amiga-news.de - Archive

Archive 10/2022

19.Oct.2022
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Graphics card ZZ9000: New firmware version 1.12.1 (update)
Lukas F. Hartmann's ZZ9000 is a graphics card with additional features and ports (network, USB, SD cards), which can be preordered in different versions (amiga-news.de reported).

Yesterday the new firmware version 1.12 was released with the following new features:

MP3 streamed decoding support (via MHI)
10 band DSP EQ (via MHI)
New p2d_rect implementation
copy_rect_nomask fix
NEOR minterm fix
BlitPlanar2Direct() fix, enable BIF_BLITTER support
Z2 RTG driver speedup by caching blitter registers

Update: (20.10.2022, 09:22, dr)

In the meantime version 1.12.1 is available, which fixes a slowdown bug of the Ethernet task. Many thanks to our reader 'TomSoniq'for the hint. (dr)

[News message: 19. Oct. 2022, 22:14] [Comments: 0]
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19.Oct.2022 Temptations port for CD32: First demo version available
The developer 'S0Y' is primarily dedicated to converting games to the Amiga platform using the game construction kit RedPill. After his Abu Simbel Profanation project, he had begun converting the Jump'n Run Temptations, originally published for MSX-1 in 1988. The basis for his conversion is a port for Android, which graphics he uses with the author's permission, but modifies some of them (amiga-news.de reported).

Today, the developer has not only released a new preview video, but also a first, early demo version of the first level. (dr)

[News message: 19. Oct. 2022, 21:15] [Comments: 0]
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19.Oct.2022 Jump'n Run: Minky V1.2
Minky (video) is a Jump'n Run in the style of Super Mario or Giana Sisters, which requires an Amiga 500 with one megabyte RAM (amiga-news.de reported). With the now released update to version 1.2, the sound should be heard on all ACA turbo cards. The author has also removed some code glitches. (dr)

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19.Oct.2022 Fantasy shooter: Third level for "Project - Quest"
A third level for the fantasy shooter "Project - Quest", which is currently in development (amiga-news.de reported), has now been published under the title link (video). (dr)

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19.Oct.2022

Tech-Demo: Update for "Street Fighter 2" port
"Street Fighter 2" is the attempt to recreate the well-known beat'm up on the Amiga using the Scorpion Engine in a better way. The author is not going to develop a full game but hopes to inspire other developers. The update for the playable demo version includes the following changes:

Screen mode changed to EHB allowing perfect sprite coloring
Background replaced with the SNES version (more accurate proportions)
Added copper sky
Optimized panels palettes
Optimized sounds

(dr)

[News message: 19. Oct. 2022, 05:55] [Comments: 0]
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18.Oct.2022

Event: Review of Amiga37
Last weekend the Amiga37 took place in Mönchengladbach. We would like to summarize here for our readers what there was to see for news, but also interesting observations at the fair:

according to ACube and Trevor Dickinson the A1222 boards (Tabor) will be produced at the end of the year and should be available at the beginning of next year
price will be similar to the Sam boards, so it should be around 900 Euro
an A1222 board was shown on site, but not in operation
ACube's laptop is supposed to be an open source laptop with a T2080 PPC CPU and upgradeable GPU, which can also run AmigaOS 4

The MorphOS team showed a beta version of MorphOS on an A1200 and A4000 (with PPC cards)

The Apollo team is working on baords for the A3000 and A4000
also working on the possibility to boot (and play) from ADF
in addition, a cable is being developed to connect a floppy drive to the V4 so that you can boot from floppy instead of ADF

Ben Hermans was also at Amiga37 and talked to Mike Battilana, Matthew Leaman and Trevor Dickinson

Alinea Computer presented their new Subway 2021 USB card: up to four USB interfaces are provided on the Amiga with clockport. These interfaces are compatible to USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 specification (no high-speed mode)
a Subway Power Adapter for the old Subway was shown as a prototype, which can provide more power for USB devices like hard disks or cell phones (up to 800 mA are possible). The card also has built-in overload protection and will also be available for the Subway 2021.

Nico Barbat and Simon Neumann introduced their new publishing company Look Behind You and presented two news:

the card game Amiga Duel: 32 Amiga models have been lovingly illustrated and researched, printed on cards and now compete against each other by features such as year of manufacture, innovation, computing power or kickstart. The card game is available for around 13 Euros
the book Die Geheimnisse von Monkey Island (The Secrets of Monkey Island) is a homage to the adventures of the ingenious pirate and has been published in a German first edition for about 25 Euro

Daniel 'Daytona675x' Müßener showed the latest version of his soccer game in 3D look Souverän Soccer:

in addition to bug fixes and engine tuning, features such as kicking in, fouls, free kicks, penalties and a jumping goalkeeper have been added
Triace, member of the group Desire, has composed two great pieces of music for the game
all this can be seen in his latest preview video, recorded live at Amiga37

Those who would like to get an impression with the help of videos:

Video by Jörg "Torque" Klopsch and McFly
Video by "Alles Spielkram": DAS war die AMIGA 37
Video of the live stream from 16.10.2022

Last but not least: On the occasion of Amiga37 Amiga Kit has published a detailed second blog entry. (dr)

[News message: 18. Oct. 2022, 21:44] [Comments: 0]
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18.Oct.2022 Developer diary: Inspired by Powermonger, part 2
n the first part of his developer diary Daniel Bratton reported how he started to reprogram the board of the game Powermonger with the intersecting lines (amiga-news.de reported). In the second part he now publishes the complete code for generating the map and the polygon, which is also available on GitHub. (dr)

[News message: 18. Oct. 2022, 06:20] [Comments: 0]
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17.Oct.2022
Andreas Falkenhahn (ANF) Hollywood APK Compiler 4.2 released
Press release: Hollywood APK Compiler 4.2 has just been released. This is a minor update which adds support for the latest target API requirement for uploading apps to the Google Play Store. This update is provided free of charge for all existing APK Compiler customers and can be downloaded in the restricted download section. (cg)

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17.Oct.2022

Trading simulation with RPG elements: Aquabyss
The game 'Aquabyss', first announced in 2018 with a teaser video, was released on Amiga 37 last weekend in a pre-release version. The game is a trading simulation in the style of Elite - without 3D sequences, but with various RPG elements. The game is set in a steampunk underwater world at the beginning of the 19th century.

Aquabyss is delivered on a floppy disk, which downloads the rest of the game data from the Internet during installation. However, an Internet connection is not necessary to actually play the game, it only makes some comfort functions available, such as saving game scores to the game server. Updates can be downloaded and installed directly from the game or - if the Amiga is not connected to the net - manually. Aquabyss can be installed on any number of computers, but only one computer can connect to the server at a time.

At the Amiga 37 a floppy disk version was available for just under 37 Euros, at the same time the distribution of the digital version for 30 Euros was supposed to start - the latter, however, failed due to a server problem, which the provider wants to fix as soon as possible. Aquabyss requires 2 megabytes of chip and 8 megabytes of Fast RAM, and the computer must also be connected to the Internet during installation. Theoretically, Aquabyss is compatible with a 68000 processor, but a 68030 is recommended for smooth gaming.

What is currently being distributed is explicitly still a pre-release version of Aquabyss: Users report crashes and program errors, saving game saves did not work at first and the German translation still has various gaps. However, the game is constantly being worked on, the faulty save function was corrected during the Amiga 37, for example. Known problems are minor incompatibilities with OS 3.2.1 - which is already being worked on - or with Apollo-based turbo cards.

As for the Apollo problems, the vendor refers to the developers of this FPGA-based processor replica: The number of problems varies from one version of the Apollo core to the next, there is no possibility to intervene - the Apollo core is simply "not 100% Amiga compatible".

Editor's note: We would like to thank 'Endee' from the a1k forum for kindly allowing us to take his screenshots. (cg)

[News message: 17. Oct. 2022, 21:57] [Comments: 0]
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17.Oct.2022
Prince (Mail) Video tutorial: Episode 33 of assembler coding course / Racing Cars Game Jam
'Prince', founder of the demo group 'Phaze101', is currently streaming the assembler programming course "Corso completo di programmazione assembler in due dischi" in English on Twitch and uploads the respective episodes time-delayed to YouTube (amiga-news.de reported). Now episode 33 was published.

Furthermore he started the Racing Cars Game Jam. As with the Retro Trex Game Jam (amiga-news.de reported), the idea behind this jam is to expand the knowledge and awareness of retro computers. This time consoles are also allowed. The challenge is to create an identical, cloned or original version of a car racing game. Some examples are listed on the website. At the end of the contest, there will be a live stream showing all the games. The contest will run until December 18, 2022. (dr)

[News message: 17. Oct. 2022, 06:07] [Comments: 0]
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17.Oct.2022

Magnifier tool: Lupe 2.1 for AmigaOS 3, 4 and MorphOS
At the end of June Matthias "UltraGelb" Böcker released version 2.0 of his magnifier tool for MorphOS and AmigaOS (amiga-news.de reported). Now he has released version 2.1, which also supports AmigaOS 4. The changes:

Added italian AmigaGuide documentation translated by Samir Hawamdeh.
Added an TEXTFRAMETYPE option to change the type of frame that is to be drawn around the coordinates and RGB displays.
The window can now also be moved around by using the cursor keys or the numeric key pad. The 'immovable' option has no effect on this. For details/qualifiers please see the documentation.
68k version now uses z.library (http://aminet.net/util/libs/zlib.lha) for PNG saving. The z.library that comes with MUI5 also works.
Added support for application.library/ringhio on OS4 to notify the user when an image was saved.
Added native support for OS4 intuition screen notifications when WB wants to close/reopen.
Added native support for iconify and jump-screen gadget if OS4 is detected.
There is now an OS4 native compile of Lupe.
Added a 'Pause' mode that can be activated either by Project menu and its menu key, just pressing space when the Lupe window is active or by a definable hotkey (see PAUSEKEY argument/ToolType).
The 68K version of Lupe now checks for zlib.library at program start and if there isn't it will disable the 'Save PNG' menu item.
There is now a bonus drawer which at the moment only contains an alternative glow icon by Luca (thanks for the icon :-))
Double-clicking the Lupe window while holding the SHIFT key will move the Lupe window to the back now if it's not set as a frontdrop window. Useful when set to borderless.
Double-clicking the Lupe window will bring it to font now if it is not set as a backdrop window.
Added glow icons done by Mikhail Malyshev which will be used from now on for the 68K version of Lupe.
Added HORIZSLIDER option to have the zoom-slider in the bottom border of the window instead of the right border.
FRONTDROP option is now simulated on classic AmigaOS and does a timed WindowToFront() every now and then.
Added BACKDROP and FRONTDROP options to have the window either always stay in the background or in the foreground respectively.
Added WINDOWBORDER option.
Added padding for RGB and and coordinates texts between frame and text. Use XTEXTPADDING and YTEXTPADDING to change the padding horizontally and vertically respectively.
Added 'Open Icon-Info' menu item to the 'Settings' menu to open the icon info window on the workbench of Lupe's icon. This mostly makes sense with the ICONNOTIFY option to have another way to edit all options without the need to restart Lupe.
Reworked the menu structure. Instead of having just the 'Project' menu, screen related items are now in the new 'Screen' menu. Settings related items were moved to a 'Settings' menu.
Improved scaling/blitting so that there are no small black borders anymore on the right and bottom sides.
Lupe will now try to use the systems default font (gfxbase.defaultfont) before using topaz.font as a final fallback.
You can now specify your own font Lupe will use to display Coordinates and RGB using the UserFont argument.
Fixed broken error handling for the PNG saver in the Amiga68k version.
Coordinates and the RGB pixel value are no longer drawn in the window border but instead are drawn in the window itself now.
Added russian catalogs by Mikhail Malyshev.
Added italian catalogs by Samir Hawamdeh and Luca Longone.
Added visual prefs Iconify gadget support, so Lupe now also sports an iconify gadget on OS3.x if visual prefs is running or the standalone 'tbiclass' (aminet/dev/gui/titlebar_ic.lha) is installed.
Mouse wheel zoom can now be inverted by tooltype or CLI argument INVERTWHEEL.
Lupe will now open its AppIcon at 0,0 when iconified.
Added some missing localisations in the about requester.
Lupe now displays its name and version in the screen title when the window is active.
Fixed an enforcer hit when parsing CLI arguments that are defined as /K/S.

(dr)

[News message: 17. Oct. 2022, 05:54] [Comments: 0]
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