WHDLoad: New installers until 19.10.2024
Using WHDLoad, games, scene demos and intros by cracking groups, which were originally designed to run only from floppy disks, can be installed on harddisk. The following installers have been added until 19.10.2024:
AmigaRemix: Further files added
AmigaRemix collects remixes of well-known soundtracks of Amiga games. Since our last news-item, the following mp3 files have been added:
Flashback, Main Menu Music (Vandahlia Special Remix)
MorphOS: Future versions of Wayfarer without updated WebKit/GTK engine
As Jacek 'jacadcaps' Piszczek has told at the title link, future versions of his web browser Wayfarer will stay with the current version 2.46 of the WebKit/GTK browser engine. Already porting this one would have taken several weeks. Since the WebKit developers removed the Legacy/Win/Cairo target and its dependencies, which Wayfarer requires, and started to use Skia, further MorphOS ports of the engine wouldn't be feasible anymore.
Apart from this, contemporary websites would also increasingly require more performance than the ageing G4 and G5 hardware can offer. For the time being, however, the existing WebKit core would be modern enough to continue to display the pages that can be displayed so far - probably even for several years to come. Until then, he tends to set up a hosted browsing service under Linux or Mac OS, which then generates the Wayfarer pages externally. Accordingly, the next version of his browser will already offer the option of either displaying the web pages locally or having them generated externally using CEF. (snx)
Book: English edition of AmigaOS 3.2 Reference Manual / French one in progress
In February, Look Behind You published the Reference Manual "AmigaOS 3.2 - Das Handbuch" in German language with 512 pages. Now the 480-page English edition is available as a book and as a digital download as well - either directly from the publisher or from selected retailers: Amiga on the Lake (USA), RetroPassion (UK) and Retro 8bit Shop (Netherlands).
In addition, a French version is now also in the works on the initiative of the Swiss retailer Relec. "AmigaOS 3.2 le Manuel" will be available in three versions: as a book for 35 Swiss Francs, digitally for 20 and both combined for 50. Potential buyers are advised to express their interest using a corresponding form.
Meanwhile, the original German edition has been updated in its digital version. This includes additions and corrections. Registered customers can download the PDF file again via their account at the publisher. (snx)
Worms: The Director's Cut 1.5 for the 30th anniversary
Next year, the legendary game Worms celebrates its 30th birthday. To mark the occasion, its programmer Andy Davidson is planning a free new edition for the Amiga. To this end, demo groups around the world are invited to contribute new levels with their own names.
A level template is available on request. The levels must have a size of 960 x 350 pixels and be sent in by New Year's Eve. Specifications for the 16-color palette: 00 - black or dark color (transparent), 01 - white or near white, 02 - pink, 03 - any color, 04 - lighter shade of 03, 05 - any color, 06 - lighter shade of 05, 07-15 - any colors. Layers: Either one image for a conventional Worms level or two images for a two-layer level, consisting of foreground and background with the same color palette. The background - to be kept darker - is shown where the foreground is transparent or the foreground is destroyed in the course of the game. (snx)
Looking back: Battle Chess was not U-certificated in Germany
At the title link, "Gamers Global" looks 35 years into the past and recalls that the Amiga chess game "Battle Chess" was indexed as harmful to minors in Germany in April 1989 on the initiative of the Bavarian State Youth Welfare Office.
However, this only lasted for about five months, as Electronic Arts successfully appealed against it. Despite the high picture quality made possible by the Amiga 500, the depiction of brutality (video) would not have reached the intensity of violence required for the index.
For this reason, during the reassessment the responsible committee came to the conclusion that also children and young people could maintain the necessary distance from the gameplay, which would be in part also imaginative and funny. (snx)
Amiga Future also celebrated the 25th anniversary of its online presence last month: its website went online for the first time on September 9, 1999. What was initially intended as a source of information for the print magazine has since continued to grow with the news section, over 100 online readable issues of the magazine, 7,000 German and 2,000 English test reports, workshops, specials, etc. (snx)
Reshoot Proxima 3: Tin box variant available
To celebrate the first birthday of the shoot'em-up game "Reshoot Proxima 3", it can now alternatively be purchased in a metal box, limited to 55 copies and signed, at the title link - optionally also with a USB stick. (snx)
Logic game: Untangle V1.1
Grzegorz Kraszewski is in the process of writing the logic game Untangle for the Amiga. The player has a number of dots in front of him, which are connected by lines and cross each other. The aim of the game is to untangle the lines by moving the dots so that no line intersects another (amiga-news.de reported). He has now released version 1.1 with the following changes:
Fixed a bug of freeing a memory block twice at game end.
Added the game ending displaying total number of moves and time spent.
Added 25 more levels, now the game has 175 levels.
The game runs in a Workbench window, an Amiga with any processor and Kickstart/Workbench 3.0 or higher are required.
He also wants to design the game so that it will run on any Amiga, from an Amiga 1000 with 256 KB Ram and KickStart 1.1 to the fastest Amiga with 3.x. (dr)
Developer log: What can be expected from the final 64-bit version of Odyssey?
At the end of August, we reported on an initial test version of the Odyssey browser for AROS version 2.0, which is being continuously updated (the latest version of the 32-bit variant was released yesterday). In a short article, Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz describes various ways in which the upcoming 64-bit version Odyssey 2.0 can execute JavaScript code and what impact this has on performance. Some of the results are quite interesting and come very close to today's (October 2024) Firefox performance. This is all the more surprising given that the WebKit engine Odyssey 2.0 was released in February 2019. (dr)
Update: (06:17, 21.10.24, dr)
Demovesion V1.04 is now available. Since the first version, numerous bugs have been fixed, the "M" key can now be used to switch the music on and off and the CPU load should now be lower. (dr)
AROS distribution: TinyAros 3.4.1
The AROS distribution TinyAros is aimed more at users, which is why no developer tools are included (but can be downloaded optionally), which makes it leaner and therefore quicker to install and ready for use.
The now released version 3.4.1 (video) is based on the current ABIv0 backport and also contains updated libraries and programmes, additional included software and bug fixes. (snx)
Cowboy/shootout game: Demo version of Duel
In "Duel", two cowboys (or so far a cowboy and an alien) that can be controlled up or down shoot at each other, with various obstacles providing cover (video). In the finalised version, you will be able to choose from over 20 characters and the weather will influence the battle. (snx)
AmigaOS 4: AmiUpdate V2.55
AmiUpdate is an update system for AmigaOS 4 and helps to keep system components and applications up to date. There are currently 241 entries in the database. Version 2.55 has now been released with the following changes:
Fixed an error in the main list helphint where the date of the update was not shown correctly.
Made some changes to the routines that handle the Ignore Manager, and saving the list back to
disk. An apparent crash appeared to be located there, although it was unreproducible here.
Fixed a memory leak that occurred each time a scan was started.
Reworked the "Abort" logic. It is no longer possible to abort the scan, but aborting updating
works as originally expected. Whether this fixes the unreproducible crashes or not remains to
be seen.
Following a successfull login, users were complaining the details were not saved. The call to
save the details was commented out. No idea why, or how long it's been like that, but it should
work as expected again!
Added support for double-clicking items to expand them in the Path Manager.
Changed the way the notifications are handled when the preferences change.
Prefs_Updates 53.19: Prefs change notifications are now handled differently to suit the new mechanism.
Development tool: vasm 2.0
After eleven months of development, Frank Wille has released the update to version 2.0 for the modular assembler vasm. The changes in version 2.0 in detail:
Support for architectures which have bytes with more than 8 bits.
Output formats bin, ihex, srec, test and vobj currently support >8-bit bytes.
New options -obe and -ole to define the endianess of target-bytes in binary output.
New options -ibe and -ile to define the endianess of target-bytes in binary includes (incbin).
New option -underscore adds a leading underscore to all imported and exported symbol names.
New option -relpath to treat all include paths as relative first, even when starting with '/' or '\'.
Reworked relocations and added the option to define their signedness.
New CPU backend for unSP (micro-nSP), having 16-bit bytes. Contributed by Adrien Destugues.
New CPU backend for the FPGA-CPU HANS, using 32-bit bytes. Contributed by Yannick Stamm.
New output module "pap", which outputs MOS Paper Tape files, as documented in the KIM-1 User's Manual. Contributed by Dimitri Theulings.
When printing error messages in macros, also print the source text line calling the macro.
A macro redefinition prints a warning with the previous definition. The old macro is correctly replaced.
Also warn about initialized space atoms (.space, etc.) in BSS sections.
Workaround for a Windows bug, when reading a source text from stdin directly via the terminal.
Fixed output of 64-bit symbol values in vobjdump.
Directives to suppress listing file output (like NOLIST) will no longer appear in the listing file.
Fixed string constants (in immediate addressing modes) with non-ASCII characters.
Fixed potential buffer overflow when generating a section name for ORG directives (since V1.9f).
Output modules now show the source line for unknown relocation errors.
m68k: Most out of range errors have now become warnings.
m68k: Out of range 8-bit immediate constants write to all 16 bits of the extension word, with a warning (to be able to simulate the behaviour of some old, faulty assemblers).
m68k: Improved -opt-size optimization for move.l->moveq/lsl, which now optimizes all values below 0x8000 where the highest and lowest bit set does not span more than 7 bits (suggested by Erik Hemming).
m68k: Float-constant optimization (OPT of, enabled by default) now also supports integer constant optimization to 16-bit.
GUI for Greaseweazle Tools: ADFDiskBox v2
Keir Fraser's "Greaseweazle" reads the magnetic layer of the floppy regardless of the format used and stores as much information as possible in a so-called "flux level image" in supercard format (SCP), making it possible to read and write back copy-protected floppies. We have been reporting on FluxMyFluffyFloppy, a GUI for the Greaseweazle Tools, for some time now. In addition to GreaseweazleGUI, there is a third alternative for Windows, ADFDiskBox, which has now been released in version 2.
The author John Brett, who has made the source code of his project available on GitHub, has kindly given us a few explanations about the new version:
Both FluxMyFluffyFloppy and GreaseweazleGUI can handle many floppy formats, while my ADFDiskBox specialises in Amiga DOS floppies. It simplifies Amiga DOS batch read and write operations (for ADF, 82-track ADF, SCP:Amiga DOS and RawSCP).
The programme requires Net Framework 4.8 to run, so it should run on Windows 10 (also runs on the 32-bit version) and Windows 11. The latest version of Greaseweazle Tools must first be downloaded and unpacked before the installer can be executed.
I've been learning C# for a while now and I'm creating this program for learning purposes (which is why the code is a bit messy). When I started, the other programs couldn't handle 82-track Amiga DOS discs or batch mode. Now they can, using the editable diskdefs file. My GUI, on the other hand, uses its own version. I have recently added some more features, such as batch mode for all Amiga formats, which is why I have changed the version number to 2. Now more than one Greaseweazle is supported on the same computer. (dr)
AmigaOS 4: Tutorial for creating a USB boot stick for the AmigaOne X5000
'McFly' has published two tutorials (available in English and German) in the OS4Depot which should enable users of an AmigaOne X5000 to create a bootable USB stick either from a system backup (OS4Depot link) or with the help of the AmigaOS 4.1 installation CD and using an RX graphics card OS4Depot link).
When asked, the author kindly wrote us the following about how it came about:
Since my X5000 no longer started properly some time ago due to a mistake on my part and the install CD also refused to start, I was looking for solutions to persuade my X5000 to start again ;-)
At the time, a Radeon R7 graphics card was still installed and I found the following devastating information on the Internet, which explained why the installation CD could not be booted:
"The basic RadeonHD driver on the OS4.1 CD does not support models with the Oland Chip set (R7 240/250), thus you cannot boot from the CD."
I therefore created a boot medium using a card reader and CF card. I have documented how I proceeded step by step in a small illustrated tutorial.
A little later I upgraded my computer with a Radeon RX580 graphics card. Because of this I collected all the necessary information on how to create a USB installation stick for AmigaOne X5000/20 with RX graphics card. This graphics card requires separate drivers which are not included on the AmigaOs4.1 install CD. I have also summarised this procedure in an illustrated guide in the hope of being able to give some users a little help. (dr)
CLI command: sysvars V0.13
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), Kickstart version and revision, version and revision of bsdsocket.library as well as whether the emulator UAE is used - and if so, in which version.
Version 0.13 provides the following changes:
Added $VampireType, $VampireCoreRev and VampireClockMult
Demis Hassabis: Nobel prize winner with an Amiga background (Update)
Demis Hassabis was recently honoured with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his outstanding contributions in the field of artificial intelligence. In particular, the development of AlphaGo, which was the first program to beat a professional Go player, and AlphaFold, which enabled revolutionary breakthroughs in protein folding, earned him the Nobel Prize. These achievements mark significant advances in AI research and biomedicine.
Interestingly, Hassabis began his career as a game developer: As teenager he was working for Bullfrog on the AI of the original Amiga game "Populous II". As project manager and lead programmer of "Theme Park", that, among other systems, was also released for the Amiga, and as a key contributor to "Black & White" (not released for the Amiga), he made a creative impact on the gaming world at an early age. The design principles Hassabis learned during this time – balancing complexity and usability, creating immersive worlds – later influenced his approach to developing AI systems. The ability to model and make accessible complex systems, which he honed as a game designer, fed directly into his scientific work. This interdisciplinary connection between game mechanics and AI research shaped his visionary approach to technological challenges.
In addition to Theme Park and Black & White, Hassabis was also involved in games like Republic: The Revolution. His experience in game development helped him to bridge the gap between entertainment and science by finding creative solutions to real scientific problems.
Update: (06:30, 17.10.24, snx)
Addition of Populous II to the news-item, based on an interview from 2016. (nba)
smbfs allows Amiga users to access Windows and Linux SMB shares, enabling network drives to be used like local drives. This makes it easier to integrate Amiga systems into modern networks and facilitates file sharing between different platforms.
"This release rolls back the changes contributed by Tygre in version 2.23, which implemented a workaround for dealing with directory and file names which made use of Unicode codepoints that could not be represented on the Amiga using the ISO 8859-1 character set. Tagged as amiga-smbfs 2.23, it was intended as a test in preparation for integrating Tygre's changes." Olaf Barthel continues on the smfbs-page on GitHub: "Sadly, the time to polish this feature never arrived and in the mean time there was no robust amiga-smbfs version to use instead. The amiga-smbfs 2.22 release intends to correct this, for the time being."
The file system in the new version for AmigaOS 3.x (68k) and AmigaOS 4.x (PPC) can be downloaded for free from the GitHub page under the title link. (nba)
Video: How the diskspare.device stores 984KB on a DD disc
Robert Smith is currently working on an update of DiskFlashback (amiga-news.de reported) and is currently working on support for the diskspare.device (Aminet link), which is a supplement or replacement for the trackdisk.device, which can be used to format discs with 960 KB or 984 KB or, if an HD drive is available, with 1920 KB or 1968 KB. In his latest video, Smith shares his findings and results on how it works. (dr)
Video series: The Amiga 1000 as a Workstation
In a nine-part journey through time, Thomas Cherryhomes attempts to categorise the Amiga 1000, which was officially launched in USA in 1985, in terms of its practical suitability as a workstation and to compare it with similar products.
At that time the Amiga 1000 was running AmigaOS 1.1, a 256KB expansion and two disk drives. Since, as the author writes, workstations were mainly used for scientific and technical tasks, with the expectation of developing customised software for a specific task, the series ultimately focused on this. The parts published so far:
