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Archiv 'New hardware and software products'

14.Jul.2021
Arne Urbaniak (E-Mail) Amiga disks on PC: Copy program A-Copy
A-Copy is a program that looks a lot like X-Copy for reading and writing ADF disk images under Windows. It requires the ADF drive hardware, which uses a Teensy USB Development Board as an adapter between PC and floppy drive. (cg) (Translation: bb)

[News message: 14. Jul. 2021, 23:51] [Comments: 0]
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14.Jul.2021

AmigaOS 4: Python implementation of Space Invaders
Programmed by Tomohiro Nishikado and Taito distributed by Taito, Space Invaders premiered in 1978: an attack of aliens had to be fended off with the spaceship, moving left and right with it at the bottom of the screen and trying to decimate with shots the rows of regularly arranged aliens that were constantly moving horizontally, gradually moving downwards.

Subsequently, there were also numerous conversions for the Amiga, such as "Super Space Invaders" or DeLuxe Galaga. In 2014, developer Lee Robinson wanted to test his Python programming skills and wrote a Python clone of the game, the source code of which he published on GitHub (YouTube video).

Amiga programmer Janne Peräaho has taken this source code, ported it from Python 3 to Python 2.5.6 and created a conversion for AmigaOS 4.

Extras:

Full screen mode
Unlimited attack waves
Highscore
Title music
Moon background
Amiga-Icon

We have tested the game briefly: The game runs in slow motion under WinUAE on a Windows computer with 2.20 GHz. Maybe newer and faster systems can get more out of it. Native on an AmigaOne X5000/20, on the other hand, it runs smoothly and is thus perfectly suited for a short phase of distraction.

The game can be downloaded for free from OS4Depot, the author is happy about a small donation if you like it, which he also considers as motivation for future projects. (dr) (Translation: bb)

[News message: 14. Jul. 2021, 07:19] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jul.2021
Indie Retro News (Webseite) Preview-Video: Point'n Click Adventure 'Athanor 2'
Two years ago 16-bit conversions of the point'n click adventure game 'Athanor 2 - The Legend Of The Birdmen' (originally developed for the Amstrad CPC) were announced. Now, a first video has been released: Athanor 2 Amiga (pre-release video), comparison of the Atari ST and Amiga conversions. (cg) (Translation: bb)

[News message: 12. Jul. 2021, 23:22] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jul.2021
Indie Retro News (Webseite) Teaser video: Jump'n Run 'Agonman' announced for August
'Agonman' is a platform game created with the help of the RedPill development environment. A teaser video announces the release of the title for August. A 68020 and 2 MB of RAM are mentioned as the minimum requirements, while a 68030 and some Fast RAM are recommended. Agonman uses some of the graphics from the 2020 released classic 'Agony'. (cg) (Translation: bb)

[News message: 12. Jul. 2021, 22:55] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jul.2021
Amigans Puzzler 'Follix' for AGA Amigas released
Recently he has updated his puzzle game ArtPazz, yesterday Simone 'saimo' Bevilacqua has announced the release of his AGA puzzle game Follix. He wrote:

"I was 16 when I bought a stock Amiga 1200, in the fall of 1993, finally making the jump from my beloved Commodore 64. Back then, I was isolated in a little town, knew nobody who was into software development, owned no programming books and had no software, apart from a bunch of floppies containing 3 pirated games I got as a bonus from the shop I had bought the Amiga from. However, having heard I was interested in programming, some friends put me in touch with an older guy who had an Amiga 4000 loaded with several original productivity programs - among which AMOS Professional - and sitting on a desk in his shop, doing nothing. The guy (who eventually became a close friend) allowed me to go to his shop and use his Amiga at will (years later, he even let me take it with me to another town!) and provided me with a copy of AMOS (registered in his name).

I started learning AMOS and improving the little programming skills I had built with the Commodore 64 User Manual and some tapes that taught BASIC. I did not consider another language because I was totally unaware of other options and, anyway, AMOS felt like a natural step from Commodore 64's BASIC and gave me the feeling that I could finally satisfy my desire of making a whole, proper game. Still, my skills and knowledge were limited, my unexpanded Amiga (which was the computer I did most of my programming on anyway) was not exactly a workstation and AMOS had its limits, so most of my ideas were doomed to remain just that - ideas. Yet, I was quite interested in puzzle games, which often have little hardware demands. And so the first game I ever created ended up being a puzzler. It was called Follia NBA¹, and the year was 1994.

The concept was stol... erm... heavily inspired by Thalion's Atomix², which I had seen on an MS-DOS computer of one of the aforementioned friends. It was a bit different from Follix: the tiles of a level were the pieces of a picture depicting the logo of an NBA team³; as a consequence, there was only one correct place for each tile; the player had to guess the area where the reconstucted picture fitted; for every 2 minutes left, the player was awared a bonus that, at his/her command, would automagically put a tile in the correct place. That first version was really bad: some design choices were completely wrong; most of the graphics were ugly; the code was messy, inefficient and, in places, uselessly complicated; the sound effects were taken from various tracker modules. In all, it mirrored perfectly the fact that the development had been a learning process. Though, it did work (I am somewhat amazed by how the patches to the workarounds to the fixes to the bugs produced, in the end, the correct result); moreover, the puzzles were actually good and the game was indeed fun.

In those days, I could not imagine I was sowing a seed. Through the years, I reworked/remade the game 4 times (plus an additional attempt that brought a prototype to AmigaOS 4 and Windows, as a byproduct of an iOS version which somebody else was supposed to take care of), with Follix being the result of the last effort. The motivation behind it was not only to make the game better, but also to make it technically special through ALS (enhancing Follia NBA using CSS, the ALS predecessor, is something I had been wanting to do for ages), to put ALS to good use and to get rid of the basketball theme (which, at some point, no longer felt appropriate to me and certainly is not everybody's cup of tea). The code and the assets of Follix have been created from scratch, but the puzzles are still the original ones (except for Follix' first 4, which are new and purpose to introduce the player to the mechanics gently, and Follia NBA's last 2, which have been excluded because of their sheer difficulty)."

The game can be downloaded for free or for a little donation as lha archive or adf file. (dr)

[News message: 12. Jul. 2021, 09:42] [Comments: 0]
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10.Jul.2021
AmigaLove

ADF support for AmigaOS 1.3: DiskMimic
Chris Brenner writes: "This software was created to fill in a missing feature of OS 1.3: the ability to mount ADF images. It allows you to directly read and write ADF images stored on your hard drive. Although it was intended to work with ADF images, there is no reason why this software shouldn't work with other types of disk images as well, as long as you have a suitable file system and enough space on your hard drive.

The main idea behind this software is to create soft drives that work just like any other Amiga drive that supports removable media. The drive is mounted, usually at startup, and then disk images can be inserted and ejected as if they were real physical disks. Up to thirty-two drives are supported."

System requirements:

Amiga with OS 1.3
reqtools.library 37.600 (attached)
den.font 6 point (attached)
Hard disk or other form of mass storage

The Amiga user 'intric8' has published a detailed and illustrated report including a video for the Amiga site 'AmigaLove'. Among other things he specifies that the diskmimic.device supports up to 32 drives, but the Disk Mimic GUI can handle "only" 8. (dr) (Translation: bb)

[News message: 10. Jul. 2021, 09:54] [Comments: 0]
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10.Jul.2021
Aminet

Game Construction Kit: RedPill 0.8.12 / Shot'em up in 33 Minutes (Video)
RedPill, developed by Carlos Peris, is a game construction kit written in Amiblitz 3.8, 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. YouTuber 'kerrichal' demonstrates in a video how to create a shot'em up game within 33 minutes using RedPill.

Changes since version 0.8.10:

FIX: When camera position moves abruptly, it was causing graphical corruption.
FIX: Fix in Level Editor screen, some buttons not working when a lot of objects were used.
FIX: Fix in Square Grid Slice in Spritesheet screen.
Added shortcuts for Level objects in the object editor, to easily see the used ones and navigate quickly to one of them.
Objects have two internal variables Custom 1 and 2, now their name can be changed and the trigger name will change too for readability.
Added action trigger Tile Type is that checks the collision type of the tile where the object is.
Added exception handling that will exit the editor or game when low on chip ram or other exceptions.
Level exits have been moved to the Level Properties tab.
Change in scrolling routine when processing the left part of the map.
Added Shotemup example in the projects folder.
FIX: In Change Type trigger, not working as expected.
FIX: In Change Tile trigger, now working fine when the tile was not on screen.
FIX: In Change Icon trigger, it was not working properly.

(dr) (Translation: bb)

[News message: 10. Jul. 2021, 07:23] [Comments: 0]
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