Post APOeZDA39mlXJihBGi by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #APOeZDA39mlXJihBGi by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
       2022-08-25T18:32:30Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Back in the nineties I (well, my mom, technically) was the proud owner of an Amiga A4000. To this day, it remains the most fun-to-use computer I used, and recently I finally decided to see if I could get it to work again under the original Workbench / AmigaOS, since its last use was as a Linux machine.Much to my surprise, an update of AmigaOS appeared as recently as in December 2021, so I purchased the CDROM and set out to install it. 1/🧵
       
 (DIR) Post #APOeZG6cD0niRw6ypc by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
       2022-08-25T18:33:20Z
       
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       AmigaOS consists of two parts: one is on HD or floppy disk, but the other is in the "Kickstart" ROM. Read Only Memory, which is to be taken literally. So out with the old chips, and in with the new ones. A stressful moment, since on an A4000 this involves removing the processor card, which in my case contains both an M68060 and a PPC 604e CPU. But it went well, and our 30 year old motherboard now holds present-day boot ROMs. 2/🧵
       
 (DIR) Post #APOeZJ9YsVwLtwVsLA by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
       2022-08-25T18:34:08Z
       
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       Next problem: an Amiga can't actually boot from CD, so one needs to create an installation floppy disk from the image on the CD. What I didn't know is that my old installation would no longer boot with the new ROMs installed. But the Amiga is my only machine with both a cd drive and a floppy drive. And the HD uses the old IDE standard. Luckily I still had an old XC Cube with IDE interface, so I mounted the Amiga HD there, in an attempt to copy the required libraries so it would boot again. 3/🧵
       
 (DIR) Post #APOeZLTUFP4D6Jqofw by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
       2022-08-25T18:35:34Z
       
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       Booting the (32 bit) XC Cube using an old Knoppix 3.2 DVD that was lying around in the attic was good enough to mount the Amiga HD and copy over the required files.Yep, that's Linux 2.4.20 :)4/🧵
       
 (DIR) Post #APOeZNdqBsXNp0i75k by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
       2022-08-25T18:36:54Z
       
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       After this operation, the Amiga booted from the old HD installation and the installation floppy could be written. After figuring out that the ATAPI CDROM is listed on scsi.device and not on atapi.device, the installation CD mounted and AmigaOS 3.2 installed on the HD, and after 30 years my Amiga is updated from Workbench 3.0 to 3.2 at last.5/🧵
       
 (DIR) Post #APOeZPKltkTL4Rnue8 by janssens_bart@mastodon.social
       2022-08-25T18:38:00Z
       
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       After some more tweaking, the network, CyberVision graphics card and PPC coprocessor are all working too. Here is an actual screenshot of my brand new AmigaOS desktop, in all its 1024x768 16 bit glory:end/🧵