Continuing on from Part 1 here, I am installing AmiKit 8.1 Real on my Amiga 4000T. I am pleased to report I have made some great progress overnight and now running AmiKit 8.5 Real!

Where I left this in Part 1, I had just got AmiKit 8.1 Real installed and booting on the Amiga 4000T. Please go back and review Part 1 first if you haven't read it yet as I am just continuing onwards from that post.

I have a Mediator 4000T PCI bridgeboard installed on this Amiga 4000T, which means I need to install the drivers for it and the various PCI cards I have installed - Voodoo3 gfx card, SoundBlaster 128 PCI, Realtek 8029 PCI card, etc.

It was at this point that I realised to my pleasant surprise that Poseidon USB drivers where all installed, and my Deneb USB was working without me having to do anything! USB sticks and USB drives working. Fantastic!

I installed Picasso96 from the AmigaOS 3.9 CD as it is needed for the Voodoo3 card to work. There are instructions on the Mediator CD that explain the steps here so I won't repeat them here.

I then copied the Mediator files onto a USB stick to install onto the Amiga 4000T - as before I did an assign for the CD name to the drawer I created so I didn't need the physical CD to install it:

The installation includes the drivers and Warp 3D as well:

I probably should try to use the Radeon 9250 card in the Amiga 4000T at some stage, but for now I want to get things working on the existing setup.

Important thing I found out though is that the CGX drivers included in the AmiKit 8.1 Real installation cause LOTS of problems with Picasso96 cards - specifically you can't see them!

To fix this problem it is important to turn off the CGX_AGA&Birdie stuff, which is done via an icon in the tools drawer on the Amikit drive called Disable_CGX_AGA&Birdie:

There is a Recover_CGX_Aga&birdie program here also to put it back again.

With the Mediator installation completed, I setup the Voodoo card as per the instructions on the CD. Once rebooted I could see the Voodoo card and resolutions in the ScreenMode prefs - excellent:
 

Testing 1280x1024 (native resolution for my TFT screen) works great from the Voodoo3 as expected:

I then save the settings and reboot - some work to do on resizing backdrops, etc, but it works - AmiKit 8.1 Real is now running on the Voodoo3 at 1280x1024:

I next set up the network settings via the Genesis wizard in the Internet drawer, selecting the FastEthernet.device driver and fixed the backdrop:

With internet active I then ran the AmiKit Live Update program, which downloads 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 updates from the internet to self-update 8.1 to the latest version of AmiKit.

This takes a long time so now is a great time to have dinner and watch some tv - I did! :-)

Eventually the downloads complete and reboot is needed. The updates then start installing, which also takes quite a while.

I noticed the GL Matrix screensaver is enabled while I was waiting for the updates to finish installing - an oldie but a goodie:
 

Updates all done, the system reboots and now we have a fully up to date AmiKit 8.5 Real running on the Amiga 4000T!

At this point I could switch to SGrab to stop taking grainy iphone photos of the progress:

A shock to me was the amount of memory AmiKit 8.5 Real uses! I have 90MB of memory on the A4000T but after updating to 8.5 I now only have 28MB of memory left!!!

This is an issue for running my demos, so I need to put more memory into the machine or work out somehow to improve the memory usage. Tempted to take the Cyberstorm with 128MB from my A4000D to fix it permanently. I noticed I can't buy the Zorro ram expansions from anywhere (out of stock) so I have to run with it.

That said - it looks great as it is.

Here is iBrowse running under Amikit 8.5 Real:

Icons look terrific, but certainly use a lot of memory for the more busy drawers:

The Shell also looks a bit different - setup with tab completion, etc.

There is a lot of software to try out on the AmiKit 8.5 Real base installation - I will have some fun trying them out.

Microgolded is installed too - I actually own a purchased copy of the full GoldEd IDE, so I will install that soon - but for now it is nice to see a familiar default editor again:

Picshow is quite impressive too - I like it. Having said that it also chews through the memory - down to 12MB free!

Eagleplayer is also nicely setup, with a nice remote control I can put in the bottom left corner to manage it, with a few tunes already there to enjoy.

Here is the Prefs drawer:

I needed to modify the AHI prefs to use the SB128 rather than Paula for audio out. I also use the Mixer application from the Mediator installation, as I feed the output of the paula rca connections into the line in on the SB128 so I only need one audio out to the speakers to here the audio from both.

GUI Preferences screen:

I needed to change the Locale preferences to Australia of course and date settings needed adjusting accordingly:

At this point it was midnight again so I ran out of time to do any more work, but I am pleased with where I have got to. Still need to set up the CD drive, get my large hard disk working with it, install more applications too! More to come!