amiga-news.de - Archive

Archive 12/2021

22.Dec.2021
G. Bernhardt (ANF) WinUAE 4.90: German translation file by BlackByte
On his WinUAE mirror Webwood.de Gunnar 'gunaTM' Bernhardt released a german translation file by BlackByte updated for version 4.90 of the emulator. The file has to be copied into the WinUAE drawer. Then german language can be selected under "Host/Misc". (snx)

[News message: 22. Dec. 2021, 20:10] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2021
Amiga Future (website) Game: Second level for "Project - Quest"
The fantasy shooter "Project - Quest" is still in development (amiga-news.de reported). Now at the title link a second level has been released (video). (snx)

[News message: 22. Dec. 2021, 20:03] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2021
Scene World Podcast (ANF) Scene World Podcast Episode #130 - THEA500 Mini
In episode 130 of their Scene World Podcast, Jörg Dröge and Arthur Heller talk with Darren Melbourne and Chris Smith of Retro Games about their down-scaled Amiga replica THEA500 Mini. Interview starts at 5:55 minutes. (snx)

[News message: 22. Dec. 2021, 09:43] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2021 WinUAE 4.9.0: Setting up the Voodoo3 RTG emulation for AmigaOS 4.1, part 1
At the beginning of March we reported for the first time that for the Amiga emulator WinUAE the emulation of the Voodoo3 graphics card is in development. This was then already made available in the beta versions.

With the release of the official version 4.9.0 the other day, this emulation is now officially introduced. So far I had defined a Zorro III board with uaegfx for the emulation of AmigaOS 4.1. Now I wanted to find out, also driven by a request in the forum, how the Voodoo3 emulation can succeed and whether it brings advantages for working with AmigaOS 4.1. With the friendly support of WinUAE developer Toni Wilen - thank you very much - and a little bit of my own investigative spirit, this task was basically mastered. However, I would like to emphasise that I am not a WinUAE expert, so comments and possible suggestions for improvement are very welcome for the benefit of all.

First of all the 'PCI bridgeboard' must be configured. For the Voodoo3 emulation, a Mediator, Prometheus or G-REX board can be used. The special thing about AmigaOS 4 is that all the necessary drivers are already included in the operating system. In contrast to the use for the AmigaOS 3 emulation, where among other things the BIOS ROM of the Voodoo 3 board must be added as a file. The same is true of the RTG driver Picasso96, now trading as P96.
'PCI bridgeboard' can be found under 'Expansions':

As is so often the case, you should also pay attention to the trivial things and check the 'Enabled' box. Otherwise, you can save your configuration as often as you like: the setting will be lost.
Then you can select the Voodoo 3 graphics card under 'RTG board':

If all this has worked, you should see the following under 'Hardware info', as Toni Wilen wrote: "It should list 2 Mediator boards, 'parent' and 'child' board with Voodoo 3 under the 'child'": board. :

That was it and it can be booted. I am omitting a screenshot of the Workbench that now appears: The resolution cannot look good because nothing has been defined yet. For the definition of the monitor type under Devs/Monitors I copied my uaegfx monitor and changed the name and the tooltype accordingly:

That was still easy. Now one or more screen resolutions have to be defined under Prefs/Picasso96Mode. I have never had anything to do with Picasso96 before - I would not call it intuitive after my current experience. I cheerfully click on the upper left icon, under which 'New Item' appears. Yes, but nothing happens. Only with the help of a YouTube video, in which the person fittingly failed to get it to work correctly, did I learn that you have to hold down the left mouse button and then drag the icon into the first window:

Then go to the menu 'Attach setting to' and select the Voodoo3 board.

And for each subsequent window, drag the 'New Item' icon from the top into the same window and adjust the resolution to your own monitor. Once everything has worked, you should find the new screen mode under Prefs/ScreenMode:

In a second article we will look at what added value this has brought us compared to the previous configuration. (dr)

[News message: 22. Dec. 2021, 06:53] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2021
Amigatronics

Retro gaming: WHDLoad 18.7
Using WHDLoad, you can install games, scene demos and intros from cracking groups to your harddisk that were only working from floppy disks previously. Version 18.7 provides the following changes:

new: if a kickstart is requested by the Slave (ws_kickname) WHDLoad provides the current default keymap as a virtual file called 'WHDLoad.keymap' kickemu kick13.s and kick31.s got a new option called SETKEYBOARD which loads and activates the 'WHDLoad.keymap'
fix: avoid a possible crash if no kickstart image could be found
chg: the check for a read-only filesystem to ignore write operations now checks the first data directory instead the current directory of WHDLoad
new: sources/whdload/lowlevel.s has been added to be used with kickemu, it is based on the OS3.1 lowlevel.library and provides a way to avoid the disk based library and save some memory, the kickemu option INIT_LOWLEVEL uses it now instead loading the disk based library
fix: corrected the key repeat fix in kick31.s
chg: resload_ListFiles no longer requires a switch to the OS if Preload was able to cache all files by using the file cache to fill the buffer with filenames
new: support for virtual filesystem plugins (VFS) added, if one of the Data/K objects specified is not a directory but a file WHDLoad will attempt to load PROGDIR:WHDLoad.VFS and uses this interface to load data for such data objects, the VFS-ABI/API is described in "include/whdvfs.i", a VFS implementation which currently supports lha and zip-archives can be obtained from http://github.com/temisu/WHDLoadArchiveFS Thanks a lot to Teemu Suutari for his great work! VFS objects are always read-only for WHDLoad, so either use SavePath/K or a first data directory which isn't VFS to allow WHDLoad to save something
fix: cursor down in the CLI usage message is working again in the standard AmigaShell (issue #5146)
chg: DIC 1.2: if a track has a read error and option Skip is active and the device is controlled by trackdisk.devices, DIC switches to sector reads now to be able to read more good data in case not all sectors on this track are unreadable
chg: WHDLoad now returns with an error code = 5 if the Preload operation has been canceled by pressing the Esc key while the splash window is open (issue #5171)
chg: a new option NoWriteInfo/N has been added as local and global option, if set WHDLoad will not update/write any .info files (issue #5153)
chg: WHDLoad now resets custom.serper on exit to stop a possible MIDI/MT32 playback via the serial line (JOTD)
new: option WriteCache/S added to overwrite global option NoWriteCache/S (issue #5263)
new: WHDLoad is now able to cache also write operations to new created files or existing files which grow in size. For that the option PreLoad must be active and there must be enough memory available to preload all files. WHDLoad will then allocate the largest free memory block remaining and use this memory to dynamically cache new files or growing existing files. The cached files are written to disk on WHDLoad exit.
new: kick31.asm can be enabled to activate internal resident command WHDCtrl which supports to quit WHDLoad ATM

(dr)

[News message: 22. Dec. 2021, 05:15] [Comments: 0]
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21.Dec.2021

Hyperion Entertainment released AmigaOS 3.2.1
Press release: Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is proud to provide the first free update of AmigaOS 3.2. It demonstrates our dedication to ensure that AmigaOS 3.2 is the most capable and most stable operating system ever for the 68K based Amigas. If you have do not already own a copy of AmigaOS 3.2, there is now even more reason to get one from your favourite dealer!

AmigaOS 3.2.1 fixes several bugs and additionally comes with new features. The team of developers and testers have worked ever since the release of AmigaOS 3.2 fixing bugs and implementing new features. They have read social platforms for user anecdotes, videos and reviews, and are excited by the positive reception and feedback.

The AmigaOS 3.2.1 update is available now!

While no new ROM images are provided, we do not suggest that you go buy new ROMs. If you are already using some kind of MapROM solution or if you or a friend have an EPROM burner, then go ahead. But it is possible that more ROM changes be rolled out in AmigaOS 3.2.2 so for everyone else we suggest that you use the file-based updating instead.

Here are the highlights of the new features and fixes of AmigaOS 3.2.1:

Fixes to almost every single gadget and image class
Fix to clipboard.device that since AmigaOS 3.1.4 would not handle clips above 16KB in some cases
Important fix to locale.library that would convert signed values to unsigned
New IconEdit with support for colorful icons (like the “GlowIcons”)
TextEdit has gained an ARexx port per open document
ShowConfig had its GUI reworked, and can now make reports in AmigaGuide format
The RAM disk linking feature have been changed a bit so it seems more like AmigaOS 3.1.4 while still being copy on read as in AmigaOS 3.2
Dropping files on console will now activate the console window
The screen will no longer remain black if you start up without any attached drive
Eject menu item in Workbench;

(dr)

[News message: 21. Dec. 2021, 22:02] [Comments: 0]
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21.Dec.2021

Arcade-Adventure: "PETSCII Robots" erhältlich
"PETSCII Robots" by well-known Texan Youtuber 8 Bit Guy is an arcade adventure originally developed for the Commodore PET, whose in-game "graphics" consisted entirely of PETSCII characters (video). The Amiga version (video) developed by Vesa Halttunen and announced about a month ago has been completed in the meantime and can be ordered from the Youtuber's web shop.

On offer are a download-only version for $10 and three different physical editions for $20, $35 and $45. The latter are currently in production and should be ready to ship by "late January, early February". (cg)

[News message: 21. Dec. 2021, 16:44] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2021
George Sokianos (ko-fi) AmigaOS 4: Port of editor 'Lite XL' announced
George Sokianos, author of the AmigaOS 4.1 application MediaVault, has announced that he has started porting the editor Lite XL, which originated in the Linux world. About his motivation and the current development status he wrote the following:

"Recently I started creating a couple of plugins for CubicIDE, trying to make it work the best way for my needs. Although CubicIDE is a 68k application it is working quite well on AmigaOS 4 and it is really fast. But it has some quirks here and there, like, for example, there is no way to show the space characters, and for projects like python sometimes this is crucial. But currently, CubicIDE is my beloved editor for development.

I also started working on porting another editor from the Linux world, called Lite XL. This one is based on lite, which as its name implies, it's a very simple small editor, but it is not maintained anymore. The reason, based on its developer, is that it has all the features he wanted, and it is finished. To be honest I rarely hear about a project being finished. Abandoned yes, but finished?

Lite XL development is quite active, getting more and more features on every release. This editor is based on Lua, SDL and plain C, except for a couple of libraries it uses which are in C++. Which makes it an interesting project to work with. It is quite fast and light and has a lot of the features most people are looking from an editor in modern computing. And for me, it gives me a good opportunity to work with technologies that I didn't have the chance to use before.

Currently, the version I am working on is 1.16, and the reason is that since v2 new libraries were introduced, that are not available on AmigaOS 4. So, before I start working with these libraries, I wanted to know if I am able to port an older version and make it work. If I will not succeed, there is no reason for me to try the newer versions.

I am also developing it in a way that the minimum amount of changes are done in the code, by introducing platform-specific files, where all the necessary methods are going to be stored, like those that have to do with paths and filesystem.

As you read these lines, I have Lite XL running on AmigaOS 4.1 FE. It can load files and save them. The scrolling is quite fast on my X5000 even for big text files, and I want to test it on another system. I am curious how it will work on my μAmigaOne.

But, unfortunately, there are other things that are not working yet, like the keyboard shortcuts. And this is what I need to do the following days.

As soon as this is finished, the code and all the changes will be available on one of my Git repositories, for everyone to have access to, and a release will be done. I hope that this won't take long." (dr)

[News message: 20. Dec. 2021, 18:37] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2021
Zoltan Balaton

Emulator: QEMU 6.2.0 released
A week ago version 6.2.0 of the emulator QEMU was released. We had described at the beginning of May in an excursion to the use of Amiga operating systems on non-native hardware how to use the operating system MorphOS under QEMU. With the release of the latest QEMU version, bugs in the USB emulation have now been fixed and some minor improvements in Pegasos2 support have been integrated:

Suppress warning when qtest enabled
Implement power-off RTAS function with VOF
Add constants for PCI config addresses
Access MV64361 registers via their memory
Implement get-time-of-day RTAS function
Warn when using VOF but no kernel is
Restrict memory to 2 gigabytes

(dr)

[News message: 20. Dec. 2021, 18:14] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2021
Rob Smith Tutorial: Porting a X-Mas game from HTML5 to AMOS, part 3
Rob Smith, known for his project DrawBridge for reading Amiga floppy disks using a standard PC floppy drive, has now released the third part of his YouTube tutorial showing how he ported the Christmas game 'Present Drop' from HTML5 to AMOS (amiga-news.de reported). In this episode he does focus on hardware sprites and collision detection. (dr)

[News message: 20. Dec. 2021, 07:02] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2021
Twitter (ANF) Amigaworld.de: Amiga 500 Clockport Adapter V3
On Amigaworld.de the Amiga 500 Clockport Adapter V3 was published under the title link. While the adapter V1 provides a total of 2 buffered clock ports and the more compact Amiga 500 Clockport Adapter V2 offers exactly 1 buffered clock port, there is now for the side expansion port in the Amiga 500 and the front expansion port in the GBA A1000 also the Amiga 500 Clockport Adapter V3 with a total of 2 buffered clock ports. (dr)

[News message: 20. Dec. 2021, 06:56] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2021
Jochen Hoffer (ANF) Puzzle game: Crazy Columns 1.05
Jochen Hoffer has released version 1.05 of his conversion of the Sega classic 'Columns' (video) as a small Christmas present (amiga-news.de reported). The game mode "Bad Buddy" has been revised, in which you have to compete against each other. The first to win a total of 9 rounds is the winner. Likewise, the instructions for the game have been expanded to include the game modes. (dr)

[News message: 20. Dec. 2021, 06:46] [Comments: 0]
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