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:
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 1600*1024).
- 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:
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]
|
| |
| Recent Discussions |
 |
|
|
|
| Latest Top-News |
|
|
|
|
| amiga-news.de |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
