Haage and Partner released a softwear package called Amiga XL. This contained two Amiga softwear emulators, designed to run on modern X86 machines (horror of horrors) of more than 800MHz. The first of these is AmigaXL, which is based on the QNX softwear engine. I fail to be impressed by it. However the other, Amithlon, delivers a very modern computing environment, and it is this package that I am going to discuss.
Amithlon is a low level emulator, booting directly from a small Linux kernal. The emulation is of an '040 Amiga, running at about 600Mhz on my 1500XP Athlon processor (1 Ghz), equipped with a graphics card. The AGA chipset is not emulated (ie. our old favourite games from our old A1200s will not run unless they can be opened on an RTG screen). However, some people have been able to run Amiga UAE from within Amithon, to get some of those games to work!
So, what hardwear have I used? As I have said, the processor is a 1500XP Athlon, on a Motherboard capable of sound using VIA '97, and VESA graphics. These in themselves would give minimal functionality to Amithlon, but to improve the capability, I have also added a Soundblaster 128 soundcard, and a Matrox G450 graphics card. A 256Mb Dimm and a 17" monitor tops off the deal. I ditched to Windows modem that the box came with, in favour of my external serial port modem. The box also came with a 30Gb hard-drive, a CDR/DVD combo unit, and another CD Rom drive. This left a spare IDE port, to which I connected my 4.3Gb hard-drive from my Amiga. I then inserted the Amiga XL CD Rom, having set (in BIOS) that drive as the highest boot priority. Yes, Amithlon is bootable directly from the CD Rom!
Once booted from the CD, the real Amiga drives and partitioning are recognised automatically, the highest priority drive being used as the boot partition. In Prefs I have set the Screenmode to "builtin: 1280x1024 16Bit PC". The CD comes with a modern version of OS3.9, and with regisered versions of the programmes Art Effect and Final Writer. At just short of £100 it is money well spent. Better yet, I have the facility of a Windows machine in the same box, when I needed to resort to this. However (beneficially), when using Windows, the Amiga hard drive was not seen or accessed.
However, after using the set-up outlined above, my Windows hard drive gave up the ghost. No problem, you might think. Just reinstall from your original disks. I then discovered how short a life CD-ROM disks have. The disk was utterly unreadable. This is apparently due to the deterioration of the pigments upon which the data is written over time. This process is slower on CD-RW disks, but on cheaper CD-R disks, they have a life of about 5 years. So, for now I do not have a working Amiga, which makes me sad. I will look at the other emulation package, Amiga Forever by Cloanto, but for now the evil empire of Murcosoft has me in its thrall! I await rescue.
Sadly, the hope offered by the development of Amithlon has now come to grief. It has all degenerated into threatened litigation between interested parties. It is to be hoped that this situation may be resolved, and that the proposed parallel convergence of the Amithlon and Amiga One / Workbench 4 may be a reality. However, the prospects of this look bleak.
