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Archiv 'New hardware and software products'

13.Apr.2025
Robert Smith (ANF) Video: Floppy emulator Big Box Amiga GoDRIvE
The floppy emulator GoDRIvE was initially only available for keyboard case Amigas (amiga-news.de reported). DigitalRetroBay now also offers it for the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 4000.

In contrast to the traditional Gotek disk emulators, the GoDrivE does not require the actual drive to be replaced, but you can switch between the two. In the video at the title link, Robert Smith demonstrates the Big Box Amiga GoDrivE by installing it in his Amiga 2000. (snx)

[News message: 13. Apr. 2025, 08:36] [Comments: 0]
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13.Apr.2025
AmigaBlogs (website) Conversion of a standard power supply unit for the Amiga 500
At the title link, Keith Monahan describes how he converted a standard 50 Watt power supply unit, which costs around 50 euros, so that he can use it as a replacement power supply unit for his Amiga 500. The model used was the GP50A13D-R1B from Meanwell. (snx)

[News message: 13. Apr. 2025, 08:36] [Comments: 0]
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11.Apr.2025

Paint program: PolarPaint for all Amiga systems
PolarPaint is an experimental paint program written with Hollywood that requires a fast computer with RTG, at least a resolution of 1440x900x16 (program window is 1400x820), at least 40 MB free Fast RAM (64 MB or more recommended) and is available for AmigaOS 3, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROSx86 and WOS.

As the author Anbjørn Myren explains when asked, he had read a thread in the Hollywood forum about how to draw a continuous line. He started experimenting with the examples in the thread and his original idea was to develop a kind of drawing/guessing game in the style of Telestrations.

And he continued to write to us: "For this I just needed a simple interface and the ability to draw a black and white sketch. This was in late 2023, but I was doing other stuff so I put it on hold for some time. In late 2024 I started to experiment some more with it, but instead of making it into an online game, I got more interested to see what drawing features I could add. I was a bit unsure to release it on aminet, especially the 68k version since it requires more horsepower than usually found in 68k Amigas. But I figured it might run at a usable speed on NG Amigas and hopefully PiStorm or perhaps Vampire systems.

Testing it on WinUAE made me discover the high RAM consumption, which made me come up with the diskbuffer idea. This saves a lot of RAM for most operations, but might result in slowdowns when loading saving disk when changing workspaces. As a bonus the diskbuffering will make backups of your work and also the undo buffer, so if you quit the program it will load your images and undo buffers on next startup so you can start where you left off.

Another thing that can use a lot of RAM is the custom flood fill procedure. I made that procedure because I wanted to have a was to floodfill with a threshold setting, similar to what you can find in Gimp. When floodfilling with threshold set above 0 it will consume a lot of memory. As a workaround for this I made an additional setting so you can restrict how big area to fill in one operation. By default this is set to maximum 5% of the workspace area. This mean you will only fill a small area at the time, but hopefully you avoid to terminate the program with a out of memory error. If you have more than around 150MB free RAM I guess you can get away with a 100% setting, but it will take a lot of time for larger areas to complete on slower systems." (dr)

[News message: 11. Apr. 2025, 09:10] [Comments: 2 - 19. Apr. 2025, 05:53]
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09.Apr.2025 Do it yourself: RetroPlayer for Amiga music modules in a wooden case
Skilled hobbyists who want a small player for Amiga music modules in an attractive wooden case with a rotary control and display will find a finished project with a list of all the components required at the title link. (There is also an English description below the Japanese one). (snx)

[News message: 09. Apr. 2025, 08:29] [Comments: 0]
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