My Acube Sam440ep motherboard that I have been running AmigaOS4.1 on has been installed in this beautiful Emko case (see picture below) for the last couple of years. I wanted to swap cases with one that had front mounted USB ports since the Amiga Sam440ep motherboard only has two USB ports on the back side (and those are used by the keyboard and mouse).

Emko is a Czech manufacturer of cases, sadly it does not seem they are making cases for private persons any more, but a couple of years ago they had quite a large offering of small Mini-ITX cases that you could buy. I picked up two of them back then, the one on the picture above and the slightly taller version of the same case. They also had a similar case as the one above available in aluminium, I should have picked that one up when I had the chance, c’est la vie…

Here is the back of the Emko case. As you can see the Sam440ep does not have many ports. There is a serial port, DVI port, S-video port, audio out, two USB ports and two ethernet ports. Not all of these ports are usable in AmigaOS4.1 though. It is possible to hook up more USB ports from the motherboard also. Acube kindly sent the backplate to me for free if I paid for shipping.

One of the best things with the Emko case is its well ventilated design, this is a beautiful case for fanless systems such as the 533MHz Sam440ep motherboard.

Migrating the Sam440ep AmigaOS 4.1 motherboard to the Morex 557

I have had my eyes on the Morex 557 Mini-ITX case for a while and was happy finding a second hand unit for sale locally. The Morex 557 is a small ITX case, not that much larger than a Mini-ITX motherboard (and actually just a tiny bit smaller than the Emko case). I suspect these type of cases will be much more difficult to find in the future thanks to the popularity of ITX gaming rigs where you need space for a graphics board so if you like small ITX cases, time to hoard up.

Step 1 – Dismounting the old case

I have set up the Sam440ep with two drives, one 256GB SSD for the Workbench and Work partition and one old 2.5″ 500GB HDD as a data drive. I had this idea to get a larger drive and migrate all Amiga stuff I have to the HDD. That way I would have a backup of all my Amiga hoard of files. That proved difficult though as the FTP program crashed no matter what I tried. Will give it another try in the future but I will definitely retire the slow mechanical HDD sometime in the future.

Step 2 – Prepare installation in new case

The motherboard is a bit dirty, I did not have enough IPA to clean it though, so next time maybe. If I remember correctly, the upper heatsink sits over the CPU and the bottom heatsink sits over the GPU. The 533MHz Acube Sam440ep can run fanless. Believe it or not, for regular Amiga stuff, 533MHz is fast enough. AmigaOS4.1 definiely does not feel slow on this modest next generation Amiga.

Step 3 – Installation in Morex case

The Morex 557 case was a really tight case, the front had to be removed to get the motherboard into the case. Also note the USB headers on the motherboard, they where not keyed so I had to look up pinouts.

Step 4 – Adding SSD and harddrive to the Sam440ep

It was not obvious where to put the storage drives at first – There was holes on the side of the case for 2.5″ units. Here is the SSD mounted to the side with two screws only, it was a tight fit but it aint going anywhere now.

And here is the 500GB harddrive mounted. I will run this until I find a good replacement. This drive has a bad habbit of spinning down which makes it slow whenever you need to access it again, no idea how to disable that and a good reason to get rid of it in the future.

As you see, with both drives mounted there is still space between the for heat to rise and escape the case.

Some words about AmigaOS 4.1 before closing this post…

So the reason for all this is to run AmigaOS4. The Sam440ep motherboard came out in 2008 (or was it 2009), even back then it was obsolete by PC standards. That it cost as much as a much high perfoming PC of its day made it a hard sell for those outside of the Amiga community.

But the future was bright back then, because of legal problems, there had been no new next generation Amiga hardware for quite some years untill the Sam was released making it difficult to hop on the AmigaOS4 train (as there was no new hardware for sale).

The Sam440ep was the first batch of AmigaOS 4 compatible hardware released by Acube that lead to renewed interest in the next generation Amiga platform. Unfortunately as we look back today, PPC was probably not the right way to go.

The future of Amiga is probably ARM and Workbench 3.*. Thanks to PiStorm, anyone can have a high performance Amiga with ”full” compatibility with 68k applications, so IMHO the future of AmigaOS 4 is bleak. But that does not and should not stop anyone from using it.

One of the advantages of a next generation Amiga is that its a much more updated version of Amiga, both from a software and hardware point of view. There is a TCP/IP stack included, AHI is standard and fonts look amazing on Workbench for example.

At the same time, configuring AmigaOS to your liking from the first installation is a reminder of how far computing has gotten in comparison with the ”modern” AmigaOS.

There is a lot of clicking and editing files to get it custom tuned to your liking. Prepare to sit off a couple of days to get it to your liking. And Prefs is unfortunately just a mess by modern standards. But when it is fine tuned to your liking, it is perfect – And most of the stuff is as it used to be. And that is the huge selling point of AmigaOS4!

Someone said that AmigaOS4 is for hardcore Workbench users – I can not agree more! This is what everyone was dreaming of back in 1995, and best is, you can get it today!

Closing off, my primary use of my Sam440ep next gen Amiga is for PPaint, there is a PPC port of it that runs beautifully on the Sam. If there was a modern browser capable of the modern web available I would not mind running a higher performance next gen Amiga as a daily driver.