brostenen wrote on 2021-02-23, 14:34:

Uhmm... What? Look at the spec's for AtariST, Amiga1200, Amiga500/600 and Atari Falcon. This is no fight/war or anything, it is […]
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Uhmm... What? Look at the spec's for AtariST, Amiga1200, Amiga500/600 and Atari Falcon.
This is no fight/war or anything, it is just facts, that the Amiga1200 is way more powerfull than an AtariST.

If I may use a different platform as an example, then the Pentium eats 486 for breakfast.
In the case of AtariST versus Amiga500/600, then it is more equal. Each win on their own turf.
Overall productivity, ST one point. Overall gaming, Amiga one point.

Oh man. All those Amiga vs ST BBS arguments from the late 80s come flooding back again. 🤣

Still think the Atari Mega STE/TT030 chassis was the sexiest looking of them all. Too bad when a nice one comes along nowadays it's like a trillion dollars on Ebay. The Amiga 3000 chassis would be my second choice for looks.

liqmat wrote on 2021-02-23, 16:03:

brostenen wrote on 2021-02-23, 14:34:

Uhmm... What? Look at the spec's for AtariST, Amiga1200, Amiga500/600 and Atari Falcon. This is no fight/war or anything, it is […]
Show full quote

Uhmm... What? Look at the spec's for AtariST, Amiga1200, Amiga500/600 and Atari Falcon.
This is no fight/war or anything, it is just facts, that the Amiga1200 is way more powerfull than an AtariST.

If I may use a different platform as an example, then the Pentium eats 486 for breakfast.
In the case of AtariST versus Amiga500/600, then it is more equal. Each win on their own turf.
Overall productivity, ST one point. Overall gaming, Amiga one point.

Oh man. All those Amiga vs ST BBS arguments from the late 80s come flooding back again. 🤣

Still think the Atari Mega STE/TT030 chassis was the sexiest looking of them all. Too bad when a nice one comes along nowadays it's like a trillion dollars on Ebay. The Amiga 3000 chassis would be my second choice for looks.

Naaah... In hinsight, we all know were both platforms fit in. Commodore released the 1200, Atari looked at it and nearly shitted their pants and then develloped the Falcon as an answer to the 1200. And they actually did better than Commodore. You need something like an Amiga4000 to match the Falcon. The Atari-ST is compareable to Amiga OCS chipset. Both ST and OCS Amiga's were 68000 based. The 1200 is AGA and 68020 plus 4xChipMem. So yeah. The 1200 eats ST's for breakfast.

Take note. I am not talking about expanded machines at all. I am talking about the factory default systems. Sure you can have an 500 beat an ST. Just shuffle an VampireV2-500 into the machine and you have something that eats even stock Amiga4000's. Or how about putting an TF536 into an AtariST, and have that eating Amiga1200's for breakfast.

It's all about the Miner imo. The man was a freakin marvel. A legend for both early Atari computers and later Commodore.

Well.... True Miner was behind a lot of Atari's 8bit stuff, yet he had nothing to do with any Atari 16bit stuff. He actually resigned from Atari because of Atari being unwilling to move into 16bit territory. Jack Tramiel was the man, who we can give credit for the AtariST.

Why I said "early" Atari. Tramiel cheaped out on the initial ST models imo. The MIDI ports were great, but the sound chip was abysmal. The gfx weren't anything to write home about either, but they sufficed. I did find Atari's TOS way more stable than Amiga's Kickstart/Workbench combo on initial release. My family had the original Amiga soon after release and it was "guru meditating" more than I care to admit. It got a lot better over that next year, though, with updates etc.

liqmat wrote on 2021-02-23, 18:35:

Tramiel cheaped out on the initial ST models imo.

Would be hard to find anything he didn't cheap out on.

Updated my Amiga500 in PC desktop case, by installing a panelmounted internal HDMI extension cable. Now I have HDMI port on the rear of the machine. The machine is beginning to take shape as a kind of big box Amiga. As of now, the specs are kind of the same as an Amiga2000-HD, just with some extra.

I have that RGBtoHDMI RPI-Zero adaptor, then IDE interface, 1 megabyte ChipRam, 8 megabyte FastRam, Harddrive, Kickstart switcher with room for 4 roms (1.2 1.3 and 3.1.4 installed), an USB keyboard adaptor and the keyboard wires extended to a DIN plug. Yup, I can have two different keyboards on the machine. I removed the CD-Rom drive in order to have an 3.5 inch HDD and active cooling. I also have a case fan in the front of the case, in order to take in and blow cool air over the combined IDE/8mb adaptor in the CPU socket.

Nicely done.

Finally fixed my Lite-On DVD±RW drive that had no belt for the past few months and it opens and closes without issues, even without a CD or DVD inserted, but it's slow at opening and closing (eject motor needs oiling or replacing). But other than that, it lives once again.

Not sure if I would call it retro.... but pulled out the Ideapad S10 off the shelf.

2008 Atom-based netbook, that my father used to use for what I guess I'd call "Field Invoicing" - we used to sell flowers wholesale and he had the netbook and an older HP inkjet printer running off an inverter tied to a deep-cycle marine battery, complete with trickle charger tied in to charge the battery when the truck was home.

Thankfully it booted up immediately. I had upgraded it to Win7 at some point from XP, as he was using it for normal web browsing after he stopped using it for invoicing. Last Windows Update (and I imagine the last time it was booted up) was completed in 2015. I'm considering setting it up as basically a permanent Spotify player for my basement stereo.

Intel Atom... those things are so slow.

Back in day, i was running Visual Studio 2008 on a Atom N270. Later, i ran a laptop with Atom N550 for quite some time with reasonable success.

Only thing, that's really too much for it, is today's browser engines. They are not really suited for those CPUs. Though, there are other browsers running reasonably well on those machines.

The only true lacking of those Atom based PCs, that i miss, is the limitation of 2GB of ram. If the chipset would allow, i would stick 4-8GB of ram into them, and they would be flying bullets!

(I still keep my EEE PC 901 and EEE PC 1015PEM around. I wouldn't get any money for them, yet they are perfectly running machines for some future experiments.)

Upgraded my Asus 1011px with an SSD recently. With an Atom N570 and 2GB RAM it can actually play 720p Youtube videos without skips, though maximizing-minimizing them is still a struggle. I could have sworn that a couple years back I could barely run 480p ones. Maybe someone at Google actually optimized their code?

Having a upgraded to Win10 a few months back I have really come to appreciate how Win7 manages to run old Windows games. It's now my go-to little retro machine that I can either play on the sofa or easily hook up to a larger monitor.

Munx wrote on 2021-02-25, 09:52:

Upgraded my Asus 1011px with an SSD recently. With an Atom N570 and 2GB RAM it can actually play 720p Youtube videos without skips, though maximizing-minimizing them is still a struggle. I could have sworn that a couple years back I could barely run 480p ones. Maybe someone at Google actually optimized their code?

Having a upgraded to Win10 a few months back I have really come to appreciate how Win7 manages to run old Windows games. It's now my go-to little retro machine that I can either play on the sofa or easily hook up to a larger monitor.

image.jpg

I like netbooks in all their underpowered glory! as you've shown they can actually manage quite well if tended to. an SSD is a wise choice, in my experience windows 10 loves nothing more than to grind down the hard disk while it does masses of mystery activities (which a few settings can help control admittedly)

gerry wrote on 2021-02-25, 10:17:

Munx wrote on 2021-02-25, 09:52:

Upgraded my Asus 1011px with an SSD recently. With an Atom N570 and 2GB RAM it can actually play 720p Youtube videos without skips, though maximizing-minimizing them is still a struggle. I could have sworn that a couple years back I could barely run 480p ones. Maybe someone at Google actually optimized their code?

Having a upgraded to Win10 a few months back I have really come to appreciate how Win7 manages to run old Windows games. It's now my go-to little retro machine that I can either play on the sofa or easily hook up to a larger monitor.

image.jpg

I like netbooks in all their underpowered glory! as you've shown they can actually manage quite well if tended to. an SSD is a wise choice, in my experience windows 10 loves nothing more than to grind down the hard disk while it does masses of mystery activities (which a few settings can help control admittedly)

The Win10 upgrade was actually for my main PC. I have a PCIe 4 m.2 drive in there, so it can gobble all the bandwidth it wants. I kept Win7 on the netbook as it allows me to play older games. Plus all the current software still supports 7, so I see no reason to change it. Probably would have kept 7 on my main PC too, but Ryzen hardware no longer has support for it.

Munx wrote on 2021-02-25, 09:52:

Upgraded my Asus 1011px with an SSD recently. With an Atom N570 and 2GB RAM it can actually play 720p Youtube videos without skips, though maximizing-minimizing them is still a struggle. I could have sworn that a couple years back I could barely run 480p ones. Maybe someone at Google actually optimized their code?

Having a upgraded to Win10 a few months back I have really come to appreciate how Win7 manages to run old Windows games. It's now my go-to little retro machine that I can either play on the sofa or easily hook up to a larger monitor.

image.jpg

You need to force different codec to be used by youtube. There are plugins ready to do it for you. After that, videos are as fluent as they can be.
Even more hardcore version would be a plugin, that makes youtube videos to be opened by VLC player. Then you use browser only for browsing and VLC to actually watch the videos.

Today (or rather this week) I have been selling quite a chunk of my retro gear. Slot 1 board, voodoo 3 2000 PCI, got a few AGP/PCI cards up, some VIA ITX motherboards...

And I'm already looking at new old hardware to buy, which was not the plan at all! 🙁

Progress on the SDF-31250...

Ghetto mounted a new hard drive (Quantum Atlas 10k 9.1GB 68-pin) on long standoffs to my GVP A2000 HC+8 Series II in my Amiga 2000 -- I had to do this because of the 68-to-50 pin adapter I'm using sticks out too far and would run into the GVP's 50-pin SCSI host port. I couldn't find any 50/68-pin combo cables that would work any better since they all have long adapters like the one I'm using -- there's also a 50-pin SCSI CD-ROM in the chain. Anyway, it works.. 🤣. I previously had a SCSI2SD in there, but it was not playing nice with the GVP. It has some initilization issue where it causes a cold boot bug that requires a hot restart to boot. Then once in the OS (Amiga 3.1.4), some programs would hard lock upon loading. (sysinfo, some demos, some games, finalwriter, etc.) I tried all sorts of different cables and termination options, nothing worked. I saw a few other people who had the same issue with the GVP + SCSI2SD combo (including Adrian's Digital Basement). Now, all is well and the real spinning disk works great.

Final specs for now:
- TF534 w/ coprocessor - 40MHz
- 1MB Chip RAM enabled
- GVP A2000 HC+8 Series II (4.5 firmware, with 4.15 on the way) w/ 8MB RAM and 9.1GB HDD
- Ariadne II Ethernet Adapter
- Indivision ECS v2
- 2x floppy drives internal, 1x Gotek external
- Plextor Ultraplex 40max SCSI CD-ROM
- USB keyboard adapter - Gateron Brown TLK mechanical keyboard w/ custom Amiga WASD keycaps
- Amiga/Atari Best Mouse in pimp mirror gold
- Custom 250w ATX --> Amiga PSU that I built into the original housing

wiretap wrote on 2021-02-25, 20:01:

Ghetto mounted a new hard drive (Quantum Atlas 10k 9.1GB 68-pin) on long standoffs to my GVP A2000 HC+8 Series II in my Amiga 20 […]
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Ghetto mounted a new hard drive (Quantum Atlas 10k 9.1GB 68-pin) on long standoffs to my GVP A2000 HC+8 Series II in my Amiga 2000 -- I had to do this because of the 68-to-50 pin adapter I'm using sticks out too far and would run into the GVP's 50-pin SCSI host port. I couldn't find any 50/68-pin combo cables that would work any better since they all have long adapters like the one I'm using -- there's also a 50-pin SCSI CD-ROM in the chain. Anyway, it works.. 🤣. I previously had a SCSI2SD in there, but it was not playing nice with the GVP. It has some initilization issue where it causes a cold boot bug that requires a hot restart to boot. Then once in the OS (Amiga 3.1.4), some programs would hard lock upon loading. (sysinfo, some demos, some games, finalwriter, etc.) I tried all sorts of different cables and termination options, nothing worked. I saw a few other people who had the same issue with the GVP + SCSI2SD combo (including Adrian's Digital Basement). Now, all is well and the real spinning disk works great.

Final specs for now:
- TF534 w/ coprocessor - 40MHz
- 1MB Chip RAM enabled
- GVP A2000 HC+8 Series II (4.5 firmware, with 4.15 on the way) w/ 8MB RAM and 9.1GB HDD
- Ariadne II Ethernet Adapter
- Indivision ECS v2
- 2x floppy drives internal, 1x Gotek external
- Plextor Ultraplex 40max SCSI CD-ROM
- USB keyboard adapter - Gateron Brown TLK mechanical keyboard w/ custom Amiga WASD keycaps
- Amiga/Atari Best Mouse in pimp mirror gold
- Custom 250w ATX --> Amiga PSU that I built into the original housing

I know you feel you've solved the lock-up issue you were having but I wouldn't be surprised if the actual conflict lies with the TF-534 and the GVC card, particularly with the 8MB ram on that card. Please keep me informed as you are one of the few people who are working with a TF534 on an amiga 2000 like me and its good to hear your notes. I know I get all kinds of memory errors when using the TF534 with my 8Up! 8MB memory board which makes the system unusable. Are you running KS 3.1 as well?

I wish I could do more testing with my A2091 HD Controller but that card currently has it's own issues so I cannot. However I believe the T534 didn't like the 2MB ram on that card either which would cause the system to lock up, sometimes even when just displaying a larger icon in workbench.

Shagittarius wrote on 2021-02-25, 20:38:

I know you feel you've solved the lock-up issue you were having but I wouldn't be surprised if the actual conflict lies with the TF-534 and the GVC card, particularly with the 8MB ram on that card. Please keep me informed as you are one of the few people who are working with a TF534 on an amiga 2000 like me and its good to hear your notes. I know I get all kinds of memory errors when using the TF534 with my 8Up! 8MB memory board which makes the system unusable. Are you running KS 3.1 as well?

I wish I could do more testing with my A2091 HD Controller but that card currently has it's own issues so I cannot. However I believe the T534 didn't like the 2MB ram on that card either which would cause the system to lock up, sometimes even when just displaying a larger icon in workbench.

There were no issues before with my old Seagate spinning disk that was original to the GVP. This was with the TF534. It only happened with the SCSI2SD once I installed that. With a spinning disk, the system is rock stable and I've never encountered any lockups/guru's/etc. I'm running KS 3.1.4 and Amiga OS 3.1.4.1.

You should probably run diagrom and do some testing of your memory as well, to make sure you don't have any faulty RAM chips.