Today in roller coaster rides:
Down: I will likely never be able to emulate or build that freakish fantasy console I've been obsessing over because the hardware and code is ancient.
Up: Somebody built almost the same system _last year_.
Down: it's $1000.
Up: It's a whole-ass computer.
Down: it's a whole-ass Amiga with no GPU acceleration and limited FPU support.
Up: people are actively fixing all these issues!
This is a little exhausting, but fun!
#fantasyconsoles #a1222 #a1222plus
I've been working remotely with #QEMU developer Balaton Zoltan to add support for emulating a new #PowerPC #Amiga board by A-EON, the #A1222plus.
Currently, #UBoot starts, but can't find the PCI bus, which is necessary to boot off the SATA hard drive.
DDR3 support is kludgy, but good enough to get past the memory controller configuration phase.
The latest A-EON boards, including the X1000, X5000 and the just released #A1222plus, also use #UBoot, but with a different second level bootloader called AmigaBoot, which can read the Kickstart from the an Amiga filesystem, including the new and mysterious NGFileSystem (NGFS).
I found a doc confirming my suspects that a copy of AmigaBoot resides in the on-board NVRAM. This explains how the A1222+ could boot off an old #AmigaOS 4.1 image for the Sam440 😏
Or maybe #UBoot always loads some OS drivers from an on-board flash partition?
This would make a lot of sense: otherwise, U-Boot would require custom code to read Kickstart files from all Amiga filesystems, including the obscure NGFS!
Too bad I didn't think of taking screenshots of the ~2 pages of environment variables I saw in the U-Boot shell. Solving the mystery will have to wait until I get my hands onto another #A1222plus... or buy my own! 
There's still an unsolved mystery:
If U-Boot loads the OS from SYS:Kickstart/ , where did it find the Radeon RX how could my old AmigaOS boot image initialize the Radeon RX 550, the P1022 SATA controller and other hardware that didn't exist on the Sam440?
Perhaps AmigaOS 4.1 "Final" Edition (2014) already included support for the P1022, which was launched by Freescale / NXP in 2010? 🤔
Hey! I still have the original ISO of #AmigaOS 4.1 FE for my old Sam440, an early PPC #Amiga board by A-Cube Systems:
https://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=1
It's unlikely it will boot on the #A1222plus, but this point I'm getting desperate.
Aside for a couple of processes crashing, the old ISO boots fine on the new board. I get to the Workbench, open a new Shell window and...
> copy SYS:libs/locale.library AmigaHD:libs/locale.library
...FIXED! Just in time to pull the plug and leave the venue!
Happy New Year everyone! I’ve got big plans for my Amiga projects in 2019, but thought I’d start off the New Year with a blog post on a not-particularly “exciting” topic, but an important one nonetheless: Backups. As I am experimenting more with my X5000 and Amiga OS 4.1, I’ve been getting particularly “twitchy” that I didn’t have a solid backup/restore plan in place, particularly as some of my experiments will invariably go wrong and I’ll need a way to roll back my changes to a known-good state. I spent a few days researching and implementing a backup strategy that’s ideal for my needs and hopefully there will be something of use to other Amiga owners too.
Unfortunately, without Startup-Sequence the system boots to a black screen 😭
Perhaps the Radeon RX 550 requires updated RTG drivers which are not part of the #AmigaOS 4 Kickstart?
But there's actually no Kickstart ROM on the #A1222plus. Instead, #UBoot loads the OS modules from the SYS:Kickstart/ directory before handing off control to the OS.
This IntuitionBase article written in 2004 documents the #PowerPC #Amiga boot process:
https://intuitionbase.com/static.php?section=en_boot-configurations
...but under time pressure, I accidentally copy the corrupt library from the HD to the USB stick, making both unbootable! ☠️
It takes me some time to figure out how to get to the real #AmigaOS boot menu, where I can disable the Startup-Sequence to fix the system from the initial CLI.
You still have to hold both mouse buttons as usual, but the USB mouse I was using had a flaky right button! 🤦♂️
Several people came today to see a #A1222plus presentation, so I'm on the clock to make it boot again 👉😰👈
Robert Bernardo, owner of the board, handed me a recovery USB stick.
The printed manual shows how to drop into a boot menu which looks like the classic #Amiga Early Startup, but is actually running in #UBoot.
So I boot the live recovery USB and open an AmigaDOS shell to restore the corrupted locale.library...
sleet01
Bernie