amiga-news DEUTSCHE VERSION
.
Links| Forums| Comments| Report news
.
Chat| Polls| Newsticker| Archive
.


.
 Per page 
Show titles only
Category
.


Archive 04/2025


08.Apr.2025



Source code editor: Hollywood 10 support for Visual Studio Code 10.0.2
For Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (Windows, Mac OS, Linux), "hw4vsc" is an extension that enables the development of Hollywood programmes with the free source code editor (amiga-news.de reported). The developer Micha J. has adapted his extension for the latest Hollywood 10 version and has just released hw4vsc v10.0.2.

Although the version number was only increased on the patch level, this is a massive release. It adds improved intellisense/code completion with proper code completion and quick info for all inbuilt Hollywood 10 functions, preprocessor commands and including constants (no quick info/help here, unfortunately). The README.md shows an example of intellisense in action.

The author asks you to use the Github bug tracker in case of problems. (nba)

[News message: 08. Apr. 2025, 15:49] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
07.Apr.2025



Mining strategy game: The history of "Aminer"
"Last Minute Creations", a Polish group of Amiga game developers (e.g. GermZ or Chaos Arena), spent more than six years working on their mining strategy game "Aminer": set in the Soviet era, the aim is to fulfil the planned economic extraction plans and mine precious metals such as silver for the Ministry of Mining and Fossil Fuels:


"Last Minute Creations" consists of 'KaiN', who writes the code, 'Luc3k', who is responsible for the music and 'Softiron', who is responsible for all graphic tasks. We asked the coder 'KaiN' how the idea for the project came about and why Aminer, which was presented at the Polish retro party RAM#3 last weekend, took so long to develop:

"We started the project approximately a month before the RetroKomp 2018 party, for the game compo. We were working on OpenFire at that time, but I thought that it'd be cool to show something new at the party, so I've quickly came up with a game I wanted to tackle for some time now.

At this point it was a silly little game where you just dig through the ground without any objective and collect the resources, and also had a challenge mode where the camera goes at the constant speed towards the finish line and you must collect the resources to get the high score.

The idea behind the game was that I really liked the Motherload game from the Flash games era, and I wanted to do a semi-infinite Y scroll on Amiga hardware, so it was mostly a tech demo wrapped together as a RK18 game compo entry - it scored 2nd place and you can see on Pouet.net that it looked a bit differently back then.

Still, the audio was very buggy, because it was my groups first entry to even have audio code at all - we used my own ACE library, which I'm developing for 11 years now and those 6.5 years ago it lacked some serious features - it's now a lot more better since it got all the features needed to create the Aminer.

The game is written entirely in C, with one small part written in C++ for convenience, using the ACE library as I've mentioned. 'Softiron' uses Pro Motion NG for his pixels. For audio of the game compo version, I used sfxr to have some basics blips and blops. After all those years the pickup sound is still from the original version.

At this point we even didn't have an audio guy in our roster, but then we found Lucek on the Polish forums, and he did an amazing job of creating the matching soundtrack for the game. He also did the remaining audio stuff.
One of the main challenges was to determine what do we want to do with this game - we basically had no idea. After we did the demo for compo, 'Softiron' wasn't too happy with the state of the game and wanted to expand it a bit more. We've brainstormed a bit, I came with a little bit of ideas - mostly mimicking the Motherload game, so vehicle part upgrades, underground bases for convenience and that's about it. 'Softiron' on the other hand took that thing to the next level by inventing the whole soviet setting and adding a lot of side mechanics not really related with the digging itself - it's funny because you can finish the whole game without digging too much.

The other challenge was to stay on target and that's mostly because of me. During the pandemic, I thought it'd be nice to release another game to the Revision game compo, so we've started working on GermZ. We've missed the deadline, it then took us a whole lot of time to make this game enjoyable. We've also released two other games for game compos in the meantime: Atarenium Falkon (with code by 'Lucek!') and Chaos Arena, both released in Decrunch party game compos. As you can see we just can't leave a compo without an entry.

Another challenge was to settle on final features. 'Softiron' had lots of ideas for this game, including adding a way to go to moon and dig there, and we had to cut many of them to release the game at foreseeable time. We've also had the hard time with balancing the gameplay due to a lot of different allowed playstyles, mechanics and lots of content. It also became not so simple game, so it no longer would be enjoyed by younger or less demanding audiences. I've mitigated that by adding a Sandbox mode in final weeks, which resembles the free digging mode from the compo version with some basic limited move count mechanics. The most difficult thing for me personally was to get the mood right. Since the game is set in the soviet era in not-so-fictional country, and touches on totalitarian regimes of the past, I hope the game won't be viewed as making those things "cool", because they really aren't. And we shouldn't forget about this, especially now that one of them is coming back from hiatus.

Besides all these explanations, why did it ultimately take so long? Well, we did:
  • 3 kilometers of the underground mine to explore
  • 8 NPCs
  • 7 distinct endings
  • 3 underground bases with base building mechanics
  • 18 achievements
  • 3 game modes and a co-op variant of each mode
  • 2 language versions
  • more than 20 minutes of soundtrack
  • definitely no secrets
  • all that crammed into a single floppy disk, if you want to torture yourself with loading times
If you want to take on the task and dig through the earth, you need an OCS Amiga with 1MB chip RAM and 1MB other RAM. The source code is available on GitHub. (dr)

[News message: 07. Apr. 2025, 10:09] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
07.Apr.2025



HxC Floppy emulator: Software V2.16.13.1
The floppy emulator HxC by Jean-Francois Del Nero completely replaces the floppy drive (of an Amiga) with an electronic device. The project, which was launched in 2006, is available in two versions, with a SD card port or with USB port (amiga-news.de reported).

A new version of the HxC floppy emulator software has now been released. The changes:
  • Mame MFI writer : Fix memory allocation error/crashes.
  • Kryoflux writer : The default sample frequency can be changed with the KFRAWEXPORT_SAMPLE_FREQUENCY variable. (patch by uru2)
  • Kryoflux Stream Loader : Support different sample rate setting from the KFInfo string.
(dr)

[News message: 07. Apr. 2025, 07:33] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
07.Apr.2025



Point'n Click adventure: Demo version of Soltys released
Pawel 'tukinem' Tukatsch has released a short demo version of the point'n click adventure game "Soltys" (video), which was originally developed by the Polish studio LK Avalon and released for MS-DOS in 1995 (Wikipedia).

However, as the author emphasises, his game is not a port, but a completely rewritten version of the original game. In addition to Polish subtitles, there are also English, German, Spanish and Italian subtitles. An Amiga computer with AGA chipset, at least 1 MB Fast RAM and harddisk are required. (dr)

[News message: 07. Apr. 2025, 07:30] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
07.Apr.2025



Arcade action: New demo version V0.98 of Ghosts'n'Goblins
At the end of 2024 'Skyzoo73' released a handsome practice study to show how Ghosts 'n Goblins can be ported to the Amiga using the Scorpion Engine (amiga-news.de reported). The now updated demo version offers a lot of corrections and optimisations and requires an AGA Amiga with Fast RAM and CD32 joypad (or similar). (dr)

[News message: 07. Apr. 2025, 05:57] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025



Aminet uploads until 05.04.2025
The following files have been added until 05.04.2025 to Aminet:
Codecraft.adf                  dev/misc   880K  OS3 Integrated Development ...       
MCE-OS4.lha                    game/edit  4.8M  OS4 Multi-game Character Ed...              
MCE.lha                        game/edit  4.2M  OS3 Multi-game Character Ed...              
Galactica.lha                  game/wb     24K  OS3 Port of strategical Lin...  
BackdPattGener.lha             gfx/edit    67K  OS3 Create your own backdro... 
PolarPaint_68k.lha             gfx/edit   2.0M  OS3 Paint program made with...        
PolarPaint_AROS.lha            gfx/edit   2.2M  ARO Paint program made with...        
PolarPaint_MOS.lha             gfx/edit   2.2M  MOS Paint program made with...        
PolarPaint_OS4.lha             gfx/edit   2.5M  OS4 Paint program made with...        
PolarPaint_WOS.lha             gfx/edit   2.3M  WUP Paint program made with...        
AmiArcadia-OS4.lha             misc/emu    11M  OS4 Signetics-based machine...        
AmiArcadia.lha                 misc/emu    10M  OS3 Signetics-based machine...        
AmiVms.lha                     misc/emu   3.8M  OS3 Simulates OpenVMS comma...               
hippoplayerupdate.lha          mus/play   414K  OS3 Updated HippoPlayer                      
AvalancheSPA.lha               util/arc     2K  GEN Spanish catalog for Ava...        
fix1980.lha                    util/arc     1K  GEN Fix an lha with timesta...       
IconLib_46.4.lha               util/libs  2.1M  OS3 free icon.library in op...  
AmigaGPT.lha                   util/misc  2.2M  VAR App for chatting to Cha...              
IgameSPA.lha                   util/misc    2K  GEN Front-end for WHDLoad                    
ReportPlus-OS4.lha             util/misc  881K  OS4 Multipurpose utility                     
ReportPlus.lha                 util/misc  699K  OS3 Multipurpose utility                     
ReportPlusMOS.lha              util/misc  775K  MOS Multipurpose utility                     
GoVD.lha                       util/wb     31K  OS3 Virtual Desktops for Wo...           
(snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:21] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025



OS4Depot uploads until 05.04.2025
The following files have been added until 05.04.2025 to OS4Depot:
arabic_console_device... dri/inp 3Mb   4.1 An arabic console device, line &...
amiarcadia.lha           emu/gam 11Mb  4.0 Signetics-based machines emulator
losmalditos.lha          gam/adv 22Mb  4.0 Adventure point and click R.P.G.
mce.lha                  gam/uti 5Mb   4.0 Multi-game Character Editor
polarpaint.lha           gra/edi 2Mb   4.1 Paint program made with Hollywood
image.lha                gra/vie 2Mb   4.0 Fast image viewer with simple fu...
amigagpt.lha             net/cha 2Mb   4.1 App for chatting to ChatGPT
wormhole.lha             net/mis 2Mb   4.1 Network file transfer utility
reportplus.lha           uti/mis 881kb 4.0 Multipurpose utility
(snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:21] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025



AROS Archives uploads until 05.04.2025
The following files have been added until 05.04.2025 to AROS Archives:
losmalditos.lha              gam/adv 22Mb  Adventure point and click R.P.G.
polarpaint_aros.lha          gra/edi 2Mb   Paint program made with Hollywood
flx_play.x86_64-aros-v11.... vid/pla 74kb  Simple FLI/FLC/FLX Animation Player
(snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:21] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025



MorphOS-Storage uploads until 05.04.2025
The following files have been added until 05.04.2025 to MorphOS-Storage:
LosMalditos_1.10.lha      Games/Adventure           Adventure point and cli...
PolarPaint_1.0.lha        Graphics/Draw             Paint program made with...
BouncingBall_1.0.lha      Misc                      Port of BouncingBall (S...
AmigaGPT_2.4.0.lha        Misc                      App for chatting to Cha...
(snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:21] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025



WHDLoad: New installers until 05.04.2025
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 05.04.2025:
  • 2025-04-05 improved: Uridium 2 (Graftgold) high scores are saved to a separate file (Info)
  • 2025-04-02 improved: North & South (Infogrames) 2nd button/joypad support fixed, more icons, new install script (Info)
(snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:20] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025
Amiga Future (website)


Crowdfunding: Psygnosis - Games People Play (Volume 1)
Following the book "Demoscene: The Amiga Renaissance", Éditions64K is now planning a two-volume publication on the history of the games company Psygnosis (e.g. Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast).

The first volume covers the years 1980 to 1993, i.e. the period from the company's foundation to its takeover by Sony. The second volume, which is due to be published next year, will be dedicated to the PlayStation era up to the end of the games publisher in 2012.

In contrast to the previous campaign, the book is almost finished and will be ready for printing by the end of the crowdfunding period on May 11. Shipping should begin around June 15. (snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:20] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
06.Apr.2025
Amiga Future (website)


Java program: ham_convert 1.11.0
Sebastian Sieczko's Java-based program ham_convert converts modern graphic formats into the HAM format of the Amiga and is now available in version 1.11.0.

New features include an MSX2+ screen 10 conversion, an improved MSX2+ screen 12 conversion, an MSX Basic image file export and bug fixes. Mode 10 allows 12,499 simultaneously displayable colors, mode 12 even 19,268. (snx)

[News message: 06. Apr. 2025, 08:20] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
<- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ->

.
Masthead | Privacy policy | Netiquette | Advertising | Contact
Copyright © 1998-2026 by amiga-news.de - all rights reserved.
.