amiga-news.de - Archive

Archive 05/2025

`28.May.2025` Reddit (forum)	Mac OS: Amiga tools Send2adf and ADF.inder With Send2adf and ADF.inder, Mac OS users are provided with two small programs at the title link with which all files in a selected directory can be written to an ADF file or the contents of an ADF file can be displayed. (snx) [News message: 28. May. 2025, 08:32] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`28.May.2025` Rafał Zabdyr (Mail)	MorphOS: Preview video of Hans Kloss - Agent J-23 "Hans Kloss - Agent J-23" is a fan project based on the Polish platform game "Hans Kloss", which was released in 1992/93 for Atari home computers and the C64. The new edition is to be released for MorphOS, Windows and Linux. A preview video has been published at the title link. (snx) [News message: 28. May. 2025, 08:31] [Comments: 1 - 08. Jun. 2025, 09:25] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`28.May.2025` Steffen Häuser (ANF)	RetroArch port for AmigaOS in progress Steffen Häuser is working on a port of RetroArch for AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4 - this is a modular emulator system in which only the cores for the different systems are exchanged. After completion, the conversion will be available free of charge in Aminet and OS4Depot, the latter already contains a package with the first cores. He writes (translation) about his port: "I am currently in the process of porting the modular emulator system RetroArch to AmigaOS. Currently there is already a beta version for AmigaOS 4 and a beta version for AmigaOS 3.x (PiStorm 4 or at least PiStorm recommended). The WarpOS version is unfortunately not yet running, but is also being worked on. If you don't know RetroArch - it's a modular system where things like video refresh, sound, joystick etc. are done by a central program, and the emulators (like PC-Engine, NeoGeo, NES, Gameboy, ...) then only have to implement the "core". There is a very large field of emulator cores for RetroArch, which can then also be ported relatively easily (some more, some less) to AmigaOS. And you don't have to program video refresh, sound etc. for every emulator from scratch. RetroArch also offers a nice GUI. RetroArch also offers a comfortable GUI for operation. I offer the current beta version to anyone who sends (for example) 10-15 Euro to my PayPal account (tirionareonwe AT gmail.com) as a donation (in case of a donation, please provide an e-mail address to which the beta version should be sent). The final version will then be published free of charge on OS4Depot and Aminet. You can also have a look at the video here. (The NeoGeo CD core is not yet included in the video, as it has only been running for a very short time). There are already a lot of cores, but there is certainly room for improvement.I might want to take a look at a Mame core and possibly also a ScummVM core at some point, once the basic version is ready." (snx) [News message: 28. May. 2025, 08:31] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.May.2025`	Module-player: NostalgicPlayer 3.0.0 for Windows NostalgicPlayer is a tool for playing music files on Windows that supports a wide range of formats, including Amiga-specific file types such as MOD (Protracker, Noisetracker) and MED (OctaMED), as well as modern formats such as MP3 and FLAC. The player was first developed by Thomas Neumann in 1993 on the Amiga, and later continued on BeOS and Windows. NostalgicPlayer requires Windows 10 or 11, .NET Desktop Runtime 9, and, of course, a sound chip or sound card in your PC. New features and bugfixes in version 3.0.0 of NostalgicPlayer: Some Ron Klaren modules did not play correctly, e.g. Battle Squadron. Fixed different issues when loading samples in mo3 modules. When a module is paused and you change position, the time is updated immediately. The Amiga filter implementation has been updated from a simple low-pass filter to a Butterworth filter, so it is now closer to the real Amiga filter. Totally rewrite of the internal mixer routines to support multiple channels in both sample files and speaker setup. That means when playing e.g. a 7.1 channel sample file, each channel will be directed to the right speakers. If you do not have all the speakers required, NostalgicPlayer will down-mix the channels and place them in speakers close to the original position. Support from 1 to 14 channels as input and 1 to 7 channels as output + subwoofer channel for both input and output. Multiple channel support added for these sample formats: FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, RIFF-WAVE (PCM) and RIFF-WAVE (IEEE). Changed the surround option, so you now can select between Dolby Pro Logic and Real channels. Real channels means modules using the surround effect, will be played directly in the rear speakers. So if you have more than 2 speakers, I recommend to set this to Real channels. Level meter and Oscilloscope visualizers now supports multiple channels. Added a volume normalizer, which will turn down the volume a little bit if overflows are detected when mixing. Added support for TFMX-MOD files. Updated LibSidPlayFp to version 2.14.0. Updated LibXmp to version 4.6.3. Added support for ArcFS archive format. Added missing module formats in LibXmp: Archimedes Tracker, Astroidea XMF, Coconizer, Digital Symphony, Digital Tracker, Digitrakker, Epic MegaGames MASI, Epic MegaGames MASI 16, Funktracker, Galaxy Music System 4.0, Galaxy Music System 5.0, Liquid Tracker, Liquid Tracker NO, Megatracker, Poly Tracker and Real Tracker. The NostalgicPlayer is available free of charge, and the source code is also available on GitHub. (nba) [News message: 27. May. 2025, 18:29] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.May.2025`	Winner demo: Dead Ahead by Flex & Ephidrena (68k Inside 2025) At this year's demoscene party 68k Inside 2025 in Finland (May 23-25), the Amiga demo "Dead Ahead" by the groups Flex and Ephidrena took first place in the Combined Demo Competition. The technically and visually impressive work combines classic 68000 demo aesthetics with modern design elements - a highlight for demoscene enthusiasts. Rloaderro (code), evilryu (shader code), farfar (3D/2D graphics) and heetach (analogue gfx) were responsible for the production. Further information about the demo and the rest of the party results can be found on the demoscene website Pouet.net. (nba) [News message: 27. May. 2025, 18:08] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.May.2025` gitlab (ANF)	Coding-tool: Copper Showdown Editor 0.0.2 Copper Showdown Editor is a live coding tool for demonstrating Copper effects. Copper lists are programmed in the LUA scripting language, and the result is then displayed on the screen in real time. Under the hood, the tool uses the vAmiga emulator. With the help of ADF export, the result can then be run directly on an A500 with 512 KB. Copper Showdown Editor is available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux and requires a 3D accelerator. (nba) [News message: 27. May. 2025, 17:24] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.May.2025` Erik 'earok' Hogan (E-Mail)	Game Construction Kit: Scorpion Engine 2024.2 The "Scorpion Engine" by Erik 'earok' Hogan enables the development of games. The engine itself is not open source, but all included demos and demo games are. The editor itself runs on Windows. Graphics are imported as PNG files, for level creation the editor Tiled is used. For sounds, music and animations Amiga formats (mod, 8svx, anim5) are used. Version 2024.2 was released today with numerous new features and updates. Changes of version 2024.2 AMIGA: "Trackdisk" export for Amiga produces NDOS disks with lower memory usage and lower loading times. Visual editor for parallax. CD32 NVRAM saving. Improved handling for scrolling, particularly where high bitplanes counts and wide screens are used. Improved support for keyboard commands, in particular multiple keypress/release events in a single frame are handled. MEGADRIVE: Much improved sprite pattern streaming. Support for some line scrolling options, including an "underwater" demo. NEOGEO: NeoGeo maps and actors use 21 sprites at most, allowing more layers of parallax to be added to each scanline. Support for NeoGeo's powerful auto animation feature for level backgrounds. Save cart support (as well as NeoGeo CD's internal save memory). UNIVERSAL: New "Brixx" and "Snek" sample games generously donated by Zooperdan! Visual editing for platform jump arcs. Improvements for adding new lines to codeblocks. Various improvements to stability and performance across all platforms. High Score table sample game. "Look Up Tables" can be implemented in external text files, allowing large amounts of data to be referenced at real time. Major improvements for debug mode, including first time support on Mega Drive and NeoGeo. Performance Scorpion Engine uses a benchmark game which is not a scientific measure by any means, but it does give a general idea of how performance on each platform has improved. A500: 4 % A1200: 6 % A1200+Fast: 3 % Mega Drive: 6 % NeoGeo: 1 % The complete source code for the Scorpion Engine is available for download under the title link. (nba) [News message: 27. May. 2025, 17:17] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.May.2025` Christian 'xeno74' Zigotzky (E-Mail)	Linux: Kernel 6.15.0 for X1000/e5500 Parallel to the release of Linux kernel 6.15.0, Christian ‘xeno74’ Zigotzky has finalized the compilation for AmigaOne X1000 and e5500 machines (X5000/20, X5000/40, Mirari, and QEMU VMs). The X1000/e5500-specific changes: adaption of the current Linux Kernel 6.15 new features for Intel and AMD hardware Added more Xbox controllers to the xpad-driver: Turtle Beach Recon Wired Controller, Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra and PowerA Wired Controller networking-fixes sound-fixes NVMe-fix (nba) [News message: 27. May. 2025, 11:07] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.May.2025` Seiya (ANF)	PDF magazine: REV'n'GE 170 (Italian/English) Besides the Italian original issue, the PDF magazine REV'n'GE ("Retro Emulator Vision and Game") is also available in English. The magazine's reviews compare, if available, the different ports of classic games to the various platforms of their time. Furthermore a focus is on rather unknown retro games. The latest issue (170) features numerous reviews and news items about games for other retro systems, as well as reviews of Cybernetix for the Amiga and Apprentice for the Atari ST, which is largely identical to the Amiga version. (nba) [News message: 27. May. 2025, 10:37] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.May.2025`	New game engine: Sevgi Engine Sevgi Engine is a new open source video game engine which provides the required tools and generates the boilerplate code to create high performing Amiga games using only the C programming language (video). It is built around the ScrollingTricks archive by Georg Steger and has the following features: All display algorithms aim to perform at a locked 50fps on a single buffered native Amiga chipset display. It implements an optimized version of the algorithm Scroller_XYUnlimited2_64 from ScrollingTricks. Benefits highly from Fast Ram where available. System friendly: aims to work on all ROM versions (2.0+) providing a clean quit back to OS without needing WHDLoad. AGA Support: supports all features provided by the AGA chipset. No limitations: designed to support all the well known visual tricks known by the popular Amiga video game titles while not limiting more experimental effects to be implemented. Easy development A native editor program is provided to generate code, manage game assets, edit color palettes etc. called Sevgi Editor. Other elements like game logic, animation and events require programming knowledge in C. The programming and compiling can be made natively (on the Amiga OS - using native compilers) or cross platfrom (on Windows or Linux PCs - using cross development tools). Sevgi Editor can import game maps made in Tiled. Templates: generates ready to compile and run game code from template genres which aims to ease bootstrapping. The templates include test assets. ptplayer: implements the great ptplayer by Frank Wille for music and audio effects. No third party dependencies: the game executable will not require any libraries Documentation: the engine code is very well commented and documented in detail in Amigaguide format. An ECS or AGA Amiga, Kickstart 2.0+ and MUI 3.8 (for Sevgi Editor) are required. We asked the author İbrahim Alper Sönmez how this project came about: Amiga-News (AN): We have been reporting on two game construction kits for some time now: RedPill and die Scorpion Engine. Did you know about the other game engines? Alper Sönmez (AS): Yes I did know about RedPill and Scropion Engine. I never tried them though. I follow both of them from websites like yours, their facebook pages and youtube channels and I really appreciate what they’ve achieved so far. AN: Did you miss anything? AS: The first thing I miss in the engines mentioned is the unavailability of a clean quit back to OS. I try to use AmigaOS to the fullest, so I download the new games on the AmigaOS using IBrowse, unpack them and copy them to some proper drawer. But when I run them and not be able to quit back to OS, I get pretty annoyed. Another feature I miss in the games made on those other engines is the engine not being able to fade in/out the copper gradients (the color gradients used as background sky). I spent particular time on these two while developing Sevgi_Engine. AN: What was the reason for developing your game engine? AS: It was mostly educational and experimental. I've always been curious about how Amiga games were made. I’ve read so many different implementation ideas from various developers on forums and always had thought experiments inside my head for a while about what would be the best combination of these ideas to have the best performing game engine for the Amiga. I was familiar with Amos (which is very convenient, yet quite limiting on many aspects) and experimented with some ideas on that initially. One day I’ve decided to write something from scratch in C implementing all my ideas without encountering the limitations caused by the infrastructure of Amos. The most essential one among those ideas was one of the screen scroll routines demonstrated in Scrolling Tricks by Georg Steger which was also written in C. So I’ve downloaded his source code from Aminet and started implementing my version of the routine. When I saw it perform amazingly well I decided that there would be something of great value if I could turn this into a fully fledged game engine. And so the Sevgi_Engine project started. AN: Is it even possible to compare your engine with the other two? AS: It is hard to make an easy comparison because of the differences in the target groups. But I can say that Sevgi_Engine is more a "boilerplate C code generator" than a "game construction kit". But of course it has an editor to help with the management of game assets and engine features. But for a comparison on the games to be created with them, I can tell that Sevgi_Engine can outperform them both on being system friendly. Another important difference is that it is open source. It is amazing that some developers have already started contributing on GitHub. AN: What is the target group? Everyone? Or rather developers/programmers? AS: Sevgi_Engine requires great knowledge of Amiga hardware programming and C language. So the target group is C developers invested in programming Amiga hardware and AmigaOS friendly code. AN: Is it more/better suited to a certain type of game? AS: It is more suited to make high performing games that work on native Amiga display, like namely Turrican, Lionheart, Fire and Ice, Superfrog, Alien Breed etc. with an important caveat: Sevgi_Engine aims to perform as well as these games but on a single buffered display. Which means there will be more chip memory available for sound and graphics assets. (dr) [News message: 26. May. 2025, 22:53] [Comments: 1 - 27. May. 2025, 10:20] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.May.2025`	Tool: morsconv 3.0 generates Morse code With Grzegorz Kraszewski's tool " morsconv" it is possible to convert text into various forms of Morse code using shell commands. The following output modes are supported: AUDIO - Outputs Morse code as realtime audio using audio.device. CON – Outputs Morse code as text to standard output using arbitrary strings for Morse elements. COUNT – Counts all the elements of Morse code for given text and print counters to the standard output. 8SVX – Generates IFF 8SVX audio file (8-bit, mono). WAVE – Generates RIFF WAVE audio file (16-bit, mono). The first output mode has been added in the now released version 3.0. AmigaOS 3.x is required. (dr) [News message: 26. May. 2025, 22:13] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.May.2025` Ryan Stapleton (Mastodon)	Preview video: New e-mail client "AMail" A fortnight ago Ryan 'bluewizard' Stapleton had already presented his project in a first video: "AMail" is to be a modern e-mail client for AmigaOS 3.2 that supports IMAP and SMTP. The second video now published shows how the client communicates with its local IMAP server and sends emails via SMTP. (dr) [News message: 26. May. 2025, 06:21] [Comments: 1 - 27. May. 2025, 14:45] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.May.2025`	Amiga 40 Tools Jam: Icon-Made V0.9 / Video interview Pawel 'tukinem' Tukatsch had submitted the first entry for the Amiga 40 Tools Jam with "Icon-Made": a simple tool, still under development, which creates standard icons from IFF image files for the Workbench (video, amiga-news.de reported). Version 0.9 now runs on a separate OCS Intuition screen or on a window in WB: the latter allows the tool to be used with graphics cards. In addition, a simple help window has been added. A Polish-language video interview with the developer has been published on YouTube, which can be viewed with English subtitles. (dr) [News message: 26. May. 2025, 06:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.May.2025`	Programming competition: Winners of the AmiGameJam 2024 Voting for the AmiGameJam 2024 started at the beginning of December 2024 (amiga-news.de reported). The winners have now been announced in a live show on Twitch: 1st place: Fast Food 2 by 'acidbottle' 2nd place: Master of Minefields by 'Reborn80' 3rd place: Ami Robbo 2 by Paweł 'tukinem' Tukatsch Congratulations to all the winners! (dr) [News message: 26. May. 2025, 05:23] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

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