27.Aug.2023
Seiya (ANF)
|
PDF magazine: REV'n'GE 149 (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.
Amiga-related, the current issue is about "Shadow of the Beast" and "Strider". (snx)
[News message: 27. Aug. 2023, 09:04] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
27.Aug.2023
GAP (ANF)
|
German Amiga Podcast: Issue 15
The fifteenth edition of the "German Amiga Podcast" (GAP) is about the Amiga game "Babariana", which is still in development. In the interview, its developer Stephan 'Makconner' Pförtner calls Babariana a mixture of "Overtime-Game" and a "dark adventure". (snx)
[News message: 27. Aug. 2023, 09:04] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
26.Aug.2023
|
Motorola68k emulation: Beta version 2.1 of Emu68 (V0.16)
Developer Michal Schulz has released beta version 2.1 of his Motorola68K emulation Emu68 for the ARM architecture, focusing on the PiStorm and PiStorm32lite which fixes bugs of the previous version and introduces many important improvements. Changes:
- CCR fixes. Beta 2 has changed internal handling of CCR, but unfortunately added several bugs due to the change. Beta 2.1 fixes all these problems, improving compatibility with m68k software.
- Fixed fusing of MOVE instructions. Until now there were few corner cases where fusing of subsequent MOVE.L instructions resulted in wrong behavior of generated code. Thanks to Paraj this issues are solved now and fusing of MOVE.L instructions works without (hopefully) any bugs.
- Added temporal instruction cache working on CHIP memory during JIT translation process. This greatly improves the translation itself, since not only the translator itself accesses instruction stream, but also CCR optimizer and CRC32 calculator.
- Added optional slowdown of code executed from CHIP memory. This might be important for old games and/or demos which rely on CPU busyloops
- Removed code inlining feature on 24-bit memory to reduce the need of crawling through the CHIP memory. Greatly improves the performance of demos/games where instruction cache is set to checksumming mode.
The beta version 2.1 is recommended for all PiStorm users. Per default the firmware is used in two-slot mode. By adding "one_slot" option to cmdline.txt one can force the single-slot operation.
The developer provides more detailed information on the changes in his new Patreon article. (dr)
[News message: 26. Aug. 2023, 21:53] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
26.Aug.2023
Paweł Tukatsch (Mail)
|
Platform game: Demo version v1.3 of Tony
Only recently Paweł 'tukinem' Tukatsch had released demo version 1.2 of his game Tony, which among other things introduced different color palettes (amiga-news.de reported). Since some bugs crept in, he has now released version 1.3. (dr)
[News message: 26. Aug. 2023, 15:56] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
26.Aug.2023
Reddit
|
Font: "TopazDouble" as Amiga-native recreation of Topaz
"TopazDouble" is an Amiga-native recreation of the 8×8 pixel Topaz font, now rendered in 8×16 for modern resolutions. As the developers wrote, the classic Amiga with 640×256 (PAL) uses a resolution close to 2:1 - which means that the standard Topaz font would be half-height if used with resolutions with a pixel aspect ratio closer to 1:1.
For some reason, an Amiga-native version of a double-height Topaz font for resolutions with a square (1:1) had never been written, which "TopazDouble" was now making up for.
This font is said to be ideal for "modern" resolutions such as 800×600, 1024×768, classic Amiga resolutions such as 640×400 and 640×512 (Hi-Res Interlace) - as well as 16:9 resolutions such as 720p and 1080p. (dr)
[News message: 26. Aug. 2023, 14:27] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
26.Aug.2023
Reddit
|
Video: The Terrible Fire developer Stephen Leary
Neil aka RMC has set up The Cave, a hands-on exhibition of retro microcomputers, consoles and games. There he also welcomes guests for a chat, this time developer Stephen Leary, creator of the Terrible Fire turbo cards, who talks here about their development history. (dr)
[News message: 26. Aug. 2023, 14:18] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
26.Aug.2023
itch.io
|
Adventure: Demo version of "Mission2Mars" v1.00
After "The Oregon Trail", Sami Vehmaa has released another text-based adventure game for AmigaOS 3, which, however, is only suitable for emulation environments due to its high requirements (250 MIPS): in "Mission2Mars" (YouTube video), a crew of five is on its way to Mars in the year 2029 to drop people off. After the nine-month journey, they spend 16 months on the surface of Mars and another 9 months on the journey home to Earth.
In space, you can visit asteroids and search for ice, like on Mars for signs of life. Using equipment, you can produce air, fuel and food from ice. (dr)
[News message: 26. Aug. 2023, 14:12] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
26.Aug.2023
itch.io
|
Action game: "Ooze: The Escape"
The developer 'Haplo' - who had already published the puzzle game Tenebra - has converted "Ooze: The Escape", originally published for ZX Spectrum, for the Amiga and given the game, among other things, improved graphics, sprites, animations and sound effects as well as a much larger map.
The player's task is to navigate Ooze through various corridors and labs, using his gravity-reversing powers to overcome obstacles and avoid robot guards. (dr)
[News message: 26. Aug. 2023, 13:57] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
25.Aug.2023
|
Demo development: Amiga Scroller
After an estimated 30 years of Amiga abstinence, Andreas Scholl is trying to remember his programming skills and has started to write a small demo. He has documented the current status with two YouTube videos: Amiga Scroller V0.001 and Amiga Scroller V0.02 (dr)
[News message: 25. Aug. 2023, 11:40] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
25.Aug.2023
Patreon
|
Game Construction Kit: Scorpion Engine 2023.3 / RetroAnimator (update)
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.
According to the developer the Scorpion Engine 2023.3 is the fastest version to date, and among many smaller improvements, it features a handful of major upgrades:
- Support for the RetroAnimator animation toolkit for fluid animations.
- Support for CDTV/CD32 music on Amiga.
- Support for Column Scrolling on Mega Drive.
- Export to CDTV/CD32 ISO on Amiga.
- Export to DragonDrive cartridge on Mega Drive.
There is also a new introduction video that briefly covers all of the tabs, as well as the differences between the Amiga and Mega Drive platforms.
Update: (16:16, 25.08.23, dr)
As Erik Hogan informs us, he has now also released the above-mentioned RetroAnimator on his Patreon website. RetroAnimator is a toolkit that can be used to create super fluid animations with minimal memory usage. It was previously only used in Engine 9000 (which was used to make MetroSiege), now it's available to Scorpion Engine developers as well (though it technically could be adapted to any engine as it uses a simple JSON data format). (dr)
[News message: 25. Aug. 2023, 05:50] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
24.Aug.2023
One Joyful Day (ANF)
|
Preview video: Real-time strategy game "AI Kills All Humans"
"One Joyful Day" is a new Game Studio making games for Modern Amigas and PC. The first game is called "AI Kills All Humans" and is a tactical Real-time strategy game, in which you play as an AI, which due to a slight change in code, is sending robots to kill all humans.
You however don't have direct control of your robots, but robots independently decide how to execute your commands, like a general telling troops to attack, but troops themselves decide how. Release is planned for the fourth quarter of 2023.
The developer has already gained experience with earlier releases such as Help My Cat! (YouTube video), "Ducks Of Apocalypse" (YouTube video) or Hollywood with Designer Tutorial (part 1, part 2). "AI Kills All Humans" (Steam link) is also being written with Hollywood. Versions for AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS are planned. There may also be a version for AmigaOS 3, but due to the requirements it will probably only be playable in emulation. (dr)
[News message: 24. Aug. 2023, 22:04] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
24.Aug.2023
|
LinuxJedi-Blog: Making Amiga IFF thumbnails work in Linux
In his latest blog entry Andrew 'LinuxJedi' Hutchings reports how to correctly display thumbnails of Amiga IFF/ILBM files on Linux machines. (dr)
[News message: 24. Aug. 2023, 13:41] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
24.Aug.2023
|
Video: Disk Backup Station
In his latest video Robert Smith introduces his "Disk Backup Station" which he presented at the Kickstart 01. He will make or sell these for people, it's purely a one off, although there is the possibility that he may release all the design files for it in the future.
The backup station can backup floppy disks to ADF or SCP and uses three greaseweazle boards to control three floppy drives, and the user interface is controlled bu a few arcade buttons connected to an Arduino. (dr)
[News message: 24. Aug. 2023, 05:40] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
23.Aug.2023
|
Blog: "Rave" developer looks back at the beginnings of his computer passion
In a very personal entry on his blog Rear Window, Rave developer Daniel 'trixie' Jedlicka wrote about the beginnings of his passion for computers and its relevance for the present. (dr)
[News message: 23. Aug. 2023, 05:52] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
22.Aug.2023
itch.io
|
Rogue-like game: Roguecraft V0.4.3
In October 2022, Budger Punch announced an Amiga version of their C64 game Rogue64 with improved graphics and adapted features (amiga-news.de reported). At the beginning of August a demo version was released for the AmiGameJam 2022 (YouTube video). Now a first update is available which among others fixes some bugs. The developers wrote:
"We have fixed issue with the game turning real-time when you tap the fire-button. We have added an instructions screen, and an (currently empty) Achievements screen. The spikes now work in the game. Be careful! The player now moves smoothly when there are not monsters in the room, to make backtracking less tedious.
We have also fixed some graphical glitches, and random memory writes that would corrupt the music. Hopefully this is good now, or at least a lot better!
There are other changes you will just have to find out yourselves. Have fun finding them!
We also want to say THANK YOU for all the awesome feedback and suggestions from all of you playing our game. It is so lovely so see the community embracing this hobby project, and want to help us make this a great game!" (dr)
[News message: 22. Aug. 2023, 21:41] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
22.Aug.2023
|
Mediathek V0.3 for all Amiga systems
In early August, we presented Jörg Renkert's Hollywood implementation of the MediathekView program for Amiga systems. Five days ago he updated to version 0.3. It would have been quick to write a report about it, but we wanted to test the program in more detail, especially with regard to streaming.
In addition to some adjustments and bug fixes, the information on a selected program is now no longer displayed on the bottom right-hand side, but on the left-hand side in a separate tab, which is automatically switched to when a program is selected.
In our first article, streaming did not work at all, although we were told by Edgar Schwan, among others, that it worked for him. So let's take another closer look. Jörg Renkert has clarified the usage again in his German instructions: next to the path to the preferred player, a "%u" must be appended, which transfers the link of the stream to the program.
One thing can be said in advance: Emotion is the only video player that could stream all videos. On the X5000, however, it only makes sense to use the low quality, as the picture and sound are no longer synchronized with the medium quality. Incidentally, ORF programs can neither be streamed nor downloaded. All fields are grayed out. There are two different MPlayer versions for AmigaOS 4 in the OS4Depot:
- Liveforit-MPlayerNG, based on MPlayer 1.1.1
- MickJT-MPlayer, based on MPlayer 1.3.0, in two versions:
The Liveforit-MPlayerNG for AmigaOS 4 cannot stream broadcasts any more than Fabien Coeurjoly's port of MPlayer 1.1.1 for MorphOS (the only one that runs without AltiVec and can therefore be used on the AmigaOne X5000).
First I checked which version of MickJT-MPlayer was installed: of course the wrong one, the one for HD graphics cards...Perfect, error found, I thought. So I unpacked the RX version, read the readme (!): I found the note there that I also needed the older version for HD graphics cards (the full archive). Good, also unpacked. Then copied the (supposed) RX version to the disk in my existing directory and saw that the archives are otherwise no different. Started the media library again, selected the program, let MPLayer stream - error message again:
Can't be true... Should Edgar have swindled me? Of course not! ;) So out of desperation (or cleverness? ;) I chose another program and tried again. And what happened? I could suddenly hear sound! And read in the text of the output window that no window could be opened using the "comp_yuv2" driver. Why was that? And slowly it dawned on me: when unpacking the HD version of the MickJT player, I had probably overwritten the RX version...stupid mistake! So, I unpacked the RX archive again, and lo and behold: the application now had an "RX" at the end. So, I copied it over, selected the transmission, timidly pressed the "E" button, and?
There you go! :) To be on the safe side, I asked Daniel Westerberg again, who had uploaded the RX version. The only difference between the HD and RX version is actually only in the replacement of the graphics card driver used: the HD version from 2018 searches for the "RadeonHD.chip" at startup and refuses to open a window if it is not found or the corresponding graphics card is present. He simply replaced this "HD" with "RX" in the exe file.
When I tried it out further, however, I noticed that there are programs for which MickJT-MPlayer still refuses to play with the above error message. If you want to see an example: just enter the search term "Garten" and then select the BR program "Bauerngärten". It could not be the codec used, as both working and non-functioning programs used "libavformat version 57.25.100".
I contacted Edgar Schwan again and the clever fox found the reason: the "Bauerngärten" movie is on the server "https://cdn-storage.br.de". Edgar had tried to download it using the "wget" tool. The answer he got was:
'The certificate owner does not match the hostname "cdn-storage.br.de"'.
He then switched off the certificate check and called the following command in the shell:
wget --no-check-certificate
https://cdn-storage.br.de/MUJIuUOVBwQIbtCCBLzGiLC1uwQoNA4p_AQS/_-dS/_Akp5-Fd571S/d2cdb4c7-b7e3-4b0a-89ec-1a43bdf5d273_E.mp4
And: now it works! By the way, also with the LiveForIt-MPlayer! So if it is possible to deactivate this certificate check in the media library, you could then also use the LiveForIt-MPlayer and (presumably) also stream under MorphOS.
The only remaining question is why the DvPlayer cannot stream: as Hans de Ruiter (who gave the DvPlayer hardware acceleration) told us, in his opinion the libavformat library used should in principle be able to stream over the network. The use of this feature could be added in future versions of DvPlayer. (dr)
[News message: 22. Aug. 2023, 06:05] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
22.Aug.2023
|
Blog: Amiga 4000T Upgrade, part 2
In the second part of a richly illustrated series of articles (amiga-news.de reported), "Epsilon's World" describes how he equips his Amiga 4000T with, among other things, a scanner, IDE CD drive and the applications AmiTube and AGABlaster. (dr)
[News message: 22. Aug. 2023, 05:08] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
21.Aug.2023
|
Point'n click adventure with photos: Holiday V1.05b
The photo point'n click adventure Holiday (YouTube video) is also a contribution to the AmiGameJam (you can still cast your vote today only!).
The player arrives in a Spanish resort in 1988 and has the task of surviving the next 11 days. To do this, you move through the town by means of photographs and must use three special items that offer protection from the sun. A few screens contain instant death scenarios. (dr)
[News message: 21. Aug. 2023, 05:52] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
21.Aug.2023
|
Frogger clone: Frogger (beta version)
After Croaker, RANA and Megafrog, Frogger is the fourth recent attempt to adapt the classic game produced by Sega in 1981 and developed by Konami, in which you have to guide a frog safely across a busy road and then across a river, for the Amiga. Frogger (YouTube video) is to be a 1:1 conversion of the Konam game and is written in assembler, based on the original Z80 code. (dr)
[News message: 21. Aug. 2023, 05:41] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
20.Aug.2023
|
Game Construction Kit: RedPill 0.9.24
RedPill, developed by Carlos Peris, is a game construction kit written in Amiblitz 3.98, which allows the development of games from various genres (see short tests of two Redpill games). RedPill is compatible with AGA and ECS, the "player" for playing the finished creations requires a total of 1.5 MB RAM. Jens 'Farbfinsternis' Henschel has written a tutorial.
The new version 0.9.24 provides the following changes:
- Added support for 64 global variables, it was 32.
- In the exported game only the used variables will be allocated, potentially
saving some memory.
- Fix in the tile animations that was causing the exported games using them to
run very slowly.
- Simplified handling of reading exporting projects.
- Fixes and implementations related to custom fonts usage in HUD and in
triggers.
- Exact values for friction and weight can now be set up and displayed.
- Trigger help routines have been improved.
- More triggers have been documented in the in-editor help.
- Optimizations in the main loop of the game.
- Optimizations in the tile comparison triggers.
- Optimizations in the player input triggers.
- Optimizations in the render code.
- Some memory was wasted when changing the current mod being played, this has
been optimized.
- Some unused code has been removed.
- Fixed a bug in Absolute Zero project when going back to menu and starting a
stage again.
(dr)
[News message: 20. Aug. 2023, 21:04] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
20.Aug.2023
Look Behind You (ANF)
|
Event: Retro Area at Gamescom 2023 with Amiga celebrities
This week, from August 23 till 27 (opening for the public on thursday), world's greatest computer games event, Gamescom, takes place in Cologne, Germany, again. Part of it is a Retro Area, and also Amiga celebrities like Turrican developers Factor 5, composer Chris Hülsbeck and former Commodore managers Petro Tyschtschenko and David Pleasance will visit the show, with the latter presenting his books at the joint booth of the publishers Look Behind You and Gameplan.
Further details about the Retro Area at Gamescom 23 can be found at the title link as well as in our german news-item. (snx)
[News message: 20. Aug. 2023, 19:23] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
| |
| Recent Discussions |
 |
|
|
|
| Latest Top-News |
|
|
|
|
| amiga-news.de |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
