25.Nov.2023
tuxcam@yahoo.it (ANF)
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PDF magazine: REV'n'GE 152 (Italian/English)
PDF magazine REV'n'GE ("Retro Emulator Vision and Game") is available in English and Italian editions. REV'n'GE tries to compare ports of old Games to various classic platforms or review lesser known titles from the homecomputer era. The current issues contains reviews of the motorcycle racing game 'Red Zone' and the recently released Amiga port of the old DOS game "Star Wars:Dark Forces". (cg)
[News message: 25. Nov. 2023, 23:45] [Comments: 0]
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25.Nov.2023
Andreas Magerl (ANF)
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Print magazine: Amiga Future issue 140 available online
The German and English editions of Amiga Future's issue 140 (September/October 2019) are freely available on the Magazine's webpage now. A few printed copies as well as high resolution PDF copies can be purchased from the publisher. (cg)
[News message: 25. Nov. 2023, 23:37] [Comments: 0]
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25.Nov.2023
Darkage Software (ANF)
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Illustrated text adventure: C64 the Mysterious Cassette
"C64 - The Mysterious Cassette - La Cassetta del Mistero" is an illustrated text adventure for AGA Amigas, featuring English and Italian translations. The game was programmed by Colin Vella, with graphics and project management by Paolo D'Urso and music by Allister Brimble. it is based on an Italian novel written by Carlo Pastore.
'C64 the Mysterious Cassette' is available in digital (9,99 Euro) or physical (29,99 Euro) editions. The latter features an USB stick containing the game as well as a DINA3 sized poster.
Note from staff: The publisher's website does not feature any screenshots or videos of the game, a demo version is not available either. Thanks to Jürgen 'Evillord68' Weiß for kindly providing the screenshots for this news item. (cg)
[News message: 25. Nov. 2023, 23:34] [Comments: 0]
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25.Nov.2023
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AROS: Irritating bug of the month November
Around a month ago, AROS developer Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz launched a new initiative including a survey: every month, a bug can be selected from a list of bugs that bother the community and have been reported in the bug tracker, which he then fixes. For the month of November, a bug that did not occur 14 years ago was fixed with 40% of the votes: Wanderer can now run CLI programmes with an argument again, so that it behaves like OS3.9. He has released an updated workbench.library V45.4 for this purpose. (dr)
[News message: 25. Nov. 2023, 08:04] [Comments: 0]
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24.Nov.2023
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Video: A look back at the cracker scene of the 80s
In a video, the YouTube channel "Modern Vintage Gamer" takes a look back at its own history of software piracy in the 1980s, in particular at the time of X-Copy Pro and Amiga. (dr)
[News message: 24. Nov. 2023, 06:20] [Comments: 0]
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24.Nov.2023
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Floppy disk images on PC and Mac: Greaseweazle Tools 1.16.2
Keir Fraser's "Greaseweazle" does - similar to Kryoflux - read the magnetic information on a floppy disk independently from the format used and saves as much information as possible to generate a so-called "Flux Level Image" in Supercard format (SCP), which enables reading and back-writing of copy-protected disks (amiga-news.de reported)
The adapter gets connected between a floppy disk drive - e.g. a standard 3.5" PC one - and a USB port of the PC or Mac. Version 1.16.2 of the Greaseweazle Tools provide the following changes:
- DCP, DIM: Fix image import
- Flux: Emit one revolution of flux where possible, rather than two
(dr)
[News message: 24. Nov. 2023, 06:10] [Comments: 0]
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23.Nov.2023
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Amiga Kit: A600GS Wiki updated
In addition to the launch of a dedicated, albeit currently still empty, A600GS website for the planned games console, which will be available in the first quarter of 2024, the Wiki under the title link has also been updated. According to this, there will be two versions available: "A600GS" will be equipped with 2GB system memory and 64 GB total memory and the "A600GS+" with 4GB system memory and 128 GB total memory. The official joypad will be standard equipment, while the mouse will only be supplied with the A600GS+ or as an additional purchase. This will be required for the standard applications such as Personal Paint (PPaint) and OctaMED. Furthermore, Amibench V46 and Directory Opus 4 GPL are included in the software package. Three screenshots of the Amibench user interface are now also available, showing which icons are used.
As Matthew Leaman from AmigaKit Ltd. informs us, an agreement has also been concluded with Markus "Captain" Kaarlonen. The A600GS contains his original Amiga music tracks "Space Debris" and "Beyond Music" as well as their newer MP3 remasters and remixes. (dr)
[News message: 23. Nov. 2023, 21:23] [Comments: 0]
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23.Nov.2023
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Video: The best original Rogue game
The Amiga user 'intric8' has published a detailed video for the Amiga website 'AmigaLove' and its YouTube channel under the title link as well as a detailed article about what he considers to be the best implementation of a Rogue game from the 80s: the Amiga implementation. He also discusses other variants and releases. (dr)
[News message: 23. Nov. 2023, 09:14] [Comments: 0]
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23.Nov.2023
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Developer log: Platform game "Robot Jet Action"
Ten days ago we reported about Tomasz 'Carrion' Mielnik's start to port his platformer "Robot Jet Action" for the Amiga. Now he has published a first developer update (YouTube video) and describes the progress as follows:
- Working on the first tileset for the first world of the game. What you see on the video is going to be one of the world’s graphics. Still a lot things to do, but at least the idea is here.
- Reimplemented the fuel gauge on the bottom panel. It’s more accurate and animates smoother… and it looks cooler
- Implemented my own fonts routine. I did that mainly to not use any workbench libraries of Amiga system.
- Also implemented my hex to decimal conversion routine that is used to show score and (later) also lifes left
- First initial Implementation of up-down scroll. It needs some tuning but it works.
- The copper colors in the background started to look like some parallax effect which, most likely I will keep in the game in this form
- sprites collisions implemented but turned off as for now
- collisions for collecting diamonds needs tuning as they are not accurate in all cases.
- For the copper colors I’ve implemented set of scripts to convert them from png files. This way I can simply draw them in gfx program and convert to Amiga OCS compliant copper colors. I needed this as there will be a lot of copper colors needed for levels.
- I also have set of scripts that convert tilemaps that I create in Tiled to my own format that I use in the game.
- Some code optimization was done because the game started to slow down on Amiga 500 configs
- some concept works on the overall gfx and design, like for example some experiments with the panel at the bottom
- Regarding the gfx, I usually work iteratively on it so please keep in mind that gfx is going to evolve during the development.
(dr)
[News message: 23. Nov. 2023, 06:39] [Comments: 0]
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22.Nov.2023
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SCSI-SD adapter: ZuluSCSI firmware v2023.11.27 (update)
ZuluSCSI is a new generation of file-based SCSI hard disk and CD-ROM drive emulators (review of an user). ZuluSCSI emulates a SCSI-I or SCSI-2 hard disk using an SD memory card (amiga-news.de reported). The Firmware release v2023.11.22, originally described in this article, has been rescinded by the author. He has released v2023.11.27 instead:
- Restore implicit device settings
- Fix device type being ignored in zuluscsi.ini
(dr)
[News message: 22. Nov. 2023, 21:44] [Comments: 0]
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22.Nov.2023
Vitno
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Emerald Web: Emerald Caves offers 64 new levels
The "Emerald Web" has set itself the goal of offering as many variants and level sets of the legendary arcade puzzlers Emerald Mine and Boulder Dash/Rockford as possible for download (amiga-news.de reported). The "Emerald Caves" now released for both OCS and AGA Amigas (YouTube video) offers 64 new levels. (dr)
[News message: 22. Nov. 2023, 07:07] [Comments: 0]
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22.Nov.2023
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Preview video: Platform game "Deathmine" (v0.03C)
In the middle of last year, we reported on an early version of the game "Deathmine" as an entry for the Amiga Blitz Basic Jam. At the end of October, the developer 'pixelplop' had converted the game into C/C++ code and has now published a new preview video, showing some new features like animated torch flames, toxic rain drops, glow worms and Morlocks. (dr)
[News message: 22. Nov. 2023, 06:51] [Comments: 0]
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22.Nov.2023
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Preview video: Shadow Dancer
Mohammed Malik is about to implement one of his favourite games on the Amiga with the Scorpion Engine: Sega's Shadow Dancer. He has now published another preview video. The game is to run on an A500, and a project page has also been set up on GitHub. (dr)
[News message: 22. Nov. 2023, 06:44] [Comments: 0]
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21.Nov.2023
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Turn-based strategy game: Developer version for "Settle the World"
As Christian 'TheoTheoderich' Wiegel writes, from now on the latest development version of "Settle the World" can be downloaded from the project page. The author asks that these versions not be used for public reviews or similar, as they are often poorly tested and contain features that have not yet been fully implemented. However, as updates for the stable branch of the game can only be released at longer intervals, the author hopes to receive feedback for planned or already partially implemented features by testing the developer versions. (dr)
[News message: 21. Nov. 2023, 06:40] [Comments: 0]
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20.Nov.2023
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Image Gallery: Update of the "Amiga Graphics Archive"
The latest update of the "Amiga Graphics Archive" adds a series of images from the 1988 air racing game Gee Bee Air Rally, whose graphics were created by Mike Nowak. (dr)
[News message: 20. Nov. 2023, 20:36] [Comments: 0]
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20.Nov.2023
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CLI command: sysvars V0.11
The sysvars command creates environment variables with system information in order to make it dependent on these, for example, in the startup sequence, which patches are included. So far there is information on the CPU and FPU, the chipset, the vertical frame rate (PAL/NTSC), Kickstart version and revision, version and revision of bsdsocket.library as well as whether the emulator UAE is used - and if so, in which version.
Die Version 0.11 provides the following changes:
- Added the tiny tool KSGE36 to the distribution
- Stands for KickStart greater or equal 36
- Tests if the current OS is at least version 36 (i.e., OS 2.0)
- Used in the test script to decide if an ENV: assign is necessary (which is for OS below 2.0) and commands have to be made resident (see below)
- It is more or less equivalent to calling Version 36 from Workbench, with the difference that it can be freely distributed (unlike the Version command) and also works below OS 1.3
- Improved the speed of the test script in OS1.2 and OS1.3 by putting the ECHO, IF, ELSE, and ENDIF commands into RAM (via resident if in shell)
- The test (in test/echo-test) can be run from workbench or deployed on a bootable floppy for real Amigas. The script CreateTestDisk can be called with a device name (e.g., df1:) to create such a disk
- Fix for AROS (here, SetVar cannot access the bsdsocket.library id string)
- Code builds with most ASM-One flavors again.
- Added version information so you can call Version sysvars
- Code/comment cleanup
Direct ownload: sysvars.lha (16 KB) (dr)
[News message: 20. Nov. 2023, 06:27] [Comments: 0]
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19.Nov.2023
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Web browser: IBrowse 3.0
Press release: IBrowse 3 has arrived. It's finally time to move on from IBrowse 2, which has been developed for over 20 years! IBrowse 3 makes available the previously unreleased features that were originally being worked on alongside IBrowse 2.4 (on a completely separate development branch), whilst retaining everything from IBrowse 2.5.9 and all the new developments since its release. The IBrowse 2 and 3 development branches are now fully merged, which was a complex and time-consuming task, due to considerable divergence. The process was completed methodically and carefully, in order to not compromise stability or lose any functionality. Development can now move forward without being restricted to the limitations of the IBrowse 2 framework, allowing for more substantial changes.
See the new What's new? and "History Log for full details of all the changes, but a brief summary follows:
- IBrowse 2 and IBrowse 3 Unification
- New Reimagined HTML Parser
- Improved HTML Engine
- The HTML engine has been improved with numerous layout and rendering enhancements, including tables, lists and superscript + subscript text.
- Hotlist Multi-aliasing
- Early Data / Zero Round Trip Time Resumption (0-RTT)
- Better GIF Animation Playback
- AmigaOS 3.2 Context Sensitive Mouse Pointers
- NList GUI Consistency
- Improved Preferences Window
- Decompression and Image Decoding Libraries Upgraded
- Space Saving Improve Efficiency
We hope you enjoy the new version and we look forward to adding new features and improving the HTML engine much further over the coming months.
IBrowse 3 is a free upgrade for those who registered IBrowse 2.5 (or upgraded) at the full 68K/PPC rate - existing key can be used with IBrowse 3. Users of the 68K only version of IBrowse 2.5 and older IBrowse versions will need to upgrade to unlock full functionality.
To celebrate the release of IBrowse 3, we are offering registration at reduced rates for new users (25-30% off) and upgrades (30-35% off) compared to the previous IBrowse 2.5 pricing. (dr)
[News message: 19. Nov. 2023, 22:18] [Comments: 0]
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19.Nov.2023
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GUI for Greaseweazle Tools : FluxMyFluffyFloppy v5.0.3 for Windows
Just the other day, in an article about setting up a Greaseweazle V4, we mentioned the graphical user interface FluxMyFluffyFloppy for the Greaseweazle Tools. Now 'FrankieTheFluff' has released version 5.0.3. Changes:
- Read: Fixed reported issue #3: filename problem for kryoflux
- Convert: Fixed reported issue #3: filename problem for kryoflux
(dr)
[News message: 19. Nov. 2023, 21:45] [Comments: 0]
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19.Nov.2023
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Amiga emulator: Amiberry 5.6.4
Amiberry is an Amiga emulator for ARM-based single-chip systems like the Raspberry Pi, the Odroid XU4 or the Tinkerboard from ASUS, which brings some newly developed features like a "WHDLoad-Booter" or support for controller configuration using RetroArch. For example it is used in the Workbench distribution AmiKit for the Raspberry Pi 4/400.
Now version 5.6.4 has been released. Changes:
Bugfixes
- Fixed problems writing parition tables to HDFs after latest updates
- Fixed crash in Add Harddrive dialog
- Quickstart did not select correct ROM for A4000T
- The default.uae could not be deleted
- GUI would not use default screenmode
- not all RAM settings were reset when changing Quickstart model
- DMX targets would crash when opening the GUI
- CD images were not activated on Reset, only on Restart
- copy all directories in macOS bundle
- add missing dirs in macOS when generating them also
- macOS did not have IPF support
- removed unused cda wait() reference
- A3000 emulation didn't work
- Fixed compiler error: braces around scalar initializer for type 'int'
- Keyboard reset would not restore keys
Improvements
- increase size of text field in Create Hardfile dialog
- fixed various clang compiler warnings
- Use CD Image name as a fallback for screenshot filename, if no floppy was found
- Accept archive formats as disk images also (e.g. .zip, .lha, .7z)
Build system
- use Github hosted macOS runner
- Build Flatpak for both x86_64 and aarch64
- fixes for aarch64 flatpak build
- Remove flatpak from Github releases (they will be hosted on Flathub instead)
- fixed paragraphs in flatpak metainfo description
- fixed flatpak source browser link in metainfo
(dr)
[News message: 19. Nov. 2023, 21:39] [Comments: 0]
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19.Nov.2023
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Weather data: AmiWeatherForecast V1.3
AmiWeatherForecasts is a weather forecasting application that provides the latest weather information for any location. It was written in the C programming language under Amiga OS 3.2 and uses data from OpenWeather (amiga-news.de reported). Changes in version 1.3:
- Using screen text font for GUI (Prefs/Font)
- Added customize color settings
- Changed min and max values for 'Add Pos X and Y'
- Added feature that finding of your location automatically
Direct download: AmiWeatherForecasts1.3.lha (38 KB) (dr)
[News message: 19. Nov. 2023, 21:33] [Comments: 0]
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19.Nov.2023
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Game Construction Kit: RedPill 0.9.29
RedPill, developed by Carlos Peris, is a game construction kit written in Amiblitz 3.98, which allows the development of games from various genres (e.g. Agonman). RedPill is compatible with AGA and ECS, the "player" for playing the finished creations requires a total of 1.5 MB RAM. Jens 'Farbfinsternis' Henschel has written a tutorial. Changes of version 0.9.29:
- Copper gradient editor has been added in the Level Properties screen.
- Instantiated objects are now not rendered the same frame they were created.
- Dialogs now works fine when reducing the width of the screen.
- Added a condition trigger CD Playing to check if audio is playing. Only works with 020+ executables.
- In objects screen, cursor keys can be used to change the display offset.
- In objects screen, 1 and 2 keys can be used to browse objects.
- Level managing optimizations.
- Trigger optimizations.
- Condition trigger optimizations.
- Final project size optimization: Sprite and background images are not copied for each level, now they are unique.
- Attempt to fix some unwanted actions when going to the workbench screen for file accessing.
- Less artifacts when going back to the editor after playing the game.
- Fix for render objects, it could be after some plays not all objects were rendered.
- Fix in using own screen being ignored sometimes.
- Fix in HUD screen select page controls when selecting a variable.
- Fix in font sheet not being initialized properly for new projects.
- Fix in animations for basic_platformer example.
- Fix in memory available number displayed in the settings screen.
(dr)
[News message: 19. Nov. 2023, 20:51] [Comments: 0]
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