Amithlon, what really should have been the next step for AmigaOS. This was designed as a stepping stone to hopefully move AmigaOS from 68k to x86 that ended up in lawsuits and copyright issues eventually killing the entire thing.
I started playing in WinUAE after the Amiga 30th and enjoyed it immensely. It reminded me of how much I loved AmigaOS and hated moving to Windows all those years ago. It ran fast, allowed me high resolution and high color screens and reminded me how much I missed AmigaOS (plus how much I had forgotten how to use it...lol ). As I read about emulating Amigas I kept seeing references to something called Amithlon, and that this Amithlon was fast...like very fast. It used old PC hardware.."hey..I have old PC hardware sitting around, maybe some of it would work."
Tracking down Amithlon I finally was ready to give it a whirl. The CD booted on one of my old unused systems.....but I couldn't do much. Screenmodes were locked, it was a small 9MB Workbench Sys: volume.....how do you get this thing installed? Reading more on Amithlon I found a few guides that were generally helpful but not detailed enough to make it easy and straightforward. Plus I didn't want "dual boot" setups, I just wanted a box that was like an Amiga.
The biggest issue was what hardware worked. A lot actually works but in limited functions, ie...you could get it installed on most computers with 1 GB of ram and IDE drives but then you couldn't have audio or networking or hardware accelerated graphics, just your standard VESA modes (though these are still faster than most Amiga RTG cards).
Going through numerous pieces of hardware (motherboards, video cards, network cards, etc..) I finally started to see how to setup, install and configure Amithlon. I've written some extremely detailed guides on the installation process and have compiled an extensive list of supported hardware that has been tested by myself or others. One thing I did discover.....Amithlon is FAST, Wickedly fast. It's the fastest AmigaOS emulation I've encountered. I run WinUAE on an Intel i7 CPU with 32 GB of RAM. Amithlon is faster!
Amithlon is based on x86 hardware, mostly PCI and from a time period of the early 2000's, when Amithlon was released.
So here's my Amithlon setup:
Gigabyte Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard
Intel Core2Duo @ 4.00 Ghz
(2) 512 MB ram modules (1 GB total) (I get 8,014,584 graphics mem and 790,631,568 other mem)
32 MB Matrox G550 PCIe graphics card
Catweasel MKIV PCI card
Soundblaster Live 5.1 PCI
Intel PRO-1000 PCIe
8x DVD-RW(-/+) Slot loading drive
20 GB SATA dos boot drive (freedos)
256 GB SATA AmigaOS drive
Multi-card USB reader
My Amithlon PC boots off a 20 GB SATA HD which is a FreeDOS installed drive. It boots to DOS and launches a small stripped down linux kernel that initializes Amithlon with a build in kickstart, allowing AmigaOS to see the hardware and you use AmigaOS drivers for the hardware if available. Once booted in to Amithlon, the 20 GB drive disappears and AmigaOS boots off a 256 GB SATA HD. This drive is partitioned out in a 10 GB boot partition and a few 25 GB partitions for Games, Downloads, Lightwave and the like. With the hardware I have, I get hardware accelerated graphics, AHI audio, Network connectivity and USB drive support. I also have the ability to read and write Amiga DD/HD floppies (more on that in a bit).
So I boot to AmigaOS 3.9, I have a workbench screen of 1280x720 @ 32bit color. I download and run applications just like I would in WinUAE or on a real Amiga....the primary difference is they need to be system friendly programs.....those that support RTG and AHI (though you can route AHI through PuhDerBaer for applications that only use Paula).
I mentioned Amithlon is fast....well one of the reasons it's so fast is that in not emulating the custom chipset it doesn't have to deal with any of the timing issues those introduce as well. While this makes it lose compatibility in some things, it makes up for it in speed and works well with system friendly apps.
Here are a few screen grabs (using SGrab) from my Amithlon system, pulled from SysInfo and SysSpeed.
The machine just screams! I enjoy using it more than WinUAE and overall it "feels" like using a real Amiga. You can't just hit F12 and add more something, you have to have the hardware in the system. Want more drive space, add another drive and set it up in HDToolBox. Want network, add a supported network card. Want USB.....oh wait, WinUAE doesn't do that yet (I love WinUAE...just a small jab). I have ShapeShifter running on it (FAST), Netsurf (FAST) and IBrowse (very nice for a quick download off Aminet). I run Lightwave 3D (hacked version) and it's such a joy to use as a 1024x768 layout looks really nice and movement is smooth and fluid. I can drag the time line bar and move it in realtime with full wireframe for the objects enabled (no bounding boxes needed). To get an idea I have a few videos posted in my Google+ page for Amithlon (my sig site has a link to the Google + group).
Floppy drives. This is unique for my setup as I was lucky enough to pick up a Catweasel MK4 recently. If you have a PC floppy drive in a system with Amithlon, you can mount PC0: and read/write PC DD disk, but Amiga floppies are out of reach. With the Catweasel (and Amiga drivers) I can read/write Amiga and PC formats, both DD and HD. I recently installed MultiFileSystem (mfs21.lha on Aminet) which has allowed me to have all the mountlist for the different formats under a folder "DF0" in DEVS:dosdrivers/ which will mount the appropriate disk type as needed. Previously if I had all the formats available and I inserted an Amiga HD disk, I would have its icon plus a TD1:??, PD1:?? and PH1:?? icons on the Workbench (TD1 = Amiga DD, TH1= Amiga HD, PD1 = PC DD and PH1 = PC HD formats). Now I just get DF0: and whatever disk type it is. Love it.
If I "need" to use custom chip software I can run E-UAE (68k version) inside Amithlon, though a bit slow (I get about 1.2 times an A1200 in SysInfo under E-UAE). Plus I have real Amiga's I can run custom chip software on or WinUAE if needed.
Amithlon in my opinion could have been the gateway to AmigaOS being a viable alternative to Macintosh and WinXP. Standard PC hardware with low requirements running AmigaOS 3.9, with the ability to run recompiled x86 apps, slowly moving the Amiga away from 68k CPUs to x86 CPUs that have pretty much dominated the world. Had this direction continued I wonder if AmigaOS could have still be in play today? Moving towards mainstream, easily obtainable hardware, with Amiga apps moving even more towards RTG displays and AHI audio, allowing more users to easily upgrade their systems as needed.