What the fastest possible x64 emulation way of OS4 today ?

@balaton
Quote:IIRC CD uses +10, usually the HD boot volume uses 0 (= boot form CD if there is a bootable one in a drive, if there is none boot from HD), so you'd have to change that to +11 (or higher) in MediaToolBox.

But that's only half of it, only AmigaOS uses the highest boot priority of all bootable volumes on all drives. U-Boot only uses the highest one per drive, for example if you have several bootable volumes on a HD.
The order U-Boot uses for searching for bootable volumes on the drives is set by the boot1, boot2, etc. env variables, which can be changed in the menu as well (ide, cdrom, floppy, net, pssii, psiicdrom, scsi, scdrom, sii, siicdrom, etc.), and it stops searching after it found a drive with a bootable volume.

Without NVRAM support you may have to change the U-Boot order on each boot, if the defaults aren't the ones you need.
For example if the CD is "AmigaOS 4.1 FE" (without updates) but the HD boot volume uses "AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 2" U-Boot may load the older kickstart modules from CD but AmigaOS boots from the HD volume with newer AmigaOS parts which can cause problems.

It's much easier and less problematic to simply remove the CD image in QEmu after AmigaOS was installed on a HD partition.

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Hi all, and thank you for the welcome.

I have been around Amigas a long time but never active on this forum.

Thanks for the info - i've got it working. Now to tweak it a bit.

Speed is not my main concern, now I will try and get the network side of things working.

Thanks again.
Leo

@Redlion
I think people found that latest rtl8139 driver in 4.1FE Update 2 may be a bit unstable so you may need to downgrade to the version from 4.1FE CD or there's an updated version published on os4welt.de forum that should work but I don't know if that's available from anywhere else other than this test version.

Hi All,

Still having some issues, first the mouse gets stuck or does not move to all areas of the screen.

I am using a TESmart KVM Switch, I have moved the mouse from the KVM to the USB on the PC - no real difference.

I have no sound at all, could that be because I have no Soundcard in my PC?

@Balaton
I can not seem to find the rtl8319 driver you mentioned. I don't have access to the older AmigaOS4.1 ISO.

@smarkusg
where did you get the 'mynet0' from in -device rtl8139,netdev=mynet0 -netdev user,id=mynet0

By the way I am using version QEMU 9.0.0

Cheers
Leo

@Redlion

The mynet0 is just the id to bind netdev and card together. It can be anything. Maybe it's clearer to write it as -netdev user,id=unet -device rtl8139,netdev=unet The -netdev option defines a natwork backend called unet that then you bind to the emulated network card. There could be different cards with different backends. The -device option defines what network card the guest OS sees, the -netdev option defines what QEMU does with the packets. What is your problem with network in the first place?

I meant the driver from the 4.1FE CD not the original 4.1. Update 1 or 2 updated this driver that made it less stable with QEMU. To get the latest driver from the os4welt.de forum you need to register otherwise downloads are not available. But unless you have network connection that sometimes breaks with high traffic it's not this problem but something else.

For mouse problems you could try different -display options see qemu-system-ppc -display help for available options, maybe -display sdl can work better if available (maybe -display sdl,gl=on when have issues with scaling). Otherwise you could get a tablet driver that was posted here on the forum somwhere and try -device usb-tablet but that won't work without installing the driver first but I don't remember where that driver was posted.

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@white

Quote:

This driver was tested on Mac M1 hardware with Qemu because most of the problems with unstable network connections occurred here, the driver solves the problems.

Under Linux/Windows this driver was not tested because there was no need for it and nobody reported problems under Linux or Windows in connection with unstable network connections.

You have to accept it when driver developers decide for themselves how and where to make their drivers available, even if it may not always be the right decision with such a small community.

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@white
The RTL driver beta versions were posted to os4welt for testing if the changes, the developer himself can't test, make any difference.
Only on QEmu with MacOS and Linux hosts there were problems with the public versions of the driver, never on Windows hosts.
AFAIK there are no problems on MacOS and Linux hosts anymore either, by updates in QEmu and/or BBoot (IRQ related?), and even the public versions of the RTL drivers are working without problems now.

You can't expect that OS4 developers support obscure setups used by only 5-10 users, like Pegasos2 (real hardware), MacMini PPC (Mona) or QEmu.
Even the A1222 has 10 times as much users but the OS4 SDK still doesn't support it, and as long as that's not changed there will be next to no software for it...

If something doesn't work with emulation, WinUAE or QEmu as well as FPU emulation in the A1222 versions, it has to be fixed in the emulator, and not adapting AmigaOS software to the emulator bugs.

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Hi All,

I have got things working to a point,
If I try and update OS4.1 it starts at update 1 which is incorrect because the ISO for the Sam460ex has update 2 included. It downloads the update 1 and installs it then want to install some Python files and it stops at the Save file requester.
So for the moment I am not doing any updates to the OS.

Still have no sound, no sure if its QEMU or my computer that is causing the issue.
So for the moment I am moving on to getting software installed.

I am now trying to get the USB drive to be recognised, but can not figure it out, Has anyone got the syntax for accessing a USB thumbdrive?
this is what I have tried, qemu-system-ppc -machine sam460ex -rtc base=localtime -display sdl,gl=on -m 2048 -drive if=none,id=hd,file=myimage.img,format=raw -device ide-hd,drive=hd,bus=ide.0 -netdev user,id=unet -device rtl8139,netdev=unet -drive if=none,id=usbdisk,format=raw,file=amigahd.img -usb -device usb-ehci,id=ehci -device usb-storage,bus=ehci.0,drive=usbdisk
It does not give me errors but it does not show a usb drive.

Cheers
Leo

@Redlion
AmigaOS version numbers and updates are confusing. There was original 4.1 then up to 6 updates to that then came 4.1FE (Final Edition) that contained all previous updates but then 4.1FE also had update 1 and 2. So it may be trying to install 4.1FE Update 1 and then 2 if your CD is the latest 4.1FE version. I don't think there was a release after 4.1FE but I could be wrong. I can't comment on errors during the update but it may be due to the lack of nvram emulation. If NVGetVar command from shell crashes you may need to replace it with some script that does nothing together with NVSetVar to avoid the errors or replace the nvram.resource.kmod in Kickstart with the Pegasos2 version (which can be found in the Updates) that does not try to access nvram. Or maybe just check what the update script does after it tries to access nvram and finish those steps by hand.

Sound works on amigaone and pegasos2 by default but the on-board sound of sam460ex is not emulated so for that machine you need to add a sound card with -device ES1370 which works with the SoundBlaster128 driver (then you may need to set it up in AHI prefs; there's some quirk in that pref that some uints need to be assigned to audio.device while some others to the SoundBlaster128 driver to get mixing working so more than one app can use sound at the same time but I don't remember which unit needs what; I think you'd leave those which are already use audio.device unchanged and change only those that are set to none or SM502 or similar to the SoundBlaster128 driver).

The sam460ex firmware has a bug that it does not boot with a USB drive attached so you should remove the "-usb -device usb-ehci,id=ehci -device usb-storage,bus=ehci.0,drive=usbdisk" options and only leave the "-drive if=none,id=usbdisk,format=raw,file=amigahd.img" option that defies the drive. Then after booting enter QEMU monitor with Ctrl+Alt+2 and issue "device_add usb-storage,drive=usbdisk" command which should plug the USB device that should then appear in AmigaOS (you can change back to the virtual machine with Ctrl+Alt+1).

@kas1e If you still have a good os4.1fe winuae configuration could you please forward the information to me?

@balaton

II have a question about soft-float. Is there any benefit on QEMU?
Qemu has a built-in soft-fload from what I read. Is there any point in compiling programs under AOS4 with soft-fload ?
The program generally runs at the same speed, It's possible I'm doing something wrong - I don't know much about it.
I'm experimenting with clib4 and gcc under AOS4 (the version of gcc is unimportant and using lsoft-fp which I built because it doesn't seem to work either). I didn't find too much on this topic and gcc compilation flags under ppc and soft-fload.
Most of the stuff I found was for i386 only.

Thanks for your help



wideo -> https://youtu.be/yNkPLVmqhgA

edit:

I rebuilt clib4 together with libsoft-fp.a, added the flag to gcc and now it seems to be working properly. No problems with "numbers" visible.
I also found this maybe useful for someone:

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Software_floating_point

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Hi All,

Back to playing with QEMU sam460ex.

I was not sucsessful in get the usb drive side of things working

I tried the " -drive if=none,id=usbdisk,format=raw,file=amigahd.img " option and after booting I enter the QEMU monitor with Ctrl+Alt+2 and issue " device_add usb-storage,drive=usbdisk "

The amigahd.img file shows up and so does the USB drive. They both have the same content and are both write protected, so copying data to the emulated machine is quite hard and I can only go one way at the moment.

by the way, (you can change back to the virtual machine with Ctrl+Alt+1) does not seem to work.

How are other people transfering data back and forth? (does anyone know if Amicloud is still going)

I have been using Hollywood with MUIRoyale, RapaGUI and SQLite3 I have had no problems so far. I got Odyssey working but I had to go back to the OS4.1FE RTL8139.device to get things stable.

Overall not quite as quick as the real thing but about 90% on most things.

Cheers Leo