How to setup your A314

This is an updated version that also cover A314 v1.2
Original post published 22 Februari 2020 - 23:09

In this tutorial I will use an A500+ rev. 8a motherboard with WorkBench 2.1 as reference.
I will try to make it mostly a bullet to bullet post, to keep it as short and clear as possible

Setting up your hardware.

First thing to do is to make sure your computer sees the extra memory that A314 will share with your Amiga, and make sure that the RTC gets detected. The amount of extra memory you will retrieve from the A314 depends on your motherboard revision, and jumper settings.

Below you can the most common A314 setups without any motherboard modifications made:

A314 Motherboard JMP2 JMP3 JMPB3 / RAS0 JMPB3 / RAS1 Shared RAM
v1.1 rev. 5 set open* N/A N/A slow/ranger*
  rev. 6a set** open     slow/ranger**
  rev. 8a open set     chip
v1.2 rev. 5 set N/A open* set* slow/ranger*
  rev. 6a set**   open set slow/ranger**
  rev. 8a open   set set chip

With these setups for rev. 5, and rev. 6a you will NOT be able to use the PiAudio, RemoterWB or the VideoPlayer - these features requires shared chip ram.
A note for those of you that happen to have rev. 3, set the A314 jumpers in the same way as for rev. 5. However, as far as I know there is no way to get chip instead of slow/ranger RAM.

Continue reading

Aminet via Midnight Commander on your A500

Have you ever wanted to get stuff from Aminet to your A500 in a convenient way?
- With the A314 you can, and here's my how-to-guide:

Above you can see when I use Midnight Commander (MC) from AmigaShell.

I run MC with two arguments:
-a, --stickchars Disable usage of graphic characters for line drawing.
-b, --nocolor Forces black and white display.
This is to make it look a bit better in AmigaShell. Continue reading

How to play Spotify on your A500

Being kind of a newbie regarding linux, it was quite hard for me to pull this of. However, with a little help from my friend, who gave me the right tools to work with, I finally got this mojo working! This is the story of how I managed to get Spotify to play on my Amiga 🙂

I got the idea after I played an mp3 via my A314 - a trapdoor expansion with a Raspberry Pi as co-processor. The PiAudio-service is piping the audio via an Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) plug called amiga. This plug pipes the raw audio via the memory that the Raspberry Pi and the Amiga shares. On the Amiga side the piped audio goes to the sound chip Paula, that takes care of the playback. Note that the Raspberry Pi takes care of the decoding. Continue reading