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Archiv 'Miscellaneous'

08.Oct.2023
Amigaworld.net (Forum) Forum: AROS-Exec preserved on AROSWorld
After the closure of Ola '4pLaY' Jensen's forum AROS-Exec for health reasons, AROSWorld has preserved it read-only for posterity at the title link. (snx)

[News message: 08. Oct. 2023, 10:54] [Comments: 0]
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02.Oct.2023 Introduction: Research project "CH LUDENS"
"Confoederatio Ludens", or "CH LUDENS" for short, is a joint project of the two universities of Bern and the universities of Lausanne and Zurich that began in February 2023 and is intended to research Swiss games culture in the period from 1969 to 2000 by 2027.

The name of the project is based on the Latin name of Switzerland, Confoederatio Helvetica, whereby Helvetica has been replaced by the Latvian word for "to play", ludere, or its participle present active form, ludens.

Among other things, the thesis will be explored that new technologies are always met through playful approaches and that there are pretty much more games and game culture around the introduction of digitality than we are aware of and know. However, these have often been dismissed as children's or hobby stuff.

For decades, digital games were programmed in Switzerland in niches, but also with commercial success. They bear witness to many sub-scenes and a society that is changing due to digitalisation. The Confoederatio Ludens team explores this largely disregarded games industry and takes a step towards the broader preservation of a highly ephemeral and disappearing cultural heritage.

An existing project has already done some preliminary work for this: Swiss Games Garden has taken on the task of listing all computer games originating in Switzerland. As far as the Amiga is concerned, one of the best-known games is certainly Traps'n'Treasures.

Now Adrian Demleitner, a member of the research group, has thought about how to deal with video games on floppy disks as research material, using the Amiga as an example in a blog entry. To this end, as he writes on Mastodon, he had first procured a complete Amiga 500 set, including some common joysticks, a mouse, a Commodore 1084 monitor and dozens of floppy disks. In a sense, this brought Adrian full circle, as he had grown up with an Amiga 500.

In his dossier, he raises, among other things, the question of how to play a game released in the 90s, for example, authentically today. Because not only the game itself, but also the game environment contributes to the overall experience: is it important to play the game with the original joystick? Is it acceptable to run the game on an emulator and display it via a 3.5-inch display in a time- and resource-efficient way? What role did the materiality of the original hardware, including the sounds it produced, play in the gaming experience? (dr)

[News message: 02. Oct. 2023, 09:50] [Comments: 0]
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27.Sep.2023
Timo Weirich (Mastodon)

Emu68 tip: Reducing the speed of the Raspberry Pi
Timo Weirich is in the process of setting up a computer museum. He is also working on his Amiga 500, which is upgraded with a PiStorm. Now he has published a tip on how to reduce the speed so that old games (e.g. XJ220) run better or correctly:

For such adjustments to Michal Schulz' Emu68 software (we reported on the release candidate of version 1.0 just a few days ago), there is Emu68-Tools provided by Philippe 'Flype' Carpentier, which were also updated four days ago. Not only the Emu68Control included in it can control some aspects of the Pi's speed, but also Emu68Info: "with the SETCLOCKRATE option, for example, you can clock the Pi 3A+ down to 600 MHz, which makes it 2.3x slower than the default speed. In combination with the possibilities of Emu68Control, you can clock the Pi 3A+ down to only about 3,000 dhrystones. That's only a little more than twice as fast as a standard A1200".

Compatibility tip: Activating the "Slow chip memory" option (or the SC parameter) in Emu68Control should be avoided. This seems to corrupt the chip memory. Test case e.g.: Pinball Dreams. (dr)

[News message: 27. Sep. 2023, 21:24] [Comments: 0]
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