amiga-news.de - Archive

Archive 02/2023

10.Feb.2023 AROS x86: Update of ABI-v0 developer branch to version 20201110-1
AROS developer Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz has released the new version 20201110-1 of AROS ABIv0 for 32-Bit systems (amiga-news.de reported). Over 1400 changes have been integrated, with 1700 still to come to match the main branch. The full list of changes can be seen under the title link. (dr)

[News message: 10. Feb. 2023, 11:45] [Comments: 0]
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10.Feb.2023 Tech demo: 3D engine for Amiga 1200
In a little tech demo, 'Rst7/CBSIE' presents his 3D engine "SDDDE" for the Amiga 1200. The corresponding project is maintained on GitHub. (dr)

[News message: 10. Feb. 2023, 06:38] [Comments: 0]
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10.Feb.2023

User Report: The PiStorm32-lite, part 1
I never really planned to get a PiStorm for my Amiga 1200. Firstly, the project - the PiStorm32 - didn't seem to be finished in the near future and then, of course, there was the question of its sense and usefulness.

Since the 90s, a Blizzard 1230 has been working reliably and seemingly for eternity in my Amiga 1200. In the 2000s, I had given it 128 MB Fast RAM and an SD hard disk so that I could also "play around" with resource-hungry software such as the browser Netsurf (see the corresponding browser test). I never had any problems with the speed, since it is 30 years old hardware. But there was one thing I had always wished for, which was denied me in the desktop version of the 1200: a graphics card. For example, I ran the mail programme YAM under AGA for many, many years, but it was really no feast for the eyes.

When, relatively spontaneously and surprisingly, the PiStorm32-lite project was not only announced at the beginning of October last year, but also completed at the end of last year, and this made it possible to run my Workbench with graphics card resolution, my thoughts also became more concrete. Especially as it is obviously possible to deactivate the card and then run the old games via diskette. I am attached to my Blizzard, but it was decided: a PiStorm32-lite should be purchased.

We published a news item the other day about the current availability of the adapter (with and without the required Raspberry Pi), although Amiga Kit now also offers the PiStorm32-lite at a fair price. I ordered the adapter and the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A separately, which arrived as follows:

Having never held a Raspberry Pi in my hands before, I was amazed at how small this single-board computer is. Especially when you had just looked into the tower of the X5000 ;) I have to admit, I'm not a born hobbyist and haven't messed around with the 1200 for ages, but assembling the adapter with the Pi and then installing it in the 1200 is doable.
First, the thermal pad is put onto the square surface provided for it:

Then place the three spacers on the holes:

Now put on the Raspberry Pi and also fix the insulation rail with the three screws:

The assembled card must now be installed in the trapdoor expansion slot on the underside of the housing. In my case, the Blizzard 1230 turbo card was in there together with the memory bar, which first has to be removed:

At the top left you can still see the SCSI cable, which I had also removed. Possibly it is meant to be inserted this way now, but with my two clumsy hands it did not work well. Since I had to open the case in such and such a way to remove the cable, I didn't try for long and was able to install the card well this way:

Incidentally, the HDMI connection can be seen in the top centre, and the USB connection in the centre right. In contrast to the Raspberry Pi 4, the 3 version has a normal HDMI connection and not a micro HDMI connection. As you can see from my standard HDMI cable: that's going to be tight!

At first I could only connect it by disconnecting the floppy drive completely:

And even then, the plug pushed the whole card up a bit by resting on the metal sheet. Anyway. I wanted to at least start a test run to see if it basically worked. Switched on and I saw:

a black screen!

As the attentive reader may have noticed, the microSD card was missing from the designated slot ;)

It was still in my discarded Nokia Lumia mobile phone. Why is that? Because my card reader doesn't have a microSD slot. I had fished out an adapter from my stock, into which the microSD card could be inserted and then read as an SD card, but unfortunately that didn't work. But I had to prepare the card somehow and so I came up with the temporary solution with the mobile phone.

The preparation of the map needs to be dealt with more intensively, but basically there are two good places to go to get information and read up:

Die Emu68 tutorials by Michal Schulz, in which he explains the setup of the SD card and the later necessary setup of the Picasso96 driver.
The "PiStorm Emu68 Simple Tutorial", which also deals with setting up the card and gives a good overview.

As far as I have noticed, most users use an AmigaOS 3.x installed on the card to take full advantage of the speed benefits when accessing the card. I primarily want to use and test my software installed on the Amiga 1200 first and therefore accept the slower IDE interface. For this, one only has to install two things on the card:

the latest "Emu68-pistorm-yyyymmdd-build.zip" Nightly Build by Michal Schulz
an Amiga1200 kickstart ROM file

The unpacked Emu68 archive looks like this:

In addition to the "bcm2710-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb" file, the archive also contains other versions for the Pi 4 etc.. However, it is sufficient to keep only the version that suits you and delete the others. The exact name of the Amiga1200 kickstart ROM file must now be entered into the "config.txt" in the last line. So "initramfs kick.rom" becomes "initramfs a1200_kick_32.rom" for me.

Okay, card is now in, second try. Ahhhhh....

After all! :) However, my eyes then discover this error message in the upper left corner of the screen when I take a closer look:

The "BUPtest" is a tool that tests the communication Pi <-> PiStorm <-> Amiga Chip RAM.
After consulting Claude and Michal - thank you very much - it is possible that the card pushed up by the HDMI connector is not seated correctly. In order to exclude or confirm this, the first part ends here and will be continued with a second one as soon as the hopefully better fitting cable (UltraThin HDMI cable) has arrived at my place. (dr)

[News message: 10. Feb. 2023, 06:21] [Comments: 0]
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10.Feb.2023 Demoparty: Lovebyte 2023 / Call to Amiga programmers
From 8pm tonight until Sunday, the Lovebyte Demoparty 2023 will take place on Discord and Twitch, where there will again be intro competitions in various categories. However, until just before the closing date, not a single Amiga demo has been submitted for this, which is why the organisers explicitly encourage programmers to submit for example at least a small 1k bootblock intro. (dr)

[News message: 10. Feb. 2023, 04:01] [Comments: 0]
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10.Feb.2023 MorphOS 3.17: openssl3.library February Hotfix
The MorphOS developer team has announced: "Another round of vulnerabilities have been identified and fixed for the version of OpenSSL that is included in MorphOS 3.17. Eight discovered issues, namely CVE-2023-0286, CVE-2022-4304, CVE-2022-4203, CVE-2023-0215, CVE-2022-4450, CVE-2023-0216, CVE-2023-0217 and CVE-2023-0401, were found to potentially affect MorphOS users.

A fixed OpenSSL library will be bundled with a future MorphOS release. Meanwhile, you can download (1,7 MB) the replacement openssl3.library that fixes the problem for MorphOS 3.17. To install it, copy the file to MOSSYS:Libs and reboot." (dr)

[News message: 10. Feb. 2023, 03:11] [Comments: 0]
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09.Feb.2023

Programming language: Amiga C/C++ Visual Studio Code Extension 1.7.1 (update)
Bartman', member of the demo group 'Abyss', provides with 'amiga-debug' a 'Visual Studio Code' extension for "compiling, debugging and profiling Amiga C/C++ programs compiled by the bundled gcc 11.2 with the bundled WinUAE" (YouTube video). Today version 1.7.0 has been released. Changes:

CHG: update to latest WinUAE (41010)
FIX: Only write m68k settings for Amiga projects
NEW: Emulator config improvements
NEW: profiler: get AGA colors from WinUAE
NEW: launch.json: new configuration attribute "stack" to override the default stack size (in bytes)

Update: (10.02.2023, 19:05, dr)

Meanwhile, a bug fixed version 1.7.1 is available: 1.7.0 would not start debugging if launch.json was missing. (dr)

[News message: 09. Feb. 2023, 21:07] [Comments: 0]
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09.Feb.2023
Gunnar Kanold (Mail) Programming contest: 12th Edition of BASIC 10Liner Contest
Homeputerium is the name of the home computer laboratory of the Eider-Treene school in Friedrichstadt. Using donated computers like Commodore 64, Atari-400, Schneider CPC-464 or Amiga 500 there pupils can make themselves familiar with them and create some sound or colorful lines by writing little BASIC programs.

The organizers wrote: "The BASIC 10Liner Contest started 2011 as a party fun at the NOMAM meeting in Northern Germany. NOMAM means 'Not only marvelous Atari machinery' and is an annual meeting from classic computer enthusiasts. The visitors of the meeting decided to hold a little contest: Write a program in 10 lines of BASIC on Atari Computers! We had loads of fun with programming the whole weekend. 2013 we decided to repeat the contest. This time only games were allowed. In 2014 we opened the 10Liner contest also for programmers who did not visit to the meeting. Owners of other 8 bit computer requested to open the contest for their machines. We met the wish and opened it for all 8 bit computers."

This year marks the twelfth edition of the competition. And even if Amiga computers belong to the 16-bit systems and thus do not fulfil the competition conditions, corresponding entries are included in the category "Wild". This year 'Toolkitman' has already submitted two Amiga projects. These and all other submitted programmes can be found in the overview at bunsen.itch.io.

The deadline for entries is Saturday, 25 March 2023, 18.00 CET. The award ceremony will take place at NOMAM on Saturday, 1 April 2023. (dr)

[News message: 09. Feb. 2023, 21:04] [Comments: 0]
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09.Feb.2023 Event: AMIGA Ruhrpott Convention in Duisburg (Germany)
On Saturday, 6 May 2023, the first AMIGA Ruhrpott Convention will take place in Duisburg-Rheinhausen (Germany) at the Area 51 youth centre, starting at 10 am. The event is intended as a meeting for Commodore AMIGA fans from the Ruhr region, but is open to everyone. Tickets are available for 18.31 euros. (dr)

[News message: 09. Feb. 2023, 16:00] [Comments: 0]
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09.Feb.2023
Andreas Magerl (ANF) Print magazine: Issue 136 of Amiga Future readable online
The German and English issue 136 (January/February 2019) of the print magazine "Amiga Future" can now be read on the magazine's website in the form of image files of the individual pages. Remaining copies of the magazine as well as a higher resolution PDF version can be purchased from the publisher. (snx)

[News message: 09. Feb. 2023, 13:14] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2023 AmigaOS 4/MorphOS: Odyssey script for GitHub websites v1.6
On our hint that you can't see download links on the GitHub page for version 5.7 of the encryption protocol AmiSSL, released today (amiga-news.de reported), with the browser Odyssey, George 'walkero' Sokianos has again adapted his script for the correct display of GitHub pages and made it available under the title link. (dr)

[News message: 08. Feb. 2023, 21:48] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2023
Twitter

HxC floppy emulator: Software V2.14.4.1
The floppy emulator HxC by Jean-Francois Del Nero completely replaces the floppy drive (of an Amiga) with an electronic device. The project, launched in 2006, is basically available in two versions:

with SD card port
with USB port

There is also special firmware for the Gotek disk drive emulator.

A new version of the HxC Floppy Emulator software has now been released, which contains numerous improvements and corrections and is used to configure the emulator or create the image files. (dr)

[News message: 08. Feb. 2023, 13:42] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2023
Puni (ANF) AmigaOS 4: Blog summary for January
For the month of January 'Puni' has again published a news summary in the areas of hard- and software for AmigaOS 4 at the title link. (snx)

[News message: 08. Feb. 2023, 11:59] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2023 Obligement: Interview with DJ Nick (Nikola Tomic)
The French AmigaOS and MorphOS magazine Obligement has conducted an English-language interview with the musician and artist Nikola Tomic alias DJ Nick. (dr)

[News message: 08. Feb. 2023, 11:49] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2023
Void AmigaOS 4: FeeDBack #14 - 4-channel tracks of Gerp demo party
The demo group 'Void' has published the 4-channel tracks of the demo party "Gerp 2023", which took place from 20. until 22. January in Sweden, as music pack. (dr)

[News message: 08. Feb. 2023, 09:51] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2023

Encryption protocol: AmiSSL 5.7 (AmigaOS 3/4)
Version 5.7 of the open source encryption protocol AmiSSL has been released, now based on the latest version OpenSSL 3.0.8, with updated root certificates and some improvements. The changes in detail:

Updated OpenSSL backend to full compatibility with the latest OpenSSL 3.0.8 (7.2.2023) version, which includes one high, seven moderate and one low severity fixes for newly identified vulnerabilities:

Fixed NULL dereference during PKCS7 data verification.
Fixed X.400 address type confusion in X.509 GeneralName.
Fixed NULL dereference validating DSA public key.
Fixed Invalid pointer dereference in d2i_PKCS7 functions.
Fixed Use-after-free following BIO_new_NDEF.
Fixed Double free after calling PEM_read_bio_ex.
Fixed Timing Oracle in RSA Decryption.
Fixed X.509 Name Constraints Read Buffer Overflow.
Fixed X.509 Policy Constraints Double Locking security issue.

Updated root certificates to latest Mozilla-based bundle provided by https://curl.se/docs/caextract.html dated 10.1.2023.
Correctly clear thread locks before using InitSemaphore() on OS3.
Prevent OS4 load time emulation corrupting the data in the PPC ASM optimised routines by moving data from .text section to .rodata.
Removed redundant code in PPC ASM optimised routines.
Removed unused PPC POWER8 specific ASM optimised routines.

Download AmigaOS 3: AmiSSL-5.7-OS3.lha (3,3 MB)
Download AmigaOS 4: AmiSSL-5.7-OS4.lha (3,1 MB)
Download SDK: AmiSSL-5.7-SDK.lha (2,3 MB) (dr)

[News message: 08. Feb. 2023, 06:07] [Comments: 0]
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