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The most retarded part of this model was the floppy drive. It still used that custom-made 1/2 speed floppy drive from Chinon, who stopped making them by 1994, making ESCOM to buy back old Amigas to cannibalize the drives. And they were still making those with the most cheap EC 68040 they could find, that didn't even had the MMU. In 1996. To compete with Pentiums 200s and PowerMacs 300s.

The A4000 is a very clear example of "Amiga Germany designed this case"

good choice of prodigy - no good playing in the background!

In a machine of this vintage.. how fast is the CF card setup vs a real hard drive ? At that time some drives were 10,000 RPM scsi drives which were available.

Dude I remember selling and assembling video toaster long time ago, good memories.

The ubiquitous Dr Chris vinyl magnet for all of us Dr Chris cult followers, LOL

What a flashback, every time I opened my A-4000 I was afraid of breaking the plastic clips of the front panel, they are so brittle. I can't count how often I had to open it for CPU cards, RAM, Retina, Cybervision 64 and stuff like SyQuest changeable hard drive (which sucked) and other stuff. Great to see the mighty 060 in it's full glory!

that's actually a backplane. The daughter card are expansion cards...just saying. Clean little junk box though. Someone's been in there and detailed it.

Jens apparently stopped making the rapid roads USB module due to a design flay in his design where the module could get shorted out via usb connect/disconnect and to stop the warranty bloodbath he stopped making the module due to so called "chip shortage".......

Thank you Q got to love the Amiga 4000.

I always made sure I had those big antistatic motherboard bags on hand just in case.

I'm a bit surprised that the chip RAM speed for stock A1200 isn't 4.00 (2x the bus width and 2x the clock of ECS). But the slower speeds make sense to me because of the higher latency of unsynchronized clocks between the chip and the non-original CPU and its RAM bus. I don't remember ever noticing that effect with my Zeus, but by the time I had that installed, I was running a Picasso and wouldn't have noticed. (I see drramtop1576 has a clearer and more up to date grasp of this issue.)

Yeah, those pesky video sluts...

I had an A4000/030 and it was 25MHz, which was soooo slow, my Blizzard A1230 was so much faster, but the 4000 had a Picasso II....

I just posted a time lapse of me putting my A4000 back together the other day. I took it apart about a year ago to do a motherboard swap and install a 060 board but waited longer than expected for the board and kickstart roms to arrive. When they finally got here I didn't feel like messing with it so it sat on my desk in pieces for far too long and I kept putting off the reassembly. It feels good to finally have the beast back together again.

A4000/040, A4000/030, A4000 CR, and the A4000T were the versions which were released - I've two of the 040 versions both part way through being refurbished, I've done the motherboard dance more than a couple of times now :D

Used to do renders late at night so we could utilise every machine in the office, even the PC on the front reception desk. Did the same years later with backburner when I moved on to 3DS max. Was a great feeling of power, like having a supercomputer at your fingertips. I bet you could render as fast on an iPad nowadays.

Back in the day I made a boot floppy with the ScreamerNet client so I could turn my office into a render farm after everyone went home.

Back in the late 90s I was working as an artist for a games developer. At that time everyone had shifted to working on PCs (DPaint and 3D Studio in DOS...blerrgh ), but I still had my own Amiga 4000/060 on my desk for running Lightwave and Brilliance. One job I was assigned was creating a 3D rendered cut scenes for a flight simulator we were working on - originally it was just going to be a 2D comic strip, panning from frame to frame, but I convinced the boss that it would look better as a 3D animation. So I set up a whole scene where you moved through a dusty loft and found the comic book in a chest. The camera zoomed in on the comic and started moving between frames, then comic pages flipping over to show the next frames. I did it all in Ligtwave on my Amiga, but knew that rendering everything would take too long, so at night when everyone left work, I would run around the building and run Screamernet on everyone's PCs, then head back to my Amiga and set the rendering going... then head off down the pub, returning hours later to find everything rendered and looking glorious!

I never had the patience or artistic skill to get into 3D modelling, but I was fascinated by the 'distributed computing' concept back then. I recall there being a horrendously expensive, multi-processor rendering machine called the "Raptor", which used Lightwave and Screamernet to munch through frames at an incredible rate, far faster than a room full of maxed out Amigas, but the Amiga would be in control. Ah, the good old days. 😁

So screamer net tells them to render different frames?

syn ack yo sup

Seems like a couple super powerful machines like WinUAE instances or the standalone Vampire would make this real nice. Would be nice to know what’s in the ack and other files. It also seems like some tool could make all that boiler plate much easier.

thats a lot of words and singing

Nostalgia!

Doesn't star also have the same amount of letters as left? 😅

Love your videos! Awesome!

I never got on with screamernet back in the day. always seemed to crash or you'd start a render going and find the client had quit after some frames so you were just single cpu rendering anyway.... So i stuck a 68060 in it instead. that made up it! Even with modern network nodes on PC lightwave its still pretty shonky! but at least we have other options now.

I used to open up Screamernet and dream that I actually had more Amigas to use it. Didn't need it though... 060 96mb RAM - it's all a LWer ever needed ever! harharhar

The good old render farm ') , it's been years that i thought of that.

In 2001 I had 128+16+2 MB of RAM in my A3k 060.

0:10 An Amiga 3k with one drive mounted on the right instead in the middle always makes me feel very uncomfortable. It hurts the eye!

It would be cool if you could add nodes from other ISA's like PPC, x86, Arm. Distributed rendering 30 years ago.

my wife “why do you happily watch a guy waving his hand at a screen “ 😉

Sigh... Guess I'll just have to delay what I'm doing in Blitz 2 as "proof of concept" and go ready some hdf's so i can test this running 6 instances of WinUAE side by side... Fun fact, going back to my old coding days on the Amiga sure is making me appreciate the blessing and modern day convenience that is not crashing the whole machine just because i mishandled a pointer :D

Thanks Q, love your Lightwave videos, many more if possible, always happy to watch animation software from the staging all the way to the final renders, ❤

I never used Screamernet, looks pretty good. I'll have to give it a go, thanks Q.

I have a Toaster Screamer (Bezel) in my collection and I ran screamer net render farm in hollywood in the 90s. (I used to also work for NewTek) Really the key to screamer net is understanding the content directory setting and making all your scene and objects and images relative to that.

So if you have two amigas connect to the same network, screamernet will auto connect to each other one both programs are up and running?

I would guess that running Winuae and 68K Lightwave on multiple PCs networked together would really scream. Pun intended. This video makes me curious to know if anyone is still using Amiga Lightwave to render videos for modern shows. Again guessing since it's been years since I've used Lightwave, but I would imagine that the current PC version of Lightwave supports some version of networked rendering.

Your thumbnail image suggests this was how B5 was done, but with a whole fleet of networked Amigas?

About Networking, if you want to network old Amiga-Hardware for cheap, use parallel port networking, sure it is only P2P but pretty fast. Two unexpanded A500 with AmiTCP do ~100kByte/s, two A3000 ~200kByte even over the internal parallel port. If one side has a dedicated modern parallel card (MFC or Ariadne) then even ~400kByte are doable which is on par with 10MBit Ethernet cards for the Amiga. You can even network Amigas and PCs - BUT do not use any cable because it might blow up your Amiga or PC or both. Things get a bit complicated as there are several ways to use parallel cables. There is a dedicated Amiga-Cabeling which reaches high speeds between Amigas, then there is a interoperable one which allows networking between Linux and Amiga at a slightly lower speed and then there is a hypergeneric one which is shockingly slow but also works between Windows 3 to 11, MacOS 3 to 11, OS/2, pretty much any unix and so on. I can't remember the specific implementation names but magplip.device is the one allowing Amiga and Linux to network pretty well. At home I have an outdated 486 with 7 RS232 and 5 Centronics ports (and ARCnet and 100MBit Ethernet using the 3c515 "Corkscrew") which acts as a router for all my old machines, from the C64, the CPC464, the IBM PC5150 running DOS and to all my Amigas. Even Amiga-Linux connects very well through parallel to the 486. Too bad that most of these old systems can not really partake with the real internet but it is good enough to transfer software through FTP, SSH and RSYNC.

hmm I resourced LW not so long ago.. I'm wondering if I should take a look at ScreamerNet... btw great video

This light wave stuff requires 90’s familiarity: glad you’re recording for posterity. Amazed this works !

Super cool. Thanks Q!

I might be odd but I love ScreamerNET and LW5.....it's just satisfying knowing how powerful this was when it was introduced. Mixed nodes, Amiga and SGI are fun too.

It hurts my soul to see you don't have kingcon installed. Poor sod 😥

Been using ScreamerNet with Amiberry-running Pi4s when doing intensive anims nowadays, but I guess you must already have guessed that! 😉 Amiga and LW5 rule!!! Thanks for the vid, mate!

What an interesting video you did there! I should try this with my Amigas! Awsome and Thanks