amiga-news.de - Archive

Archive 07/2022

08.Jul.2022

Amiga emulator for MacOS: vAmiga 2.1b4
By releasing version 2.0 (amiga-news.de reported), developer Dirk Hoffmann has started the beta phase of version 2.1 of his Amiga emulator vAmiga for MacOS and yesterday released the fourth beta version. Changes:

Added support for ECS Denise (SuperHires modes)

macOS 10.15 or higher is required. (dr)

[News message: 08. Jul. 2022, 22:23] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jul.2022
Erik Hogan Game Construction Kit: Scorpion Engine V2022.5
The "Scorpion Engine" developed by Erik 'earok' Hogan allows you to develop games. The engine itself is closed source, all demos and example games are open source. The editor runs under Windows. Graphics are imported as PNG files, levels created by using the editor Tiled eingesetzt. For importing and creating sounds, music and animations the Amiga formats (mod, 8svx, anim5) are used.

A few moments ago he has relesaed version 2022.5. Among others it includes expanded control of sound tones, a new parallax demo, editor improvements for easier development, the ability to swap level backgrounds on the fly, bug fixes and more.

You can support the developer on his Patreon website. (dr)

[News message: 08. Jul. 2022, 13:16] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jul.2022
Gunnar von Boehn

Apollo Space Invaders: Eighth developer version of the remake
Arne von Boehn is writing a Space Invaders remake in 68K assembler on a Vampire4 standalone (amiga-news.de reported). Besides a new preview video there is also a new developer version for testing.

As Gunnar explains, the game is playable, but not yet finished. Arne has now added the 2-player mode, which still needs to be refined. Likewise, work continues on the UFOs: if they were hit, extras will be dropped in the future, such as alien freeze, extra life, quick shot, quick reload, repair bunker, shield, etc. All graphics are made by Kevin Saunders. In addition, the bunker damage will be improved and drawn in more detail, as well as the sound effects refined.

The game uses true colors and runs at 60 frames per second. The Super-AGA chipset and the AMMX instruction set are required. In the end, the game should run on both the Vampire V2 and V4.

Download: ARNEINVADER8.exe (52 MB) (dr)

[News message: 08. Jul. 2022, 07:00] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jul.2022

Programming language: AmiBlitz 3.9.4
At the end of March the new major version 3.9.0 of the programming language AmiBlitz was released. Yesterday a fourth update with bug fixes was released with version 3.9.4. Changes:

fixed: scrolling problem with vertical slider in source window
fixed: crash when trying to save settings from settings-window
fixed: setting "autolayout" was not stored correctly
fixed: bug in userlibs-loading routine that corrupted the internal libs list
improved: rawkeylib now supports NM_WHEEL_UP/NM_WHEEL_DOWN-Events sent by WinUAE that means PED supports mousewheel without any further tools like FreeWheel
changed: instruction browser - search for functions in includes is now switched off by default
changed: some default settings to better values (CON:, sourcefont)

In addition, the documentation was revised:

added all missing commands of windowslib to windowslib.guide

(dr)

[News message: 08. Jul. 2022, 05:53] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jul.2022

Game Construction Kit: RedPill 0.9.11
RedPill, developed by Carlos Peris, is a game construction kit written in Amiblitz 3.9, which allows the development of games from various genres (see short tests of two Redpill games). RedPill is compatible with AGA and ECS, the "player" for playing the finished creations requires a total of 1.5 MB RAM. Jens 'Farbfinsternis' Henschel has written a tutorial which he recently updated.

Changes of version 0.9.11:

Added new action trigger Set Cam Limits to change the bounds of camera movement.
Refactor of some features allows to gain 14ks of memory in most games.
Camera center now works correctly for reduced display sizes.
EXPERIMENTAL: Support for games with only 2 and 4 colors.
Fix for freeze after making a Build.
Fix for the spritesheet number 9 not being exported correctly.
For some reason it seems display was moved one pixes to the left, this has been corrected.

(dr)

[News message: 07. Jul. 2022, 17:48] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jul.2022 Preview video: Kung Fu action 'Devil's Temple'
Devil's Temple features 10 stages of intense arcade kung fu action based on the classic Irem games Kung Fu Master and Vigilante. Over 300 frames of animation were packed into the game and every cycle of performance was used on the Amiga A500. The game will adapt to upgrades, so additional chip ram will result in better music, AGA will provide additional colors and a greater variety of enemies in the game.

Yesterday, a new preview video was released for the game in development, allowing a brief look at each of the bonus levels in Devil's Temple. These are obtained after defeating the level 3, 6 and 9 bosses and are meant to break up the action a bit.

The game is already available for pre-order as a boxed edition. Likewise, a demo version of the first stage is available on itch.io. (dr)

[News message: 07. Jul. 2022, 13:17] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jul.2022 Blog review: Sound card Maestro Professional
The blog 'shred.zone' presents in a detailed article the internal sound card Maestro Professional, which was distributed by the German company MacroSystem in the early 1990s. Besides the presentation of the design, the development of a corresponding driver maestix.library is also highlighted, since MacroSystem itself never released the required Amiga software. (dr)

[News message: 07. Jul. 2022, 11:48] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jul.2022 Game: 'Hunting Frogs'
At the Swedish demo party Gubbdata!, which took place this year from July 1 to 3, the Swedish demo group Software Of Sweden presented version 1.0 of their game 'Hunting Frogs': with a frog you try to catch and eat insects here (YouTube-Video). The game is based on a 28-year-old code, can be played by up to four players and was uploaded to Aminet yesterday. (dr)

[News message: 07. Jul. 2022, 07:37] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jul.2022 Verschlüsselungsprotokoll: AmiSSL 5.3 (AmigaOS 3/4)
Only about 14 days ago version 5.2 of the open source encryption protocol AmiSSL was released, which has now been updated to version 5.3. It is now based on OpenSSL 3.0.5, which was released just two days ago. (dr)

[News message: 07. Jul. 2022, 07:17] [Comments: 0]
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06.Jul.2022 Video: Creating games graphics
Graphic artist Simone Bernacchia, who has designed graphics for numerous Amiga games, explains some of his designs in this talk recorded at the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show 2022. (dr)

[News message: 06. Jul. 2022, 07:15] [Comments: 0]
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06.Jul.2022

MorphOS: MouseTracker 1.3
The team of #amigazeux has released version 1.3 of its commodity MouseTracker, which records mouse movements and clicks and can display them as realtime overlay. Changes:

Image format for saving can now be selected and isn't limited to PNG only anymore. Formats supported through Reggae are: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, ILBM, DEEP.
Added '%x' as placeholder for save filenames for track and heatmaps that is replaced by the approriate suffix for the set image format.
When an overlay track/heatmap is shown it will now also mix the map with the screen on non-composited screens. Live-updates for trackmaps on non-composited screens are not done for now.
On non-composited screens the prgress window was 'burned' into the track/heatmap. Fixed.
Reduced the amount of tracker nodes created by a factor of ~3 by optimising away unnececarry waypoints.
Added a small close button in the left top corner when showing Track- and/or HeatMap overlays.
The config file is now saved as a sequence of template strings instead of saving one binary blob. The old config is loaded once and converted to the new config automatically. The old config is not deleted by MouseTracker itself in case you have to revert to an older version of MT. If you want to manually delete it: 'env:MouseTrackerCX/default.cfg' and the same in envarc:
"Strength" header in mouse tracker prefs also acts as a button now to advance all cycle gadgets at once.
The "Track" header of the track column in mouse tracker prefs is a button now and can be used to toggle respective checkmarks.
When an overlay is shown the window opacity can now be adjusted by pressing CTRL and moving the mouse wheel.
Fixed mouse distance calculation which was severly broken. My head still hurts...
Also tracks the fourth mouse button now.
Now also visually tracks mouse-wheel up and down events.
Prefs handling was completely jumbled up internally. Fixed.
Added NOSCREENBAROBJECT=NOSBAR/S option to have no screenbar object created at all. Works from tooltypes and/or shell.
Will add its own screenbar object to the screen titlebar when started. The screenbar object offers a popup menu with a couple of options (map creation, go to prefs, go to stats) to chose from. Furthermore the screenbar object displays the mouse position on the screen using a sizeable dot. Check out its config options in the pubscreen manager (right click on screen depth button).
Fixed a memory leak when parsing tooltypes.
Added PREFS=GUI/S option to open the GUI of MouseTracker directly when started. Works from tooltypes aswell as from shell.
It is now possible to select the screen to generate an overlay or image for from the prefs.
Stats for individual screens are tracked now and can be selected in the 'Stats' tab for display.
Long term statistics can be reset now too. It has a saverty requester aswell.
Added a savety requester to the 'Reset Statistics' button.
Prefs/statistics GUI got some cosmetic changes.
Heatmap creation for low screen sizes did not work. Fixed.
Sped up final HeatMap generation by about 300%.
Sped up drawing of TrackMap and HeatMap by more than 1000%.
Added MagicBeacon notification support when a a Track- or HeatMap has been saved. Left clicking the notification will open the drawer the map has been saved to while right clicking it will open the image itself in an Ambient window.
Statistics now always opens in a virtual group allowing the window to be sized smaller.
When mouse pointer reenters a screen and the trackmap live update is shown, it won't draw a line from the last position the mouse pointer left the screen from to the new position the mouse pointer reentered the screen.
Added short description texts to all progress windows.
Removed all spaces in texts displaying percentages.

(dr)

[News message: 06. Jul. 2022, 06:16] [Comments: 0]
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06.Jul.2022 Flashback: Australian Amiga Gazette (update)
The Australian Amiga Gazette (AAG) was founded in 1996 to keep the Amiga computer alive here in Australia. The first issue was published in December 1996, the last in October 1998, making 23 issues.

AAG was created entirely on an Amiga 4000 using Amiga's Page Stream Publishing software and printed on a second-hand press. The magazine had 40 black and white printed pages and contained articles, product reviews and advertising.

20 issues are available for download in PDF format at the title link. Two have yet to be scanned, one issue was never printed.

Update: (25.07.2022, 16:47, dr)

According to Michael Burak in the English-language comment section, he has redone the scans in 600 dpi and re-uploaded them. (dr)

[News message: 06. Jul. 2022, 06:07] [Comments: 10 - 25. Jul. 2022, 18:53]
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