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obitus1990
USA

Posted Sun Mar 28, 2021 8:12 pm

I'm an idiot.... USB works. First, I assumed I needed to use Poseidon...wrong. The card can read it on its own without an Amiga based-USB stack. However, it is not going to automatically mount it for you. The only way I found this information was by reading the docs for the Rev3 board. You need to have two pieces of software installed on your Amiga, fat95 (goes in the L: folder) and dosmount. Both can be had on Aminet.

Then, you have to manually enter a shell command "dosmount zz9000usbstorage.device fat95 mount"

The USB stick must be FAT32 formatted.

Worked the first time I tried it. I wish it was hot swap in its capabilities, but, I guess this makes it just like anything else "old computer" related in that you need to turn it off before plugging anything into it.

I think the network port works...I cannot remember, but, I have roadshow installed on this computer, which I would not have done if I didn't have working ethernet. I commented it out of my startup sequence to make the system boot faster, as it was timing out due to no ethernet cable being plugged in. I'll have to plug one in tomorrow and verify.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Mon Mar 29, 2021 1:09 am

Generally, networking seems to work at a basic functionality. Works, but slow. And sometimes it won’t.

USB also seems to work but not hot-pluggable.

User avatar
Kevin Brice
Seattle, WA
YouTube

Posted Mon Mar 29, 2021 9:02 pm

The USB is also only for FAT-formated USB storage, right? Or does it work with other things I've missed?

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Mar 30, 2021 1:57 am

USB is for mass storage only, but regardless of file system. You can also use FFS if you like.

However, for data exchange with anything Non-Amiga, FAT is the way to go.

The problem with mntmn is that they never seem to finish anything. They are inventors. They constantly come up with new stuff that looks awesome (such as the linux thing), but the - probably boring - job of creating a solid firmware that does what it is supposed to do takes forever. Networking is still not fully working, and slow. I hear there are still bus timing issues on some systems. But hey, let's install Linux on the second ARM.

The roadmap for the firmware has become a bloated monster, I doubt that it will ever be production ready, before they come up with the ZZZ1000000.

User avatar
stevelord

Posted Thu Apr 01, 2021 1:02 pm

Gregg Donner has a really good site with ZZ9000 info. It's where I go because I don't do twitter anymore and half the time updates are on there, and the main site doesn't have a fixed place for updates.

I think you hit the nail on the head about inventing. Lukas is clearly very smart across multiple domains, but I think running full Linux detracts from the Amiga experience rather than adding to it. At the same time I can understand the desire to address interesting difficult problems instead of the boring laborious work of getting USB integrated with Poseidon for example.

I did feel a little let down by the voltage issue. This is his second FPGA-based graphics card and while I've never designed systems as complex as the ZZ9000 these kinds of power and heat issues were schoolboy errors that should've been picked up before release. Still, what's done is done. I'm glad it was sorted, even if I had a bit of a brown-trouser moment fixing mine.

It is without a doubt the best Amiga graphics card I've ever seen. It works reasonably well as an Ethernet card, and it mostly sucks for USB. The 256Mb of auto-detected RAM is useful but since upgrading drivers and it being auto-detected I've noticed a drop in stability, similar to when I was adding 192mb of RAM off the card (as opposed to 128mb). This is most likely specific to my setup rather than anything at MNT's end.

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Kevin Brice
Seattle, WA
YouTube

Posted Sun Apr 04, 2021 2:31 am

I dunno. Linux similarly isn't the highest thing on my priority list, but it's hard for me to see how it detracts from the experience. Every big box Amiga's been designed explicitly for bridge boards, to the point of having a bunch of ISA slots that do nothing without one besides maybe power a Time Base Corrector. It seems very much within the Amiga experience to be able to run another OS on a sidecar CPU, accessing it as an application within AmigaOS. That'd especially be the case if you could seamlessly transfer files between the two. Imagine being able to pop over into Firefox on Linux and download files straight into an Amiga drawer from sites too heavy for IBrowse. There's real possibility there.

Would I use Linux on the ZZ9000? Probably not, unless the integration were super tight such that it became clearly easier than grabbing stuff from my PC or Mac, a task that would be way easier with better USB support. But in a weird way, what could be more true to the spirit of the Amiga than the next generation of bridge board running Linux?

User avatar
Kevin Brice
Seattle, WA
YouTube

Posted Tue Apr 06, 2021 1:12 am

I'm more iffy on this after reading about it more. It sounds like Linux would have to completely boot on the ZZ9000 before the Amiga frame buffer would show up. I was envisioning some sort of very light weight hypervisor that would run the existing graphics and then run Linux off in a separate partition, but it sounds like the current concept is just for the card to run Linux, and then Linux would host the Amiga graphics.





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