12.Feb.2016
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Quick review: PDF magazine Amigaville, issue 4
November last year Brian Hedley started publishing his PDF magazine Amigaville, releasing a new issue every month. Having released just three issues, each downloaded "several hundred times" (Hedley), the author decided to switch to commercial distribution: Amigaville #4 needs to be purchased for 2 GBP. We had a closer look at the review copy kindly provided by Hedley.
At 36 pages, Amigaville #4 is slightly thicker than the previous issues. The design stayed pretty much the same: a mix of single column (a rather odd choice, given the A4 page size) and three column layouts as well as pages with or without background pictures or patterns. The lack of justification and hyphenation results in a slightly jagged and amateurish appearance, many of the embedded graphics seem to have a low resolution - the full page ads included for nostalgia being the worst offenders - or have clearly visible JPEG artifacts.
The design does continue to improve with every issue though. Should the remaining problems get fixed in future releases, the mag's appearance is absolutely adequate given the price asked for it.
With regard to contents, Amigaville is still covering all aspects of the Amiga scene. The current issue features news, reviews of old games (Pacmania, Prince of Persia, Heroquest, Deluxe Galaga und Castlevania), an overview over First Person Shooters on the Amiga, an indepth look at Amiga Anywhere's destiny and the cover story "Should Hyperion port OS4 to x86?". The final two features are Hedley's personal history with computers ("My Amiga experience - or lack thereof") - which eats up no less than six pages - and the "Grumpy old Git" column.
The quality of the content matches that of your average retro blog: Hedley's texts are entertaining to read and he's offering an interesting mix of topics - while research or fact checking seem to play only a minor role during the writing process. Additionally, the author's lack of Amiga experience is clearly evident in many cases. The Amiga Anywhere article is a good example: While it does provide a decent overview, several technical terms get mixed up and it gets a few historical facts wrong. Plus, its conclusion starts with "for all the good intentions that Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss had" - nobody who witnessed the whole thing would ever word it like that.
Our conclusion: If you prefer having information presented in the style of a magazine, Amigaville is not that bad of a deal: you'll get a fair amount of entertainment for your 2 GBP, even if the switch to commercial distribution came too early and should have been delayed until several minor issues had been fixed.
Comparing Amigaville to the competition doesn't do it any favours though: Every other month, you can buy one issue of Amiga Future (6.50 Euro, 50+ pages, professionally printed) or two issues of Amigaville (5.40 Euro, about 70 pages, PDF only) - and all of a sudden, the newcomer's price/performance ratio doesn't look all that good anymore. (cg) (Translation: cg)
[News message: 12. Feb. 2016, 21:55] [Comments: 0]
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10.Feb.2016
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Aminet needs help: searching for freely distributable Amiga magazines
The Aminet team writes: A lot of older freely distributable software is still missing from Aminet. Some of it is preserved nicely on Public Domain disks or CD compilations easily available on the web - but a lot of it is rotting away on private hard disks, old, unmaintained ftp servers or forgotten websites. The Aminet team has been collecting dormant software and quietly adding it to the collection for nearly a decade now. Hunting down software is a rather time consuming process though, and many things can no longer be tracked down easily.
Our current focus is freely distributable magazines - diskmags, ASCII newsletters, free PDF documents - you name it, we want it. We have compiled a list of all the titles we have (note that not all of these are available for download yet), as you can see we're still missing a lot of these releases.
If any of you collectors out there can provide us with missing information or even supply some of the missing releases, we'd be very glad to hear from you. (cg) (Translation: cg)
[News message: 10. Feb. 2016, 16:52] [Comments: 5 - 16. Feb. 2016, 15:34]
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09.Feb.2016
David Brunet (ANF)
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Obligement: Interview with Christoph Gutjahr (Aminet, amiga-news.de; engl./fr.)
French magazine Obligement published an interview with Christoph Gutjahr today, administrator of the software repository Aminet and one of the two publishers of amiga-news.de since 2010.
The interview contains background information on both websites and is available in english at the title link as well as in french. (snx)
[News message: 09. Feb. 2016, 19:32] [Comments: 0]
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08.Feb.2016
AROS-Exec (Forum)
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AROS: A week in AROS (from 25.01.2016)
Weekly Krzysztof 'Deadwood' Śmiechowicz summarizes the latest progresses and developments of the AROS-programmers.
Week of January 25th:
- MultiView is now used for animation datatype (mazze)
- Work on modularization of SysExplorer started (Kalamatee)
- MultiView is now showing more details about data objects (Kalamatee)
- Fix for accessing freed memory implemented in Listtree MUI class (deadwood)
- MultiView is now presenting more information about images and animations (Kalamatee)
- Animation.datatype is reworked to speed up playback (Kalamatee)
- Intuition no longer crashes when menu name is not provided (Kalamatee)
- Rendering of animations in EHB mode has been fixed (Kalamatee)
- Anim.datatype now correctly supports anim-8 unpacking (Kalamatee)
- Further fixes to anim-3 format implemented (Kalamatee)
- Implementation of jumping to a selected frame in animation.datatype started (Kalamatee)
- Hooks are now correctly called from within realtime.library (Kalamatee)
- Tapedeck.gadget handles input on progress bar correctly (Kalamatee)
- Forward/rewind is now working in animation.datatype (Kalamatee)
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 08. Feb. 2016, 14:45] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
Amiga Future (Webseite)
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Text editor featuring Kickstart-1.2 compatibility: Redit 1.12
Kai Scherrer's text editor Redit works without any limitations on an Amiga equipped with Kickstart 1.2, but also is fully compatible with higher versions of the system. The editor can be also launched from an emergancy disk or used after booting without startup-sequence. Changes in version 1.12:
- added: Undo & Redo
- improved: more pleasent inital size and position of file request
- improved: loading large directories in 1.3 file request was slow
- bugfix: selecting last line with triple mouse click was broken
- bugfix: selecting first word with double mouse click was broken.
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 17:25] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
MorphZone (Forum)
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MorphOS: Tutorial for mounting network drives
The Finnish member 'jPV' of the demo group RNO has added the tutorial for for mounting network drives to the MorphOS library. It is about Samba, NetFS, RDesktop and the Google-Drive-Handler.
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 15:11] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
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Aminet-Uploads until 06.02.2016
The following archives have been added to Aminet until February 6th, 2016:
AFnews-68k.lha comm/tcp 894K 68k Amiga Future Everywhere 68k
GoogleDrive_handlr_AR... comm/tcp 950K x86 Google Drive handler for AROS
DiskImageGui.lha disk/misc 17K 68k Mount ADF, ISO and HDF disk i...
ImageMount.lha disk/misc 18K 68k Mount ADF, ISO and HDF disk i...
TunnelsAndTrolls.lha game/role 11M 68k Implementation of Tunnels &am...
AssaultCubeReloaded26... game/shoot 68M x86 First-person shooter
Flecho.lha game/wb 31K 68k Point arrows to the numbers!
Calimero_2.5.lha text/dtp 6.3M MOS A DTP Program
Redit.lha text/edit 48K 68k Text editor
mARK.lha util/arc 12K 68k Simple Gui for LhA, LZX, UnZi...
PoseidonScripts.lha util/misc 15K 68k Alternative ways of using the...
xbenchlist.lha util/misc 28K 68k X-bEnCh List Generator
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 10:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
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OS4Depot-Uploads until 06.02.2016
The following archives have been added to OS4Depot until February 6th, 2016:
mhe.lha dev/ide 6Mb 4.0 Hollywood IDE
reactive_crypto.lha dri/mis 93kb 4.1 Hashing classes for Reactive
voxelbird.lha gam/act 4Mb 4.0 Amazing Voxel Bird Saga
voxelnoid.lha gam/act 7Mb 4.0 Duel Edition
wingsbf_rhdc.lha gam/act 16Mb 4.0 Head-to-head 3D air combat game,...
wingsbf_w3dr12.lha gam/act 16Mb 4.0 Head-to-head 3D air combat game,...
wingsbf_w3dr7.lha gam/act 16Mb 4.0 Head-to-head 3D air combat game,...
amigaracer.lha gam/dri 72Mb 4.1 A Lotus Turbo Challenge game alike
sqrxz2.lha gam/pla 1Mb 4.0 Better play golf!
reactive_lib.lha lib/mis 64kb 4.1 A custom BOOPSI system
rhash_cmd.lha uti/she 13kb 4.1 rHash preforms hashing of files
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 10:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
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AROS-Archives-Uploads until 06.02.2016
The following archive has been added to AROS-Archives until February 6th, 2016:
rebound.i386-aros.zip gam/puz 7Mb Brick busting puzzle game.
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 10:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
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WHDLoad: New packages until 06.02.2016
Using WHDLoad, you can install games, scene demos and intros from cracking groups to your harddisk that were only working from floppy disks previously. The following installer has been added until February 6th, 2016:
- 2016-02-05 updated: Airborne Ranger (Microprose) patch redone, movep instructions patched, blitter waits disabled on 68000, trainer options added, byte write to volume register fixed, new install script (Info)
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 10:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
Amiga.org (Forum)
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Big Book of Amiga Hardware: Amiga 2200 (A1000jr) added
On the Amiga hardware reference website "Big Book of Amiga Hardware" the A2200 has been added. The website wrote: "A few months after the cancellation of the A1000+ and A3000+ it was decided the company should attempt to salvage the A1000+ technology and build a lower spec ECS-based machine. The project was developed under the codename 'A1000jr', an unofficial title intended to annoy Bill Sydnes."
The Amiga 2200 had an ESC chipset, which for reasons of costs only contained Zorro-II slots. They are on a Riser card, other extension boards had to be plugged in horizontally. All in all four different versions were planned which should differ in the processor as well as in the number of Zorro-II slots: A2200 (68020, two slots), A2400 (four slots) and analogical to that the A3200 and A3400 with a 68030-processor. The case of the A2200 was similar to the case of the Amiga 4000.
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 09:54] [Comments: 0]
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07.Feb.2016
David Brunet (ANF)
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Obligement: Results of the Amiga Games Award 2015
On February 6th 2016, french magazine Obligement announced the results of the Amiga Games Award 2015 for the best Amiga games, voted by Amigans from all Amiga platforms.
AmigaOS (68k):
- Zerosphere (Code Red / Alexander Grupe)
- SQRXZ 3 (Retroguru)
- Solomon's Key 2 (Oookami Games)
AmigaOS 4:
- Wings Battlefield Ultimate Duel Edition (Cherry Darling)
- Gorky 17 (Metropolis Software)
- Swamp Defense 2 (AmiBoing/EntwicklerX)
MorphOS:
- Wings Battlefield Ultimate Duel Edition (Cherry Darling)
- Ask Me Up XXL (Boing Attitude :))
- Fruit'Y (Retroguru)
AROS:
- Wings Battlefield Ultimate Duel Edition (Cherry Darling)
- Fruit'Y (Retroguru)
- L'Abbaye Des Morts (LocoMalito)
(snx)
[News message: 07. Feb. 2016, 08:53] [Comments: 0]
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05.Feb.2016
Amigaville (ANF)
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English PDF magazine: Fourth issue of "Amigaville" for sale
Amigaville is an English-language PDF magazine. Ther first three issues are available on Aminet. The published decided to take 2£ for the forthcoming issue, you can pay via Paypal.
(cg) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 05. Feb. 2016, 14:45] [Comments: 0]
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05.Feb.2016
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Amiga Inc.-Magazine: "Club Amiga Monthly" on archive.org
After it was evident that the participants of the coupon action of Amiga Inc. would not get back their money and that the promised auxiliary services could not be realized, Amiga Inc. tried to avoid a PR desaster, which could have damaged AmigaOS 4 and the AmigaOne.
All purchasers of the coupon were rewarded with a "club" membership. All members should get an exclusive club magazine providing the latest information on AmigaOS 4/AmigaOne development. The HTML-based "Club Amiga Monthly" was published monthly on os.amiga.com/cam/ and could only be accessed by club members. After twelve issues the magazine was discontinued.
The magazines which were already thought to have been lost forever are now available again for eveybody on archive.org.
(cg) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 05. Feb. 2016, 14:40] [Comments: 0]
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04.Feb.2016
AROS-Exec (Forum)
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AROS: FUSE file system exFAT 53.3 and NTFS-3G 53.4
Since November, the FUSE file system framework has been available to AROS, thanks to Fredrik Wikstrom (amiga-news.de reported). Now the drivers for the NTFS-3G and for the exFAT file system have been updated. The last mentioned "does not crash anymore when used to automount USB drive ".
Changes:
- exFAT 53.3
- Disk I/O layer now uses a segmented LRU for the read cache and automatically sorted block ranges for the write cache.
- Replaced cache semaphore with a simple boolean variable that indicates to the memhandler when the cache is being accessed.
- NTFS-3G 53.4
- Disk I/O layer now uses a segmented LRU for the read cache and automatically sorted block ranges for the write cache.
- Replaced cache semaphore with a simple boolean variable that indicates to the memhandler when the cache is being accessed.
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 04. Feb. 2016, 17:57] [Comments: 0]
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