• Created a very basic work in progress IXML plugin (See Ix-Guide, www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/hudson/187.
• Amended EvenMore's escape code interpreter. Not sure if these codes are in use already, if they are, someone let me know. I have 2 new codes, *e[50;0;0;0m and *e[51;0;0;0m. Both take 3 arguments after them to allocate a pen for text (R,G,B). 50 changes the Pen colour, and 51 will change the background colour, thus giving you multicoloured text.
• Rewrote RTF plugin from the ground up with full colour support.

• bibcursed v2.0.0 - Editor for BibTeX
• Anubis v3.0.2 - Mailprogram
• barkix v1.0.2 - Barcode generator for PCL without the need for font cartridges

Also an update for the greetings program ´Bekuna´ Version 1.9R4 from Kuno Naumann is available for download. The program has many features like greting depending on daytime, display of date, time, summertime, moonphase and sign, and reminder of birthdays and events.

The new port is one of the climaxes of the Computex. More and more manufacturers of mainboards, controllers, and hard drives have products with the successor of IDE and E-IDE (up to UDMA-133) in the program. Serial ATA should replace the parallel ATA complete until February 2003.

The advantage of SATA is the easier and more stable connecting. Timing problems are history. Also the new cables with 4 to 8 poles ease the circulation of air inside the tower because they are not blocking the stream.

SATA uses up to 4 direct point-to-point connections between controller and one device per connection. This doubles the maximum of possible devices. Problems with jumpers and bus-termination are no longer expected, because every wire is terminated at both ends in the chip. A defective device will not effect the others.

SATA is designed for using period of 10 years with two duplications of performance up to 600 MB/sec. At start a transfer rate of 150 MB/sec is supported, slighlty less than LVD-SCSI with 160 MB/sec. Some of the other features are the break through of the 137 GB limit of harddrives, "hot-plug"-abilities, and 1st-Party-DMA.

The first devices will maybe available in third quarter 2002, but some manufacturers of mainboards have started to implement it into their chipsets.

• 11.06.02 new: M1 Tank Platoon (Microprose) done by JOTD
• 11.06.02 new: Killerball (Microids) done by JOTD
• 11.06.02 new: Guy Spy (Ready Soft) done by JOTD
• 11.06.02 improved: Road Wars (Arcadia Systems) supports another version, new icons
• 10.06.02 new: Dream Web (Empire Software) done by Dr.Zarkov
• 10.06.02 new: Invasion (Sector Software) done by Codetapper
• 10.06.02 improved: Deuteros (Ian Bird) supports another version
• 10.06.02 new: Blasteroids (Tengen/Image Works) done by Psygore
• 10.06.02 improved: Super Cars (Gremlin) now compatible with emulators, manual included
• 05.06.02 improved: Battle Isle (Blue Byte) minor changes

editors note:
We are not able to say something about the differences between the above version and the one reported by Amiforce on 08.06.2002. If you anything about it feel free to tell us.

Update 12.06.2002:
David McMinn explained us the difference:

I saw your note on the AmigaNews site, that you could not see the difference between the different AmiBlitz distributions, so I thought I would clarify.

First of all, Bernd Roesch has updated the editor and compiler greatly, and convinced Acid software to release Blitz Basic 2 for free, under the name AmiBlitz2. However, Bernd did not provide a ready-made package for users to download and use, only updates.

I decided to create an user distribution which would provide everything a person needs to start programming in AmiBlitz as I have been maintaining the Blitz2000 site for a few years. Of course, since AmiBlitz is free, anyone can do this if they choose, such as CJ Stroker has done on the AmiForce site.

The differences between the distributions on the Blitz2000 and AmiForce sites are that they have different contents and are aimed at different people. For example, the distribution provided by AmiForce does not seem to have the acidlibs and deflibs files, so you already need a working installation of AmiBlitz to use it (they might have it in other archives on the site though, I have not looked through all of them). The AmiForce site is also more useful for German speaking programmers, as a lot/most of the documentation they have is available in German (for example, the AmiBlitz manuals). The distributions on the Blitz2000 site are available in different sizes and have all the documents for the libraries included in the archive, as well as useful tools and the library files mentioned above.

The only thing which would be nice to keep the same between all distributions is the default set of libraries that are provided. Bernd suggested this as it makes everything easier from the viewpoint of everyone has the same libraries to start off with.

Sorry for the long mail, but I hope this clears the situation up :)

• Dillo--a Web Browser as Fast as Lightning, by Matthias Arndt
• Cracking open proprietary envelopes, by Adrian J. Chung
• Help Dex, by Shane Collinge
• Compiler Design with Python, by Dinil Divakaran
• A Linux Fax Server for a Windows Network, by Pedro Fraile
• Writing Your Own Toy OS (PART II), by Krishnakumar R.
• The Foolish Things We Do With Our Computers, by Mike Orr
• Improving Hard Disk Performance with hdparam, by Piter Punk
• Qubism, by Jon "Sir Flakey" Harsem
• Getting started with PIC 16F84 on GNU/Linux, by Jerry Sebastian
• A Framework For Writing Application Servers In C++, by Rob Tougher

• mcp1_39.lha (912K)
• mcp1_39u.lha (450K)

• Screenmode requester
• GadTools user interface
• Most requesters operable via keyboard
• CAMD library
• New 32 colour design
• Localisation
• German catalogue included
• and much more

• Goal!
• Dizzy Dice
• Beam
• Police Quest 2
• Starball
• Night Dawn
• Streetgang
• Khalaan
• The three Stooges
• Silent Service II
• Seek & Destroy
• Their finest Hour
• Christoph Kolumbus
• Jurassic Park

1. Scans of software, of which there are no pictures available yet.
2. Supplemental informationen about software in the Little Book of Amiga Software.
3. Information about software not yet mentioned on the pages.
4. Software instruction manuals.