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Archiv 'New hardware and software products'

22.Oct.2023

Tool: SpriteSplitter v0.2 (update)
The basic idea of a spritesheet is to pack a series of images together into a single image. Dan 'zooperdan' Thoresen's "SpriteSplitter" reverses this: it is a simple tool for splitting a spritesheet image into separate images that can be used in the Scorpion Engine. This allows the user to save time when updating spritesheets by automating this process.

It is planned to expand the tool in the future:

Parameters to set start and end sprite index. This would let you split out a range of sprites from a larger spritesheet that contain lots of sprites.
Parameter for toggling Preserve Palette which let you keep original palette and it's index order.
Specify rects for spritesheets with irregularly shaped sprites.

Update: (22.10.2023, 15:25, dr)

Meanwhile, version 0.2 is already available. Changes:

Changed to named parameter/value pairs for clarity.
Added from and to parameters which let you specify range of sprites to be split/separated out from the spritesheet. This is very useful if you have a large unified spritesheet and you want to grab ranges from it and save to different places.
Changed so that when output is not specified SpriteSplitter uses the input as a base for the output instead.

(dr)

[News message: 22. Oct. 2023, 07:36] [Comments: 0]
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20.Oct.2023
Hackaday.com (ANF) Amiga-compatible mainboard: Denise
For about 90 Euro the Amiga-compatible mainboard "Denise" from the Swedish developer Enterlogic should be available in principle, plus e.g. 14 Euro shipping costs to Germany - but currently it is listed as sold out since the end of June, a new batch is announced. Besides the bare board, one gets another PCB for the RAM and two microcontrollers including firmware to use also PC keyboard and mouse besides the original Amiga ones.

Once all other components, including the 68000 processor and the Amiga custom chips, have been found and soldered, the fully assembled Denise is said to be most comparable to an Amiga 500+ with two Zorro II slots. (snx)

[News message: 20. Oct. 2023, 20:55] [Comments: 0]
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20.Oct.2023 CLI command: sysvars - system information as environment variables
The sysvars command creates environment variables with system information in order to make it dependent on these, for example, in the startup sequence, which patches are included. So far there is information on the CPU and FPU, the chipset, the vertical frame rate (PAL/NTSC) as well as whether the emulator UAE is used - and if so, in which version.

AmigaOS 2.x is required, a future version for operating system version 1.3 is being considered. (snx)

[News message: 20. Oct. 2023, 10:53] [Comments: 0]
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20.Oct.2023 Do it yourself: amiga-DSKRDY PCB for floppy disk drives
If no original Amiga disk drives are used, the "RDY" signal that the floppy disk drive is ready is usually missing, which can cause problems with some programs.

The 15x20 millimeter board amiga-DSKRDY provides the corresponding signal for such drives, assuming that readiness actually exists after 500 milliseconds. (snx)

[News message: 20. Oct. 2023, 10:53] [Comments: 0]
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20.Oct.2023

Alien Breed clone: new playable demo for 'Chaos Guns'
Chaos Guns started life as a mashup of 'Alien Breed' - running and gunning from a top-down view - and 'Hired Guns' - four indepently playable characters. A first tech demo, written in the rather exotic programming language 'PowerD', was released in 2014. After loosing the only coder and realizing that engine as originally envisioned would be too taxing for the Amiga, the team created several prototypes including one created with Backbone that was released to the public in 2016.

Shortly afterwards Jozef Tomka joined the team as a coder, to write an engine for this reduced version of the game - 32 instead of 256 colors, only one playable character - in Assembler. But according to members of the team, everybody was involved in too many projects, so work on Chaos Guns came to a halt for years. But now Tomka has published a new early alpha version of the game:

"Chaos Guns 8.69 (2023)" ist playable (video), even if the enemies aren't really fighting back yet. To be able to shoot, you first have to select a weapon using the "1" to "7" keys.

Download: ChaosGuns_8.69.lha (386 KB) (cg)

[News message: 20. Oct. 2023, 01:30] [Comments: 0]
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18.Oct.2023 3D action adventure: Bugdom 2 for Linux and MorphOS
Similar to the first part of the 3D action adventure game "Bugdom", the second part of the game originally published by Pangea Software was ported to modern OS by 'jorio'.

Afterwards, 'BeWorld' compiled Bugdom 2 for MorphOS (the latest SDL archive is required) and Christian 'xeno74' Zigotzky for LinuxPPC-32Bit. The game runs on the Linux PowerPC distributions Void PPC, MintPPC, Fienix.

Download: Bugdom2_4.4.0-linux-powerpc.tar.gz (133 MB) (dr)

[News message: 18. Oct. 2023, 21:22] [Comments: 0]
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