[News] The AmigaOne in Leeuwarden (photos) | ANN.lu |
Posted on 25-May-2002 17:32 GMT by petros1815 | 122 comments View flat View list |
The AmigaOne was presented in Leeuwarden today. Unfortunately, only openfirmware bios was shown. Photos of the presentation at http://www.amigascene.nl/nieuws/nieuws.htm .
At around 15.00 Computer City brought the AmigaOne motherboard. It is the first sample of the 1.0a board. Because the motherboard was different from the one that Eyetech had, it was not possible to use the Linux from the old board. Because there was no more time for a new installation, we had to do only with the openfirmware bios. There are installed a IBM processor (without cooling!), 128MB, Soundblaster soundcard and a ATi Radeon 7500 AGP.
It now waits for OS4.
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The AmigaOne in Leeuwarden (photos) : Comment 109 of 122 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Solar on 28-May-2002 10:57 GMT | As (almost) always, I am not so much astounded by the original misconception, but by the failure of the others to correct it...
1) Do not fear - any "standard" BIOS automatically initializes installed SCSI cards (which usually have a BIOS of their own), so your SCSI drives will be there from the start.
2) Even your off-the-shelf 486 can let you chose your booting partition, this has nothing to do with BIOS. The BIOS initializes busses, cards, and ports, then starts the bootup code. That bootup code can be anything from a bare-bones LILO to a full-featured GUI to chose your OS of choice - depending on how long you are willing to wait before you make the choice. (GUI code requires graphics and AGP drivers to be loaded.) This is called "boot manager". Examples are VAMOS, XOSL, LILO.
3) Amiga Early Startup Menu is more or less equivalent to such a GUI boot manager, not to a BIOS interface. The Amiga, with it's fixed hardware, had no *need* for BIOS settings. If your AmigaOne manufacturer knows his stuff, you should have no need to ever *CHANGE* BIOS settings - unless you like to tamper, or need to work around buggy peripherals. Think of BIOS settings as a feature the Amiga did *NOT* have.
4) Of course a "standard" BIOS cannot possibly display the same amount of graphical beauty as the Kickstart Early Startup. Reason is simple: The Kickstart was 512 kB custom code linked to custom, well-known-at-Kickstart-build-time hardware. If you don't have custom hardware (as in AGP / PCI), and your BIOS is like, 64? kB, you don't display fancy widgets. You settle for smallest common denominator - text. (Remember that a 64 kB BIOS is *not* equivalent to the 512 kByte Kickstart boot manager, neither in concept nor functionality...)
5) If your AmigaOne BIOS gets in the way, do not flame the concept of BIOS, flame the manufacturer for not pre-setting the BIOS correctly. |
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