax69]

So what is this? Is this an emulator running on top of freedos?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Sorta

[@Evilslayer73]

Hi Chris i try to boot on my old pentium 4 and im stuck on the bouncing ball screen what it causing that?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

Video card type or too much ram. Look at snkbittens blog on the compatible types of the era luckily they’re like $10 on eBay if you need one all of the links are the extended description

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

incompatible video card, check out the extended desc and look at snkbittens blog, he lists cards and stuff that workwell, and good thing theyre super inexpensive on ebooger now

[@rogabrielsen]

I got the same problem (P4 3 ghz). I have tried 512 MB RAM and 1 GB RAM. Use only integrated graphics

[@Evilslayer73]

@@rogabrielsen Ok if i use the integrated card it gonna work? if yes its awesome!

[@Evilslayer73]

@@ChrisEdwardsRestoration Thanks a lot Chris you are the master:)

[@DarkDefender01]

Intel Outside!

[@valenrn8657]

Amithlon is half of the Amiga since it doesn't run Amiga's WHDLoad games i.e. about DraCo level compatibility.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

it can run whdloads you need to install E-UAE then it will emulate the customs

[@another3997]

Amithlon doesn't automatically emulate the Amiga custom chips, but WHDLoad is irrelevant to the discussion. Software that requires access to those custom chips, or bypasses the OS routines, simply won't work without some form of chipset emulation, with or without WHDLoad.

[@valenrn8657]

PiStorm32-RPi 4B-Emu68's SysInfo's MIPS and MFLOPS are faster.

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

thats great. this is from 1998, not bad for a 20+ year old PC

[@another3997]

Emulated MIPS and FLOPS in Sysinfo aren't a great way of measuring real world performance. But try comparing PiStorm to WinUAE running on any x86 CPU (or UAE on Apple Silicon) made in the last couple of years and you'll see how slow PiStorm is, both in usage and in Sysinfo. Plus the fact that no matter how fast the virtual "CPU", the PiStorm is saddled with all the usual limitations of the old Amiga hardware. You can't get round those limitations when using original hardware or even FPGA versions.

[@memphisartguy2]

The dark amiga channels updated Amithlon, with a 3.2.x release. was hoping to see that. When you going to do a video on system one?

[@ChrisEdwardsRestoration]

if i had it i could. i have been reading toms blog on how to extract and inject the roms into the gz files

[@iCQ_www.SPCL.tk_]

always learn something from u sir, thanks for sharing!!!!!!!!!!