19.Jun.2021
ALBs Blog
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Sample source code: Hardware-oriented programming with Free Pascal
Marcus 'ALB42' Sackrow has published on GitHub some examples for hardware-near programming - i.e. writing directly to chip registers - with Freepascal. The goal was to create the shortest possible compilations that recreate typical demoscene effects: the 700-byte tool 'copper' creates a copper list, while the 3-kilobyte 'sinus' uses the copper to manipulate bitplanes to create a sine effect. (cg) (Translation: bb)
[News message: 19. Jun. 2021, 23:21] [Comments: 0]
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19.Jun.2021
Andreas Magerl (ANF)
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Print magazine: Amiga Future, issue 151 - preview and reading samples
From issue 151 (July/August 2021) of Amiga Future the readings as well as the preview are online since today. The topics include an interview with Michael Borrmann (Inviyya), a preview of AmigaOS 3.2 and a review of "Hibernated 1: Director's Cut".
(cg) (Translation: bb)
[News message: 19. Jun. 2021, 21:24] [Comments: 0]
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19.Jun.2021
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Trevor's Amiga Blog: First volume finished, beta version of DvPlayer in test
After more than 10 months Trevor Dickinson from A-EON Technology has written an entry in his Trevor's Amiga Blog again.
A large part of it is his report about the work on the two volume book 'From Vultures to Vampires' about the Amiga history, which is to be written by him and David Pleasance, starting with the takeover of the Commodore rights by ESCOM. He says the first volume has been completed and is now being proofread.
In a second section he gives a brief history of the movie player 'DvPlayer', starting with the first version developed by Stephen Fellner in 2005, through the acquisition of the rights from A-EON Technology (2015) and their work on hardware accelerated video playback support for the A-EON RadeonHD v2 driver using the graphics card's own GPU, to the creation of a new beta version that Hans der Ruiter has developed and is currently testing.
The new version allows high-resolution video files to be played either in full-screen mode or in scalable windows that can be resized during playback. To that end, he uploaded a screenshot to his blog page showing DvPlayer playing an HD and a 1080p video in parallel on an AmigaOne X5000/40. Matthew Leaman would have informed him that, if all went well, the new version would be released in the AmiStore next month. (dr) (Translation: bb)
[News message: 19. Jun. 2021, 15:31] [Comments: 0]
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19.Jun.2021
Aminet
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Icon-Library 46.4.545
Recently we introduced Peter Keunecke's icon.library which provides all functions for processing pictograms. Due to the release of AmigaOS 3.2, but obviously also inspired by our contribution and especially the numerous comments, he has now released version 46.4.545.
For the first time he has not only added a documentation in the form of an 'IconLib.guide' as requested by many, but has also made it available in English as well as in German.
Furthermore, the TrueColor (TC) version now displays OS4 and PNG icons 30-70% faster in conjunction with workbench.library v44+ or Wanderer on native screens, but not with WB 3.1 and DOpus5. As Peter Keunecke writes further, AmigaOS 3.2 now requires at least an icon.library v47. In order to be able to use his icon.library under this OS anyway, he has apparently upgraded the 'icon.library_TC020' to version 51.4.545. The other two standard versions 'icon.library_68000' and 'icon.library_68020' do not work under AmigaOS 3.2 anymore.
According to him, the new icon.library provided by AmigaOS 3.2 should be "more efficient and faster, avoiding many useless refreshes". But since he does not own the new OS, he cannot test this. At least 'FastWB' seems to have no advantage anymore. And further he writes: "The new OS 3.2 file type detection of DefIcons is only supported by my v51 libraries like TC020. I have no intention to set the 680x0 versions higher." (dr) (Translation: bb)
[News message: 19. Jun. 2021, 06:37] [Comments: 0]
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17.Jun.2021
Artur Gadawski per Mail
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7-bit: Software update for Wicher cards
A software update for the cards developed by 7-bit has been released. Changes:
- added support for AmigaOS3.2
- WicherCfg - added support for Wicher1220EC
- WicherCfgGui - added support for Wicher1220EC
- spi.librarby - added support for Wicher1220EC
- enc28j60_w32.device - added support for Wicher1220EC
- Tools_Menu - added support for Wicher1220EC
(dr)
[News message: 17. Jun. 2021, 22:35] [Comments: 0]
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17.Jun.2021
Alfred Faust (ANF)
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Multimedia MIDI sequencer: BarsnPipes 1.0 for Amiga OS4.1 FE
At the end of October in 2009, Alfred Faust decided to stop developing his multimedia MIDI sequencer BarsnPipes due to increasing health problems (we reported). In July 2013 he released the source code of his programm. Mainly due to Corona, Alfred Faust has a lot of spare time which among others he invested in updating his AmigaOS 4 computer and its operating system to OS 4.1 FE and eventually reworking and compiling BarsnPipes for Amiga OS 4.1 FE.
The first official full version 1.0 now is available in the download section of his website also including all previous updates. He also has updated all development documents:
- New Rules for Tools OS 4.1 FE
- Michael Rees SDK OS4.1 FE
- New Rules for Skins
- tools for creating catalogs
By releasing this full version, Alfred Faust wants to consciously distinguish from other development lines "whose programmers", as he wrote, "use my source code, but don't mention me as the main developer of BarsnPipes (not Bars&Pipes Professional 2.5). This is not a good style and also violates the copyrights." (dr)
[News message: 17. Jun. 2021, 06:14] [Comments: 0]
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16.Jun.2021
AmigaLove (ANF)
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Mod-Player: HippoPlayer 2.46beta
After 21 years today Kari-Pekka Koljonen has released an update of his MOD player HippoPlayer on Github. He wrote:
"There was an actual user request (by daxb) in the English Amiga Board a few years back to remove the module list size restriction. This turned out to be a fun challenge. The code assumed the module list index to be a positive 16-bit number, and also used the same index with some magic values to mean a few things. There were a lot of places to change to make this work. The restriction is now at 0x1ffff (131071), which is a crazy amount.
Such a large list eats a lot of memory and is quite slow to process, as it is a doubly linked list. List iteration operations needed some optimization to be usable on an A500. (Next challenge: get rid of the linked list approach.) Random play bookkeeping previously worked only for lists of up to 8192 (0x1fff) modules, this limit is now removed as well.
I decided to challenge myself with some UI changes. The main window buttons are quite cryptic with both left and right mouse button actions, which I have conveniently forgot about. I implemented a modern feeling tooltip which will pop up a helpful text for each button. Maybe this is a first tooltip on kick1.3?
Right clicks on the buttons don't really work like left clicks. I don't know why the past-me left them like that, they're ugly and non-user friendly that way. I changed the buttons to have a proper visualization for right clicks as well.
I also added a few wait pointers to places with long running operations.
Another thing that motivated me to do some hippo coding was the realization that the multitasking approaches used in HiP are bad. At the time I had no idea about thread safe programming. This could lead to some random crashes at times due to bad luck with timing.
Exec provides semaphores to protect shared data, so these were added to a lot of places. Some safety regarging interrupts relying on some data was also added. External applications using the HippoPort still use all data freely.
Fixes:
- Extraneous requester pop up removed when loading TFMX modules.
- Fixed a case where unpacked modules were not identified as modules, or a non-module file was identified as a valid module (due to badly initialized memory).
- A memory leak removed from the file requester.
- Memory usage is lowered in several situations:
- Random play bookkeeping now uses a dynamically allocated table.
- Each modulelist entry is now about 30 bytes smaller, for 1000 modules that means memory savings of about 30 kB! :-)
- Unnecessary library loading removed from startup. This also speeds up starting on slow machines.
- Improved stability
- Starting and stopping playback and loading modules like a crazy person is now not so prone to crashing. This is achieved by adding exclusive access checks to module data and module list in several places (see above).
- Other general bad behaviour removed from many places, not directly visible to user.
- May survive low memory situations better when loading module programs or adding files.
- A bunch of smaller fixes, such as enforcer hit removals at a few places.
- Code refactoring! It's still quite a mess in many places."
The latest beta version can be downloaded from releases. After unpacking the archive, in the folder "dist" the new version is available and can be copied over the existing installation. 'HippoPlayer.group' has to be copied to 'S'. (dr)
[News message: 16. Jun. 2021, 07:16] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jun.2021
Aminet
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Screen capture: SnapIT for MorphOS 2.x, AROS and AmigaOS 4.1
After more than four years, Stefan Blixth (OnyxSoft) has updated his tool for taking screenshots to version 1.5 (message about version 1.4).
Changes in version 1.5:
- Removed a bug that could be triggered when closing the program.
- Removed a bug that could be triggered lockups when user had multiple screens open.
- Added variable templates for the use of name on Screen / Window in the parser.
- Added variable templates for date (year and month) and time (hour, minutes and seconds) in parser.
- Added "USEALPHA" TOOLTYPE for MorphOS systems.
- Removed the "bubble help" temporary on OS4 binaries since it could cause a lockup on the system.
- Added support to be able to fetch ancient GIMMEZEROZERO windows =) (ex.ZoneXplorer)
(dr) (Translation: bb)
[News message: 15. Jun. 2021, 14:46] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jun.2021
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CS-Lab: Test of new firmware 1.10 for Warp1260
According to Greg Donner on his unofficial Warp 3060/4060 page, the YouTube channel Amiga Tests has tested the latest firmware 1.10 of the Warp 1260 for the Amiga 1200 and a video published.
Compared to the previous version 1.08, these are the changes:
- MicroSD can be formatted as FFS, PFS3 and others.
- Amiga can boot from microSD.
- Transfer speeds up to 20 MB/s!
- Very low CPU usage [~3-9%] while accessing the microSD.
- 224 MB Fast RAM!
- MicroSD is PCMCIA-friendly.
- Combination of microSD and Warp IDE CF, or microSD and Amiga internal IDE can be used simultaneously.
According to 'JakubH' in the Polish forum ppa.pl the firmware will be made available during the next weeks. (dr)
[News message: 15. Jun. 2021, 06:07] [Comments: 0]
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14.Jun.2021
Blog Amigaguru
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Game announcement: 'CYBERSPHERE' for AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS(x86)
In his latest blog entry the 'AmigaGuru’s Gamerblog' has announced a new commercial point&click adventure developed by GDG-Entertainment among others for AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS(x86). You can get some first impressions by watching a YouTube trailer.
According to GDG-Entertainment the game will have the following features:
- Loads of locations to visit, divided into three main areas: city streets, city undergrounds, space station.
- Voxel-based futuristic graphics.
- Easy icon-driven mechanics that mimics text-adventures ones.
- Full range of sound effects and inspiring music.
- Localized in English, French and Italian.
Hardware requirements:
- CPU: G3 or PPC440 (AmigaOS), G3 (MorhpOS)
- Fast memory: 512MB (AmigaOS 4.1 and MorphOS)
- Harddrive: 100MB
According to AmigaGuru’s Gamerblog the game has been finished and will be probably released in August 2021. On its website there is also a demo version for each platform available. (dr)
[News message: 14. Jun. 2021, 07:11] [Comments: 0]
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14.Jun.2021
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Contest: Amiga Art Contest 2021
The "Amiga Art Contest 2021" (video) is organized by the two Youtubers 10 Minute Amiga Retrocast and Pixel Vixen. In its third edition, participants can submit their works in the categories of "hand-drawn artwork", "digital photography", "ray tracing" and "music pieces". The submissions of the two previous years 2019 and 2020 can be viewed on the official website.
Only works created or (in the case of digital photographs) edited on an Amiga (real or emulated) are eligible. Second place winners will receive A-EON sponsored digital licenses for Personal Paint 7.3 or ImageFX 4.5, first place winners will receive four $50 vouchers for the Retrorewind.ca store. Deadline for entries is October 11, winners will be announced in an episode of the Youtube show "10 Minute Amiga Retrocast". (dr) (Translation: bb)
[News message: 14. Jun. 2021, 06:25] [Comments: 0]
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14.Jun.2021
Reddit
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68k.news: Simple HTML-Google News for vintage computers
Recently we reportd about the FrogFind! search engine which simplifies search results and thus make them accessable for older browsers. Simultaneously to this project the YouTuber 'Action Retro' has created a Google News website based on SimplePie and a php port of Mozilla's Readability which displays news items without menus, ads, footers and all what it is not necessariliy needed for the message itself. So it is possible to read them for example with the Amiga browser AWeb. You can set your country as well as your favourite news section in the upper menu of the website. The source code is available on GitHub. (dr)
[News message: 14. Jun. 2021, 05:25] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jun.2021
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Remake: Textadventure Hibernated 1 (Director's Cut)
In 2019 the commercial textadventure 'Hibernated - This Place is Death' was released as first part of a planned trilogy. His release Stefan Vogt now has ported as Director's Cut' to the Z-machine originally developed by Infocom: An development environment for textadventures.
Vogt finally "ended up completely rewriting it" adding "tons of narrative content and new riddles". The game also now is available for many platforms.
Probably on 1. August the game also will be available in a boxed edition on poly.play featuring the following content:
- 3,5" floppy disk
- Cardboard box with slipcase (23 x 18,5 x 2,5 cm)
- Mission patch
- Developer's autograph card
- MicroSD card including disk images and more
- Manual (DIN A5, English)
- Quick guide "How to Play Interactive Fiction"
- Stickers
- Din-A3 poster
- Shrink-wrapped
The game can be pre-ordered for 35 Euro.
(dr)
[News message: 13. Jun. 2021, 12:45] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jun.2021
AmigaLove
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Third part of textadventure series: Silk Dust
After Two Days to the Race and The Queen's Footsteps, Davide Bucci has released the third part of his textadventure series named 'Silk Dust'.
About the tasks of the player the author has written: "Today is April 19, 1907. You, Emilia Vittorini, arrived yesterday in Varenna, on the shore of the beautiful Lake Como. You are hosted at the magnificent Villa Briccorosso; Princess Lucilla Briccorosso is preparing the Silk Road Race, a 10,000km rally raid between Cairo in Egypt and Peking in China, to be done by car. You represent ITA, founded by your father, the company that built the car the Princess just bought to use during the rally. The car is supposed to be delivered today. Your role will be to assist the delivery and make sure everything is perfectly functional".
Obviously the author has used real persons and places. Its history he has explained in a separaten article. The game is available for several platforms like Amiga, C64, ZX Spectrum etc. The author asks for reporting "typos, errors and bugs". (dr)
[News message: 13. Jun. 2021, 08:42] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jun.2021
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Aminet uploads until 12.06.2021
The following files have been added until 12.06.2021 to Aminet:
KONEY_MECHMICROBES.lha demo/sound 362K 68k KONEY: MECHMICROBES Hardcore ...
ALS.lha dev/amos 546K 68k AMOS Layers System
REDPILLGameCreator.lha dev/misc 2.1M 68k Game Creator with AGA support
dsp3210.lha driver/oth 95K 68k DSP 3210 drivers and tools
F1GP2021Carset.lha game/data 13K 2021 Carset for F1GP
EXULT_RTG.lha game/role 49M 68k Amiga port of Ultima 7 (EXULT)
AmiDuke_RTG.lha game/shoot 938K 68k Amiga port of Duke Nukem 3D
D1X_Rebirth_RTG.lha game/shoot 2.5M 68k Amiga port of Descent (DXX-Re...
ODAMEX_RTG.lha game/shoot 19M 68k Amiga port of ODAMEX
OpenDUNE_RTG.lha game/strat 276K 68k Amiga port of Dune 2 (OpenDUNE)
DOSBox_RTG.lha misc/emu 1.5M 68k Amiga port of DOSBox
Lofoten.lha mods/8voic 2.0M Lofoten 8ch Synth by HKvalhe
Crockettstheme.lha mods/misc 250K 4ch Crockett's Theme Corrected
RNOArchive.lha util/arc 1.7M MOS Graphical archive manager
RNOArchive_AROS.lha util/arc 1.8M x86 Graphical archive manager
RNOArchive_OS4.lha util/arc 2.1M OS4 Graphical archive manager
TDir2Guide.lha util/cli 11K 68k Create AGuide from text dir scan
dintwm.lha util/wb 26K 68k Dynamic Intuition Window Manager
(snx)
[News message: 13. Jun. 2021, 07:17] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jun.2021
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OS4Depot uploads until 12.06.2021
The following files have been added until 12.06.2021 to OS4Depot:
oo.lha dev/lib 1Mb 4.1 Bring easier programming to C an...
egalaxtouchusbfd.lha dri/inp 45kb 4.1 USB driver for eGalax touchscree...
itmtouchusbfd.lha dri/inp 45kb 4.1 USB driver for ITM touchscreen c...
wavesharetouchusbfd.lha dri/inp 44kb 4.1 USB driver for waveshare touchsc...
thewidow.lha gam/adv 19Mb 4.0 Game Terror Paranormal Adventure
loschinos.lha gam/chi 4Mb 4.0 This is the classic spanish game...
aos-iconsupdate7.lha gra/ico 17Mb 4.0 AmigaOS 4.1 Style Icons ...
redeth.lha net/sam 3Mb 4.0 Graphical interface to manage co...
zitaftpserver.lha net/ser 11Mb 4.1 A fast and secure FTP(S) server.
rnoarchive.lha uti/arc 2Mb 4.1 Graphical archive manager.
(snx)
[News message: 13. Jun. 2021, 07:17] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jun.2021
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MorphOS-Storage uploads until 12.06.2021
The following files have been added until 12.06.2021 to MorphOS-Storage:
RNOArchive_1.0.lha Files/Archive Graphical archive manager
TheWidow_FinalVersion.lha Games/Adventure The Widow the point and...
LosChinos_3.51.lha Games/Think This is the classic Spa...
AnimWebConverter_4.10.lha Graphics/Tools A little and easy web t...
YT_URL_Extractor_2.2.lha Network/Web YouTube URL extractor.
(snx)
[News message: 13. Jun. 2021, 07:17] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jun.2021
Amigaworld.net (Webseite)
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A-EON Technology: Updates for Warp3D Nova and Copy command
As part of their Enhancer Software, A-EON Technology have updated both the graphics card driver Warp3D Nova and their own variant of the Copy command - the latter being, besides AmigaOS 4, also available for AmigaOS 3.x. The Warp3D Nova update is especially useful for owners of Radeon RX 570/580 cards, fixing a bug that caused freezes.
As always, customers can download the new versions using the Updater software.
Changes:
- Warp3D Nova 1.85
(Warp3DNova.library, W3DN_SI.library, W3DN_GCN.library)
- W3DN_SI/GCN: Added framebuffer lock failure detection to prevent a crash (#717)
- W3DN_GCN: No more freezing with RX 570/580 cards (#361)
- W3DN_GCN: Fixed W3DNHelloTriangle corruption with Radeon RX 570/580 cards
- W3DN_SI/GCN - Using an array of textures in a loop would cause graphics corruption and also a GPU lockup. FIXED
- W3DN_SI/GCN - Elementwise access to vec3 vertex shader inputs was broken. FIXED
- DDK: Added tests for the bug listed above
- Copy 46.7 / 54.7
- Fixed bug in setting the path of the destination file if it wasn't provided. It could use the source file's path instead of the current dir.
(snx)
[News message: 13. Jun. 2021, 07:17] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jun.2021
Artur Gadawski (Mail)
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Product announcement: 7-bit accelerator board Wicher 1220 for A1200
After developing the Wicher 508i accelerator board for the A500, Artur Gadawski from 7-bit has announced the version for the A1200, the Wicher 1220:
Currently the board is in beta test phase and will have the following features:
- CPU: MC68EC020
- CPU clock speed: 25MHz, 33MHz
- Memory: 11MB Fast Ram (16MB SDRAM)
- SPI-Controller
- Realtime clock (RTC)
- microSD card reader
- Ethernet controller
A price for the Wicher 1220 has not yet been set. (dr)
[News message: 12. Jun. 2021, 06:55] [Comments: 0]
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