Amiga NextGen.

In my previous post, I still owned a beautiful Amiga 4000T. For several practical reasons, I decided to sell this beauty to another Amiga-fan and got myself a “Next Gen” Amiga, an AmigaOne.

AmigaOne is originally made by Eyetech as a project for Amiga1200 and Amiga4000 to upgrade a CPU using the original Custom Chips. Because of hardware issues, they’ve cancelled the project in 2001. In 2002 they restarted it as becoming a whole new machine and the AmigaOne was born. Started in 2002 with the AmigaOne SE and followed up in 2003 by AmigaOne XE.

The one I got is an AmigaOne Micro-A1 – C. It consists of a 800MHz G4 CPU connected to a Mini-ITX mainboard where the videochip (ATI Radeon 7000 AGP) is integrated on the mainboard. Where the first 2 models AmigaOne (SE and XE) had heat issues and were generally unstable, the 3rd model from 2004 fixed this issue. It’s only made as a mainboard, so no official cases. It originally came with 256MB PC133 RAM.

I found a whole system in a really small case (I believe it’s a Dell case) for a reasonable amount of money.ย  This was the last board made by Eyetech and the last AmigaOne until 2011 when the AmigaOne 500 (Acube systems) and AmigaOne X1000 (A-EON) were introduced in a small amount.

While AmigaOne was made, there had to be another system. AmigaOS 3.9 is made for the Motorola 68000-series CPU while AmigaOne’s had a blazing fast G3 PPC cpu. Back in 2001, Hyperion Entertainment was asked by Amiga Inc. to produce a native PPC AmigaOS. AmigaOS 4.0 was born.

Current stage of AmigaOS 4.x is AmigaOS 4.1 (released in 2008) update 5 (august 2012) which runs without any trouble on the microA1 I currently own.

After a small upgrade from 256MB to 512MB RAM I created some photo’s yesterday of my running microA1-C with AmigaOS 4.1 update 5.

This is how it looks while the machine is booting the latest AmigaOS:

 

Smart people do see a difference in screen. Yes, left picture is made when I attached a Philips 19″ to it, but the screen broke down so I had to attach an older, but better Belinea 17″.

So, then it’s booted up.. It shows the following screen:

 

Having a working Internet connection, I could even go to Youtube using Timberwolf (=Firefox for Amiga). Timberwolf is still in alpha release, so really really slow. Lucky AmigaOS has another browser called OWB which is based on the Webkit engine and is workable (shown below on the right)

Using the E-AEU emulator (which is convenient added to AmigaOS 4.1) I can even run old Amiga games (E-UAE starts up an emulating layer which starts up WorkBench 3.1 and with that WHDLoad and finally the game, all within a few seconds!)

Below left is the E-UAE emulator running. Right is Superfrog running using this emulator:

Obviously, you can run more! See DirectoryOpus 4 (PPC version) and a MOD/IT player which is an Impulse Tracker called SchismTracker (also available for Linux, Windows and Mac).

You probably wonder if there’s anything useful to do with a 2004 AmigaOne? Of course, next to running old games, listening to music modules and doing webbrowsing, there are loads of free software made for AmigaOS including things like a SSH client (below left) or nice graphic effects (while dragging for example) when showing off what a almost 10 year old machine is capable of doing.

Ofcourse, I do understand all the latest operating systems are working faster/better (though starting up AmigaOS 4.1 only takes a few seconds) and it will never be mainstream. It’s just good to have a choice and great to see a company created in 1985, died multiple times and still continue to make new and beautiful things. Amiga is not just a computer, it’s a feeling only real Amiga-fans will understand.

Amiga made usable

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post here on blog.bartvandenakker.nl. It doesn’t made nothing happened in my life. Actually, a lot happened so the next few days I’ll post a few more stories. This post will be again about Amiga, like the last one .

A lot of happened with my Amiga’s. First of all, I cleaned a lot and sold the GVP A530 Turbo Card for I won’t use it. With the money got from that, I rebuild my Amiga 4000T to a ‘usable’ workstation.

First of all, a bit of cleaning was necessary, so the entireย  Amiga needed to get “naked”.

look! A naked A4000TWith this, I could clean the front so it was as white as can be without using chemical stuff:

A4000T Front

As you probably already seen, there’s a TFT screen. I managed to get an old 19″ TFT screen (Philips) which was working pretty nice with the Amiga. The Amiga 4000T is capable of sending out the native resolution (1280×1024) but it’s limited in colours then. So, I put it on 1024×768 with 16 bit colour which is enough for me ๐Ÿ™‚

When everything was clean I put the Amiga back together and it was able to boot from the old SCSI harddisk. Notice the difference between the Amiga and it’s external CD-drive/SyQyest device:

Amiga 4000T Booting

So, the Amiga was clean and able to boot, but still not very usable. So, I decided to buy a CF-to-IDE device, a 2GB CF card and a network interface card for the hardware and AmigaOS 3.9 as operating system. Installing AmigaOS 3.9 on the CF was a piece of cake, it almost worked immediately. You may ask now, why not upgrade the AmigaOS 3.1 installation on the SCSI HD? Well, the harddisk sounds like it will die pretty soon and I’d like to have some of the original information on that harddisk. Who knows what it may contain and not visible. It took me an evening to figure out that a 68060 CPU won’t be able to boot AmigaOS 3.9 as it is. First I had to create a bootdisk using AmigaOS 3.1 and with that bootdisk (Rescue disk) I can boot up AmigaOS 3.9 and install it on the CF. In the end, I managed to get it working. Here’s a link to Youtube, made with an iPhone 4 so bare with me in quality: AmigaOS 3.9 booting

At that moment I had a booting Amiga with AmigaOS 3.9, but still no network. I bought one on Amibay and it took me a week to figure out, the guy sent another card. So, I spend a whole week getting a driver from a completely different network card to work with the one I received. My life became easier the moment I found out which network card I actually got (thanks to AmigaScene again ๐Ÿ˜‰ ).

Amiga can go on the Internet now (using a 10Mbit ethernet card!) and apart from a decent browser, it’s kinda usable (IRC, Mail, FTP work flaweless). I’m going to try for the Samba client so I can actually use my network at home (and play millions of MOD-files ๐Ÿ˜‰ ).

Because I was on AmigaScene a lot, I found out that in USA people are making a movie (Viva Amiga) about Amiga. Also the main filmmaker (Zach Weddington) was coming to the Netherlands (and Germany) to see how Amiga still exists here. I didn’t think too long and went there with my revived Amiga 4000T. It was truly an awesome party to be. Lot of Amiga fans and famous Dutch people who used to work with Amiga’s. For me the best part was, Mr. R.J. Mical was there as well. RJ Mical (website) is one of the original Amiga creators and basically invented the GUI of Amiga. Besides that, RJ is just an awesome guy. He had the time of his life and enjoyed the whole day (like everybody else did!)

Picture below is taken behind my Amiga4000T. You can see a part of the AmigaOS 3.9 screen my Amiga4000T is showing!

 

At the end of the day, I even got my Amiga 4000T autographed by one of the original Amiga creators. For the record, almost all Amiga’s ever made were at that day and my Amiga 4000T was the only 4000T which was around. Special moment for me!

RJ Mical SigningHe wrote: “Thank you for taking care of my baby” .

So, this is the current status of the Amiga. At June 16th this Amiga will be in Maarssen at the “Commodore GG dag” where it will be in the lineup of all Amiga’s ever made (and still working). For Amiga or Commodore fans, a place to be!

Commodore Amiga’s saved

A while ago I visited a friend who was collecting old game consoles. We started to talk about the awesome machines he has and we came across Commodore Amiga. For most people this is a system which was active between, oh let’s say, 1985 and somewhere mid 90s. The machines were absolutely great in both audio and video. Started with an Amiga 1000 which was the first system with the next one, an Amiga 500; the most known one. Due bad marketing caused by Commodore, this was the called the successor of the evenly famous Commodore 64. This is in no way the case, they were (and are) completely different systems.

As some of my reader may know (or not), I’ve been collecting old home computers when I was approx 15 years younger than I am today. It also included an Amiga 600 (successor of the A500 and the cheaper version of an A2000). Around that period I fell in love with the whole Amiga concept. I loved everything about it. Good graphics, even better audio. Soon I received an A1200 and extended it up to a level where it had an external harddisk and a 68030 CPU running at 40Mhz (standard A1200 is a 680EC20 @ 14Mhz). This machine was actually connected to the Internet and was able to play MP3 music and everything. Soon after this one, I found a CDTV, one of the real game consoles coming from the Amiga factory (CDTV is basically an A500 with CD-drive). It all ended when I started to move out of my fathers house and the A1200 died. Everything is sold or given away to other collectors. Big regret now ๐Ÿ™

Going back to a few weeks ago when I talked to this friend of mine. I really felt I needed to have an Amiga again. So, I started to search for them and also put a question on twitter. Soon I’ve received an answer to my question that somebody had some Amigas on their attic. Allright, let me know when I can pick them up. After some mail exchange we picked out a date to get all machines. He told me he found an Amiga 4000T(ower) and 2x an Amiga 500. The A4000 was broken as far as he told me (which is a shame, the A4000T is the last real Amiga ever came out). So, last tuesday I went over there with my car, thinking I would receive 2x A500 and 1x 4000T. This is what I received..


Amiga M1764 monitor
Amiga 500 Computer (incl box)
Amiga 500 Computer with 512KB memory extension (incl box)
A530 Turbo for use with A500
A4000T incl box
External SCSI device with a Philips CDD3600 brander and a “SyQuest” drive.
10 SyQuest disks 270MB each
8 boxes fully loaded with Amiga software/games

One Amiga 500 didn’t boot up, the other one did. The A4000T did work, but couldn’t boot it’s Workbench nor did it seems to address the external SCSI. Given the time at that moment, I decided to call it a day (it was 1.30 am …)

The next day I decided to put it on AmigaScene, a dutch Amiga forum. People were amazed by what I found the other day. The A530 Turbo is apparently something special and the 4000T was also high-rated. In the end of the day, after work, I went home to open the case to see what’s inside it. Again, a (positive shock). The machine was clean inside. With clean, I mean really clean. It’s always been in a smoke-free environment. All condensators look fine and so did the batterij. At that moment I realised I’ve something special. Inside I found an unknown card which, because of the chips, I found is a Cyberstorm MK-II 060/SCSI-II (50Mhz/32MB RAM). Also I found a Cybervision 64/3D. These are really some special cards. On makes the A4000 suitable for heavy duty audio/video work and the CyberVision card is a 3D enabled, 64bit graphics card. I was jumping of happiness.

But the joy went away when I found out there was a SCSI harddisk inside which seemed to be utterly broken. It just didn’t spin up. At that moment I realised I did several dead harddisk repairments in the old days. I got the harddisk out and started to give it a good shake, put it back to power and the miracle was complete, it was spinning up again. Put everything together again and voila:

A fully booted Amiga 4000T running Workbench 3.1. Next I’ll upgrade this machine to AmigaOS 3.9 and hopefully get it connected to the Internet again. Next challenge, the A500/A530 !

The Big VoIP Post

As self proclaimed VoIP-expert (and so does my boss say) I decided to create this blog post. English is not my normal language, already my apologies for the mistakes! Let me know if you find one ๐Ÿ˜‰

The reason of this blog is partly because of my job. As already said, I’m a self proclaimed VoIP-expert and I’m lucky my boss also thinks like that. Because of this, I get all phone calls from customers who have problems with VoIP. Also I’m testing small PBX devices so I can give a fair shot of what the pro and cons are. I hope you enjoy the read. If you disagree, well.. let me know and even better, tell me why you disagree. Perhaps this will be updated!

VoIP in general

First of all, VoIP is really not that hard. The biggest difference between old school telephones and VoIP is basically the network. You probably think now, that’s pretty obvious and it is. Lot of customers don’t know this and there’s the first problem. While plain old telephones working with 2-wires, are the 2 wires replaces by UDP traffic over IP when using the standard VoIP. The customers telephone system has to convert that digital data into analog data which a phone will understand. The audio will be packed into small packets (UDP) and transported over the Internet. As you can imagine now, the packets had to come in the telephone system with a good stream and preferable directly behind each other. Back to the customer who doesn’t know that VoIP is traveling on network and thru routers. These people go to the local computer shop and buy the most cheap router there is. Result is a very bad VoIP connection (caused by this cheap router who cannot handle the traffic well) and the provider gets the blame. It’s the same as buying a huge and beautiful caravan while having a T-Ford pulling the thing. So, my first advice:
Use a decent router if you want to use VoIP!

In my tests, I’ll be using a Asterisk 1.4-based trunk which is directly connected to the Internet. It supports DDI and T.38 thru G711.alaw. Also support for G711.ulaw and G729, but these don’t work with T.38.

If you’re not aware what DDI and T.38 are, it’s probably better to read some wikipedia articles about this. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Telephone systems / PBX

Hardware solutions using old telephone systems

The first systems I tested with were the default PBX systems which were originally older phone systems and with some added hardware they become suitable for VoIP. These systems are usually set up by old phone-expert with almost no knowledge of networking. Most common are Siemens, Panasonic, Alcatel and probably some more.

The problem is that these systems usually aren’t capable of firewalling. So, they put a cheap ass router before it and suddenly they have one-way audio, cracking sound and much other inexplainable problems. At one of the customers I found a Netgear firewall. Great systems, but terrible in VoIP transporting. Especially when a PBX uses 2 IP addresses to do VoIP (control IP and the UDP Stream IP). The Netgears SIP Helper cannot handle this. Panasonic PBX is known to do this. Ask your local PBX supplier how your system works and if it uses only one IP address, use the SIP helper. It will prevent problems!

All the above systems work good with a decent router in front of it. Put a nice Cisco there and it works. DDI has to be on for all named systems, else they simply refuse to work. T.38 is also working like a charm.

For old hardware VoIP/PBX solutions (Panasonic, Siemens, Alcatel):
Pro:

  • It works when good configured
  • T.38 Support and DDI Support are perfect.

Cons:

  • Pretty expensive
  • No sense of security, so external firewall is needed
  • Trunk providers has to pay to get support from the maker.

Software Solutions

There are a plenty of software solutions. I can’t test them all because there are simply too much. I like the software solution the best because the whole networking/firewalling part could be done by the operating system. Some of them are even free (like Asterisk) and really work like a charm in basically anything. Also some of them (Swyxware) have huge problems with T.38 (Swyx only supports G771ulaw for T.38 which doesn’t work everywhere). Some software tools cannot use DDI (XLite) and depending on which software you choose, it will only support one line (again X-lite).

Pro:

  • Networking/security done by operating system
  • Support of T.38/DDI/Codecs depend on software
  • Can be free.

Cons:

  • Can be relatively expensive.
  • Not always decent support.
  • Not all software

Home office all-in-1 devices

In this category I only have 2 tested. Both devices are basically doing the same.

– FritzBox 7120 –

The all known Fritzbox. Beautiful device which does routing, firewalling, ADSL / Dialup and being a (wireless) switch. Also T.38 fax works perfectly and with the good working Fax2Email functionality it will save a few trees as well. There is only one major Con on this device, there is and there never will be DDI support. So, you can not make it a real PBX in an office environment (unless all phones can ring at the same time).

– Draytek IPPBX 2820n –

This can do exactly the same as the FritzBox with 2 differences. DDI is working perfectly (even with menu’s, call forwarding based on phone number and/or office hours). So, I thought I found a winner. With the latest firmware release they say to support T.38 and that’s the other difference. T.38 doesn’t work. Again, a big con. Voicemail to Email works nice and even fallback to PSTN works. Really a device which can make it in the VoIP world as cheap device

– Gigaset 800 series –

Gigaset is a bit odd one here. It’s not an all-in-one device but only a PBX. In the background it runs Linux and Asterisk. Gigaset only created a nice interface with Asterisk and ask a lot of money for it. Because it runs on Asterisk, everything works. So, nothing more to add except I think it’s too expensive.

VoIP to PSTN/ISDN

Only a few tested and these simply work. T.38 support is questionable. So far, only a Linksys is tested and that one worked.

VoIP Phones

Well, generally these work with DDI and not with T.38. One exception, the Gigaset. This one is not supporting DDI at the moment.

What I hope to reach with this blog

Well, I hope that some vendors will make their VoIP products better. I also hope that all people who are thinking of starting to use VoIP, also think about how the VoIP device (or devices) will be connected to the network. Use a decent router. The router is 80% responsible of how you’ll experience the quality of VoIP! Remember that!

If you have any questions, feel free to respond below. I’d love to see comments and hopefully I made some things clear.

Bart’s little place on the web

Hi there everybody. I just created a small blog where I can put some things which I think could be interesting for this world to know. Youโ€™ll find several things I found out at work (which will be below the Geek portion) or anything about my bands and music. Last, but not least, a part about Russia. As a Dutch guy, Russia is weird and perhaps somebody thinks this is interesting to read.

Enjoy your stay!!