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14.-16.11.25 • Flashback-Symposium #02 • Jößnitz (Germany)

`05.Jan.2023`	AmigaOS 4.1: SDL 2.26.1 Release Candidate 2 At the beginning of December, Juha 'capehill' Niemimaki had published the first release candidate of version 2.26.1 of the multimedia library SDL for AmigaOS 4.1 (amiga-news.de reported). The library is intended to make it easier for programmers to develop portable applications and is used by numerous open source games. SDL requires AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition and optionally OpenGL ES 2.0. Today he has published the second release candidate providing the following changes: Fix joystick GUID generation and update internal gamecontroller database with new GUIDs. Remove related RC1 workaround. Please use the SDL 2.26.1 RC2 (or newer) library when providing new controller mappings. Support SDL_WINDOW_FULLSCREEN_DESKTOP flag. It's implemented as a custom screen (instead of WB). Refactor library init/quit routines: initialize thread subsystem using constructor. Refactor shared library management: open common libraries in constructor and close them in destructor. Require ogles2.library minimum version 2 (instead of 0). (dr) [News message: 05. Jan. 2023, 22:19] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`05.Jan.2023`	Tool: Image2PDF for all Amiga systems Bernd Assenmacher has released version 1.3 of his tool Image2PDF, which converts PNG or JPG images into a PDF file. Among other things, A3, A4 or A5 can be selected as the target format. Image2PDF is available for all Amiga systems and requires the Polybios-Plugin. It is sufficient to copy the files "polybios.ext" and "polybios.hwp" to "Libs/Hollywood" (for AROS only the file "polybios.hwp" exists). Changes in version 1.3: added icons from Carlo again which were accidently bad converted in V1.2 corrected "Credits" in terms of the Amikit icon(s) ;-) the source folder and the save folder is now memorized when doing more than one picture to PDF added requester which asks if it is wanted to do more pictures to PDF added requester if the PDF file already exists (overwrite protection) on commandline/shell it is no longer neccesary to give the full path of the picture file its now checked if the PDF file to be saved ends with ".pdf" improved error message in case of invalid loaded picture/file added automatic closing of the viewer windows added Image2PDF as Hollywood Applet (at least Hollywood Player 9.1 has to be used) (dr) [News message: 05. Jan. 2023, 18:13] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`05.Jan.2023` Amigaland	Action adventure: Anniversary Edition of Enemy 1 and 2 At Christmas 2013, the action adventure Enemy 2 - Missing In Action was released as freeware. Technically identical to its commercial predecessor Enemy - Tempest Of Violence, the title offered completely new levels and brought the story begun in the first part to a conclusion. At the end of 2016, there was a Collectors Edition of Enemy 2. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Enemy 1, Anachronia released an Anniversary Edition for Enemy 1 and Enemy 2. The update contains various optimisations, bug fixes and redesigns of individual rooms. Both parts run on any Amiga with 1 MB RAM. (dr) [News message: 05. Jan. 2023, 07:12] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`04.Jan.2023` Alfred Faust (ANF)	MorphOS: BarsnPipes 1.2 Alfred Faust wrote: "After several weeks of intensive programming, a new version of BarsnPipes for MorphOS 3.17 has been completed and is available for download at the title link. Import and export of MIDI files (*.mid) has been integrated into the main programme. The 10 different mouse pointers in the editor have been firmly integrated into the main programme as new 32bit png images. These are now pointers of the same type as the system pointer, ... and much more ... All available tools (102) and accessories (6) (the plugins of BarsnPipes) for which the source code has been released and whose use with the new version of the main programme makes sense have been integrated. Included in the archive, all available documentation and instructions. For developers, the "New Rules for Tools" (instructions and all material for programming tools and accessories) have been adapted for MOS 3.17 (and higher). Also an SDK for tools and accessories by Michael Rees, which extends the "New Rules for Tools" and makes them more comfortable. The "Rules for Skins" (instructions for designing your own surfaces for BarsnPipes), as well as the material for your own translations of the Locale catalogue files are also available for download. BarsnPipes has thus reached a stage of development that essentially marks an end point. Every possible extension or improvement can be made using the tools or accessories." (dr) [News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 18:32] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`04.Jan.2023` Twitter	CDXL video player: AGABlaster 0.9.91 AGABlaster plays Commodore's CDXL video format. According to the author, it uses a customized version of the CDXL format supporting the AGA chipset with 24 bit colors and variable length frames. Customized CDXL files can be generated with AGAConv. AGABlaster is written in 68K Assembly and runs on native Amiga hardware (no gfx card or sound card required). In version 0.9.91 support for PAUSE on startup was added which allows to wait for modern monitors to synchronize at first frame. (dr) [News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 11:07] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`04.Jan.2023`	Floppy disk images on PC and Mac: Greaseweazle Tools 1.5 Keir Fraser's "Greaseweazle" does - similar to Kryoflux - read the magnetic information on a floppy disk independently from the format used and saves as much information as possible to generate a so-called "Flux Level Image" in Supercard format (SCP), which enables reading and back-writing of copy-protected disks (amiga-news.de reported) The adapter gets connected between a floppy disk drive - e.g. a standard 3.5" PC one - and a USB port of the PC or Mac. A few moments ago version 1.5 of the Greaseweazle Tools was released providing the following changes: User-configurable disk formats: New option --diskdefs New disk formats: ensoniq.mirage and sci.prophet Fill missing/bad sectors with -=[BAD SECTOR]=- pattern (dr) [News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 10:53] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`04.Jan.2023`	Video: Amiga 500 with serial number 190 In his latest video, Jan Beta takes a look at what he believes to be one of the first Amiga 500s, as it bears the serial number 190. (dr) [News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 07:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`04.Jan.2023` amigaworld.net (ANF)	AmigaOS 4: Payback ported After a long development period - announced in V - Apex Designs released their Grand Theft Auto clone Payback in February 2001, including a demo version for 68k and PPC processors (WarpUP). In this, the player slips into the role of a young getaway driver while trying to become a big gangster boss. Seven updates and several new and updated maps were released afterwards. Roman 'kas1e' Kargin had received permission from Apex Designs to port the game to AmigaOS 4, which is now available at OS4Depot under the title link. The original game and the last update are also required. The procedure for installing the update is available in detail in the description. Kargin writes about the content of the update: "The original Payback was written in C and built via StormC (meaning GCC 2.95), and a large part of the code was Assembler-based: the 68K version used the 68K assembler, whereas the PPC/WarpOS version used H&P's Power ASM assembler (this one is with Motorola syntax, so it's PPC assembler with Phxass kind syntax and is incompatible with GCC's "as"). So I was in needs to port all the C code from old GCC to newer GCC, and then take the Power ASM assembler code used for the WarpOS version and adapt it, so it can be compiled with self build VASMMOT_PPC (which means VASM with Motorola syntax). Then I used GCC to combine everything into a single OS4 binary. The assembler code adaptation was minor, but I had to implement a few functions that were not available in VASM's assembler (prolog/epilog, pushgprs/popgprs, etc). The next major issue was Payback's Warp3D rendering. The codes were once again "old GFX card" based and contained some bugs, so some rewriting and fixing was required. Yeah, it is not uncommon for game developers from the past to assume that only old kinds of graphics cards will be used (as it was in Exodus: The Last War, for example). Now, you can use hardware rendering on your RadeonHD or RadeonRX cards with no problems, be it NovaBridge or Warp3D_SI. Thanks to Hans for his help in terms of Warp3D code! Migration from GCC 2.95 to GCC 11.3 also takes some time because of plenty of deprecated code, old-fashioned use of DOS's anchors, message ports, memory allocations, the way of calling assembler functions, non-static structs, etc. And, as we were told, the things that were forgiven in GCC 2.95 are no longer applicable in today's GCC, so changes must be made. On top of that, instead of newlib, I do use Afxgroup's improved CLIB2 fork (more specifically, CLIB2_beta07). Once things start working, new video modes are added (so you can play HD modes like 1920x1080 too). At the same time, Javier starts writing a new "preference" program that is now Reaction-based, logical, and visually appealing. Now you can control everything from the PaybackSetupOS4 binary right from the start, as well as later in the game as before, of course. Also, Javier does help with some bits all over the place as always, so hats off for that! The following changes are not included in this update, but are planned for future ones: Support for window mode. Finalizing of the FLC video player with auto-scaling. We do have a working version, but it's not good enough, so we postponed it to a later update. Complete the migration from audio.device to the ahi.device. Also, it kind of works already, but not well enough. Fixing hardware rendering to works on the older Warp3D classic drivers again (migration to the newer GCC required extensive rewriting, resulting in clumsy hardware mode on real Warp3D). to fix bugs that will be found in this update." (dr) [News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 06:43] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`03.Jan.2023` MorphZone	MorphOS: ENCORE updated several demos At the end of October, the demo and game developers Encore (among other 2D shooter Fortis) released its new demo "Morphever", a few days ago the demo "KHESHKHASH" has been updated. Now the developers have updated Morphever, as well as the three other older demos Morphobia, Morphilia and Morphoza to version 1.2.0, which mainly fixes bugs, and features the latest engine and some minor improvements. (dr) [News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 20:57] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`03.Jan.2023` Amigans-Forum	AmigaOS 4: Accessing the ARexx ports of applications on remote PCs In a recent blog entry, Andy Broad (among other things, graphics programme SketchBlock) reports on his current project, currently still called "NetRexx", with which one can write Arexx scripts to control applications on remote computers (YouTube video). (dr) [News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 16:36] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`03.Jan.2023`	Amiga emulator: Amiberry 5.5.1 Amiberry is an Amiga emulator for ARM-based single-chip systems like the Raspberry Pi, the Odroid XU4 or the Tinkerboard from ASUS, which brings some newly developed features like a "WHDLoad-Booter" or support for controller configuration using RetroArch. For example it is used in the Workbench distribution AmiKit for the Raspberry Pi 4/400. Three days ago, the developer had released version 5.5 (amiga-news.de reported) and now provides an update for that. Changes: Bugfixes Retropie's SDL2 version doesn't have SDL_isupper Improvements added more logging during controller detection implemented checking for filenames without charset conversion skip files starting with a dot when reading a directory Build System detect revisions in the detected tags (dr) [News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 05:47] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`03.Jan.2023` Twitter	Blog: Displaying 24-bit images optimally in HAM mode For more than 25 years, Arnaud Carré has been programming and as a member of the demo group Oxygene also demos. In his newly established blog, he deals with the problem of displaying 24-bit images correctly and as best as possible on current PC hardware in the Amiga's HAM mode in order to use them in demos, for example. For this, he gives code examples and insights into his converter, which he will publish soon. (dr) [News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 05:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`02.Jan.2023`	RTG Solitaire: "Solitare match" V0.89 At the beginning of December, Sami Vehmaa had published a demo version of his graphics card Solitaire conversion "Solitare match" (YouTube video), which is primarily intended for Amiga emulators or Apollo cards due to the high CPU requirements. The demo version contains five levels. With this update, the paid version now has 75 levels. Besides, the game engine was improved. (dr) [News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 14:09] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`02.Jan.2023`	Dock: QDock V1.49 At the end of October, Sami Vehmaa published the first version of his start bar "QDock" (amiga-news.de reported), which he continues to develop (YouTube video). This update fixes several minor bugs. The tool is currently available for 1 Euro or more. The originally high CPU requirements have been lowered so that the dock can also be used with a 68030 processor when the reflections are deactivated or with a 68060 when activated. In addition, AmigaOS 3.2 (the author could not test under AmigaOS 3.1), graphics card and 22 MB RAM are required. (dr) [News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 14:04] [Comments: 1 - 02. Jan. 2023, 19:38] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`02.Jan.2023` GitHub	Porting Amiga applications to Linux: AxRuntime 41.5 Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz' "AxRuntime" is a runtime environment for Linux which emulates the AmigaOS-API and therefore enables porting Amiga applications on Linux and developing applications which can be compiled for AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS as well as Linux (amiga-news.de reported). Under Windows it is possible to use it by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which has been generally available for Windows 10 and 11 in the Microsoft Store since the end of November (amiga-news.de reported). The new version is based on the recently released version 20221221-1 of the ABI v11 developer branch and provides minor bug fixes and changes (latest YouTube video). (dr) [News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 13:53] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`02.Jan.2023`	Aracade-Spiel: "Green Beret" update Green Beret is a conversion of Konami's arcade classic of the same name to the Amiga, written using the Scorpion Engine and won third place at AmiGameJam (amiga-news.de reported). With this update, the developer wishes all a happy new year. Changes: added 2 selectable difficulty levels (Normal and Arcade), because people asked for a less brutal experience. "Normal" has a lifebar (which is not a "heresy", since the Japanese version of Contra Hard Corps (Mega Drive) does that too). "Arcade" is the same difficulty as previous versions (no lifebar, 1 hit = dead). some minor improvements here and there, such as a little flag marking a "save point/spawn point" reached. (dr) [News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 13:47] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`02.Jan.2023`	Linux: Browser Artic Fox V40.1 Christian 'xeno74' Zigotzky has compiled version 40.1 of the web browser Artic Fox (screenshot) for Linux PowerPC (32 Bit). Basically it runs under the Linux PowerPC distributions Void PPC, MintPPC, Fienix and Ubuntu 10.04 (which are also available for AmigaOne X1000 and 5000. Mainly, the browser is meant for older resp. slow systems (e.g. G3 with Ubuntu 10.04) because it is using an older version of the Goanna engine which has a good performance on slower systems. As a result, certain pages like GitHub cannot be fully displayed. Download: arcticfox-40.1.linux-powerpc.tar.bz2 (37 MB) (dr) [News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 07:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`02.Jan.2023`	Action game: Elf Spirit Hunters released For the TOY BOX JAM 4, the developer Erik 'earok' Hogan has written the action game "Elf Spirit Hunters" using his Scorpion Engine and released it today. It is inspired by David Crane's Ghostbusters game. The player's task is to rid the world of the last remaining Halloween ghosts shortly before Christmas. To do this, you have to buy elves as helpers in the shop as well as chests in which the ghosts are trapped. An Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM is required. (dr) [News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 07:25] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023` Amigans	AmigaOS 4: Update for Heretic II in development According to Roman 'kas1e' Kargin, Steffen Häuser is working on updates for the games published by Hyerion Entertainment such as Heretic II and Quake II for AmigaOS 4. He had already worked on the beta test for the original version (amiga-news.de reported). Kargin has now published a first preview video for Heretic II. Among other things, the new version should support HD modes like 1920x1080. In addition, all movies will be scaled and filtered so that there will no longer be 320×240 windows as in the original Warp OS version. (dr) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 14:29] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023` David Brunet (ANF)	New articles on Obligement The articles below have been added to the website of the French Amiga/MorphOS magazine Obligement during the last two months. All translations are welcome. Please contact David 'Daff' Brunet for more information. Novembre/December 2022 news. Old articles from AmigaDP 1 to 4: Review of DirWork 1.43, Review of NewZap 3.30, Review of PC-Task 1.10, Demo: Black & White Slide 2, Review of AppServer 301, Review of TurboQuantum, Review of VCLI 3.0, Demo: The Intruder, Review of ABackup 1.40, Review of MED 3.20, Review of Equality, Comparative: File search tools on AmigaOS 1.x/2.x, Demo: Optimus Maximus, Review of Magnetic Pages 1.3, etc. Interview with Alfred Faust (BarsnPipes developper). Interview with Stoo Cambridge (Cannon Fodder/SWOS graphist). Hardware: X500 Evo. Hardare: Eclipsis. File: Amiga history (update of the year 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985). File: Trecision history (3rd part). Tutorial: Installation of Warp3D Nova, Nova Bridge, MiniGL, OGLES2 and WarpOS Emu on AmigaOS 4.1. Tutorial: LightWave - Create a perfect Boing Ball. DIY: Use of the new LEDs on the Replay FPGA Arcade. Programming: Getting Started with Lua on MorphOS. Special quizz about Workbench. (dr) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 14:03] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023` Amigans	AmigaOS 4: Version 6.9 of audio driver for Intel HD Audio The AHI driver for AmigaOS 4 written by Harald Kanning supports PCIe cards with sound chips that meet the HD Audio specification (amiga-news.de reported). The archive also contains a simple "mixer" which can be used to control the volume. Now the developer has released an update to version 6.9 with the following changes: Added support for Sound Blaster Audigy FX (V2) (alc1220 based). This is the best card supported to date with a SNR of 120dB Added Install script Added Titlebar Docky Added workaround for AHI quirk that always selects a monitor input '0' and control monitor volume when you want to play a sound. This can potentially result in a lot of noise when playing sounds -> Added "Mute inputs" as monitor input 0 Small speed improvements AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 2 (the author has not tested it under previous versions) and AHI 6.6 are required. (dr) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 14:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023`	Aminet uploads until 31.12.2022 The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to Aminet: enc_sce_kheshkhash.lha demo/misc 22M MOS Kheshkhash by Encore & Scenic ASMPro1.19.lha dev/asm 109K 68k ASM-Pro v1.19 (update) pdp10-its-disassemble... dev/cross 7.1M MOS Tools for analysing PDP-10 IT... vCPUComp.lha dev/cross 14K 68k Gigatron asm compiler COP.lha dev/debug 166K 68k Low Level Debugger libpng1639_a68k.lha dev/lib 1.5M 68k Lib for reading/writing PNG PcmciaCD.lha driver/med 15K 68k ATAPI PCMCIA CD driver Sony Vaio ScummVM_AGA_060.lha game/misc 7.9M 68k Amiga port of ScummVM ScummVM_RTG.lha game/misc 8.0M 68k Amiga port of ScummVM StefADV.lha game/text 52K 68k Little italian text adventure invasionespaziale.lha game/wb 217K 68k Space Invasion Game AmiArcadia.lha misc/emu 4.6M 68k Signetics-based machines emul... AmiArcadiaMOS.lha misc/emu 4.9M MOS Signetics-based machines emul... AmiArcadia-OS4.lha misc/emu 5.1M OS4 Signetics-based machines emul... LN4Brisbane.lha mods/misc 12M LN4Brisbane 4ch MED by HKvalhe LN4Lv10.lha mods/misc 1.1M LN4 Lv10 4ch MED track by HKv... SamplesCreator.lha mus/edit 44K 68k 8svx samples creation and saving Tipografia_AROS.lha text/dtp 2.4M x86 Generator of printable signs ... Tipografia_MorphOS.lha text/dtp 2.4M MOS Generate printable signs usin... Tipografia_OS4.lha text/dtp 2.9M OS4 Generate printable signs usin... DisLib.lha util/libs 19K 68k A library based MC68K disasse... filesysbox_68k.lha util/libs 35K 68k A FUSE compatible file system... StartBar-ITA.lha util/wb 164K 68k Italian version of StartBar StartWin.lha util/wb 203K 68k Two bugged workbench launchba... (snx) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023`	OS4Depot uploads until 31.12.2022 The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to OS4Depot: rave.lha aud/edi 3Mb 4.1 An editor for mono/stereo audio ... modexplorerce.lha aud/pla 2Mb 4.0 Streaming mod file from Internet... modexplorerng.lha aud/pla 3Mb 4.0 Streaming mod file from Internet farewell_e-card.lha dem 5Mb 4.0 This is a demo with a farewell e... hdaudio_ahi.lha dri/aud 242kb 4.1 Generic HD audio driver for Amig... amiarcadia.lha emu/gam 5Mb 4.0 Signetics-based machines emulator amibrixx.lha gam/puz 2Mb 4.0 Puzzle game for the Amiga computer myblocktetris.lha gam/puz 92kb 4.0 A small tetris-like game tipografia.lha gra/mis 3Mb 4.0 Generator of printable signs usi... comicon.lha gra/vie 2Mb 4.0 Simply downloads the comic-strip smb2fs.lha net/sam 123kb 4.1 Filesystem for accessing files u... mcamiga.lha uti/fil 2Mb 4.1 Midnight/Norton commander style ... snoopdos_ita.lha uti/mis 19kb 4.0 Italian catalog file for SnoopDos (snx) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023`	AROS Archives uploads until 31.12.2022 The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to AROS Archives: farewell_e-card.lha dem 4Mb This is a demo with a farewell e... comicon_aros.lha gra/vie 2Mb simply downloads the comic-strip... tipografia.i386-aros.lha off/dtp 2Mb Generator of printable signs usi... (snx) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023`	MorphOS-Storage uploads until 31.12.2022 The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage: ModExplorerNG_3.82.zip Audio/Players A module player by Jörg. ENCORE_SCENIC_Kheshkha... Demoscene/ENCORE A demo for MorphOS name... Nanosaur2_2.1.0.lha Games/Action Pangea Software’s Nanos... BillyFrontier_1.1.0.lha Games/Action Billy Frontier is an ar... OttoMatic_4.0.0.lha Games/Adventure OttoMatic_4.0.0 for mod... CroMagRally_3.0.0.lha Games/Race The wildest racing game... Woof!_10.5.0.lha Games/Shoot3D Woof! is a continuation... fheroes2_1.0.0.lha Games/Strategy fheroes2 is a recreatio... AmiBrixx_2.2.lha Games/Think A puzzle-game for the a... ComicOn_1.4.lha Graphics/Show ComicOn downloads the s... Farewell e-card.lha Misc Farewell e-Card from M... Tipografia_1.2.lha Office/DTP Generate printable sign... TinyGL-Update-2022-12-... System/Update This is the seventh pub... (snx) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`01.Jan.2023`	WHDLoad: New installers until 31.12.2022 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 31.12.2022: 2022-12-31 updated: Sink or Swim (Zeppelin Games/Odysseus Software) patch rewritten, real files used, Bplcon0 color bit fixes, interrupts fixed (Info, Image) 2022-12-29 improved: Bards Tale (Interplay) sound problems on fast machines fixed (Info) 2022-12-29 updated: Ski or Die (Electronic Arts) patch rewritten, files instead of disk image used, disk access disabled, 68000 quitkey support, keyboard routine fixed, fire button 2 support for Snowball Blast event added (Info) 2022-12-28 improved: Portal (Activision) now uses real files, fixed blitter issues, skip introduction (Info) 2022-12-28 improved: Desert Strike (Electronic Arts) fast memory support added, improved controls, better blitter fixes (Info) 2022-12-26 improved: Steel (Hewson) out of bounds blits fixed, access faults fixed (patch works on 68000 now) (Info) 2022-12-26 improved: Stardust (Bloodhouse) data directory path in slave corrected (Info) 2022-12-26 improved: Stardust (Bloodhouse) correct V1.6 slave included now (Info) 2022-12-26 improved: Stardust (Bloodhouse) possible crash after tunnel sequence fixed, minor graphics problems introduced in V1.5 fixed (Info) 2022-12-26 improved: Escape from Colditz (Digital Magic Software) chip memory requirements reduced, access fault fixed (Info) 2022-12-26 improved: Necronom (LineL) weapons can be selected with fire button 2, 68000 quitkey support (Info) 2022-12-25 improved: Space Ace (Ready Soft) supports another version (Info) (snx) [News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022`	Amiga emulator: Amiberry 5.5 Amiberry is an Amiga emulator for ARM-based single-chip systems like the Raspberry Pi, the Odroid XU4 or the Tinkerboard from ASUS, which brings some newly developed features like a "WHDLoad-Booter" or support for controller configuration using RetroArch. For example it is used in the Workbench distribution AmiKit for the Raspberry Pi 4/400. A few moments ago, version 5.5 has been released. Changes: Bugfixes Reverted CD32 autoloader to normal config added linefeed in logging errors from CDDA init CDDA and AHI wouldn't respect the selected SDL2 audio device CDDA audio would fail to init in some cases CD32 mode wasn't properly applied when using WHDLoad booter fixed passing string to write_log in Panel Paths Enumeration of Recording devices would write into sound device ID NVRAM path wasn't used in CD32/CDTV configs uaegfx blitter was accidentally disabled uaegfx masked and overlapping blit fix gfx_top_windowed/gfx_left_windowed replacement config entries When using Alt-Tab, the keys were not released when returning control When selecting a folder/file the contents were not always updated Fixed magicmouse without virtual mouse driver Changing HDD controller for Hardfile lost the path to the hardfile fixed glitches with File and Folder selectors Controller axes inverted status was not respected when reading their input Improvements add support for UAE Zorro II RTG boards increase Savestate thumb size replace sdl2-config with pkgconf use 2MB Chip also, for A600 configs with Fast RAM major refactoring of whdload booter add more descriptive text when remapping controller buttons updated WHDLoad XML and GameControllers DB to latest versions ShowMessage now supports 3 lines. Added timestamp info when updating XML Added more configurable paths in GUI: NVRAM, Screenshots, Savestates added nvram and inputrecordings directories in repo updated WHDLoad XML to latest version cherry-picked various pieces from x86 branch cherry pick updates from x86 branch Build System added RPI4 Manjaro separate build added inputrecordings and nvram directories in packaging (dr) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 14:14] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022`	Blog: How authentic is the Amiga 1000 in "Stranger Things"? Carl Svensson always reports in his blog in detail and philosophically profound about various Amiga topics. In his latest article he explores the question of how authentic the shown workbench pictures of the Amiga 1000 are, appearing in the series "Stranger Things" are (amiga-news.de reported). (dr) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 07:25] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022`	Video: Status update on BitBeamCannon projects In a short video BitBeamCannon has informed about the current status of their projects (Metro Siege, DaemonClaw). (dr) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 07:13] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022`	Video: 25 popular demos For all those who want to spend New Year's Eve comfortably at home, a little video tip: the YouTube channel "Casual Retro Gamer" (CRG) (among other things Building a new Amiga 2000) had asked a few weeks ago via its Twitter account what the users think are the most popular demos. The result is a list of 25 demos, which are shown in a video of about 1,5h length. More than half of them are Amiga demos (for example Enigma, Desert Dream or World of Commodore). (dr) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:56] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022` MorphZone (forum)	MorphOS: Web browser Wayfarer 4.8 (2nd Update) Jacek 'jacadcaps' Piszczek has released version 4.6 of his Wayfarer web browser for MorphOS, which primarily fixes bugs but also improves image dragging alongside updated libraries (cURL, png, webp, sqlite). Please note that the current openssl3.library is required. Download: wayfarer.lha (29 MB) Update: (09:09, 01.01.23, snx) Meanwhile version 4.7 is available. This one doesn't require latest openssl3.library anymore, but optionally checks for updates of it. Also localization strings cosmetics are included. 2nd Update: (16:41, 03.01.23, dr) The developer has released version 4.8, which provides a fix for cUrl if Socks Proxies are used. (snx) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:48] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022` Puni (ANF)	AmigaOS 4: Blog summary of December For the month of November 'Puni' has again published a news summary in the areas of hard- and software for AmigaOS 4 at the title link. (snx) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:38] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`31.Dec.2022` Amigatronics (ANF)	Video review: Junior's Great Adventure At the title link, Amigatronics has published a short review video of the game Junior's Great Adventure, which was released by Amigamers in spring. The platform game, created with Backbone, is inspired by the silent movie era in terms of its sepia colours, fits on a single floppy disk and requires 1 MB of RAM as well as at least Kickstart 2.1. (snx) [News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:35] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`30.Dec.2022`	Rediscovered: Unfinished Blitz Basic 2 projects Jake Birkett is the head of indie game developers Grey Alien Games, which has been releasing downloadable games for PC and Mac since 2004. These have included the popular Regency Solitaire, which combines a Jane Austen-style story with various solitaire levels and special powerups that you get by upgrading your ballroom. Or Ancient Enemy, a turn-based battle card game based on solitaire, or from last year T-Minus 30: a 30-minute city builder where you have to save as many people as possible by building rockets before the planet blows up. And what is this enthusiasm for computer game development based on? Exactly, before this time, Birkett was a passionate Amiga user and programmer. So in the early 90s he wrote games on his Amigas 1200, which he still owns today, first in assembler, then in Blitz Basic 2, of which he only published one: as a fan of Solitaire under Windows 3.11 he wrote a corresponding implementation for the Amiga (YouTube video). Besides that, there are quite a few gaming projects started. Recently, Birkett took the 80Mb 2.5" HDD out of the Amiga 1200 and used a 44-pin IDE-to-SATA adapter to plug it into his PC. As he tells us, at first his PC wouldn't boot when it was plugged in. So he told the BIOS to treat it as a hot-swap drive, then booted Windows and plugged it in, and WinUAE was able to recognise it and create a full image of it. He then used the hard disk image to examine all his old code and recompile it to create videos. First, he turned his attention to games written in Blitz Basic 2, finding, among other things: "Oids" (an asteroids clone with a twist that you bounce off the edge of the screen): YouTube-Video Platform game: YouTube-Video "Speed Grind" (a fast-paced vertically scrolling arcade game that is almost done. Only the levels still have to be put in the right order): YouTube-Video Basically, he is thinking about finishing one or the other project now, even though he admits that he actually wants to spend his free time on other things due to the game development during the week. Finally, he tells us that he used to make a lot of rave/trance music on his Amiga and he programmed demos with images that pulsed with the music. This example (warning, it has flashing lights) has a cheesy, fun track that works well with the fractal images he used. Each image has 32 colours and is split into 8 colours per Amiga sound channel, and when a note is triggered in each channel, the corresponding 8 colours are pulsed, giving quite an interesting effect! We look forward to seeing (and reporting) what else Jake Birkett digs up! (dr) [News message: 30. Dec. 2022, 13:30] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`30.Dec.2022`	Motorola68k emulation: Nightly Build von Emu68 für PiStorm32-lite veröffentlicht Developer Michal Schulz regularly provides background information and status updates on his Motorola68K emulation Emu68 for the ARM architecture on his Patreon page. After the beta version 0.10 released at the beginning of March (amiga-news.de reported) he has now released a correspondingly adapted version of Emu68 as a nightly build for PiStorm32-lite (amiga-news.de reported) published the day before yesterday and reports about it in his current entry. Download: Emu68-pistorm32lite-20221229-9b18f6.zip (3,6 MB) (dr) [News message: 30. Dec. 2022, 06:52] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`29.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4: SMB2 handler smb2fs V53.2 The Server Message Block (SMB) is a network protocol for file, print and other server services in computer networks and allows access to files and directories located on another computer (Wikipedia entry). Fredrik Wikstrom's SMB2 handler is based on libsmb2 and allows remote access to files via the SMB2/3 protocols (amiga-news.de reported). Version 53.2, released today, includes the following changes: Added USER and PASSWORD arguments. Disabled CTRL-C signal checking in libc and ISocket->WaitSelect(). Merged latest fixes from the libsmb2 github repo: convert system time to little endian in NTLMSSP code. convert destination path directory separators in rename function. The newlib.library V53.40 or newer (or V53.30, included in AmigaOS 4.1 FE) and the filesysbox.library V54.4 or newer are required. (dr) [News message: 29. Dec. 2022, 14:23] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`29.Dec.2022` MorphZone	MorphOS: ENCORE & SCENIC released KHESHKHASH demo At the end of October, the game and demo developers from Encore (2D shooter Fortis, among others) released their demo Morphever. Before they now devote themselves to game development again and want to tackle some projects that have been put on hold, they have updated one of their older demos: KHESHKHASH was originally released in 2002 with demo group Scenic, which required an Amiga with PPC and 3D accelerator. Since it was difficult to find hardware capable of playing this demo with high resolution and acceptable frame rate, it was decided to recreate it for a wider range of current MorphOS hardware (YouTube video). (dr) [News message: 29. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`29.Dec.2022`	68k hardware emulation: PiStorm32-lite with firmware released Claude Schwarz' PiStorm connects a Raspberry Pi to the CPU socket of an Amiga using an adapter and uses the British single-board computer to emulate a fast m68k processor. The variant for the Amiga 1200 is called "PiStorm32". Yesterday the developer published on GitHub the repository for the PiStorm32-lite variant, which contains all hardware design and manufacturing files including ordering instructions for JLCPCB and the firmware. The lite variant is supposed to take into account the current difficult situation in the procurement of components and in principle be cheaper (amiga-news.de reported). PiStorm32-lite is compatible with: PI3A PI3B PI4B PiZero2 (is to be tested in detail because of the small space around the HDMI connection) Soon there will be another custom-made CM4 adapter for the PiStorm32-lite (amiga-news.de reported). The custom-made adapter will provide the best cooling in the limited space, as well as convenient access to all IOs (HDMI, USB, Ethernet) through the A1200 module slot near the joystick/mouse ports without modifications to the Amiga case. As the developer explains to us, the Pistorm32-lite replaces CPU, gives the CPU Fast-RAM and provides, among other things, a virtual graphics card on the Zorro bus. This allows resolutions with Emu68 of up to 1920 x 1080 (PI3) or 4k (pi4). Emu68 is the associated JIT (just in time) compiler that translates the Amiga's Motorola machine code into ARM machine code in real time. AmigaOS runs completely unchanged on it. Everything else is then real AmigaOS drivers, written in 68k code, which talk to the Raspberry hardware. Asked about the speed the Amiga can achieve with it, Schwarz said: with Emu68, a 68040 at 1.6GHz using a PI3 or about 3GHz using a Pi4. Or on a 68060 scale: a 68060 at 800MHz with Pi3 or 1.5GHz with a Pi.4. Michal Schulz is continuously improving the RTG driver (amiga-news.de reported), but basically it already works very well. Currently, for example, it is already possible to play a 720p MPEG video smoothly with Riva. The firmware, called "gateware", is an early first version written by him and Niklas Eckström. It functions very stably, but still needs to be further developed, in which users can contribute with their experiences and thus also follow the progress. At the moment, the PiStorm is only available as a self-built version, but it is expected that the first prefabricated copies will soon be available for purchase. (dr) [News message: 29. Dec. 2022, 06:26] [Comments: 1 - 28. Jan. 2023, 17:55] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`28.Dec.2022`	Video: Programming demos with "AProcessing" framework With the seventh episode, the video series in which 'Prince' (founder of the demo group 'Phaze101', assembler coding course) talks in detail with developer and Resistance member Alessio 'OzzyBoshi' Garzi about his "AProcessing" framework for creating demos and intros is finished. (dr) [News message: 28. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`28.Dec.2022`	Emulator: vAmigaWeb v2.3 b1 vAmigaWeb is an Amiga emulator for the web browser or a Progressive Web App (PWA) based on the Amiga emulator for MacOS vAmiga. Based on the latest version 2.3 b1 of vAmiga, the developer 'mithrendal' has also updated his application. Changes: can operate 4 floppy drives and 4 hard disks simultaneously i.e. df0-df3, dh0-dh3 for a classic professional amiga workstation environment supports extended ADF file format upgraded to latest vAmigaCore (dr) [News message: 28. Dec. 2022, 06:33] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`27.Dec.2022` MorphZone	MorphOS: Eighth beta version of TinyGL MorphOS team developer Mark 'Bigfoot' Olsen had offered a bounty project for improved OpenGL support as well as drivers for more Radeon graphics cards under the title link, which has been successfully funded (amiga-news.de reported). Now the developer has released the eighth public beta version of his TinyGL update. Changes: tinygl.library: Library version is now 53.7. Fixed multiple issues with GL_RGB5_A1 textures. Fixed a problem with ARB fragment programs that caused such programs that used non-consecutive texture image units to fail. For example a program that used texture unit 0 and texture unit 2, but not texture unit 1 would misrender. Fixed a problem with mipmapped cubemaps where such textures would get treated as 2D textures rather than cube map textures. This problem only affected textures which are mipmap complete. r300.library: Library version is now 53.10. Added support for GL_RGB5_A1 textures. As the developer wrote, "especially the texture solves a bunch of problems with various different games, both existing games and future game ports. Among the games now working again is Descent Freespace, for example." (dr) [News message: 27. Dec. 2022, 08:42] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.Dec.2022` Jan (ANF)	Workbench distribution: AmiKit XE 11.9.0 for Raspberry Pi 4/400 and Windows AmiKit has released an update to version 11.9.0 of the Workbench distribution AmiKit XE for the Raspberry Pi 4/400 (changes) as well as for Windows/Mac/Linux (changes) and wished a merry Christmas. (dr) [News message: 26. Dec. 2022, 16:09] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4: Audio editor Rave 1.4 Daniel 'trixie' Jedlicka has released version 1.4 of the audio editor "Rave" (amiga-news.de reported) and reports in detail about the development of this current version in his new blog entry. Changes of version 1.4: Implemented a resampler module with four quality settings Each project now keeps an activity log, which can be displayed in the Project Information window A reworked Fade plugin with configurable fade curves Fixed: User-aborting an operation no longer triggers an error requester Loading and saving of empty files is now supported Linked with the latest version of libFLAC for improved FLAC support Updated documentation Rave requires AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 2 as well as A-EON's Enhancer Core classes. (dr) [News message: 26. Dec. 2022, 16:02] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`26.Dec.2022` Amigaworld.net (website)	PDF magazine: REV'n'GE 141 (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. Amiga-related, the current issue is about "Akira" and "Luma". (snx) [News message: 26. Dec. 2022, 09:01] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`25.Dec.2022` Twitter	A-EON Technology: Enhancer Software Core Release 2 / Delay of A1222 According to Trevor Dickinson in his latest blog entry, the production of the A1222 Plus continues to delay due to the "ongoing worldwide lack of integrated circuits and other electronic supply chain issues". As he explained: "One small micro-controller which costs $6.83 each in batches of 100+ is only available for delivery at the end of 2023. Although it can be purchased now from another trade supplier for the extortionate price of ~$420 each." ACube and A-EON are therefore still looking for alternative suppliers. Furthermore, he announces the immediate availability of Enhancer Software Core Release 2, which can be downloaded free of charge on AmiSphere for registered users. It is a free standalone version of the Enhancer software that includes classes, libraries and system files along with a software development kit that allows developers to create their own projects using features of the Enhancer software core components. Included is: Datatypes: Info Datatype LogFile Datatype MPEGA Datatype MOD Datatype SimpleHTML Datatype Sound Datatype WAV Datatype Gadgets and Classes: Anim Gadget Class Clock Gadget Class DateSheet Gadget Class InfoWindow Class ListViewer Gadget Class OptionButton Gadget Class PieChart Gadget Class ProgressBar Gadget Class Select Gadget Class SliderBar Gadget Class Shared Image Class Thumblist Gadget Class TickBox Gadget Class Time Gadget Class ToolBar Gadget System: AmiSphereServer Updater Utilities: InfoWindow Libraries: Codesets CLI Commands and Tools: LDCK RequestChooser SystemReboot Preferences: AmiSphere Preferences Finally, the full commercial version of Enhancer Software v2.2 will be offered at a 30% discount until 31 December 2022. Likewise, users who have already purchased version 2.2 in December 2022 will receive a 30% credit on their Amistore accounts. (dr) [News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 11:24] [Comments: 1 - 26. Dec. 2022, 13:34] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`25.Dec.2022`	Aminet uploads until 24.12.2022 The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to Aminet: ApolloExplorer.zip comm/tcp 26M 68k Apollo Explorer ZitaFTPServer.lha comm/tcp 14M OS4 A fast and secure FTP(S) server. COP.lha dev/debug 166K 68k Low Level Debugger HWP_ZIP.lha dev/hwood 286K ALL Read and write ZIP archives parForth.lha dev/lang 394K x86 pForth compiled with AROS fun... REDPILLGameCreator.lha dev/misc 3.0M 68k Game Creator with AGA support Fussball-WM-2022.lha docs/misc 10K TurboCalc Spreadsheet WM-2022... worldcup.lha docs/misc 655K Soccer World Cup statistics 1... StefACS.lha game/demo 162K 68k Adventures creator, working i... DeadMetal2.lha game/strat 16M 68k Strategy game sequel - 12 bat... WhatIFF1.08.lha mags/misc 469K What IFF? #1.08-December-2022 AmiArcadiaMOS.lha misc/emu 4.9M MOS Signetics-based machines emul... AmiVms.lha misc/emu 3.4M 68k Simulates OpenVMS commands AmigaAMP3.lha mus/play 2.0M OS4 Multi format audio player wit... AmigaAMP3-68k.lha mus/play 403K 68k MPEG audio player with GUI AmiModRadio.lha mus/play 3.0M 68k Play modules from Internet so... avalanche.lha util/arc 84K OS4 ReAction unarchive GUI for xf... LHArchiver.lha util/arc 4.6M 68k create lha archives intuitively SteBaseConv.lha util/conv 46K 68k Numeric base converter for an... IconLib_46.4.lha util/libs 1.1M 68k free icon.library in optimize... IdentifyDev.lha util/libs 66K 68k Identify hardware and more IdentifyUsr.lha util/libs 98K 68k Identify hardware and more SoftIEEE.lha util/libs 76K 68k math lib&881/882 FPU emulator... AmiKick.lha util/misc 46K Check Kickstart images under ... igame_fr.lha util/misc 7K 68k French catalog for iGame v2.2.0 VATestprogram.zip util/misc 2.8M 68k Versatile Amiga Test Program (snx) [News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`25.Dec.2022`	OS4Depot uploads until 24.12.2022 The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to OS4Depot: aifc2wav.lha aud/con 19kb 4.0 will save IMA4, SOWT and SDX2, A... gym2vgm.lha aud/con 13kb 4.0 Converts GYM, SSL, and CYM files... gym2vgmv.lha aud/con 13kb 4.0 Converts GYM, SSL, and CYM files... amigaamp3.lha aud/pla 2Mb 4.1 Multi format audio player with GUI libsamplerate.lha dev/lib 4Mb 4.0 Library for sample rate conversion arabic_console_device... dri/inp 3Mb 4.1 An arabic console device, line &... paybackupdate.lha gam/act 877kb 4.1 Native version of Payback for Am... colorit.lha gam/puz 2Mb 4.0 A small games with colors breakhack.lha gam/rol 15Mb 4.1 Breakhack is a small roguelike game hwp_zip.lha lib/hol 286kb 4.0 Read and write zip archives for ... aya.lha net/mis 2Mb 4.0 Access wolfram alpha answer mach... smb2fs.lha net/sam 122kb 4.1 Filesystem for accessing files u... zitaftpserver.lha net/ser 14Mb 4.1 A fast and secure FTP(S) server. fuppes.lha net/ser 15Mb 4.1 Free UPnP Entertainment Service avalanche.lha uti/arc 84kb 4.1 Simple ReAction GUI for xadmaster avalanche_ita.lha uti/arc 5kb 4.0 Italian translation for Avalanche lharchiver.lha uti/arc 5Mb 4.0 Create LhA archives intuitively airscan.lha uti/pri 107kb 4.1 Native Amiga scanner utility hex2.lha uti/sci 867kb 4.0 Simple calculator with variables... thumbnailmaker.lha vid/mis 6kb 4.1 Arexx script for ArtEffect, gene... (snx) [News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`25.Dec.2022`	AROS Archives uploads until 24.12.2022 The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to AROS Archives: parforth.i386-aros.lha dev/lan 394kb pForth v27 compiled with AROS fu... worldcup.lha doc/mis 655kb Soccer World Cup statistics 1930... zip.i386-aros.lha lib/mis 286kb Plugin allows Hollywood scripts ... (snx) [News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`25.Dec.2022`	MorphOS-Storage uploads until 24.12.2022 The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage: HWP_ZIP_1.2.lha Development/Hollywood/... Read and write ZIP arch... AmiArcadia_29.34.lha Emulation A Signetics-based machi... LHArchiver_1.7.lha Files/Archive Create lha archives int... Freedroid_1.0.2.lha Games/Action Remake of the classic P... SuperTux_0.1.3.lha Games/Platform SuperTux_0.1.3.lha 194X_0.7b.lha Games/Shoot2D 194X_0.7b.lha MahjonggTiles_1.2.lha Games/Think MUI based Shanghai type... Mesa-demos.lha Graphics/TinyGL Mesa demos for TinyGL Fireflies_2.06.lha Graphics/TinyGL FireFlies (MorphOS Tiny... Scout_3.6.lha System/Monitoring This is the official co... TinyGL-Update-2022-12-... System/Update This is the seventh pub... (snx) [News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`25.Dec.2022`	WHDLoad: New installers until 24.12.2022 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 24.12.2022: 2022-12-24 new: Hoi (Hollyware) done by StingRay (Info) 2022-12-22 improved: Kid Gloves (Logotron) fix player weapon, keyboard handling fixed, quitkey improved, audio player fixed, trainer added, extra button support added (Info) 2022-12-20 new: Dragons of Flame (Strategic Simulations Inc) done by StingRay (Info) 2022-12-18 improved: IK+ (Archer MacLean) bouncing ball samples fixed (Info) (snx) [News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022`	Video: Digitising printed AMOS source files In another part of his series of short tutorials on AMOS Pro (amiga-news.de reported), retro and Amiga fan 'Yawning Angel' this time takes on the task of how to get AMOS code he wrote in the 90s and printed out on a dot matrix printer back into his Amiga A1200 to run the code. (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 14:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022`	Amiga emulator for MacOS: vAmiga 2.21 and 2.3b1 With the release of version 2.21 of his Amiga emulator vAmiga for MacOS, its developer Dirk Hoffmann fixes two small bugs of version 2.2 released in early December: Snapshots containing more than 512 KB Slow Ram were reported as being corrupted. Memory footprint is back to normal. At the same time, he has released a first first beta version for version 2.3. Changes: Bug fixes: When drive mechanics were emulated, invalid SYNC words sometimes showed up. Snapshots containing more than 512 KB Slow Ram were reported as being corrupted. Memory footprint is back to normal. Fixes an activity monitor drawing bug in CRT mode. Enhancements: Extended ADFs with misaligned sync words can be read. Warp mode can be switched on or off via keyboard shortcuts. RetroShell offers a special debug mode, now. The minimum system requirement for his emulator is macOS 10.15. (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 14:27] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022`	ACube Systems: UBoot 2015.b for Sam460EX/Sam460CR/Sam460LE boards (update) Press release Bassano del Grappa, Italy - 23 December 2022 ACube Systems is pleased to announce a new release of the U-Boot firmware for its Sam460 line of motherboards. New in this version added support for the Sam460LE board improved support for Radeon 2xx series (R7 240, 250 etc...) solved a bug in the PCI Express init routine added support for new u-Boot eeprom chips The updated installation guide describes in detail the usual installation method (ISO image) and alternative methods (TFTP). Direct download of the installation archive: Sam460_updater_ 2015b.zip (1,3 MB) Additional informationen: Please note: UBoot and UBoot updater make use of GPL code and thus are both published under GPL. Direct download of the source codes: u-boot-2015.b_prod.tar.gz (4,9 MB) With this release, ACube wishes all its customers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thanks for sticking with us and for your incredible support. An exciting 2023 awaits all our fellow Amiga users and friends. Stay tuned and keep following us for new products and announcements in the next year! Update: (26.12.2022, 08:15, dr) According to ACube Systems, the download is currently unavailable due to user-reported problems. If you need help, please contact ACube by mail. (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 14:07] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 24 - Michael Rupp / Amiga-News.de wishes Merry Xmas The Christmas door and thus the conclusion of our Advent calendar premiere is Michael Rupp. More than a year ago, Michael familiarised himself with the Hollywood programming language and wrote SonosController, an application for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS that can be used to control the "speakers" distributed by Sonos. In the meantime, he has further developed this to version 1.2, which now also supports AmigaOS 3. But his main project is certainly a different one: at the beginning of 2001, and of course we reported on it, Michael Rupp published the result of his work on TAWS - The Amiga Workbench Simulation - for the first time publicly with version 0.5: a JavaScript project with the aim of bringing the look and feel of the Workbench to the browser. The idea came from the fact that many Amiga-themed pages are based on the Workbench for their navigation, which he aims to perfect with this. Michael has been working on the project for over 20 years now and we would like to mention a few "milestones": Version 0.9: Firefox support Version 0.11: the first application, "Clock", which look like the Amiga original but offers some additional options Version 0.13: support for Opera and AppleWebKit browsers (Safari, Google Chrome and OWB), MultiView loads JPEG, GIF, PNG, HTML and Text Version 0.16: complete simulation of AmigaOS 1.2 Version 0.17: complete AmigaGuide interpreter Version 0.23: all AmigaOS versions are simulated Version 0.26: Simulation of Amiga Shell Version 0.30: TAWS Early Preset Selection Version 0.31: new AmigaOS 3.1.4 Preset Version 0.34: MultiView support for IFF-ILBM files, new presets "AROS One" and "OS 3.9 AfA One" On the occasion of his Advent calendar door, he has today put the current version 0.35 online and, in addition to numerous new features and improvements, has also included a little Christmas surprise at our suggestion. Before we close our calendar with the last anecdote, we would like to use it to thank everyone who participated in the calendar once again. We hope it was a welcome change for everyone away from the usual news ticker. We wish our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We would like to thank you for your continued loyalty over the years and would like to encourage you to continue to contribute in the new year: both with feedback on the software and hardware projects presented here by the developers, but also with news reports via our Amiga News Feed (ANF). On the one hand this makes our voluntary work easier and on the other hand it is a service to the community and an expression of appreciation. Thank you very much! And now please, Michael :) "Pirate copies Yes, that's right, I said the unword: Pirate copies No "backup copies" or "not-quite-empty disks", but plain and simple: Pirate copies And the following story tells us that these can be dangerous. Even if it is somewhat different from what one would expect ... but everything in order: Trading pirated copies was the most natural thing in the world for us at the age of 14 (ok, yes, even later). There was a reason that we had not saved up a stupid console with its impractical cartridges, but a real computer with recordable floppy disks. Buying originals didn't even occur to you, the thought was so absurd. They cost a fortune! No, the money was needed for the memory expansion, everything was already expensive enough: over 200 francs for 512 kilobytes, just imagine. But I still think that all the piracy at the time contributed to the success of the Amiga to an extent that should not be underestimated, at least for the hardware manufacturers. Less so for the software producers, of course. In other words, success and decline rolled into one. Well. And where better to do this than in the schoolyard, before, after or even during lessons? Exactly. Nowhere. So there was nothing unusual about always having a few floppy disks at hand at school. So, one fine summer's day in 1989, the following happened: No, wait, I have to go a little further: I grew up in a rather rural area, in Teufen, an idyllic village of 5,000 souls in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, which already counted as a somewhat larger village in Switzerland (at least at that time). The school was undergoing renovations, so some subjects had been moved to a provisional location, including the cooking class, which I was supposed to switch to during the break. However, the provisional school was on the other side of the main road from the school itself, and the school itself was on a hill. And nice weather meant I was on my bike (CH German for "bicycle"). So, that brings us to all the important facts. I ask you to visualise this: We have a hill, a steep road that leads across the well-travelled main road incl. tram to the makeshift. And at the top you see young Michi swinging onto his bike, in his left hand a pack of freshly exchanged disks with ... right: Pirate copies. "Everything's easy", I think to myself, I can brake well with my right hand, and off I go, down the steep road. The main road quickly approaches, I pull on the brake, and it does: Whack! Brake cable snapped and there is no time left for further reflection, only reflexes remain. And these tell me that I must not let go of the disks under any circumstances, because at that age they were worth more than pure money. And apparently also more than life and limb. The road is rushing towards me, luckily there is no tram coming, but while I'm chasing across it, a station wagon gets in my way, so I slam into its side with full force. Suddenly I can fly, and then the lights go out for a moment. When I wake up, the police are already there and the ambulance is not long in coming, and I wonder how long I was away. As it turned out, I had probably not been unconscious for a minute, and there was a very specific reason why the police were at the scene of the accident faster than anyone would think possible: The car was the police Of all the vehicles whizzing past, I had actually chosen the police car to demonstrate the full power of kinetic energy. By the way, Yvonne, who I secretly had a huge crush on, had observed the whole thing, and she immediately informed my parents. In retrospect, I often thought that I should have used this circumstance somehow to get closer to her. But at the time I was probably just embarrassed, and unfortunately nothing ever came of it. And the disks? The ... Pirate copies? They were scattered all over the road, but the nice policeman, who seemed a bit worn out himself, collected them for me and gave them back to me. A car must have driven over one of them, it was gone, but all the others were still in perfect working order! I still find it remarkable today - and somehow also sweet - how absolutely clueless the authorities were about this issue back then, at least in rural Switzerland. Oh yes: About a year later I received an official letter informing me that a case against me had been dropped, of which I had known nothing at all. But even then it was only about the damage to the police car and not about ... Pirate copies!" (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 07:26] [Comments: 2 - 24. Dec. 2022, 13:55] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022` Michael Rupp (ANF)	Javascript: TAWS - The Amiga Workbench Simulation 0.35 TAWS ("The Amiga Workbench Simulation") is a Javascript simulation of the Amiga-Workbench 1.0 - 4.1 FE for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Apple-WebKit-Browser (including Odyssey). Any kind of feedback the author Michael Rupp would very appreciate. His work can be supported by a little donation from inside TAWS. Version 0.35 includes among others the following changes: HippoPlayer (in Work): Thanks a lot to (www.wothke.ch) for his open source player routines. Features: The following playback routines (https://bitbucket.org/wothke) are implemented, each of them supporting many tracker formats: adplug asap ds snes nez psx sid sc68 uade vgm xmp zxtune And besides: A Christmas surprise! Many thanks to Daniel Reimann from amiga-news.de who persuaded me to do this. The effort was... um... bigger than expected, but it was worth it! (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 07:03] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022`	RTG Solitare: "Solitare match" V0.85 At the beginning of December, Sami Vehmaa had published a demo version of his graphics card Solitare conversion "Solitare match" (YouTube video), which is primarily intended for Amiga emulators or Apollo cards due to the high CPU requirements. The demo version contains five levels. The paid version has meanwhile grown from ten levels to 50 and is currently available for 1.50 Euro. (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 06:09] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`24.Dec.2022` Hans de Ruiter	AmigaOS 4: FTP server ZitaFTP 1.36 Hans de Ruiter has released version 1.36 of his commercial FTP server "ZitaFTP". He wrote: "One user said he didn't want the status icon, and asked how to remove it. Now that he mentioned it, having control over the docky/SysTray icon is obvious. I just didn't think about it earlier. Anyway, v1.36 adds this missing ability. So, if you're someone who doesn't want the status icon flickering on your Workbench/Desktop, you've now got the power to disable it. Another user managed to lock himself out of his own server by entering the wrong password one too many times. He asked if it were possible to unban clients via the UI. The answer was no at the time, but it's possible now. One user had a lengthy list of things he didn't like. I suppose some developers would hate users like this, but I appreciate knowing what it is that people want. Some of this feedback has been implemented, while others ended up on the to-do list. Still other feedback was already on the to-do list, but the priorities have been tweaked. So, ZitaFTP Server users (including trial users), if you have suggestions, feedback, or think you've spotted a bug, then please use the built-in "Submit Feedback/Bug" button in the UI. It's a bright orange button in the lower right corner, so you can't miss it. You can also find it by right clicking on the docky/SysTray icon." A single licence of ZitaFTP Server' costs around 47 euros. The programme can be tested free of charge for 30 days. (dr) [News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 05:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	Game Construction Kit: RedPill 0.9.15 RedPill, developed by Carlos Peris, is a game construction kit written in Amiblitz 3.9, 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. Among others the new version 0.9.15 offers sprite backgrounds with up to 8 different levels of parallax and a new FX layer for games with less than 256 (32 in ECS) colors (YouTube-Video). (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 16:13] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4: Status update on WebKit port In keeping with today's Advent calendar door, George 'walkero' Sokianos has just given a status update on the work on the WebKit port for AmigaOS 4 which started at the beginning of November (amiga-news.de reported): According to this, the team around him would have reached one of their milestones by successfully compiling the JavaScriptCore (JSC) library together with the test binaries. Afterwards, he would have successfully tested it on his system under various conditions, with one exception (pthread). On GitHub the problems are documented which the team was faced as well as information on the development environment can be found. As a next step, he would now try to make changes to be able to compile the files with newlib as well. If this is not possible, he will provide all the necessary information so that missing parts can be added. (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 14:44] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	Porting Amiga applications to Linux: AxRuntime 41.4 Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz' "AxRuntime" is a runtime environment for Linux which emulates the AmigaOS-API and therefore enables porting Amiga applications on Linux and developing applications which can be compiled for AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS as well as Linux (amiga-news.de reported). Under Windows it is possible to use it by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which has been generally available for Windows 10 and 11 in the Microsoft Store since the end of November (amiga-news.de reported). The new version is based on the recently released version 20221221-1 of the ABI v11 developer branch and introduces, among other things, the Zune prefs V0.2 and the editor V1.1 (YouTube video). (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 12:55] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	Tool: identify-library 41.0 A few moments ago, Richard Körber has released version 41.0 of his identify.library (amiga-news.de reported). Changes: Removed IDTAG_Secondary (has never been fully realized anyway) VMC Amithlon is detected Updated Vampire names Warp1240/1260 is detected OCS was not correctly detected on very fast machines, (hopefully) fixed dos.library was closed incorrectly in all tools, fixed Other minor bugfixes Downloads: IdentifyDev.lha (66 kB) IdentifyUsr.lha (98 kB) (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 11:23] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022` Andreas Magerl (ANF)	APC&TCP: Amiga37 DVD A DVD of Amiga37, which took place in October 2022 in Mönchengladbach, is now available at APC&TCP at the title link. More precisely, it is two pressed data DVDs in DVD-9 format with a total playing time of over 5 hours. The majority of the proceeds is intended to go to the organisers for a follow-up event. Content: Amiga Future Special Issue Amiga37 (PDF) Amiga37 Documentation Amiga37 Photos Amiga37 Tour, Part 1 & Part 2 Amiga37 Speech of Dave Haynie and Ron Nicholson (ENG) Amiga37 Speech of Hannes Seifert (GER) Amiga37 Speech of Jon Hare and Mev Dinc (ENG) Amiga37 Speech of Martyn Brown and Andreas Tadic (ENG) Amiga37 Speech of Tim Wright and Mike Clarke (ENG) Amiga34 Documentation (snx) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 11:02] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 23 - George Sokianos One more time we will be awake...;) George 'walkero' Sokianos will shorten the time until Christmas Eve with his story for our 23rd door. George is currently the driving force behind many AmigaOS 4 projects and it is always surprising how varied his software theme choices are and where he finds the time to tackle it all. In addition, he has also been providing MorphOS versions of his software lately. At least here with us, his "career" began with the release of Comicami, a viewer for comics in .cbr and .cbz formats for AmigaOS 4. George tirelessly tries to improve the user experience under the Amiga operating systems and to make standards from the PC world available for the Amiga with smart ideas: For example, he has released aiostreams ("All In One Streams"), a collection of Python scripts that make it possible to watch retro streams on Twitch.tv and Mixer.com also under AmigaOS 4, AmigaOS 3, MorphOS and AROS instead of on the PC. Likewise, he publishes and updates scripts for the Odyssey web browser (AmigaOS 4 port) on his website, which succeed in displaying, for example, GitHub or itch.io websites. However, he is also venturing into the really big chunks that could make his just-mentioned efforts obsolete at some point: as we reported at the beginning of November, he has formed a small team that has started porting WebKit. The developer is also significantly responsible for the Software Development Kits for AmigaOS 4.1, ports the Editor Lite XL for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS and maintains iGame, his MUI-based frontend for launching WHDLoad titles. Using MediaVault, online radio stations can be streamed and podcasts listened to. We also want to mention his ported games, for example BreakHack, which was only released yesterday, BlobWars: Attrition or The Battle for the Solar System - The Pandoran War. On his Ko-fi website you will not only find a lot of interesting background information, but also the possibility to donate a coffee or more to him as appreciation (of which he gives 50% back to the community at the end of each month by supporting projects or developers). We wish George continued joy and success with his projects and look forward to many more interesting news here with us. His anecdote: "I'd like to share a little story of how I got into the Amiga NG scene. As I've been an Amiga user since around 1989, I was watching all the news for our beloved machine, and of course, I was drooling watching videos of the AmigaOS 4 running on PPC computers back then. I wanted... No. I needed an Amiga capable to run that operating system. So every day I was watching those youtube videos people were uploading from their AmigaOne XE and SE. Every day I was thinking about how I could buy one. Back then there were not many computers left to buy, as the availability was reducing dramatically. And there were no announcements for new machines to be released. The cost was high. That year was crucial for me since in May that year I got married to my wife, and we were expecting our first kid around October. So the family expenses were at a high grade. But I could stop thinking that fabulous computers with this exceptional OS. The funny thing is that I remember that every day I was going to work and I was visiting the online Amiga shops to check the availability. Every day I was filling up the order form and kept my hand from hitting that "Submit" button. Every day I was sooooo close, but yet so far. The nightmares started when shop by shop began to show the "Not available" label beside the AmigaOnes photos. That awful red label made my sweat grow and my heartbeat increase. Up until a hot day in June 2005 when that "Submit" button finally got clicked. For one more time, I was visiting the website of GGS-Data in Sweden and I was drooling at the photos of a microAmigaOne. And YES... that microAmigaOne became mine. I completed all the necessary payments and got the confirmation for my order, saying that everything was fine. The next day I visited the shops' web pages again and I was looking at the red label without caring anymore. That label appeared on the GGS-Data's website as well. Was the microAmigaOne I bought the last one that was for sale? Did I manage to get the very last AmigaOne back in 2005? What would happen if that day I didn't click that "Submit" button at the end of the order form? Would I be here with all of you developing software for the AmigaOS? I guess we will never learn what would happen. The only thing that I know is that while I am writing those words, I have that microAmigaOne beside my desk, ready to put a smile on my face, as it did 17 years ago. And most importantly, I survived my wife's menace to tell you the story. Take care of your Amiga computers and have fun with them." (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 08:37] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	SCSI-SD adapter: ZuluSCSI firmware 1.2.0 ZuluSCSI is a new generation of file-based SCSI hard disk and CD-ROM drive emulators. ZuluSCSI emulates a SCSI-I or SCSI-2 hard disk using an SD memory card (amiga-news.de reported). Version 1.2.0 of the firmware was released yesterday. Changes: RP2040 write performance improvements and bug fixes Optional GPT partition support Add the ability to disable the status LED (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 06:25] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`23.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4: SMB2-Handler ported Server Message Block (SMB) is a network protocol for file, print and other server services in computer networks and allows access to files and directories located on another computer. The SMB2 handler ported by Fredrik Wikstrom for AmigaOS 4 is based on libsmb2 and allows remote access to files via the SMB2/3 protocols. The newlib.library V53.40 or newer (or the V53.30 as included in 4.1 FE) and the filesysbox.library V54.4 or newer are required. (dr) [News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 06:08] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`22.Dec.2022` deadwood	AROS x86_64: Update of ABI-v11 developer branch The AROS developer Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz had given his stable branch of AROS for 64-bit Intel and AMD processors the code name 'ABIv11' to distinguish it from the in-progress ABIv1 version in the main AROS repository. It has now updated this to version "20221221-1". The new release includes improvements and fixes made since March 2022. Among improvements is the major work done on Scalos during summer to fix multiple compatibility, stability and 64-bit problems. (dr) [News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 21:04] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`22.Dec.2022`	Blog: Amiga Kit's Christmas entry At the beginning of October, Amiga Kit had started its own blog. In the new entry published yesterday, one remembers games suitable for the Christmas season and takes a look at various Amiga specials. (dr) [News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 20:51] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`22.Dec.2022`	ReAction-GUI for XAD: Avalanche 1.9 for AmigaOS 3 and 4 Chris Young has released version 1.9 of his ReAction-based graphical user interface Avalanche for the unarchiving system XAD, which also supports the xfdmaster.library and can search for viruses using the xvs.library. The developer has written his tool explicitly for AmigaOS 3.2, but has also been tested under AmigaOS 4. Since it uses a new window.class, it might not work with older OS3 versions. Changes: Add "snapshot window" option: note that the position is not saved unless save is clicked in prefs Add ToolType to disable the ASL hook (filters ASL req to only show archives) Add ToolType to set the initial drawer visible in ASL requester Fix iconify Rebuilt with optimisations (dr) [News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 19:28] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`22.Dec.2022` Mike Battilana (E-Mail)	Amiga Forever 10: Update 10.0.10.0 The emulator package Amiga Forever 10 (amiga-news.de reported) was updated on December 20 with version 10.0.10.0. By including WinUAE 4.10.0, the integration of a virtual modem was rounded off on the Amiga side, so that it can also be used with the programs NComm and Term. Those who already use Amiga Forever 10 can carry out the update under "Help/About" or download the installation program again. (snx) [News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 13:02] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`22.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4: BreakHack released According to George 'walkero' Sokianos in his latest Ko-Fi blog entry, he started working on porting a game called BreakHack some time ago and finally decided to release it. It is a Roguelike game developed by Linus Probert. The latter describes the game as "a casual roguelike intended to provide entertainment for 10-30 minutes when you are taking a break from anything else in your life. It's easy to learn but hard to beat, no extra lives no fuss. Just enter the dungeon kill the monsters and get the loot." Sokianos received permission from the original developer to include all assets. Direct GitHub download: breakhack-OS4_4.0.3r1.lha (15 MB) (dr) [News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 11:48] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`22.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 22 - Jacek Piszczek Willkommen zum 22. Türchen, für das Jacek 'jacadcaps' Piszczek eine kleine Anekdote verfasst hat. Even those who have never or only marginally dealt with the MorphOS operating system will have heard about Jacek's impressive work on his e-mail client Iris and web browser Wayfarer. As exciting as his projects are, the interview we conducted with him in the middle of this year is also worth reading and we would like to recommend it here. We hope you will find as much time for your projects in the future, Jacek. We wish you much joy and continued positive feedback. He wrote the following hardware anecdote: "It was 1998 and I finally managed to buy an A1200 with a PowerPC. Of course at that time it was already becoming a little hard to just get everything from one store, so it took a while to get the motherboard, the Infinitiv tower case and so on. Once everything was finally there, I was very eager to replace the A500 I’ve since outgrown. I’ve known, of course, that the aging hardware was a little finicky and tried to be patient with it. Still, I didn’t expect smoke to come out of the computer on the first power on. Turned out it was the Micronik power adapter cable which was either soldered incorrectly or didn’t get a good enough fit. The result: the cables literally burst and I had to get the power adapter repaired. It’s bugged me several times since, before I was able to replace the whole tower for an Elbox one: Another attempt. Got the cable repaired and assembled everything back again. Power on. Smoke comes out… OK… deep breath… Turns out that in my haste to get it all working I’ve managed to shift the IDE plug by 1 pin. Since Commodore cheaped out when building the Amiga and didn’t use a shrouded header it wasn’t exactly hard to do. Unfortunately, this fried the IDE chip on the A1200 motherboard, so now I’ve had a nice, working, A1200 with a PowerPC card and only a floppy drive to run software from. A much faster A500, ha ha. In the end it was easier to just add an Elbox FastATA to the set than get the A1200 motherboard repaired. Think it all cost me over a month and way too much money. Still, that Amiga was what eventually let me start working on MorphOS and I’ve used it daily until about 2004." (dr) [News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 11:29] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`21.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 21 - Frank Wille The 21st door goes online and for this one Frank Wille has taken time out with an anecdote. If you want to take a look at Frank Wille's wealth of work, his Homepage is the best place to start. For more than 20 years he has been working together with Volker Barthelmann on vbcc, a highly optimised, portable ISO C compiler for Amiga 3/4 and MorphOS, last updated in March this year. The vbcc distribution also includes the portable linker vlink and the portable assembler vasm. In any case, one should not forget to take a look at the "Other Projects" to get an impression of Frank's versatility: he is responsible for the game Solid Gold and the Amiga conversions of Retroguru games such as the Sqrxz series (1, 2, 3), Giana's Return, Xump or Fruit'Y, but also for the assembler PhxAss, the involvement in the Amiga and Pegasos versions of the operating system NetBSD as well as for ppclibemu ppclibemu. He was also involved in the beta test of the Pegasos II adaptation of AmigaOS 4.1. Furthermore, he indirectly supports the Sonnet-Amiga project through corresponding adaptations of vasm and vlink. Many thanks also to you, Frank, for your long-lasting commitment. We read your story: "I have been in love with Denmark for decades. Wonderful nature and carefree freedom. All is still right with the world. It's no wonder that the Danes are considered the happiest people in the world. I'm sure that's true of the rest of Scandinavia too, but Denmark is the best place for me to be. Because of all the time I spend there, I have also learned the language - well, at least I don't have any problems understanding everything - and I have also become a fan of the Danish charts, which you can listen to on long drives in the car. I have written many titles on a USB stick, so that I can remember them here on journeys as well. Back to the Amiga: With our games (Solid Gold, Sqrxz, Trap Runner, Celtic Heart, etc.) I attach a lot of importance to the classic feeling, with trackloader from disk. I.e. the game starts already in the bootblock, loads a 2nd-stage bootloader, which then shows the team logo and loads the main part. The boot block has 512 bytes and still has some unused space. Then I remembered that some programmers in the past liked to put hidden messages in such areas, like the ROM song in the flash ROM on Phase5's CSPPC (and BPPC?) cards. I think it was something from Morissette at the time. So in each boot block of our games, I put a verse of various songs from the Danish charts that I just happened to have in my head. Among others, from the following artists: Celina Ree, Medina, Jokeren, Rasmus Seebach. All in Danish. Only Celtic Heart has a verse in English by Tuomas Holopainen (Nightwish) "The Life and Times of Scrooge", which of course was not in the charts. :)" (dr) [News message: 21. Dec. 2022, 16:21] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`20.Dec.2022` Thomas Wenzel (ANF)	Audio player: AmigaAMP 3.33 released Thomas Wenzel wrote: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! :) Bug fixes: Fixed repeat track/all functionality. Corrected error message for unsupported stream format. Fixed wrong memory deallocation when closing the about requester. Revised automatic runtime switching between AHI and MHI output. New features: Added pulldown menu items for repeat track/all and shuffle. Better handling of AHI modes with different limitations. AHI has some peculiarities in that the maximum volume depends on the mode used (stereo++ or not) and the number of mixing channels. Until now, you always had to be careful not to turn it up too loud, because otherwise it would suddenly get quieter again, and with a bit of bad luck you wouldn't hear anything at all. The aim is that you don't have to worry about this any more because AmigaAMP determines the necessary limits itself. Hopefully it works for everyone. :) (dr) [News message: 20. Dec. 2022, 21:43] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`20.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 20 - Robert Smith It's getting close to Christmas and we open the 20th door with an anecdote from Robert Smith. The developer is probably best known for his project, initially called "Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer": this uses a microcontroller - in this case an Arduino board - to read and write Amiga floppy disks with a connected, commercially available PC floppy disk drive. In mid-2021, he then renamed it "DrawBridge" (Disk Reader and Writer Bridge). Since the beginning of 2022, he has also made a plug-in available with the "FloppyBridge", whereby the emulators WinUAE and Amiberry can work with real floppy disks (video about how it works). Apart from that, he deals with a wide variety of topics and tries to explain facts and backgrounds to users through videos. For example: How Data is Encoded and Stored on Floppy Disks How Floppy Disk Copy Protection Worked How easy is it to make your own joystick using a 3D printer? Do-it-yourself: Adapter for connecting DB9 joysticks How to program Wordle in AMOS on the AMIGA or from yesterday Programming "Santa's Present Drop 2" in AMOS Thank you Robert for your informative videos and your various projects. Continued success and joy. His anecdote: "Whilst I was at college (high school) I started to develop my interest in computers, and having received an Amiga 500+ for Christmas. I quickly became interested in programming rather than just playing games. As if “computers” wasn’t enough of a reason to be picked on at school for being a geek or nerd, programming was like the ultimate, but I was not discouraged. A few years later I went to university, a difficult time, especially if you’re shy, as you’re surrounded by lots of new people. It was also during the time when most of us were slowly transitioning away from the Amiga after commodore went bankrupt and was (it felt like) constantly being sold to yet another company with empty promises. On the one hand I had all this great Amiga knowledge, but on a dead platform. It doesn’t take long to meet other like-minded people with similar skills, and you soon realise they’re just as useful on other machines as they were on the Amiga. We were all geeks and nerds though, and you could sometimes feel a bit of an outcast in some situations. One day I had a revelation whilst sharing a drink at the student union bar. Sitting there, listening to the table next to us, was a group of guys discussing the football match that had occurred the night before. The level of enthusiasm, passion, anger, competitiveness and raging going on regarding the players, the referee, and the various different teams they supported, along with the intimate knowledge they seemed to have about the skills of each individual player made me smile. I sat there thinking, we’re all geeks in our own way. Merry Christmas." (dr) [News message: 20. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022` WinUAE Homepage (ANF)	Emulator: WinUAE 4.10.0 Version 4.10.0 of the Amiga emulator WinUAE has been released. Changes: Major update 68000 based unexpanded (with optional Slow or Fast RAM expansion) configurations are now 100% cycle-accurate. Big thanks to ross for writing test programs that required perfect cycle accuracy. Lots of expected and unexpected hardware features found and implemented. Featute updates that got delayed but will be implemented in 5.0 OCS and ECS Denise mid screen resolution changes are not pixel perfect, correct chip model specific bit pattern is not emulated yet. AGA is pixel perfect. Not all blitter line draw width != 2 (invalid line draw configuration, normally not used) conditions are 100% accurate. Disk status/interrupt timing is not fully confirmed yet. New hardware emulation features and update 68000 emulation is finally fully cycle accurate, last missing part, interrupt level change detection timing, is now cycle accurate. Custom chipset interrupt timing is now cycle accurate. CIA emulation is now fully cycle accurate. Timers were accurate previously but now also interrupt timing, TOD counting, CPU/E-clock sync, and more, including undocumented side-effects are cycle accurate. Serial port internal timing, interrupt timing, including SERDATR status bits are now cycle accurate (I used serial port interrupts as a timer in my cputester real 68000 interrupt timing tests) Audio interrupt timing is now cycle accurate (Was almost fully accurate previously). Blitter timing is now cycle accurate (previously startup behavior and interrupt timing was not fully accurate). Blitter line mode with invalid settings (for example width not 2, octant and line direction mismatch etc) is now almost accurately emulated. Some conditions are not fully correct. Copper is now cycle accurate, previously some special cases were not handled correctly. More undocumented chipset features implemented. A1000 Denise bug emulated: sprites end horizontally 1 lores pixel later than bitplane horizontal window end. Currently enabled when A1000 Agnus is selected. OCS/ECS vs AGA EHB on/off mid screen change different behavior emulated. Emulated chipset mode display is blanked if programmed mode is active but has invalid configuration (for example too short or too long sync pulses or missing syncs, genlock sync enabled without genlock, etc). Optional display mode change resync black screen delay. Programmed custom chipset modes again use also blanking timing to position the display in addition to vsync and hsync (Most real world SVGA monitors do the same). Max allowed programmed mode non-interlaced vertical line count is now 800 (increased from 592), special 700+ line programmed modes are possible and compatible with real SVGA monitors. Refresh cycles conflicting with bitplane DMA is now accurately emulated, including all display and audio related glitches it can cause. Optional Chip RAM and Slow RAM power up pattern emulation, enabled by default. Color palette is now filled with pseudo-random contents at power up (was all black previously). Monitor type selection. Composite sync or H/V sync. ECS Agnus/AGA programmed display modes can generate different C-Sync and H/V sync signals. New other features and updates RTG (uaegfx) Picasso96 v3.0+ mixed mode screen draggging is enabled by default. RTG (uaegfx) blitter emulation now supports previously unsupported less common blitter operations. RTG (uaegfx and emulated boards) automatic integer scaling support. On the fly FloppyBridge drive change to normal or back now triggers automatic disk change condition. Harddrive panel Full drive/RDB mode is now normal checbox. Hopefully it is less confusing than button that didn’t look like a button. Larger default GUI size and slightly larger font if Windows desktop is large enough (at least 16001024). CD audio is now always mixed with Paula audio. Separate CD audio output support removed. Some American Laser Games didn’t have ROM descrambling support, also added missing ROM variants. Added American Laser Games Quickstart support. Added NVRAM path to Paths panel. Arcade/CD32/CDTV hardware NVRAM files default to this path. Keyboard reset change, reset state is kept until at least one key is released. CTRL+C in console log/debug window does not anymore close WinUAE. CTRL+C in newer Windows versions can be used as a Copy operation. Changed CTRL+F12 fullscreen/windowed switch: If already switched from full-window to window. Next CTRL+F12 will return back to full-window, not fullscreen. Optional interlace mode filter profile added. DirectDraw mode was replaced with GDI mode. GDI mode does not support exclusive fullscreen but supports basic scaling modes and uaegfx hardware cursor that DirectDraw mode did not support. Palette mode screenshot support. If enabled and screen has <= 256 colors, palette mode screenshot is created. It also attempts to preserve first 32 color entries if possible. RTC is automatically enabled if chipset extra= and system has fast ram, slow ram or chip ram expansion. Save MSM6242B RTC model control registers to RTC file if they are modified. Previously only RF5C01A (Used in big box Amigas) control registers (and NVRAM) was saved. If Quickstart ROM based Arcade hardware config (Arcadia or ALG) is selected, NVRAM file name is automatically set to ROM name. Genlock video file path is also set if ALG ROM is selected. Config files are not affected. ROM file list sorting changed, added grouping, sort by group priority first (KS ROMs, extended KS ROMs, freezer ROMs etc..), then alphabetically. Sometimes old graphics was temporarily visible in RTG modes if RTG had visible black borders (depends on scaling mode) and screen was switched and new screen had larger size/resolution. Added “Slow” flag to RAM panel. If set, selected memory bank has Chip RAM timing but is not Chip RAM capable. Advanced chipset panel “C00000 is Fast RAM” removed, it is not needed anymore. 4.9.x bugs fixed* Sprite to playfield and playfield to playfield collisions were unreliable. RTG (uaegfx) overlay was not drawn. 32-bit Windows only. Magic mouse mode without virtual mouse driver installed: mouse position was incorrect in RTG modes and it also ignored scaling modes. If hardware emulated RTG board VRAM was immediately (no gap in address space) after any RAM/ROM region and JIT direct was enabled: first 4096 bytes (host CPU page size) of VRAM was not fully JIT direct compatible and any direct read or write to first 4096 bytes would not access VRAM correctly, causing unexpected graphics glitches. Quickstart panel floppy bootblock check used current track of drive (not track 0). Broken when FloppyBridge support was added. Hires resolution and hires BPLCON1 bit set (or shres and shres BPLCON1 bit): single pixel horizontal offset may have appeared in right side of screen. AGA and non-subpixel mode only. CD32/CDTV Quickstart mode “remembered” previous DF0: setting and didn’t disable it by default (even if Quickstart panel showed it as disabled). CD32/CDTV Quickstart panel DF0: was not possible to select/enable. Z2 RAM configuration was unreliable. Older bugs fixed CHD CD image CD audio timing fix. Direct3D11 with custom shaders leaked memory. Directory filesystem softlinks fixed. 68060 without FPU or disabled FPU and executing FPU instruction that uses -(An) or (An)+ addressing mode: D7 was modified when exception stack frame was created. Reading from non-existing custom register always returned 0xFFFF instead of data that previous cycle’s possible DMA access transferred. Higher 68000/010 integer clock multipliers (4x+) in CE mode: chipset access timing was not accurate. Second 1M extended ROM bank is now internally split to two 512k banks. Non-aligned bank start and size caused problems in some configs. Hardware emulated RTG boards that have physically swapped red and blue output (Spectrum, Piccolo, Piccolo SD64) had wrong colors in 24/32-bit modes. Piccolo Z3 and Piccolo SD64 Z3 had wrong autoconfig board logical size (which crashed the driver). CD audio was not resumed if WinUAE was unminimized and minimize was configured to pause emulation. Debugging related updates and fixes Ultra extreme overscan mode. Shows complete full raster including blanking regions. Horizontal and vertical blanking disabled. COLOR0 changes are always visible. DMA debugger shows CIA accesses (including cycles lost due to E-Clock sync) and Chip RAM RAS/CAS addressing values. DMA debugger shows CPU memory access type (instruction fetch or data access). Interrupt level and interrupt level change detection are included. DMA debugger shows CPU opcodes in basic form (“NOP”, “MOVE” etc), vertically. Which can look a bit weird… Added CPU STOP state information to DMA debugger (\| = STOP idle cycle, + = STOP idle cycle and higher IPL detected = STOP ending soon) Visual DMA debugger shows conflicting cycles as blinking red pixels. Horizontal and vertical position are now included in debugger history output (H/HH) Added OR, AND and XOR operators to debugger calculator (\|, &, ^). sp command parsed attached sprites incorrectly. It was not possible to enter debugger anymore if CPU was stuck in stopped state after entering and exiting the debugger once. Tracing STOP instruction now works differently, each single step executes one internal STOP “round”. Memwatch break point that crossed 64k “bank” didn’t map last 64k “bank” if it was only partially needed. Self modifying code (smc) debugger feature now clears detected modifications if 68020+ instruction cache is flushed. DMA debugger (both console and visual) better support for variable/toggling horizontal and vertical line counts. (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 20:53] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022` PPA-Forum	Preview video: Pinball Dreams 2 in development Polish programmer 'Tukinem' - known among others for his platform game Ami-Tower or the farming simulation Farmiga - has started to port Pinball Dreams 2, released in 1994 only for the PC, to the Amiga in Blitz Basic 2. Target platform is an Amiga 1200 with 8MB Fast Ram (preview video). As he wrote, he chose this pinball version mainly because of the "cool music". The goal is to write universal code that can be used in other pinball games. For the physics of the game, however, he says he will need at least another month. (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 17:49] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022`	ACube Systems: Production of Sam460LE-Boards completed Press release: Hello dear customers and friends, December brought us some gifts that you will soon have on your desk: the first batch of Sam460LE. These boards have brilliantly passed all functional tests from the assembly line, and now we are manually testing every single unit as per our quality assurance standards. As we complete testing the boards, we will start shipping in chronological order starting from top to bottom of our orders queue. We are almost there, just a bit more patience and the first customers should start receiving the Sam460LE before the end of the year. We are confident that yours patience will be rewarded by a well-tested product that you will surely enjoy using. (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 15:55] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 19 - Oliver Roberts We start the Christmas week with the 19th door and Oliver Roberts. Without Oliver Roberts we would not have the best and fastest browser for AmigaOS 3 and no current AmiSSL. But in the 90s Oliver was still in Formula One fever (and maybe still is?): In 1994 he started programming and publishing a first beta version 0.2 of F1GP-Ed, an editor for the Amiga version of the games Formula One Grand Prix or World Circuit by MicroProse Software. The homepage is still online and the editor was developed up to version V3.44 in 1999 (History). 1999 was the start for the development of his Warp Datatypes with WarpJPEG: he is still developing the datatypes distributed as shareware. The image formats JFIF/JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Windows BMP, PCX, PSD (Adobe Photoshop®) and WebP are supported; further formats are planned. The main feature of the datatypes, especially on PowerPC systems, is their decoding speed (hence the name Warp) and the AltiVec acceleration. The very efficient memory usage in turn benefits 68K systems. The main project, however, is undoubtedly the browser IBrowse, which is available for both AmigaOS 3 and MorphOS, as well as AmigaOS 4, and can be tested in each case as a demo version. Just a few days ago Roberts and his team released the current version 2.5.8. The browser has a long history: Originally developed by Stefan Burström for Omnipresence Intl. from 1995 and distributed by HiSoft, from 2003 IOSPIRIT (until 2007) took over the distribution and the IBrowse developer team around Burström and Roberts took over the development. During this time, at the end of 2006, IBrowse 2.4 was released. In 2008, development was temporarily at a standstill due to Burström's retirement. Due to various reasons, the release of version 2.5 could only happen in 2019. From now on, not only were updates released regularly again, Roberts also took over the development of the encryption software AmiSSL, a port of OpenSSL for AmigaOS, from Jens Maus in 2020. This gives applications SSL/TLS/HTTPS support. For your perseverance and long-lasting support of Amiga systems, a heartfelt thank you, Oliver. Your story: It's never too late to upgrade If you're anything like me, I tend to upgrade electronics only when absolutely required, especially if your needs are being fulfilled by what you already have. This is somewhat true for my Amiga systems too, but it is great to know that there are still a variety of options out there, allowing us to upgrade and fix our Amigas. What follows is a summary of my Amiga upgrades over the past 15 years or so. My A1200, purchased in 1995, has gone through many upgrades over the years, but not really much since I made a custom tower case for it and added a BlizzardPPC 68060 603e/240MHz/SCSI card + BVisionPPC. This was quite some years ago considering I bought the BlizzardPPC as soon as stock was available! This all worked great and I had maxed out the upgrade options at the time. Then, in 2015, the A1200 motherboard went faulty - I had managed to deduce that an area of the 2Mb chip ram had gone bad. To cut a long story short, I managed to find brand new replacement chips and eventually my motherboard was repaired in 2019. Unfortunately, a few days later, the main SCSI hard drive died and would not power up. Luckily, I managed to find the exact same drive model on eBay, so ordered a reconditioned one on the off-chance that swapping the logic boards over would revive my drive - it did and all data was intact! (I did actually have an slightly out of date backup anyway). This is where my latest A1200 upgrade journey began. Not knowing why the logic board on the hard drive had died, as a precaution I replaced the tower's aging AT PSU with a new ATX one (same model as I put in my AmigaOne XE - more on that later). This involved buying various power adapters, including Ian Steadman's excellent ATX to Amiga power adapter board. Next up, I didn't want to rely on the hard drive anymore and new SCSI hard drives were by then impossible to buy, so I switched to using a SCSI2SD v6 along with a 64Gb SD card. At the same time I retired my IDE HDD, replacing it with an IDE to CompactFlash adapter. This has hopefully future proofed my A1200 for quite a few more years. Why bother maintaining a 25 year old system? It holds a lot of history for me, where I created most of my Amiga software, including WarpJPEG, later leading to all the Warp Datatypes, plus IBrowse 2.4 development. It also happens to be the very first A1200 in the world to successfully boot AmigaOS 4.0, after I managed to fix the 603e specific TLB exception handlers in the kernel for Hyperion. I still find my A1200 invaluable for testing and development, despite not being my main development system any longer... Since 2005, my main development machine has been an early AmigaOne XE G4. Again, until recently I have not needed to upgrade this much, except when I first obtained it in 2005. I kitted the case out with two 120mm cooling fans running at low speed via a bay based controller, replaced the stock wobbly CPU cooler with something much better (Zalman VF900), added two temperature sensors, bought a larger new IDE HDD and replaced the stock 256Mb dram with 1Gb. Later, in 2013, I swapped the PSU out with a brand new one, which fixed instability and freezes that had started happening. It has been running perfectly fine since then and I had not considered upgrading anything, especially not a new Amiga motherboard since I would miss the G4's Altivec. However, only a few weeks ago, something strange happened - I chose to upgrade it when I didn't really need to! It all started when I needed to access a faulty laptop HDD - I didn't have a spare SATA connection in anything and the drive would not respond when used with SATA to USB adapters. I decided to buy a cheap SATA card for an old PC that I had in storage. This is pretty old and took PCI cards - yes, the same cards that the A1XE takes. The plan was to buy a A1XE compatible SATA card, which would also work in the PC and I managed to find a sii3114 card on Amazon for under 4 Euro. My IDE HDD was still running fine with no apparent issues or SMART errors, but it is over 15 years old and I'm sure it sounds louder than it used to. To preempt a potential failure, I bought a Kingston SSD for the sii3114 card and transferred everything from my HDD across. I was surprised at how cheap the lower capacity SSDs are these days - it was much cheaper than buying a SATA HDD, especially as I do not really need much space. As an added bonus, the SSD uses only 3W of power, 10W or so less than my old HDD. Finally, having noticed the CPU reaching higher temperatures than usual this year, my next task was to remove the G4 cooler to renew the thermal paste that I had last applied over 15 years ago - a delicate and somewhat dangerous task, akin to open heart surgery. The operation went smoothly and now the G4 runs even cooler than I remember at 28 degrees idle / 31 degrees full load - hoping this will help extend the life of my A1XE further still. In case you're wondering what happened with the laptop HDD, Linux diagnostic tools confirmed it as non-recoverable and dead, but as it was 2 weeks before the expiration of the 5 year warranty, I quickly sent it back to Seagate for a free replacement. After these efforts to keep my Amigas up and running, this allows me to continue with Amiga software development and I'm hoping to not need to open them up at all for many years to come! My first Amiga was actually an A600, which desperately needs attention too - a few years ago, I bought a CF card adapter to replace its dead HDD, but have yet to get around to installing it. There is still much we can do to fix and improve our aging hardware and maybe this article will help provide some inspiration. There are a variety of solutions available, allowing us to use the latest hardware and it is not necessarily expensive either - we can utilize cheap PC components from many retailers online and we fortunately have a few Amiga hardware retailers left too. Who would have thought that when we bought our floppy based Amigas many years ago, before HDDs were affordable or widespread, that it would be possible to use today's latest flash-based memory technology instead. It's never too late to upgrade... (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 09:28] [Comments: 1 - 20. Dec. 2022, 08:22] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022`	Video tutorial: Programming "Santa's Present Drop 2" in AMOS Last year, Robert Smith showed how he ported a game from HTML 5 to AMOS in a four-part video series. The result was "Santa's Present Drop". In his latest video, he shows how he programmed the second part of the game in AMOS. (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 06:35] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022` Andreas Falkenhahn (ANF)	Hollywood: ZIP plugin 1.2 released Version 1.2 of the ZIP plugin for Hollywood is now available for download. This is a minor update which mostly contains bugfixes and optimizations. The plugin is now available for free download from the official Hollywood portal. Thanks to Hollywood's cross-platform plugin system versions for AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, MorphOS, WarpOS, AROS (x86), Linux (arm, ppc, x86, x64), macOS (ppc, x86, x64), Windows (x86, x64), Android and iOS are provided. (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 06:21] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	Aminet uploads until 17.12.2022 The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to Aminet: AmiGemini.lha comm/net 152K 68k Gemini + Spartan + Gopher bro... CloudDav_1.9.lha comm/net 990K MOS A WebDav client rasm.lha dev/cross 890K MOS Roudoudou's Z80 Assembler PatchWork.lha dev/debug 48K 68k Validate library calls with A... libsamplerate.lha dev/lib 3.9M OS4 Library for sample rate conve... c2plib.lha dev/misc 185K 68k chunky2planar as an Amiga sha... Sensei.lha driver/oth 37K 68k Displays I2C Sensor informati... nblood.lha game/shoot 1.0M 68k Blood Amiga Port ham_convert.zip gfx/conv 4.2M HAM graphic converter WhatIFF1.08.lha mags/misc 421K What IFF? #1.08-December-2022 AmiArcadia.lha misc/emu 4.6M 68k Signetics-based machines emul... AmiArcadia-OS4.lha misc/emu 5.1M OS4 Signetics-based machines emul... mednafen.lha misc/emu 12M OS4 Mednafen Avalanche_FR.lha util/arc 7K French catalog for Avalanche 1.8 AvalancheDE.lha util/arc 1K German catalog for Avalanche 1.8 AmiSSL-5.6-OS3.lha util/libs 3.3M 68k OpenSSL as an Amiga shared li... AmiSSL-5.6-OS4.lha util/libs 3.1M OS4 OpenSSL as an Amiga shared li... AmiSSL-5.6-SDK.lha util/libs 2.3M AOS OpenSSL as an Amiga shared li... DisLib.lha util/libs 19K 68k A library based MC68K disasse... AmiKick.lha util/misc 45K Check Kickstart images under ... Anno.lha util/time 291K 68k Reminder and calendar utility newmeter.lha util/wb 28K 68k Shows free RAM and storage as... (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	OS4Depot uploads until 17.12.2022 The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to OS4Depot: nes_8to1v2.lha aud/con 10kb 4.0 Converts 8-bit samples to NES�... amissl-sdk.lha dev/mis 2Mb 4.0 SDK for AmiSSL amiarcadia.lha emu/gam 5Mb 4.0 Signetics-based machines emulator mednafen.lha emu/gam 12Mb 4.1 Mednafen Emulator igame_fr.lha gam/uti 7kb 4.0 French catalog for iGame v2.2.0 amissl.lha lib/mis 3Mb 4.0 OpenSSL as an Amiga shared library sshterm.lha net/mis 172kb 4.1 SSH client with builtin terminal... (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	AROS Archives uploads until 17.12.2022 The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to AROS Archives: whatiff1.08.lha doc/mis 421kb Magazine on AmigaGuide Format (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	MorphOS-Storage uploads until 17.12.2022 The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage: RASM_1.8.lha Development/Cross Roudoudou's Z80 Assembler TuxRacer_0.61.lha Games/Race TuxRacer_0.61.lha SoulFu_1.5.2.lha Games/Role SoulFu port for MorphOS BeastieWorker_0.4.lha Games/Think 3D Sokoban AmiSSL_5.6-68k.lha Network/SSL OpenSSL as an Amiga sha... CloudDav_1.9.lha Network/Streaming A WebDav client TinyGL-Update-2022-12-... System/Update This is the sixth publi... (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	WHDLoad: New installers until 17.12.2022 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 17.12.2022: 2022-12-17 updated: Back To The Future 2 (Imageworks/Images) patch rewritten, keyboard routine rewritten, game does not freeze anymore, trainer options added, highscore load/save added, DMA wait in replayer fixed, source code included (Info) 2022-12-16 fixed: Escape from Colditz (Digital Magic Software) random crashes fixed, debugkey handling removed from keyboard interrupt (Info) 2022-12-16 new: Wrong Way Driver (pink^abyss) done by JOTD (Info) 2022-12-16 improved: Fighter Bomber (Activision) uses fast memory, new install script, added manual, hints, cheats (Info) 2022-12-16 improved: Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters (Tengen/Teque) fire button 2 can be used for bombs, manual included (Info) 2022-12-14 improved: Edd the Duck 2 (Zeppelin Games) support for SPS 1726 added, 68000 quitkey support (Info, Image) 2022-12-14 improved: Solid Gold (Night Owl Design) ButtonWait support for level info screens added (Info, Image) 2022-12-13 improved: Akira (ICE) supports another OCS version (Info) 2022-12-13 improved: Venus the Flytrap (Gremlin) crash on 68000 machines fixed (happened if CUSTOM2 was not used), support for fire button 2 added (Info) 2022-12-13 fixed: Assassin (Team 17) graphics problem in title screen fixed (caused by wrong Bplcon0 color bit fix) (Info) 2022-12-13 fixed: The Power (Demonware) new approach for random generator fixes, no more access faults (Info) 2022-12-13 updated: Edd the Duck (BBC) patch rewritten, replayer bugs fixed, keyboard bugs fixed, trainer options added, highscore load/save added, source code included (Info, Image) 2022-12-11 improved: Hellrun Machine (Amiga Fun) keyboard interrupt rewritten to work on 68000 machines, 68000 quitkey support (Info) 2022-12-11 updated: The Power (Demonware) patch rewritten, trainer options added, 68000 quitkey support, CPU dependent delays fixed, source code included, OS stuff patched (Info) (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022` Andreas Magerl (ANF)	Print magazine: Amiga Future, issue 160 - 25 years - preview and excerpts Preview and excerpts of Amiga Future issue 160 (January/February 2023) have been published online meanwhile at the title link. Content includes a preview of Reshooot Proxima 3, a review of Apollo Manticore and an event report from Amiga37. Amiga Future magazine is available as an English and a German printed magazine and can be bought directly from the magazine's editorial office as well as several Amiga dealers. (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022` Amiga Future (website)	German Amiga Podcast: Issue 10 The tenth edition of the "German Amiga Podcast" (GAP) reports from the Amiga Meeting in Neumünster and looks ahead to the Amiga Ruhrpott Convention 2023. (snx) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 18 - Marcus Sackrow For the fourth Advent, Marcus 'ALB42' Sackrow is our storyteller. Marcus is a Free Pascal programmer and has managed a lot of projects over the years, which he regularly informs about in his blog. In 2014, he started porting Free Pascal first to AROS and later also to AmigaOS 3.1. Most recently, he released Free Pascal 3.2.2 for all Amiga systems in May 2021. Likewise, in 2015 he started working on his text editor EdiSyn with syntax highlighting for AROS (latest version 0.54. In mid-2016, he began working on his OpenStreetMap viewer Mapparium, which he further developed to version 0.8 and also made available again for all Amiga systems. His extensive creative output also includes his free Pascal programme Leu for loading and limited editing of Excel (xlsx), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ods), TurboCalc (tcd) and ASCII (csv) files. The list could go on, but of course his current project AmiTube must be mentioned: a YouTube client for all Amiga systems that makes it possible to watch YouTube videos on an Amiga. To do this, they are converted into Commodore's CDXL format and downloaded. To shorten the time until Christmas a little, he has kindly put another game behind his 18th door: his "Amigale" is a conversion of the well-known "Mastermind" (or logic trainer) with words for Amigas from Kickstart 1.3, which is currently popping up everywhere as "Wordle". The task is to guess a word, whereby the programme tells you whether a letter is included or even in the right place. "Amigale" (download at the end of the story) contains both a German and an English dictionary: (I should definitely have some more lessons in English...: what is "Spahi"??) Thank you very much, Marcus, and keep up the good work on your projects! And with his anecdote, we wish him and all our readers a happy fourth Advent: Amiga, Chemistry and Internet In 1997 I started studying chemistry at the University of Siegen. My professor in the General Chemistry lecture (Prof. Meixner) was quite new at this university and had a lot of interest in computers and the internet. He had a nice new idea for a new website and a student for it. But since he was new at the university, he only knew us first-year students and someone from my fellow students probably gave him my name when asked. So I introduced myself for the job. The general chemistry lecture I had with him is a very basic lecture on chemistry, a bit of repetition from chemistry classes (so that everyone is on the same level) but also new things quickly so that it doesn't get too boring. One feature in contrast to later lectures was that it contained a lot of chemical experiments as a presentation on the professor's desk. And there were really many, sometimes 5-6 per lecture hour. Especially popular, of course, were all the experiments that had something to do with fire or explosions. (The phophore explosion left a deep memory, after the whole lecture hall had a whistling in their ears for 20 minutes, not healthy). Professor Meixner's idea was to give the students a better way to prepare or review the lecture, which works best via the experiments. Of course, films work much better than simple pictures and text, so the idea was to record the experiments and put them on the internet with an explanation. I was to be responsible for the technical implementation, i.e. creating the films, converting them and creating the HTML pages. To show that I can do this well, I should first create the website for his research group. At that time I only had my Amiga 1200, at that time still with modem as connection to the university's network. So I created and tested the whole page on my Amiga and then uploaded it via FTP to the university's server. The HTML texts themselves were all created with a plain text editor (GoldED), I tried some of the HTML editors but wasn't that satisfied. Especially since I tested the pages against the online HTML validator (HTML 3.2 was still quite new back then). Professor Meixner had such a key phrase for his research, "Espionage in the world of molecules", for which I had designed a logo: a water molecule with a magnifying glass in front of it. And since I had just read some 3D course in an Amiga magazine, I implemented the logo as a 3D animation (Lightwave for the 3D, ADPro for converting/shrinking images, MainActor for the GIF animation). I was satisfied and the professor was thrilled. Later versions of the page are still available on archive.org (a little warning: 90s wepage-overload ;)) For the actual project, money was now requested, a computer with frame grabber card and a very cheap (PAL) camera were bought - cheap USB cameras did not exist yet, hence this combination. The camera was chosen because some of the experiments were very dangerous and we had to expect that the camera would be destroyed or at least damaged. However, this did not happen, as we were always quite careful and protected the camera extra, partly with its own, additionally protective housing. There were three people involved in total, a technical assistant who prepared and carried out the experiments (she had a lot of experience there as she also did this for the lecture). An advanced student (I think he was about to graduate) for the technical support and texts on the website and me as the person responsible for the technology and the actual website "programming". The basic idea was to record the experiments, then put pictures of them and descriptions on the web, and if possible even the videos themselves. But we quickly ran into the problem that almost all students only had access to the internet via modem (like me with my 33,600 modem). This meant that the films could not be too big. On the other hand, there were hardly any video formats that could be played universally. So we decided on MPEG, because you can almost always find a player there (even on the Amiga) and, as a stopgap, GIF-Anim. Professor Meixner set the file size limit at 500 Kb. The Amiga was again used to create the web pages and especially the GIF animations (including the background image, which was also created on the Amiga with PPaint). The recording and processing of the experiments took several months, and later the descriptions of the experiments were translated into Spanish and French and supplemented with small quiz questions. A funny anecdote at the end: when the site went online, the university was very worried because it described how to make explosives (black powder is one of the experiments, but also phosphorus or termite; they are pretty violent experiments). So they didn't want to see these experiments on the free internet, we had to install an IP filter so that only students of the University of Siegen could see these experiments. A few years later, nobody was interested any more. The website still exists today, on archive.org, but also as a copy on my own site. Download: Amigale1c.zip (88 Kb) (dr) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 1 - 18. Dec. 2022, 18:43] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`17.Dec.2022` Twitter	Web browser: IBrowse 2.5.8 for Amiga OS 3/4 and MorphOS Press release: Happy Christmas to all our loyal IBrowse users and thank you for the continued support. In 2023, we hope to share some exciting plans for the future of IBrowse. In the meantime, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of IBrowse 2.5.8, which may be here downloaded (OS4 users may use AmiUpdate instead). This is the eighth free update for registered owners of IBrowse 2.5. IBrowse 2.1-2.4 and 1.x owners may upgrade to IBrowse 2.5.8 via our store at discounted rates. Please note: IBrowse 2.5.8 requires AmiSSL 5.5 as minimum, with AmiSSL 5.6 being the latest version at the time of writing, so you are advised to download it before updating IBrowse, otherwise you will be left without HTTPS access. Due to the bugs that unfortunately crept into the initial 2.5.7 release (although these were quickly resolved with hotfixes) we decided to make a full new stable release. This release contains the previous hotfixes, plus a few more fixes and improvements: Unescape the URL before showing it in the popup bubble when the mouse is over links Fixed crash that occurs if the info window failed to allocate memory when updating the URL Fixed crash that can happen when specifying a non-existent filename on the command line when starting from the shell OS4: Reversed the protocol and codec modules file lock change in 25.108, unless at least elf.library 53.35 is detected, due to a relocation issue in older versions Fixed Gemini support which stopped working in 25.108 Include updated Greek catalogs from Aminet (dr) [News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 16:08] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`17.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 17 - Thomas Claus Behind the 17th Advent calendar door awaits the anecdote of Thomas 'imagodespira' Claus, who as a graphic designer forms the duo of EntwicklerX together with the programmer Frank Menzel. When one thinks of EntwicklerX, two things come to mind: the commercial media player Emotion and elaborately written games for AmigaOS 4. And there is something for everyone. A small list: Tower Defense game Swamp Defense (2011) Arcade puzzle game Balance Blox (2012) Match-3-Diamant game Tap Jewels (2012) Space Shoot'em-up M.A.C.E. (2013) Bubble Shooter DX (2015) Jump'n Run Spencer (2018) Asteroid shooter Super Star Blast (2019, Preview) M.A.C.E. Tower Defense (2022) They started the development of their media player Emotion in 2016 and released a first alpha version soon after. The official version then was released at the beginning of 2017. An update to version 1.9 is available on the developer page. As Thomas told us, more games and remastered versions are planned - but since they are not pure Amiga developers, of course always depending on other projects. We wish good luck and look forward to today's anecdote: "My first computer was an Atari 130XE. At the time of the German reunification, there was a "welcome money" for GDR citizens and my brother and I begged "our" money from our parents to be allowed to buy a computer in the Intershop. Of course, we had no idea about computers, we just wanted one. When we were standing in the Intershop, there was only one option for the 200 DM (100,- per child). An Atari 130XE for 192,- (the value is burnt into my memory, I hope it's right ;)). So we bought this one. Of course, there were also C64 computers and Amigas in the corner, but financially unattainable. Once home, the device was connected to the Raduga TV (Russian brand, very explosive). A blue screen came up with the text "Ready". That was it. By trial and error we got into a screen where notes could be seen. Our English skills were close to zero, so we couldn't even translate "Self Test" (I was 13 and we were learning Russian at school). However, Self Test brought us a tune and made us want to hear more. After that, there was some digging in the manual and we found out that we couldn't go on without external media. We needed a "datasette". We begged and pleaded with parents again and were able to dust off my little sister's money for our Atari and thus buy a Datasette XC12 and a game (Kikstart). That was the entry into my computer world. In the course of time we found out that our neighbour had an Atari 800XL and so we got some software. My favourite game at the time was Montezuma's Revenge. Actually, it's still my favourite game. In the meantime I have an Atari 130XE again, Datasette and every now and then I give myself a round of Montezuma... Back to my youth. As a happy Atari fan, I dreamed of the Atari ST, MegaST and other Atari devices that were also in our computer shops at some point. Amiga didn't interest me at all. But one day my cousin who lived one street over called. "Come over, I want to show you something". No sooner said than done. Now I was standing in his room. There was an old TV on the floor, an Amiga 500 in front of it and Rick Dangerous was playing. I've never seen such graphic splendour, it looked like the real thing. The sound was amazing, especially the dying in the game. You heard that a lot... Yeah, what can I say. It was a quick conversion. After that afternoon, I didn't even know how to spell Atari anymore. I wanted an AMIGA! Some time later I was able to sell the Atari, my brother was in training and gave money for an Amiga 500 and I shovelled out my aunt's coal cellar to be able to buy a memory expansion... From here on there was no turning back. To get a reference to today: as some may know, I develop small games with Frank Menzel at the EntwicklerX. Also for AmigaOS 4. I already dreamt of this with the first Atari. Here I drew simple pixel pictures in Basic with the commands "Plot" and "DrawTo" (I didn't have a drawing programme). Later I pixelated in Deluxe Paint, mostly small game scenes for platformers. So running levels and obstacles. Montezuma's Revenge but also Rick Dangerous never really let me go and so we were able to finish our "Pyramid Quest" in early 2021 and release it on Windows, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox. My 14-year-old Atari self had already dreamed of this, but would never have thought it possible to pull something like this off. We're not well-known developers, don't have a hit, but get by and still dream of new projects that are viable for 2 people. Often our games are interpretations of old games and game principles that we used to love on the Amiga and still love and enjoy playing. You can find our projects on various platforms, for example itch.io. You will certainly recognise one or two of the game principles, even if the realisations are often somewhat different and the templates usually remain unattainable...". (dr) [News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 09:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`17.Dec.2022`	Puzzle game: AmiBlock After the Amiga conversion of the game "Wood Block Puzzle" by the Polish developer 'Tukinem' (amiga-news.de reported), 'Szafir' has now released his variant under the name "AmiBlock". It is also written in Blitz Basic 2 and requires an Amiga 500. (dr) [News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 06:22] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`17.Dec.2022` Passione Amiga (ANF)	Italian Print/PDF magazine: Passione Amiga, issue 11 Press release: With great joy and a bit of excitement we are pleased to announce that the new issue of Passione Amiga, where we celebrate two years of publishing, is now available for purchase! The entire editorial team has worked hard to get this issue out slightly ahead of the official date, so that Amazon can deliver it under the tree to anyone who wants to read it or give it as a Christmas present. Content: Video games: Devil's Temple: Son of Kung Fu Master, Aquabyss, Black Dawn: Technomage, Wonderboy, Wrong Way Back, Chaos Arena, Wood Block Puzzle, Luma Reviews: Amiga Duel, Amiga Forever 10 Special Amiga Blitz Basic Game Jam 2022 Special Amiga games in physical version Blender course, part 3 AmigaOS 3.2 R4 NDK And also: Games news, Tech news, THEA500 Mini news, Tricks and Solutions, Demo scene, New Talents, Mailbox The magazine is available as digital (3 Euro) or printed version (7,50 Euro, via Amazon). Its current issue consists of 48 A4 color pages. (dr) [News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 06:19] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`17.Dec.2022`	Text adventure: The Daring Rescue of Pacuvia the Sheep Domenico 'Diduz' Misciagna has released his very first game, The Daring Rescue of Pacuvia the Sheep, a text adventure written in Amos Professional 2.0 that can be played in English and Italian. As an employee of a mysterious "agency", you find yourself on a dangerous mission: the biotechnically bred sheep Pacuvia must be freed from the clutches of a man who has no idea what he has stolen. For security reasons, all digital tools have been taken away from you and you are limited to purely analogue equipment. And Pacuvia doesn't seem to be quite so helpless either... The game is available for C64, Amiga, MS-DOS and Tandy M100. The Amiga version requires 512Kb RAM and Kickstart 1.3. As Misciagna writes, he suddenly realised during the 2020 Corona Lockdown that he had never written a video game before. He has been following and commenting on audio-visual art all his life. His bachelor thesis in 2020 was an academic study on video games. In the same year, he launched his website Lucasdelirium, dedicated to LucasArts adventure games. Moreover, since he had been playing computer games since childhood, it was time to write one himself. And the result is this text adventure. (dr) [News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 06:08] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`16.Dec.2022`	Blog: Review of RadeonHD V5 driver with a X1000 While 'Epsilon' had taken a look back at 40 years of English-language Amiga magazine history in his blog "Epsilon's World" two days ago, he now devotes himself to his AmigaOne X1000 and AmigaOS 4: Thus he acquired the latest Enhancer Software 2.2, the new RadeonHD V5 driver and finally the latest version of DvPlayer in order to test all this on his AmigaOne X1000 under his previous graphics card Southern Island's R7 250X, as well as a newly acquired Radeon HD R9 ASUS 270X PCI-E. (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 20:03] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`16.Dec.2022`	MorphOS: Sixth beta version of TinyGL MorphOS team developer Mark 'Bigfoot' Olsen had offered a bounty project for improved OpenGL support as well as drivers for more Radeon graphics cards under the title link, which has been successfully funded (amiga-news.de reported). Now the developer has released the sixth public beta version of his TinyGL update. He wrote: "The main change in this update is the completion of project 1: Implement the fixed-function OpenGL pipeline as shaders. This change fixes a variety of rendering problems in various apps and games on hardware that currently supports shaders, meaning R300 and newer. Unfortunately there are a couple of known regressions in this update as well, but at this point they've reached a number and severity that is low enough that I didn't want to hold off this update any longer before getting it out to you all. The known problems all affect R300 and newer hardware and are: Virtual Grand Prix 2 runs noticeably slower than before, and the rear view mirrors no longer render correctly. FooBillard has rendering glitches it didn't have before. However this update also does fix some rendering issues that were previously broken, so this one is a mixed bag. Descent Freespace is completely broken. Reportedly there's an issue with the plasma blanker, but I'm not entirely sure of the details at this point. I will probably release one more TinyGL update this year that hopefully addresses all of the above, plus any other regressions that might be reported by you." (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 18:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`16.Dec.2022`	Kickstarter camaign: Checkmate 19" IPS Retro Monitor successfully financed Just three days ago, it did not look as if the Kickstarter campaign to finance the Checkmate 19" IPS Retro Monitor could be successfully completed with 138.938 of the required 239.785 Euro paid at that time. Now, about two days before the end of the campaign, 248.781 euros have been received, and the goal has thus been exceeded. (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 09:30] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`16.Dec.2022`	Boing Attitude: Interview with John Girvin (NIVRIG GAMES) Boing Attitude, publisher of the quiz game Ask Me Up XXL and the file manager Dir Me Up, among others, published the fourth issue of the French print magazine "BOING" at the beginning of July. Among other things, it contained an interview with John Girvin, the developer of games like Turbo Santa (Deluxe) or Turbo Tomato, which is now available under the title link. (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 09:01] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`16.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 16 - Günter Bartsch The 16th Advent calendar door is opened and we look forward to an anecdote Günter Bartsch. At the end of August 2021, the developer had not only published the source code of his Amiga QuickBasic (AQB) compiler on GitHub, but also a first early version 0.7.0 and aroused great interest in the comments to our corresponding news item. With AQB, the author wants to provide a "modern, clean, OS-compliant and future-proof BASIC. An important feature of AQB are the modules: AQB has only relatively few built-in commands, but a - also syntactically - quite powerful module concept. The modules can be implemented fully transparently in BASIC (AQB) or also in C (GCC) or even mixed; AQB is fully link-compatible with GCC. As the developer further explains, it should be possible to give AQB different "personalities" - currently only _aqb is implemented, which is intended as a default dialect and is oriented towards AmigaBASIC, QuickBASIC and FreeBASIC. But it should also be possible to give AQB a GFA, Blitz or Amos personality, for example. In general, the focus of AQB (at the moment) would be on system-compliant application development. With version 0.8.0 he then introduced a source level debugger and since the last, current version 0.8.2 there are now instructions and functions for sound output, new tutorials and also a simple music demo programs. Even though almost a year has passed since the last version, Günter continues to work on his project. As he tells us, there have already been quite a lot of further developments, which he "only" needs to finally bring into a release-ready state. We keep our fingers crossed for this and for the further development of his project and look forward to many more exciting discussions about it here. His anecdote or, in this case, short story :) "The year is 1988. At the beginning of the year an event occurred that would change my life forever: I had gotten an Amiga 500 for my birthday. Ever since I had watched an episode of "ARD Computerzeit" on public TV in which the Amiga was introduced I knew: I want that computer and no other. At that time (I was 12) my funds were very limited - but at some point my parents had had enough of my whining so they fulfilled my wish. Driven by a lot of euphoria and even more childish naivety and curiosity I had spent every free minute of the year (and also many minutes in which I was supposed to do other things) with this dream computer (I still couldn't really wrap my head around the fact that now one of these actually was sitting in my bedroom). A lot of people would probably imagine that I mainly wanted to play games on the Amiga - but that wasn't the case. In fact I didn't have any games for it and being a true geek with no friends the temptation to drift into the gaming world through private backup copies was rather small. Instead, I did with the new computer what I had done - again in the absence of other software - with my Commodore Plus/4 which I owned before the Amiga: I wrote programs in BASIC. On the Amiga that meant coding in AmigaBASIC which was supplied on the Extras disk. Despite all the euphoria, I soon had doubts as to whether this really was the greatest tool for the job. The execution speed of the Programs might have been OK compared to my Plus/4, but the editor was extremely sluggish. Of course those were thoughts that I first had never dared to say - after all, the Amiga was the best and fastest computer in the entire universe and AmigaBASIC was the official BASIC, which came directly from Commodore, the company where (in my mind) those gods worked who had created this dream computer - how could there be anything better? Luckily I got my hands on a copy of the german magazine "Amiga Magazin". Even though I certainly didn't understand all the articles in it, from studying it I did learn that there were other programming environments for the Amiga that could possibly represent an improvement over the AmigaBASIC. And so it came about that, together with my mother, I trudged through the Christmas-decorated downtown Stuttgart heading for department stores and computer shops looking for a Christmas present. So I described to various salespersons my troubles with AmigaBASIC and boldly asked them about compilers and assemblers. Usually the last two terms confused the staff, but at least two of them knew about the problems with AmigaBASIC so each offered their respective in-house recommended solution for that. Luckily I had enough doubts right there on the spot about the "True Basic" which was offered to me in the local "Karstadt" department store that I encouraged my mother to let us try again somewhere else. At smaller computer shop called "Schreiber Computer" I was then offered a product called "GFA BASIC" and the saleswoman actually succeeded in convincing both my mother as the sponsor and me as the user. Compared to AmigaBASIC, GFA BASIC turned out to be a downright revelation - speed, instruction set, documentation - all a difference like night and day, I was amazed! If there were any last doubts in my mind whether this investment was the right one (the label "Interpreter" on the box bothered me a bit, as I much rather wanted to have a true compiler), these were finally scattered on the day when I got my hands on a copy of the "Sonderheft 3: Basic und Spiele" issue of "Amiga Magazin". It contained an article comparing various BASIC implementations for the Amiga in which GFA BASIC did very well. The first weeks with GFA BASIC were very productive indeed - all those small sample programs from the manual worked fine, a small vocabulary training program was implemented just as quickly as various small graphics and sound experiments. Accordingly, I felt well prepared and even more motivated, to tackle bigger projects now. Among other things, I had a painting program in mind, a kind of DeluxePaint clone in BASIC (now that I have this great programming environment, I don't need to buy any more software, I can write everything myself - so I thought). The beginnings of these projects were always done easily, first successes came - opening screens and windows, drawing pixels using the mouse, no problem. However, as the programs grew in size, so did the number of bugs - not surprising, I knew that even back then. However, those errors turned out to be increasingly difficult to find: Program functions that just worked perfectly suddenly refused to work at all, although the code in question was the same. Yes, even the interpreter's built-in commands occasionally stopped working they way I expected them to. I debugged deeper and deeper, wrote small test programs - most of which worked fine - but as soon as I put the code back into my big program, it suddenly behaved completely differently or crashed completely. Of course, that didn't deter me one bit - obviously there was just a lot to learn for myself, obviously I just kept doing something wrong and that's why my programs didn't work. I quickly realized that the commands apparently interacted with each other in complex ways - with this insight I was then able to solve many of my problems. "Ah, I have to first set the foreground and then the background color, then it works" - that was the kind of discovery, which I diligently noted in the manual. Over time, my hypotheses, with which I tried to explain to myself the behavior of the interpreter in particular and of the Amiga in general, grew more and more complex. Apparently there was an enormous wealth of secret knowledge there to discover about how these miracle machines actually worked. Of course, such secret knowledge wasn't to be found in the manual, but could only be acquired laboriously through many experiments and collected from many sources. I wasn't discouraged - quite the opposite, I was fascinated by the thought that there was apparently a mystical world to explore there and motivated by the idea of me maybe someday too would belong to that secret circle of people who possess this knowledge. So, undeterred, I kept experimenting and consulted more and more literature. "GFA BASIC 3.0 - Training for advanced users" was one of the books from which I hoped for enlightenment. The book - published by GFA Systemtechnik GmbH themselves, at least - actually opened up new horizons for me. Some of the techniques in there I had never seen before, some of the commands never heard of - that most of the example programs on the floppy that came with the book didn't work for me unless I modified them astonished not me in the slightest. For one, the programs I had previously typed in from books and magazines hadn't usually worked right away either and on the other hand I was able to put all that secret knowledge I had accumulated up to that point to good use to get the programs running - which actually was successful for most of them. Despite all these partial successes and insights - a real breakthrough never seemed to happen for me. My larger programs tended to stay quite brittle and so very slowly a feeling of frustration set in. During my literature research I came across the book "AMIGA Programming with MODULA-2" from Markt und Technik publishing company. There was even a matching compiler available - though only a very limited demo version - on a fish disk. That then was once again another revelation: a true compiler, I can write real programs like the professionals - and they even worked! Everything so clear and structured everything does what it should, just as it says? Should something like this be possible should there exist a world without any mystical secret knowledge? At that point, GFA BASIC was quickly forgotten in my life - I was fascinated by Wirth's languages, so I spent the following years happily coding in Modula-2, Pascal and Oberon, but that's another story. It was then more by chance that at some point during this period I found out what was behind my experiences with GFA BASIC: in some magazine article GFA BASIC 3.5 was reviewed and the author casually mentioned that while the first versions of GFA BASIC for the Amiga were quite buggy, the situation seemed to improve with each update. GFA BASIC had errors?! This product I purchased for money that was packaged so neatly and made by absolute professionals could have been not perfect? Those many surprising properties that I had so painstakingly explored could it possibly be that they were not intended at all? I can hardly put into words what I felt when the full dimension of these insights slowly dawned on me: I simply had never considered that a bug could not be my mistake! What's more, probably the only mistake I had made was that I had never sent back this software registration card that came with the box - so I was never informed about available updates. Well, today I like to think back to those days with a smile - those were very important lessons I learned back then, many of them still guide me to this day. Without the Amiga, without these programming environments - I would have never gotten to where I am today, I am very grateful for that." (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`16.Dec.2022`	Emulator: QEMU 7.2.0 released QEMU is an open source computer emulator and virtualizer. QEMU is able to emulate a complete computer in software without the need of hardware virtualization. So it is possible to emulate Amiga operating systems like AROS, AmigaOS or MorphOS on QEMU. This support is provided by QEMU developer Zoltan Balaton, who gives lots of tips and info on a dedicated webseite (see also our Excursion of Amiga operating systems on non-native hardware). According to Zoltan Balaton, the now released version 7.2.0 (PowerPC related commits) contains some changes that mainly affect newer Power CPUs, but also those that affect the entire PPC emulation: for example, the command decoding has been changed to decodetree. This is a generic method of describing commands, using general code for decoding instead of the custom code used before. As the developer kindly explained to us, this can lead to better performance, but it does not have to, as Decodetree is not optimised. Similarly, there were also some changes to the implementation of AltiVec commands that could improve their speed, but it would depend on how it was used and what the host CPU supported. He had done some tests and found that in some cases it could be a few percent faster, but it did not really make a big change. Since sam460ex does not have AltiVec, it only benefits from the PPC instruction decoding changes, he said. Emulation via pegasos2 and mac99 could be slightly better with code that uses AltiVec. However, he says it is difficult to test this with AmigaOS 4, which has no graphics driver for the graphics cards emulated by QEMU in the pegasos2 version. For tinkerers, however, he has an idea that could be tried out: One would have to copy some drivers to get the output on pegasos2. This means that one has to edit the boot CD or an installed version (which is not so easy, but feasible). You would have to copy the kernel from the AmigaOS-pegasos2 version and update the PCIGraphics.card and siliconmotion502.chip from the sam460ex version, as he erwähnt before. You would then have to create a CD from this. (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 06:08] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`15.Dec.2022`	Encryption protocol: AmiSSL 5.6 (AmigaOS 3/4) The open source encryption protocol AmiSSL has been updated to version 5.6 and contains a fix for server applications and some other minor changes. The changes in detail: Fixed TLS 1.3 cipher lookup failure regression on OS4. The improvement from v5.4 that released file locks on the OS4 libraries is now only activated with elf.library 53.35 or higher. Minor build changes. Download AmigaOS 3: AmiSSL-5.6-OS3.lha (3,3 MB) Download AmigaOS 4: AmiSSL-5.6-OS4.lha (3,1 MB) Download SDK: AmiSSL-5.6-SDK.lha (2,3 MB) (dr) [News message: 15. Dec. 2022, 20:51] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`15.Dec.2022`	Video: 'DarkG' from Batman Group guest at AmigaBill In his "Replay" series on Twitch.tv, 'AmigaBill' had 'DarkG', a member of the Batman Group, as a guest three days ago and talked to him about the recently released demo Batman Rises. (dr) [News message: 15. Dec. 2022, 12:56] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`15.Dec.2022` CS-Lab website (ANF)	Warp 560/Warp 1260: Firmware Pack 1.300 CS-Lab has released an update of the firmware for its 68060-based Warp accelerator boards. Changes of Warp Firmware Pack 1.300: WiFi support through SANA-2 warpNET.device (you need TCP/IP stack like Roadshow or Miami) Separate driver for onboard IDE (warpATA.device) Added direct-scsi mode support for warpSD.device and warpUSBDisk.device P96 RTG driver fix of WHDLoad "freeze" issues Updated WarpDiag and WarpTool tools Included firmware for Warp1240 model Lots of other minor fixes (dr) [News message: 15. Dec. 2022, 06:55] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`15.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 15 - Dennis Pauler We open the 15th advent calendar door and welcome Dennis 'Hurrican' Pauler from Virtual Dimension. Virtual Dimension can look back on a long history and has incredibly changed and gained versatility over the years: In 1991 the group around Dennis Pauler was founded and focused on programming demos - for example the Red Sky BBS Intro - and games until 1999: so they released "Walls - The 97-Edition" in 1998 and "Othello - Das virtuelle Brettspiel" in 1999 , both to be found on their home page. At the beginning of 1999 parts of the Virtual Dimension team participate as editors in the German magazine "Amiga Fever", which was discontinued after only four issues and integrated into amigaOS. Likewise the content support of the website was discontinued from the year 2002. Dennis' call to the readers which can be read there "better get involved...send a news message to a news site..." we can only support and is possible via Amiga News Feed at any time. From 1999 onwards, the "On site" (German) series initially concentrated on trade fair videos - for example on the World of Amiga 2000 - before audio books and dubbing work were added. Over time, many more video series were added. But also the programming of (Amiga)games has been rediscovered: Dennis works himself (again) into C-programming and develops the game "Danger Dennis" in the series "Coding with Dennis" (German). Not only for this, but also for all further projects we wish Virtual Dimension good luck and are now looking forward to Dennis' story: Backed the wrong horse? My friends and I already got thrilled at the age of 11. We no longer wanted to just PLAY computer games, we wanted to DEVELOP them ourselves. But all beginnings are difficult. After moderately successful experiments with Basic on the C64 and AmigaBasic on the Amiga, we were looking for ways to get more out of our computers. A short excursion into Amiga programming with C based on a course from the magazine AmigaPlus didn't lead to the goal either, because the course ended after a few relaxation exercises where it could have become interesting. We lacked the contacts, the books and probably the imagination how we could have developed our skills. That the way was much more complicated than we thought at that time, I should realize more than 20 years later, when I finally opened the chapter "Programming C for the Amiga" again. Ambitious but slightly frustrated, after experimenting with shell scripts and the RedSector Demomaker, we finally stumbled upon a programming environment that promised what we had hoped for. We're talking about "AMOS - The Creator", and our goal of finally developing decent games ourselves was within reach. The year was 1994 and the conditions could not have been better. Under the name "Virtual Dimension" a cool troop had come together to make their dream of game development come true. AMOS - first in the basic version, then in the Pro version - enabled fast development progress with background graphics, bobs and music. And our platform was THE game machine: the Amiga, which had just received a contemporary upgrade with the AGA computers and could at least keep up with the PCs in terms of price/performance. We worked on several games at the same time, shared the work and met several times a week for joint development sessions with pair programming. At the same time, we tentatively began to network with the net community, downloading the latest tools and demos from mailboxes, writing our first emails, and discussing important questions on Usenet such as "Does Warp 9.9 period = Warp 10?" When the news of the bankruptcy of Commodore, the parent company of the Amiga, reached us, we were initially unmoved. After all, optimism was spread in the computer magazines that a financially strong buyer would soon be found (Samsung, for example, was being discussed) and that the race to catch up with the PC would then be all the faster. But the more months went by without any positive news, the greater our worries became. First of all, however, we did everything we could to get our first game ready. In autumn 1994, the time had finally come and "Walls", a game fiercely inspired by "Breakout" and "Arkanoid", was ready for release. Unlike our previous programming attempts, which had rarely seen disks other than our own, "Walls" was included by no less than three public domain series (Spielekiste, German Games and Nordlicht-PD) in their programme. The Amiga magazine reported on our game in a small section and one day there were even unannounced fans at the door and the slightly overwhelmed Dennis. Meanwhile, the rumour mill on Usenet was bubbling over the future of the Amiga. Commodore UK had taken over the Amiga rights in a "management buyout" and would soon bring a new computer onto the market with the Amiga 1300 CD, it was said. This soon turned out to be a hoax, but through David Pleasance's stories we now know that it almost came true. A group of fans did not want to wait any longer and decided to replace the AmigaOS with a new open source implementation and port it to the PC. The Amiga Replacement OS - AROS for short - as it was called at the beginning, was born. There was movement in the scene, but time passed and more and more users and developers left the Amiga. If a buyer wasn't found soon who could save the sinking ship, our beloved computer would lose its connection to the PC world for good. The song "Final Countdown" by Europe took on a whole new meaning for me during this time. One year after the Commodore bankruptcy, a buyer was finally found in the form of Escom, but the hoped-for new start turned out to be much weaker than hoped for. The Amiga 1200, now three years old, was produced again, but without a turbo card, memory expansion and hard disk, no one could be impressed with it in 1995. New computers were announced, but before a new Amiga had made it to the shop counter, Escom had also gone bankrupt and the dithering began again. So had we backed the wrong horse in choosing the Amiga as a platform for a game development ambition? Yes and no. The three more games that we finally published for the Amiga in 1998 - all written with AMOS - achieved many thousands of downloads from our website, which had been set up in the meantime. But we had finally lost touch with modern game development. In retrospect, this was certainly not the worst thing that could have happened to us, considering the poor working conditions that still prevail in the games industry today. We then took our professional careers in other directions, even though the thought of developing our own games would never completely fade from our minds. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Amiga seemed to be history, despite all attempts to breathe new life into the platform with the help of the PowerPC processor. But like us, many others were to remember the time with the Amiga fondly and so, from 2013 onwards, new - also commercial - games for our old friend slowly appeared again. Thanks to the internet, we were able to make contact with many other Amiga fans and finally got back to the old idea of developing our own games for the Amiga. Of course, we don't have as much time as we did when we were students, so the journey is slow. But the conspiratorial community that just won't let the old computer die has given us a home and, despite everything, doesn't let us lose sight of the goal - and this time, even really with the programming language C! But that's another story... (dr) [News message: 15. Dec. 2022, 06:49] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 14 - Erik Hogan Today's Advent calendar door belongs to the game developer Erik 'earok' Hogan. Of course, the game construction kit "Scorpion Engine", which we first reported on in April 2020 and which he developed and continues to develop, immediately comes to mind. It would probably fill a separate article to list all the games that use his engine, many of which are still in development (for example, "Creeping Me Out Hex Night"). But here are a few examples: Jump'N Run Duckstroma the mini game Super Delivery Boy the arcade game Green Beret or the Amiga conversion of Wonderboy A developer has just started his conversion of the action game "Trojan", published in 1986, on the basis of the Scorpion Engine and has published a first preview video for it. But Hogan himself also logically uses his engine to develop (demo) games: for example, the adaptation of the C64 classic "Raid Over Moscow", the jump'n run "Monkey Ladd" or the platform game "Super-Go-Down-The-Hole". On his Patreon page he provides information about new releases and games. Thank you Erik. We look forward to many more exciting game projects! His anecdote: "In English, we've borrowed the word "strafe" (as in, a plane "strafing" or attacking ground targets, itself derived from the old expression "gott strafe England" or "god punish England") to denote sideways movement in first person shooters. I was working on a game that, while not a first person shooter, was an educational title played from the first person. When testing, I went to use the standard A or D keys for sideways movement in the game, and realised they did nothing. Since most young gamers would expect those keys to activate sideways movement (games such as Minecraft do), I added a simple item to the project todo list that simply said "strafe". A little while later, the project manager - who is from Germany and is passionate about educational games but isn't a hardcore gamer themselves - told me at a meeting that they were very confused that, according to my todo list, I apparently wanted to punish someone." (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 11:28] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	Linux: Kernel 6.1 for AmigaOne X1000/X5000 Right after the release of the Linux kernel 6.1, Christian 'xeno74' Zigotzky has compiled it for AmigaOne X1000 and X5000 and offered the kernel for download in the associated discussion topic of the Hyperion forum. There you can also find a screenshot showing the Debian distribution using the current kernel. (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 09:38] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	Preview video: Super Metal Hero At the beginning of 2020, Raster Wizards announced the game "Super Metal Hero". After development was frozen in favour of the game Hyper Runner, work is now resumed. A new preview video shows the first final boss: first draft, revised version. (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 06:56] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	AmigaGuide magazine: Issue 8 of "WhatIFF?" published "WhatIFF?" is an English Amiga magazine in AmigaGuide format. Unlike other magazines or journals, WhatIFF? does not deal with games, but is primarily intended for users who want to work creatively with their Amigas (amiga-news.de reported). Now issue 8 was published containing the following articles: Reviews Dell LED 15Khz Monitor A1200.net Translucent Case RNOEffects Aminet Short Reviews Guides Watch YouTube Videos on your AGA Amiga Part 1 LightWave 101 - Starfield Brilliance 101 - Reflections Storage Solutions Articles A Look Back At 2022 American Magazines First LD Computer? Interviews PixelVixen Anthony (The Amiga Show) (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 06:07] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	Blog: Review of English Amiga print magazines In his latest blog entry of his "Epsilon's World" Epsilon gives a review of English-language Amiga magazines of the last 40 years, as usually detailed and and with numerous pictures. He himself had decided to get one copy of each English-language Amiga magazine, with at least one issue per year, covering the entire period from 1985 to 2022. He came across 44 different English-language Amiga magazines in the process. (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 06:02] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	Minimig: Revision 1.91 In mid-March we reported on revision 1.8 of Minimig: the reimplementation of an Amiga 500 in an FPGA, a field-programmable gate array. After six months of development, Minimig REV 9 is now available. Accelerator cards like the TerribleFire 534 and 536 can now run at 50MHz, caching of kick.rom of the PiStorm is now possible as BOOTROM has been replaced by a new ESC/OCS chip - MIA. REV 9 offers not only hardware changes but also software updates. In addition, this board is 6-layer and has a revised voltage regulation. And the MC68SEC000 can be operated at up to 60MHz. The card (without housing) is currently sold out, otherwise it is listed in the shop for around 330 Euros. (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 06:02] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`14.Dec.2022`	Debugging tool: PatchWork 1.1 In keeping with yesterday's Advent calendar door, Richard Körber has released version 1.1 of his debugging tool "PatchWork" (amiga-news.de reported). Changes: New TASKNAME option, which only reports hits caused by tasks with the given name. Note that this is just an output filter. Options like DEADLY still apply to all tasks. Use short relocation tables, prohibits loading on Kick 1.x (dr) [News message: 14. Dec. 2022, 05:43] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`13.Dec.2022`	Kickstarter campaign: Update on the Checkmate 19" IPS Retro Monitor About three weeks ago, Stephen Jones launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund monitors for retro computers (amiga-news.de reported). Five days remain and so far 138.938 of the required 239.785 Euro have been funded. Jones has taken this interim status as an opportunity to publish a condensed version of the video presentation of the project. On the other hand, he is now offering a so-called "Festive Placeholder Deposit": here, all those who cannot afford the full contribution can still reserve a monitor for a minimum amount of around 117 euros. However, supporters who pay the full amount will be delivered first. (dr) [News message: 13. Dec. 2022, 15:39] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`13.Dec.2022` Dimitris Panokostas	Mastodon-Client: Update on Amidon development status The author of the Amiga emulator Amiberry, Dimitris 'MiDWaN' Panokostas, is in the process of developing a Mastodon client for AmigaOS 3 (amiga-news.de reported). In a blog entry published on his Ko-fi page he now reports about the current state. Among other things, an "anonymous" avatar is now included by default and is shown until the user logs into the server. (dr) [News message: 13. Dec. 2022, 14:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`13.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 13 - Richard Körber ust in time for lunch break, the 13th door of our Advent calendar opens. We may introduce: Richard 'Shred' Körber. This could be a record so far: Already on 04 May 1999 we reported (in German) about Richard Körber's newly established website "Palmiga", which was aimed at Amiga users who wanted to connect their computer to a PalmOS PDA. In mid-2001 he was kindly asked by Palm Inc. to rename his site because "Palmiga" and "PalmLink" would infringe trademark rights. So Amiga-PDA was born, which was originally part of his homepage which already existed since 1998. For all those who are still interested today, please refer to his PdaLink library and the corresponding GitHub project. The developer is probably best known for his identify library, which recognises Zorro cards by their manufacturer and product ID, provides information about the system (CPU, FPU, memory, clock frequency, etc.) and decodes Guru codes and function offsets. Originally, in early 2003, he announced (in German) on our site that he had to stop development due to lack of time and published the source codes of the project on Sourceforge. More than a year ago, however, he not only published the source codes on GitHub, but also resumed development and made the current version 40.2 available for download in mid-October. He also wrote his own driver for the internal sound card Maestro Professional, developed YAMI, a mouse interface that makes it possible to use serial PC mice on Amiga or ATARI ST computers, and resumed work on his debugging tool PatchWork. His articles in the Retro Blog of his site are definitely worth reading, for example about the restoration of an Amiga 1000 or the problem of the right mouse button on the Amiga 1200. Many thanks for your development work, Richard! He remembered the following anecdote for us: "It was in 1998, at a time when the Internet was massively growing. As a young professional, I was working in the web department of a startup in Cologne and felt like a pioneer in a new country. After weeks of work, our team had completed a new website. The design template had been created by an external advertising agency via Photoshop. We manually converted the designs into individual web pages, which was common practice at that time. In the late afternoon, everything was finally finished, the launch was imminent and the press had already been informed. The other colleagues had already called it a day, and I was just about to pack my bag, too, when an email from my boss popped up in my inbox. 'The agency has asked us to make one last small change to the layout', was his comment. Below that I found a forwarded email with the details. I looked at the request and groaned. I would have to change all one hundred pages by hand for that. Those are the tasks you love. I could forget my plans to leave in time. It would probably even take until late at night. With an Amiga, yeah, this would have been a piece of cake. I would have opened the web pages in GoldEd, and would have let it do the changes automatically, remote controlled by a quickly crafted ARexx script. With my Windows computer at work this was unthinkable. There was no possibility to control programs with a script language. Oh, if only I had my Amiga here now, I thought to myself and sighed. Then I remembered that I had installed an Amiga emulator on my work PC a few weeks earlier because I wanted to try it out. But that was just for fun. Now I have a job to do. Is that professional? Is it even possible to do that? Why not! I transferred the web pages to the virtual Amiga hard disk, programmed an ARexx script and let GoldEd apply the changes. The plan worked. After less than an hour the change was completed. So the Amiga saved the launch date. And I made it home in time." (dr) [News message: 13. Dec. 2022, 13:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`13.Dec.2022` Cloanto (ANF)	Cloanto: Amiga Forever and C64 Forever 10 Press release: December 12, 2022 - Cloanto released today version 10 of Amiga Forever and C64 Forever, the official Commodore/Amiga preservation, emulation and support suites for Windows. The new editions are the result of almost two years of development since the previous major version 9. Cloanto's RetroPlatform framework is the result of a lot of effort to make Amiga and CBM 8-bit features and interfaces appear effortlessly unified. The two packages now encompass more than 700K lines of code written by Cloanto, integrating with a collaborative endeavour of emulation plugins and content preservation. Before adding visible features, a priority of this version consisted in the removal of speed and space constraints. Some of the old barriers may have been out of sight before, but the result after upgrading is a satisfying sensation of increased freedom and power: the title editor opens and closes in an instant, large media files are handled with more ease, while windows and other elements that used to be fixed can now be resized. Content folders can be added anywhere under Amiga Files and CBM Files, while new personal playlists and improved content shortcuts offer more ways to rapidly access titles and folders stored on any disk. Amiga Forever 10 includes direct support for FloppyBridge-compatible floppy drive and controller devices (e.g. DrawBridge, Greaseweazle, SuperCard Pro, Waffle). Whereas previous versions only supported floppy disk images, now physical floppy drives and disks can be accessed by the emulation. No additional software is required. New and improved features: Revamped Amiga Files: custom folders, subfolders and folder shortcuts can be added anywhere to better organize titles and to handle massive content collections Improved player, including personal playlists, pervasive Rename, Cut, Copy and Paste commands, and intuitive resize of preview area and emulation window Faster title editing and application responsiveness: quick opening and closing of the title editor (asynchronous content extraction, differential compression) and runtime optimizations when working with large media images Direct support for FloppyBridge-compatible floppy drive and controller devices like the DrawBridge, Greaseweazle, SuperCard Pro and Waffle (drives work in Amiga emulation, no additional software required) Hayes-compatible "internet modem" to access your favorite BBS systems Improved Windows File Explorer and Search integration: enhanced thumbnail provider to preview screenshots and box shots, and new details in property handler to view and index RP9 title properties Support for new features introduced in Windows 11 and Windows 10 versions up to 22H2 Hundreds of other new features and refinements Amiga Explorer 10 has already been released a few days ago. As always, we are grateful to the many friends who supported this project and our Amiga passion, vision and hope. Special thanks to Toni Wilen. Current and soon-to-be Amiga serial and print integration features would not have been possible without his help. (dr) [News message: 13. Dec. 2022, 07:09] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`12.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 12 - 'Prince' The Amiga-News.de Advent Calendar starts with 'Prince' and the twelfth door into the new week. 'Prince' is the founder of the demo group 'Phaze101' and an incredibly busy Amiga developer: he might be best known to our readers for his assembler coding course. Between 1994 and 1996, Fabio 'Randy' Ciucci, a member of the demo group RamJam, wrote the assembly programming course "Corso completo di programmazione assembler in due dischi". With Ciucci's permission, RamJam published this programming course as a book in 2016. 'Prince' is currently streaming this course in English on Twitch and then uploading the respective episodes to YouTube. Almost in parallel, he recorded his 16-part Let's Make an Amiga Game Tutorial and also published it on YouTube. The resulting game "Mr Poo's Journey" is available on itch.io for a price that you can choose yourself. Among other projects, he also regularly organises "Game Jams" with the aim of expanding knowledge and awareness about retro computers. Recently, for example, there was the Retro Trex Game Jam, which resulted in his version Dino Run or also DRex by another developer. The Racing Cars Game Jam will run until 31 January 2023. His anecdote: "When I look at the source codes I wrote 30 years ago and more, I am totally fascinated. I love them! As a teenager, I didn't think twice about what I was writing! Mainly I had written demos and tools at that time, and I must confess that these source codes are often a mystery to me as well. On the one hand, I realise how little I knew back then. On the other hand, I still somehow managed to get programmes to work. Some of these source codes were also written for experimental purposes. They contain all kinds of errors! Mistakes that I wouldn't make now. I have improved my programming skills over the years. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for my memory. On the contrary: sometimes I have the feeling that it is going steeply downhill! There is one thing that is all over my sources back then that I can't remember. Most of the sources begin with comments that has something like this: "Dedicated to the one ______ I love". Who was her, "the one I love" back then? Memory is playing tricks on me and this is something that didn't improve :)" (dr) [News message: 12. Dec. 2022, 13:58] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`12.Dec.2022`	Demo tip: "Batman Rises" It does not often happen that amiga-news.de publishes a recommendation for a demo, but this production of the Batman Group is more than worth it: "Batman Rises" ranked first on the Posadas 2022 Autumn Edition which took place last weekend and only requires an Amiga 500 with 1 MB RAM. Very impressive demo! (dr) [News message: 12. Dec. 2022, 06:12] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	Analogue Pocket: Amiga core V0.0.6 Alpha The handheld game console Analogue Pocket (Wikipedia) is FPGA-based and as such supports modules from Nintendo, Sega, the PC Engine or the Atari Lynx. The early version 0.0.6 Alpha of the Amiga core mentioned in our last news item has now been released: some interlaced games have been fixed, and the floppy controller speed has been increased. (dr) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 15:09] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	Aminet uploads until 10.12.2022 The following files have been added until 10.12.2022 to Aminet: ign-AddOn-XLSX.lha biz/spread 303K OS4 ignition addon for access xls... plm80.lha dev/cross 273K MOS C port of Intel's ISIS-II PLM80 HWP_XML.lha dev/hwood 387K ALL Hollywood plugin for parsing ... Fussball-WM-2022.lha docs/misc 11K TurboCalc Spreadsheet WM-2022... nblood.lha game/shoot 1.0M 68k Blood Amiga Port dMagnetic.lha game/text 353K MOS Interpreter for Magnetic Scro... dvdauthor.lha gfx/conv 1.8M OS4 Set of tools for authoring a DVD AmiArcadia.lha misc/emu 4.6M 68k Signetics-based machines emul... AmiArcadiaMOS.lha misc/emu 4.9M MOS Signetics-based machines emul... AmiArcadia-OS4.lha misc/emu 5.1M OS4 Signetics-based machines emul... ASE2019_2.0.lha text/edit 188K 68k Text editor avalanche.lha util/arc 96K OS4 ReAction unarchive GUI for xf... aiostreams.lha util/batch 228K Stream video from major onlin... png16_lib.lha util/libs 235K OS4 Shared library based on libpng16 HexSee.lha util/misc 55K 68k Hex File Viewer HexSee_OS4.lha util/misc 336K OS4 Hex File Viewer (OS4 version) VATestprogram.zip util/misc 2.7M 68k Versatile Amiga Test Program (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:42] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	OS4Depot uploads until 10.12.2022 The following files have been added until 10.12.2022 to OS4Depot: libpsem.lha dev/lib 176kb 4.0 POSIX semaphore implementation libwprintf.lha dev/lib 32kb 4.0 Wide char printf functions glsnoop.lha dev/uti 198kb 4.1 Trace and profile OGLES2 and W3D... amiarcadia.lha emu/gam 5Mb 4.0 Signetics-based machines emulator fpcmines.lha gam/puz 2Mb 4.0 A classical mine sweeper clone lazsokoban.lha gam/puz 1Mb 4.1 Clone of the classic Japanese pu... pixman_lib.lha lib/gra 315kb 4.0 Pixman-1 as an AmigaOS shared li... png16_lib.lha lib/gra 235kb 4.0 Shared library based on LibPNG16 hwp_xmlparser.lha lib/hol 387kb 4.0 Hollywood plugin for parsing XML... ign-addon-xlsx.lha off/spr 303kb 4.1 Ignition addon for access xlsx-f... avalanche.lha uti/arc 96kb 4.1 Simple ReAction GUI for xadmaster avalanche_ita.lha uti/arc 5kb 4.0 Italian translation for Avalanche hexsee.lha uti/fil 336kb 4.1 Hex File Viewer muiplot.lha uti/sci 905kb 4.0 Simple function plotter dvdauthor.lha vid/con 2Mb 4.1 Set of tools for authoring a DVD aiostreams.lha vid/mis 228kb 4.1 Stream video from major online p... (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:42] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	AROS Archives uploads until 10.12.2022 The following files have been added until 10.12.2022 to AROS Archives: lazsokoban.i386-aros.lha gam/puz 2Mb Puzzle Game multiview.i386-aros.zip uti/wor 29kb Utilities Viewer (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:42] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	MorphOS-Storage uploads until 10.12.2022 The following files have been added until 10.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage: plm80_0.2.9x.lha Development/Cross C port of Intel's ISIS-... HWP_XML_2.0.lha Development/Hollywood/... The XML plugin allows H... AmiArcadia_29.33.lha Emulation A Signetics-based machi... dMagnetic_0.34.lha Games/Text Interpreter for Magneti... LazSokoban.lha Games/Think A Sokoban clone with skins AIOStreams_1.7.6.lha Network/Streaming Stream online video fro... (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:42] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	WHDLoad: New installers until 10.12.2022 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 10.12.2022: 2022-12-10 improved: Dragon Strike (Westwood/S.S.I) added joypad controls (Info) 2022-12-10 new: Cobra (Bytec) done by Psygore (Info) 2022-12-10 improved: The Settlers / Die Siedler (Blue Byte) intro bugs fixed, a slave for low memory config included (Info) 2022-12-06 improved: Cadaver (Imageworks/Bitmap Brothers) re-enabled 512k expansion memory (Info) (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:42] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022` Amigaworld.net (Forum)	Video: Beth Richard disassembles an Amiga CD 1200 (English) The CD 1200, which was only produced in a few copies as a prototype, was not only to equip an Amiga 1200 with an external CD-ROM drive, but also to ensure compatibility with Commodore's game console Amiga CD³². In the video at the title link, Beth Richard, who was involved in its development as lead engineer, opens the specimen in the British Retro Computer Museum (amiga-news.de reported) - 28 years after she last saw a CD 1200. (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022` Amigaworld.net (Webseite)	Print magazine: Boing #5 (French) "Boing" is a French print magazine by Boing Attitude (among others Dir Me Up and Word Me Up XXL) for all Amiga systems and contains 52 A4 pages in colour. The fifth issue contains among other things an interview with the musician of numerous Amiga titles Barry Leitch (e.g. Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Silkworm) as well as reviews of THEA500 Mini and the Apollo Core R9 for the Vampire V4. (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022` Amiga Future (Webseite)	Java program: ham_convert 1.8.7 Sebastian Sieczko's Java-based program ham_convert converts modern graphic formats into the Amiga's HAM format and is now available in version 1.8.7. New features include bug fixes for resizing and an improved HAM8 output in non-CIE94 colour mode. (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 11 - Alain Fontanin For the third Advent and the eleventh door, we asked Alain Fontanin for an anecdote. Alain and his text editor "Amiga Source Editor (2019)", of which he has recently released version 2.0, is on the one hand a wonderful example of how nostalgia and the "memory of the good old days" can give rise to active software development in the here and now, and on the other hand how the Amiga community can help each other and other readers and developers can advance projects through feedback. In our introductory news item to the new edition of his editor almost exactly two years ago, Alain reported that development had originally begun in 1989. Then, when he watched the documentary "Viva Amiga" in 2019, he was reminded of what was for him a "wonderful time". Since he was no longer programming for his Mac, he decided to pick up where he left off in 1991 with the development of his text editor. This was driven forward by feedback from our readers, especially in the early days, and now you can see the current state of his project for yourself. In an interview with Alain conducted by David Brunet (French Amiga magazine Obligement) you can learn more about him. Among other things, he has promised implementations for other Amiga systems. We continue to keep our fingers crossed for his editor and now look forward to his anecdote: "When Amiga-News.de proposed me to participate in this project, I found it very interesting. Then while thinking about what to tell, I was afraid of "Grandpa tell us the war", well kids sit down, grandpa will start the story! I participated in only one professional development project on the Amiga, it was during my military service in an electronic squadron in 1992 (my military diploma says C programmer on PC and Amiga!). Why should I tell you about this? Well, this is the only computer project in my career for which I could neither exchange with the users nor visualize the final result (security reasons). The project consisted in managing through an Amiga 2000, the display of the video network of the electronic operations center. I had to exchange on the specifications, the evolutions and the bugs with a non computer scientist correspondent, who did not have access to the operational center (!) and I had only an Amiga 500 with a color screen (whereas the display of the video network was monochrome). The first deliveries were catastrophic: nothing worked properly, I was ashamed when I reported to the IT manager. I tried at first to improve my code (without success), before understanding that my salvation lay in the collaboration with the correspondent, I trained him in the use of the Amiga system, I fully integrated him in my development project. He was thus able to exchange more efficiently with the users and to give me reliable information. Finally, in 6 months (part-time, because I was also developing on Windows 3.0), I had a functional product for my return to civilian life. What I learned from this experience is that it's not enough to be technically competent, you have to be able to interact with all the stakeholders and this is often the most complex thing for a developer to do. This has served me well since then!" (dr) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	Motorola68k emulation: Emu68 graphics driver development In his latest blog entry, developer Michal Schulz reports on the work he has started with the P96 VideoCore driver and in particular with the VPU (Vector Processing Unit). In a short Video he demonstrates the VideoCore driver for the P96 RTG subsystem, which is somewhat accelerated thanks to the VPU unit, using a 2560x1440x32 screen with a moving window, loading a large JPG image in MultiView and scrolling the image in the rather large MultiView window on an Amiga 600. Claude Schwarz, on the other hand, reports in a tweet that the PiStorm32-lite beta boards (amiga-news.de reported) have passed the smoke test and also boot as expected in the Amiga 1200. (dr) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 06:29] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`10.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 10 - Edgar Schwan We start the weekend with the tenth door and Edgar Schwan. Edgar has been developing his Unix environment for AmigaOS 4, called AmiCygnix (current version 1.6), tirelessly and with great dedication for many years: it is not an emulation, but all programs are compiled natively for AmigaOS 4. He started with this in 2006 with a pre-release version of X-Window, before the environment still called Cygnix followed a little later. With version 1.0 he renamed it AmiCygnix, as it was no longer compatible with its predecessors. For his environment, he has not only ported numerous games, but also applications such as the mail client Sylpheed with very good IMAP4 support, the spreadsheet Gnumeric but above all the word processor AbiWord. Besides, he has released native versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. In today's Advent calendar door, the developer describes his chequered history of hardware conquests and why and how he started programming: "Actually, it was simply the fascination of being able to do something on the computer with a few commands or to create a usable programme. My programming career began with the C64. I still have my first book on it: "Programmieren in Maschinensprache mit dem Commodore-64" (publisher "Hofacker"). It was in the shop where I bought my C64. And yes - it had to be directly assembler! The whole thing was like cracking a puzzle. ;). Even then, I was more concerned with user software. Among other things, I wrote a font editor and a programme for translating machine code into an executable programme. The highlight was a game called "Pailgame", which was voted programme of the month in the magazine "64er". I got 3000 DM for it - those were the days :) But Pailgame is the only programme I published. The idea for the game probably came to me at a meeting with like-minded people. I don't remember exactly what I did with the money. I think I saved it and then invested it in my first Amiga, an Amiga 1000. It must have been around 1989. I bought it second-hand from a priest and it replaced my C64. I wasn't happy with it for long. There was simply too little you could do with it. After the A1000, there was an A2000 (bought second-hand again), which I could then really upgrade: A2630 Turbo, A2320 Flickerfixer, A2286 BridgeBoard, Multiface IO and whatnot. The A1000 then went to a friend. After Commodore went bankrupt, I got one of the last A4000Ds. Directly with a WarpEngine 040/33 with full memory expansion. For that, the Amiga 2000 was given away. Later I bought a CyberstormPPC 604e/233. At some point, I bought an A4000T (Escom) screwed together from leftover stock and bought it. That was real high-end :). Unfortunately, I was still not happy with the performance. When the first AmigaOne-XE boards became available, I bought them straight away. That was a really fine thing. With this computer, I really started programming. The SDK for OS4 with gcc compiler was a bit different from the StormC I had used last time. Unfortunately the board did not last 2 years (not repairable) and thanks to Vesalia I got a SAM-440-Flex. With this computer I started using AmiCygnix. You can always use performance when compiling, so at some point it had to be a SAM-460ex and for a few years now an AmigaOne X5000. The A4000T and the CyberStormPPC were sold at some point. Everything has to be paid for... I still have the A4000D today and it was also recapped. I hardly use it any more, but I still have my heart set on it. I also still have the SAM-440-Flex and the SAM-460ex as reserve systems. As you can see: I'm very attached to the Amiga :)" If you would like to try out Edgar's C64 game "Pailgame", the developer has kindly made the game available to us. If you do not have the original hardware, you can use a C64 emulator such as "Vice" or "Frodo". Download: PAILGAME.D64.zip (7 KB). (dr) [News message: 10. Dec. 2022, 06:17] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`10.Dec.2022`	Dock: QDock V1.39 At the end of October, Sami Vehmaa published the first version of his start bar "QDock" (amiga-news.de reported), which he continues to develop (YouTube video). In the update that has now been released, he has implemented various improvements: for example, the three rows of icons are now preloaded, which means that it can now be used better even at lower CPU/HDD speeds. The bar can be aligned on the left or in the centre and the last icon row used is saved. Likewise, you can now move icons between rows. The tool is currently available for 2 euros or more. The originally high CPU requirements have been lowered so that the dock can also be used with a 68030 processor when the reflections are deactivated or with a 68060 when activated. In addition, AmigaOS 3.2 (the author could not test under AmigaOS 3.1), graphics card and 22 MB RAM are required. (dr) [News message: 10. Dec. 2022, 05:30] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`10.Dec.2022`	Puzzle game: Update for "Wood Block Puzzle" The Polish developer 'Tukinem' has written a conversion of the game Wood Block Puzzle (online variant) for Amiga in BlitzBasic 2 (amiga-news.de reported). In the small update that has now been released, he has fixed a bug that occurred when eliminating a horizontal and vertical line at the same time. (dr) [News message: 10. Dec. 2022, 05:16] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`10.Dec.2022`	Jump'n Run: Minky V1.41 Minky (video) is a Jump'n Run in the style of Super Mario or Giana Sisters, which requires an Amiga 500 with one megabyte RAM (amiga-news.de reported). With the now released update to version 1.41, the selection "Joy Up" or "Joypad 2nd Fire" is available in the menu for jumping. In addition, there is now a WHDLoad installer and a separate Minky version for it. (dr) [News message: 10. Dec. 2022, 05:12] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`09.Dec.2022`	ReAction-GUI for XAD: Avalanche 1.8 for AmigaOS 3 and 4 Chris Young has released version 1.8 of his ReAction-based graphical user interface Avalanche for the unarchiving system XAD, which also supports the xfdmaster.library and can search for viruses using the xvs.library. The developer has written his tool explicitly for AmigaOS 3.2, but has also been tested under AmigaOS 4. Since it uses a new window.class, it might not work with older OS3 versions. Changes: Some very hefty internal changes! Multiple windows supported internally. Limitations: Commodities events only operate on the main (first) window Does not spawn new process, so cannot use other windows whilst one is busy Simple ARexx port added. Config options moved to separate prefs window Note the options to snapshot the current window and change the default destination are currently not available. They can still be manually set through tooltypes. Config window (dr) [News message: 09. Dec. 2022, 20:32] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`09.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 9 - Jérôme Senay Jérôme 'Glames' Senay is the patron of our ninth advent calendar door. He is the manager of and programmer for Boing Attitude and a few days ago could celebrate the tenth anniversary of the quiz game AskMeUp at the beginning of December, which was first available for Android, Windows and Linux, and shortly afterwards also for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS and has been constantly expanded. To mark the occasion, the game is currently available at half price. The story of Boing Attiutude and Glames - the nickname is borrowed from the hero of the game "Operation Stealth" and was the first video game he was able to finish - starts much earlier though: so he published an interview with Ben Hermans about AmigaOS 4.0 at the beginning of 2002 (still available and certainly interesting to read). In early 2008 he published the game "Word Me Up XXL" for AmigaOS 4 (and a little later also MorphOS), which combines arcade and puzzle elements. Since 2021 he publishes the French print magazine BOING, of which the fifth issue was recently announced. By the way, with the publication of the magazine a friendly cooperation between him and Amiga-News began: so we are allowed to provide our German-speaking readers with translations of interesting interviews, for example with Mike Parent (Metro Siege) or the Apollo team. For this, as well as for your many years of commitment, a heartfelt thank you, Glames! His thoughts on the Advent season: "(Christmas)Time is running out ! Ahh Christmas! Family, friends, gifts... A good time in perspective! Well, unless you're a coder. Because yes, this event can quickly become a nightmare for us Amiga developers. How indeed not to offer on this occasion a gift to all the players and users of our games and applications? Remember, some game publishers even made Christmas editions of their games! For example, Psygnosis and its "Christmas Lemmings" with its little creatures dressed as Santa Claus for the occasion but also its Christmas decorations with fireplaces, garlands, ... More recently, the most striking example is the game "Turbo Tomato" and its "Turbo Santa" which is even more than a special edition, a real new game that uses the engine of its model. In short, you will understand, the pressure weighs heavily on the shoulders of developers, including those of operating systems. We have indeed become accustomed to having a new version of AmigaOS (3 or 4) or MorphOS every winter. Some teams even choose to only release one version per year, just before this family celebration day. For me, the challenge gets harder every year! In 2008, I only had one game that could possibly receive an update, Word Me Up XXL on AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS. But since then I've added a few new games and apps and... Android and Windows as platforms. I chose not to make a Christmas version but rather to deliver a new update just before Santa's visit. The first choice to be made is therefore to select the application or the game for which an update will be delivered at Christmas and this should not be done at the last moment to allow time to do this update. Real Cornelian choice! Sometimes in good years, I even managed to update several productions. But I have to admit that in recent years, I'm already happy when I manage to deliver one. Last year (2021) almost saw no updates delivered by Boing Attitude. As you may know, I launched a magazine (in French) dedicated to the Amiga in the summer of 2021, BOING. And when I released issue #2 in October, I thought it would be great to have a number #3 just before Christmas. But what an idea! As a reminder, I am independent in IT, so I had my 8 hours to do with my main client at the moment, a smaller simultaneous project to manage for another client and... the writing and design of the magazine ! I worked more than 50 hours for 6 weeks, sometimes more than 60 hours or even 70 hours the week of wrapping up! But the hard work paid off and BOING #3 was released on December 16, just before Christmas. The bad news is that I couldn't update my apps or games... Alright, I need to leave you! I have a Christmas update to prepare! ;)" (dr) [News message: 09. Dec. 2022, 06:38] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`08.Dec.2022`	Blog: Review of the UltimatePPC Expansion Card The blog "Amiga alive" not only presents own, partly older projects, but also reports about other software and hardware products. In the latest blog entry, the developer once again traces the development and the missed opportunities of the UltimatePPC board for Amiga 3000/4000 that was announced but never went into production. (dr) [News message: 08. Dec. 2022, 20:17] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`08.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4.1: Update of Excel addon for spreadsheet ignition With the release of the spreadsheet ignition 1.21, Achim Pankalla had also provided the xlsx-AddOn for reading MS-Excel files for the first time (amiga-news.de reported). For this he has released a small update to version 0.11 today: now it handle "empty" marker corrects two errors in shared formulas-handle now changes %-values, that ignition handles they correct (dr) [News message: 08. Dec. 2022, 14:55] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`08.Dec.2022`	Video: Building a new Amiga 2000 - part 2 The YouTube channel "Casual Retro Gamer" (CRG) is dedicated to repairing and building retro hardware (amiga-news.de reported). The recently launched video series (part 1) shows how a new Amiga 2000 is assembled. The board used is the EATX form factor version reworked by developer 'jasonsbeer' (amiga-news.de reported). In the second part, the slots are installed and the bluster chip. It also deals with the keyboard and the case. (dr) [News message: 08. Dec. 2022, 05:38] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`08.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 8 - Daniel Müßener For the 8th door of our Advent calendar, we were able to win Daniel 'Daytona675x' Müßener. Who would like to play "Battle Squadron" again? :) Originally developed by Cope-com in 1989, the game was re-released for AmigaOS 4 (and iOS, Android, Windows, OS X) by the makers together with Daniel at the end of 2013. At the end of 2015, a port of the game "Wings! Remastered Edition" for AmigaOS 4, AROS and MorphOS was announced and a first preview was published. A new demo version was then available at the beginning of 2020. In addition, Daniel released the AmigaOS 4 version of the arcade shooter Tower 57, which was crowdfunded in the summer of 2015, in early 2018. Likewise for AmigaOS 4 on behalf of A-EON, he is developing the OpenGL ES 2 wrapper, first announced in 2016, which is part of the Enhancer software. The developer is currently working on two projects: Atomic Bomberman Fan Rewrite is a revision of the eponymous Bomberman variant for Windows from 1997. The improvements include that it runs again on current Windows versions in addition to Amiga systems, USB input devices can be used, up to ten players can be active on one device and the game modes have been revised. There is also network support for online competitions. Version 2.15 is currently available on his website. Finally, Daniel regularly informs about the development status of his football game in 3D optics, "Souverän Soccer", whose target platform is an Amiga 1200 in delivery condition, by means of preview videos. And quite "incidentally", his CV also includes the Amiga Future honorary offices of "translator" and "Gamescom man for everything"! Thank you, Daniel, for your commitment to the Amiga and of course for your Advent story which now follows: "It was neither during the contemplative Christmas season nor Easter, New Year's Eve or Carnival, although a corresponding overkill of red wine, eggnog or Kölsch would have been an explanation for my mental derangement, which I would like to tell you about now, my dear children. Not so long ago it happened that I was desperately tinkering with the serial-link feature of my Amiga soccer game. It was already late at night and the rain was pattering on the office window, the sound of which could hardly be distinguished from the clicks of the maltreated keyboard. Unfortunately, our Amiga's serial isn't something she can brag about. But if you stuff her slowly so that she can look at each bit three times and from all sides, then she can swallow'em just fine. The protocol for the game is very compact so as not to overwhelm the ladies. If initialized with the same random seed then the game is fully deterministic, the outcome only depends on the player-input sequence being applied over time. Therefore, it turns out that fortunately a meager 2 bytes per machine must be transmitted per frame. That's a good thing because there's not enough performance remaining for more, at least on a naked A1200 running "Souverän Soccer", where you're already at the extreme limit and absolutely must keep 50 fps with minimal latency. Anyway, all joystick and key commands, implicit synchronization and error correction information are contained in these 2x2 bytes. But it was a rocky road until I got there, and the protocol's evolution consisted out of many repeating circles of trying out, crying and throwing away again. And of course, at the beginning there was a much simpler protocol. First it was merely a proof-of-concept. For that Amiga #1 (let's call her "Santa") simply sent 1 byte with its current joystick bits to Amiga #2 ("Rudolph"). Rudolph, on the other hand, sent 2 bytes, namely his own joystick data and the last one received from Santa. Exactly this input pair was then used by both for the calculation of the next simulation step. And here we are, back in that night outlined above. Team "Santa" and team "Rudolph" were finally about to show on the pitch what they had rehearsed in theory. But apparently our two minions were conspiring against me or some Poltergeist in the machine was involved: If you moved Santa's active player, then Rudolph's focused player would also run in the same direction - and as if that wasn't wrong enough, they only did that on Rudolph's screen, on Santa's both player objects didn't move at all! And when you used the joystick attached to Rudolph, the same thing happened, only from his mirrored perspective! That cannot happen! Every programmer knows this sentence well enough, but it has rarely been more appropriate than in this case. This behavior simply could not and should not occur, completely impossible! Nevertheless, it happened. But even after two more terribly long hours, all I managed to do was to make things even worse. At one point I felt like Tom shredding up Jerry's diary. But before the poor Amigas or Competitions had to die an undeserved death, I preferred to pull the plug and leave my workbench with a shuffling gait and sagging shoulders towards bed. But even there I was not allowed to rest: in my dreams I found myself in the middle of a storm on a greasy, sodden soccer field. With each flash of lightning, the outlines of spaghetti-code-text-fragments shimmered through the clouds, forming ludicrous sigils. Tens of thousands of morbidly bloated zeros and worm-like squirming ones cavorted in the grandstand. My ears were ringing not so much from the cracking thunder as from the deafening fan chants, which most closely resembled a C64 tape played on the stereo. After a moment of dizziness and disorientation, I realized I was standing in one of the two goals. Then a very sharply shot apple hit me at the skull! The shooter used my near knockout, followed up and converted the rebound all too confidently. The fact that all players were two-dimensional pixel men was not particularly remarkable. But what caught my eye were the team shirts: while my team's jersey featured a & ampersand, the opposing team showed a simple vertical line, much like a pipe symbol. But before I could wonder any further, I got a ball in the stomach - and another - and another. When I got my hands on the last one, I saw that it wasn't a classic football, but a green, round, shriveled something, which stared at me with two teary eyes and said with a grin: "Get up, stupid dad!". After waking up in a sweat and stopping my daughter from continuing to bounce on my stomach, three things revealed themselves to me with absolute clarity: Firstly, years of C64 and Amiga gaming definitely left some marks, secondly, children give you so much in return, and thirdly, there was something about those nasty pipe strokes and the ampersands, my subconscious had noticed something that had escaped the higher-level part. All right, cat bath, coffee, morning stool, freshly back to work! And lo and behold, it took less than a minute to discover and correct the cause of the problem. So, what had happened? Within the whole game logic there is a variable that stores various on/off states as bits. Among many other things, there's one bit indicating whether a serial link match is currently running and another one which determines if the respective Amiga acts as Santa in that case. Accordingly, there are locations where these bits are tested to decide which code path to take. In C this looks like this, where gf_Santa simply represents this specific bit: if(gameplay_flags & gf_Santa) { // Santa-stuff comes here } else { // Rudolph-stuff comes here } And right here a tiny but mean typo had crept in. Instead of this & (binary AND) there was a \| (binary OR): if(gameplay_flags \| gf_Santa) In contrast to the desired bit test, this is just crap, unfortunately syntactically completely legal crap which doesn't even trigger a compiler warning here. I could also have written if(true) here, the effect would have been the same, namely that only the Santa code was ever executed - even if running on a Rudolph :P This typo can only be explained with temporary mental derangement. To crown it all, as a programmer you are lazy by nature. Which is why this error had doubled because I had copied the wrong line to another place, so this quirk was in both the receive and the send logic. Ultimately, this is what happened if you pushed Santa's joystick to the left: Santa sends his joystick data, "to the left" Rudolph sends his joystick data, "idle" Santa wants to receive 2 bytes, but so far there is only 1, so nothing to do Rudolph wants to receive 2 bytes, but so far there is only 1, so nothing to do Santa sends his joystick data, "still to the left" Rudolph sends his joystick data, "still idle" Santa has now received 2 bytes and interprets them as "Player1: nothing, player2: nothing" Rudolph now has 2 bytes and interprets them as "player1: to the left, player2: to the left" Argh! Of course the whole serial-link construct didn't really work properly after the & correction, but the penny had dropped and a first test match was successfully held on the same day. And the story's moral? Never underestimate your own routine-blindness and goofiness, stupid dad! Well then, good night, dear little children!" (dr) [News message: 08. Dec. 2022, 04:15] [Comments: 1 - 08. Dec. 2022, 09:32] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`08.Dec.2022`	RTG Solitare: Demo version of "Solitare match" Sami Vehmaa has released a demo version of his graphics card Solitare conversion "Solitare match" (YouTube video), which is primarily intended for Amiga emulators or Apollo cards due to the high CPU requirements. The demo version contains five levels. Those who want to encourage the developer to continue working on his game can buy the game for around three Euros and currently receive ten of the intended 100 levels in return. (dr) [News message: 08. Dec. 2022, 03:17] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`08.Dec.2022`	Print/PDF magazine: Amiga Addict, issue 17 The seventeenth issue of the British magazine "Amiga Addict" is now available as a digital version for about 5.20 Euros. The printed version of the Christmas issue (from 15 December) including shipping costs about 11.50 euros. The current issue contains the following topics: A free Xmas game made for us by Amiga Drawbridge genius Rob Smith A pull out poster with suggestions on what you might want to play with the family when you've polished off Christmas dinner Ravi reports back from the biggest Amiga event of the year, Amiga 37 in Germany Reviews of brand new games Devil's Temple, Minky and None of Us A look back on some classic Christmas games, like Fire and Ice and Xmas Lemmings Getting animated with Cinema 4D in The Creative Revolution Demoscene at Christmas with h0ffman Special guests AmigaLove, Andrew Korn and Chris Winter tell us about their connection with the Amiga And much much more! (dr) [News message: 08. Dec. 2022, 02:36] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`07.Dec.2022`	Amiga emulator for MacOS: vAmiga 2.2 After developer Dirk Hoffmann released the first beta version 2.2 of his Amiga emulator vAmiga for MacOS in mid-November (amiga-news.de reported), he has now released the final version 2.2. Changes: Fixed a bug that caused the emulator to crash when a Copper list was viewed in RetroShell. Fixed some minor GUI issues. Cleaned up some code. The minimum system requirement for the emulator is macOS 10.15. (dr) [News message: 07. Dec. 2022, 19:56] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`07.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 7 - Christian Zigotzky Door 7 of our advent calendar is filled by Christian 'xeno74' Zigotzky. You could almost say: he is the fairy godmother for everything to do with Linux on PPC Amigas. However, his "amiga-news.de career" began with the port of SuperTuxKart to AmigaOS 4. In the following years, he diligently published not only new Linux kernel versions for the various PPC Amigas, but also entire Linux distributions: for example, Lubuntu 13.10 for Sam440ep at the end of 2013, openSUSE 13.2 for the AmigaOne X1000 in May 2015 or afew months ago Void 5.1 for AmigaOne X1000/X5000 (for which we published an installation guide). Recently, there have also been various game ports for Linux PowerPC, such as Billy Frontier. Please read his advent anecdote: How I joined A-EON... It started quite harmlessly in 2010. I needed a cable and was looking for it in my boxes in the attic. I found the cable, but also my old Amiga 4000D in another box. To this day, I don't know what had driven me there, but I simply took the Amiga down to the flat. On my journey of discovery through various Amiga websites, I noticed that the development of hardware and software had continued and was on fire. After buying an Indivision AGA MK1, I was able to start my A4000D (CPU Motorola 68040 with 25 MHz, 16 MB Fast-RAM) with a connected TFT monitor without any problems. I was totally impressed by the Indivision AGA MK1 because of the tapping of the data from the Lisa chip and the processing and output via VGA. It whetted my appetite for more. As a Linux fan, I then installed Debian Linux 3.1r8 m68k on the 4000D (screenshot). Which worked so well that I always wanted to continue with Linux on the Amiga. After a while, the desire to buy an Amiga 4000T arose. That was a dream that I didn't fulfil at the time. So I looked for advertisements and found someone who wanted to sell his A4000T. I went there and was totally disappointed about the condition of this A4000T. But I had already heard about the X1000 at that time and was totally excited. Only the price put me off a little and availability was still a problem. However, a dealer had a used ACube Sam440ep-flex (trade fair exhibit) on offer. I thought, why don't I buy a more powerful and cheaper NG-Amiga instead of an expensive A4000T? So I took the plunge and bought it. The Sam was just great, so I quickly forgot about the Amiga 4000T. I used OS4.1 with all my m68k games and suddenly didn't need my A4000D anymore. I also installed Linux (as befits a Linux fanatic) and was very happy with the result. But I couldn't get the desire for the X1000 out of my head, and in a rush I ordered it at the end of 2012 and got it at the beginning of 2013. I used it just like the Sam and also installed Linux again (what else?). I was super happy except with the hardware 3D acceleration under Linux. There were problems when I played SuperTuxKart, which frustrated me. The problem was fixed in newer kernel versions but these were not yet available for the X1000. With the help of Markus, I was able to compile a new kernel that solved the problems. I then also released it. After the release of another kernel, Trevor asked me if I would like to join the A-EON Linux support team. And so fate took its course, with visits to trade fairs and many new contacts to other Amiga enthusiasts. A development I wouldn't want to miss and which I hadn't expected. Well, that's what happens when you look for a cable in the attic and rummage through the treasure chests. So think twice about looking in boxes of computer stuff in the basement or attic, because memories and dreams might be awakened. ;-)" (dr) [News message: 07. Dec. 2022, 06:18] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`06.Dec.2022`	Module player: NostalgicPlayer 1.9.0 for Windows NostalgicPlayer is a program for playing Amiga music modules under Windows, based on APlayer. The development of the player had been started by the author Thomas Neumann in 1993 on the Amiga, later continued on BeOS and now on Windows (amiga-news.de reported). Today, version 1.9.0 has been released, providing the following changes: Several players show 0 as volume in the Sample Information window instead of 256. The sub-song detection change in last version contained several bugs. The module could stop too early if you changed the position. When looping is on and the module loops, if you then stop the loop, the module ended the next time it changed its position. Also some modules timed out when the duration was calculated. All this should be fixed now. The Unreal Music File loader was broken by a change a couple of versions ago, so the modules could not be loaded. The piano visual did not show anything when opened while a module is playing. It only worked if already opened when a module starts. Fixed a critical bug in the Spinning Square visualizer. When stopping or switching modules, there was a potentical risk for memory leaks or even a crash. Added tooltips to the sample information window, so it is now possible to see what the different icons means. Updated Krypton.Toolkit and Krypton.Navigator to version 70.22.11.312. Updated libsidplayfp to version 2.4.0. Added these new module formats: Game Music Creator, Quadra Composer, Delta Music 1.0, Delta Music 2.0. An installation package can be found on Microsoft Store. (dr) [News message: 06. Dec. 2022, 20:54] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`06.Dec.2022`	AmigaOS 4.1: SDL 2.26.1 Release Candidate 1 At the end of October, Juha 'capehill' Niemimaki had published version 2.24.0 of the multimedia library SDL for AmigaOS 4.1 (amiga-news.de reported). The library is intended to make it easier for programmers to develop portable applications and is used by numerous open source games. SDL requires AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition and optionally OpenGL ES 2.0. Today he has published the first release candidate for version 2.26.1 inclusing the following Amiga specific changes: Compile with GCC 11.2 Fix shaped window alpha bitmap creation Enable virtual joysticks Add a workaround for game controller detection (AmigaOS 4 GUIDs are unfortunately broken) Add 2in1 game controller Update installer: delete old libSDL2.so soft links (dr) [News message: 06. Dec. 2022, 20:40] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`06.Dec.2022`	Programming language: Amiga C/C++ Visual Studio Code Extension 1.6.8 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 1.6.8 has been released. Changes: NEW: update gcc to 12.2.0, binutils, GNU gdb (GDB) 13.0.50.20221127-git FIX: WinUAE/FS-UAE: don't enable "Full stack frame tracking" (caused WinUAE to crash due to stack overflow in certain situations) NEW: assembly: View memory for symbols in assembly NEW: assembly: Support other Motorola assembly language providers FIX: assembly: Cycle count was missing on last line of source NEW: assembly: Cycle decoration improvements FIX: assembly: Async parsing CHG: disassembly: New CPU cycle count implementation with improved accuracy NEW: disassembly: Tooltip improvements NEW: debugger: Disassembled memory view NEW: debugger: Add symbol offset labels to registers (dr) [News message: 06. Dec. 2022, 20:31] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`06.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 6 - Matthias Böcker For St. Nicholas Day and the sixth door, Matthias 'UltraGelb' Böcker has something special for all MorphOS users: especially for our Advent calendar, he has written a wintry Screenblanker module. Already in the early days of amiga-news.de Matthias was also in the headlines with his ingenious FTP client AmiTradeCenter (ATC): On March 27th 2000 we reported about his first prerelease of ATC. He continued to develop the client until version 1.4 from 2010. As an industrious developer especially for MorphOS he has published over the years for example the fun program ShapeShow, the digital clock ClockToy or from more recent times and also for AmigaOS 3 and 4 the utility for automatic updating of version, revision and build numbers RevFlex or the magnifier tool Lupe. We say thank you for his commitment and of course for the nice surprise and hand over to Matthias: "This is my contribution to the amiga-news.de advent calendar. In keeping with the festive theme, it is a screenblanker module for MorphOS that sprinkles the active screen with snowflakes that accumulate on windows and at the bottom of the screen. Many thanks to the team of amiga-news.de for the good work! I wish all users a wonderful Advent season and a Merry Christmas! :-)" Download: Snow.lha (55KB) (dr) [News message: 06. Dec. 2022, 18:52] [Comments: 2 - 06. Dec. 2022, 20:12] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`06.Dec.2022`	SCSI-SD adapter: ZuluSCSI firmware 1.1.5 ZuluSCSI is a new generation of file-based SCSI hard disk and CD-ROM drive emulators. ZuluSCSI emulates a SCSI-I or SCSI-2 hard disk using an SD memory card (amiga-news.de reported). Version 1.1.3 of the firmware was released today. Changes since 1.1.3: Report proper termination on ZuluSCSI mini v1.0 Fix reporting time of firmware version Dont show ROM drive log messages when platform has none - for ZuluSCSI V1.x boards Add compressed file suffixes to exclusion list (dr) [News message: 06. Dec. 2022, 06:15] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`06.Dec.2022`	Floppy emulator: GoFloppy Andrew 'LinuxJedi' Hutchings had already reported about his new floppy emulator project "GoFloppy" on Twitter some time ago (Tweet 1, Tweet 2) and now also found the time to report about it in more detail on his blog: the "GoFloppy" drive is a floppy drive emulator, similar to "Gotek", in the form of a 3.5 inch floppy (short YouTube video), which uses the same FlashFloppy firmware. However, when reverse-engineering the Gotek drive, the developer made some changes: An SD card is used instead of a USB stick A jog dial to control the device A 1.3" OLED display Much simpler hardware configuration (slide switch for drive ID selector for example) There are many other internal differences too, but these do not affect users so much. On his website Retro Supplies, he offers the GoFloppys for around 70 Euros plus shipping, but they usually sell out quickly, as they do currently. If they are no longer in stock, you can sign up for the list on the product page so that you will be notified as soon as new ones are available. (dr) [News message: 06. Dec. 2022, 06:12] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

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