amiga-news.de - Archive

Archive 09/2021

11.Sep.2021 Dungeon Crawler: 'Blade' released
Mark Sheeky originally released his game in 1996 and wrote:

"Blade was my 20th, last, and most ambitious game for Amiga; an expanded, isometric sequel to my Roguelike game Hilt. The game took over a year to develop and was signed to be published by a troubled company named Alive Mediasoft. The game was released without my consent and I received nothing. Unable to take matters further in these moribund years of the Amiga, I released the game for free.

Supplied in ADF format for use with Amiga emulators, and in RP9 format for use with Cloanto's Amiga Forever and other RetroPlatform emulators. The game needs to be installed to a virtual Amiga hard drive, so the RP9 files contain a pre-installed version of Blade. The standalone intro sequence can be viewed separately from one of the discs." (dr)

[News message: 11. Sep. 2021, 20:20] [Comments: 0]
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11.Sep.2021 Game Construction Kit: Scorpion Engine V2021.6.0
The "Scorpion Engine" developed by Erik 'earok' Hogan allows you to develop games. The engine itself is closed source, all demos and example games are open source. The editor runs under Windows. Graphics are imported as PNG files, levels created by using the editor Tiled eingesetzt. For importing and creating sounds, music and animations the Amiga formats (mod, 8svx, anim5) are used.

Recently version 2021.6.0 has been released featuring multiplayer for up to four players, multiplexed sprites, translucency effects and more (YouTube video). (dr)

[News message: 11. Sep. 2021, 19:49] [Comments: 0]
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11.Sep.2021

Dock bar: WBDock 2 V2.430 for AmigaOS 3.1 and higher
Thomas Rapp has updated his dock bar 'WBDock 2' for AmigaOS 3.1 to version 2.430 and recentlx fixed a bug pointed out by our reader 'yelworC'.

the MagicWB style can now have skinned edges
fixed starting project icons on WB V44+ with DOpus5 as WB replacement
preview of the dock app SDK included (unfinished)
fixed deadlock when dragging Workbench icons over the dock

(dr)

[News message: 11. Sep. 2021, 19:02] [Comments: 0]
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11.Sep.2021
Amigaworld.net (forum) Video: 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast #108 - Mainboard ReAmiga 3000
In episode 108 of his video cast 10MARC Douglas Compton reviews the replacement mainboard ReAmiga 3000 by John "Chucky" Hertell (amiga-news.de reported).

Besides this review there has been also video footage by the developer himself published in August and October 2019. (snx)

[News message: 11. Sep. 2021, 06:10] [Comments: 0]
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11.Sep.2021

RTG driver: P96 v3.1.2
A few weeks ago, Individual Computers had updated its graphics card driver P96 to version 3.1.1. Now another bug fix release is available. Changes:

In case the display was switched from a display that is not in the chain to the native output, connected to another card that is in the display chain, then P96 did not de-activate the monitor switch of the other card, and hence the display remained blank.
Added the 320x240 and 320x200 mode templates to P96Mode.
The vesa mode templates of P96Mode lacked the sync polarity information. They have now been added.
In case allocating an additional screen buffer for screen dragging does not work, V3.1.1 failed. V3.1.2 now falls back to an earlier method of migrating the front viewport and re-allocating it, requiring a roundtrip of the display contents through system RAM.
In case the board did not indicate the presence of the blitter, memory reorganization for screen dragging might not have worked at all, and thus screen dragging may have failed. This also hurt the ZZ9000 which, besides having a blitter, does not indicate its presence to P96.
In case the native Amiga output does not have any visible screen, it is now turned off and the background color is set to black.
The flicker fixers are now only turned off if a board on the display chain becomes active. Otherwise, the native display generation remains untouched.
In case no active screen is available anymore on a given monitor, the corresponding monitor is now blanked.
When allocating the frontmost bitmap, the memory handling only migrated front and back bitmap if no blitter was available for moving memory around. It now migrates all bitmaps.
The picasso96api.library now returns the CVisionPPC big-endian modes with increased priority to ensure tools use these modes with priority. This may help to get some programs to work that assume a particular display organization without checking what they get or need.
The same modifications have been made to the emulation.library, which is responsible for emulation of the villageTronic API and the cybergraphics API.
Note that while the above modifications make big-endian modes preferred modes, not all graphic modes may be available under all situations. In particular, if GRANTDIRECTACCESS is set, modes that require an "aperture switch" are not. In particular, the ARGB mode on the CVisionPPC requires such a switch to be made, and is thus not available, unless GRANTDIRECTACCES is not set.
The CGfx emulation indicated the depth of the ARGB modes as 32bit, though the original CGfx API indicates depths of such modes as 24 bit. This got fixed, and alpha is not included in the depth computation for emulation purposes.
Some programs seem to call LoadView(NULL) in supervisor mode. Note that this function is not supervisor-callable, though P96 now adds a workaround that executes at least some of the code in supervisor code. (*)
The P96 Installer script now explicitly sets the user level to "Intermediate" before continuing with the question whether to install the software. This is necessary as the "novice" user will never be asked, and therefore the user will never be asked, looping/waiting forever for confirmation.

Please mind that some of these updates are an effort to work around bugs of other programs. Especially (*) was an attempt of getting basically-broken software to work. In detail, a few demos have been reported that use this function call. However, our workaround was not successful, but also not harmful to compatibility with good software. Please note that this is not a standard thing for iComp to try - the prime directive should be to fix broken software at the source, and not add workarounds where they don't belong. (dr)

[News message: 11. Sep. 2021, 03:43] [Comments: 0]
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10.Sep.2021 Amiga emulator for MacOS: vAmiga 1.1 Beta 1
In May the developer Dirk Hoffmann released version 1.0 of his Amiga emulator for MacOS. Now he has released the new version 1.1 Beta1 and explained:

"During the last weeks I worked a lot on the code base of vAmiga and VirtualC64. My goal was to align the code bases of both emulators as much as possible, which I managed to do to a large extent. This effort will ease the maintenance of both emulators in future. In the process of refactoring, many internal changes have been made that are not noticeable to the user. However, due to the far-reaching changes, it is likely that one or the other bug has found its way in. For this reason, the new version is released as a beta version first.

The biggest change from a user's point of view is the newly added drop layer, which automatically blends in when a media file (ADF, DMS, etc.) is dragged into the emulator. Now changing disks is even simpler than it already was in the old version.

Last but not least, the speed of the emulator has been optimized. In warp mode, vAmiga 1.1 runs up to 15% faster than the previous version." (dr)

[News message: 10. Sep. 2021, 16:49] [Comments: 0]
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10.Sep.2021
Commodore News Page

Single-Screen-platformer: 'Inca Man' V1.1 released
Only a few days ago, Amiten (e.g. Cocoa Banana, Parallel Worlds 2) released the single-screen-platformer 'Inca Man' (video) and now provided an update to version 1.1. Changes:

Fixed lives counter.
Fixed colour to bat, vampire and wrong pixel to player 2.
Added 2 New game speeds/difficulties : Easy Mode and Super Easy(Slow) for kids.
Added TIME OVER.
Added PDF manual in English.
Added PDF manual in Español.

(dr)

[News message: 10. Sep. 2021, 16:30] [Comments: 0]
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09.Sep.2021

MUI-based SFTP/FTP(S)-Client: RNOXFER 1.3 for AmigaOS 3/4 and MorphOS
As announced by the release of the pdf viewer RNOPDF, the developer 'jPV^RNO' has updated his FTP client 'RNOXFER' to version 1.3 which among others now also supports the SFTP protokoll. Additionally he has published a tutorial and a video on his website which are supposed to explain the functions and the usage in a comfortable way. Changes of version 1.3:

Added support for the SFTP protocol
Added support for large files
Added an option to use graphic enhanced buttons in the program GUI
Transfer speeds are displayed in the progress gauge
Added an option to show directory names in bold text
Directory creating failures are handled better
Fixed handling of links with the full path
Added an option to verify uploads
Added selection information within the status line
Status line indicates if the selected files are equal on both sides
Better URL encoding when copying URLs to the clipboard
Pattern selection interprets #? as a wildcard now
More verbose delete requester
Added a password requester if no password is set when connecting
Added a command line argument for the passive mode (defaults to pasv now)
Minor tweaking

(dr)

[News message: 09. Sep. 2021, 12:18] [Comments: 0]
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09.Sep.2021

fxBlankers: Screenblankers for MorphOS
Stephan Blixth (OnyxSoft) wrote:

"I wanted to learn how to make some cool blankers for MorphOS. There was some basic examples how to make the framework etc. in the SDK for MorphOS which was really good as base. And since I'm not a demo coder I recall there was some cool effects in the AROS distribution. I used some of them as base to create this effectful blankers."

Version 1.0 provides the three screenblankers 'DawaFire', 'Fireworks' and 'Flamme'. You have to copy them to System:Classes/Blankers.
The source code is available on GitHub. (dr)

[News message: 09. Sep. 2021, 08:31] [Comments: 0]
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