15.Jan.2023
Glames (Boing Attitude)
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Quiz for AmigaOS 4/MorphOS: "2022 FIFA World Cup" add-on for AskMeUp XXL
Press release: The "2022 FIFA World Cup" add-on, which includes 96 new questions about the lastest World Cup of soccer, is now freely downloadable from our website. Intended for Ask Me Up XXL buyers, the game offers you more than 2300 questions of general knowledge for your AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and Windows computers!
"What was the FIFA® ranking of the Qatar team before the start of the competition ?", "Who was the youngest player in the competition ?", ... are some of the questions to which you will now have the answers!
Features:
- Theme / 2022 FIFA® World Cup
- Game modes / Quiz - Survival - Cup
- Forms / Text: 88%, text/image: 11%, image: 1%
- Languages / English and French
An installer is included. AskMeUp XXL 3.5.0 or newer required. Here is a list of the available add-ons. (dr)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 21:05] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
Amigans
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AmigaOS 4: Shader player Shaderjoy 1.24
Shaderjoy allows displaying and creating Shadertoy compatible fragment shaders. Fragment shaders, also called pixel shaders, are programs that are executed per fragment (pixel) on the GPU.The ogles2.library 3.2 and Warp3D Nova 54.16 are required. Now Juha "Capehill" Niemimaki has released version 1.24. Changes:
- Add GLSL Help button: a URL (khronos.org) will be opened.
- Add PUBSCREEN tooltype.
- Add editor toggle menu option in window mode.
- Disable blanker using application.library.
- Fix some CppCheck findings.
- Fix "GetAttr fail" issue which happened when user dropped a file without editor view.
- Compile with GCC 11 - thanks to all people working on the SDK!
(dr)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 08:43] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
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Aminet uploads until 14.01.2023
The following files have been added until 14.01.2023 to Aminet:
ASMPro1.19.lha dev/asm 109K 68k ASM-Pro v1.19c (minor update)
filex-2.6-morphos.lha disk/moni 598K MOS binary file editor (8 catalogs)
RescueLander.lha game/actio 45K 68k Land on Earth or Moon or Mars...
StefACS.lha game/demo 64K 68k Adventures creator, working i...
ScummVM_AGA_060.lha game/misc 7.9M 68k Amiga AGA port of ScummVM 1.9...
ScummVM_RTG.lha game/misc 7.9M 68k Amiga port of ScummVM
GQ2Demo.lha game/role 990K 68k Demo of a Point & Click Adven...
FlashMandelNG_OS4.lha gfx/fract 34M OS4 Mandelbrot & Julia fractals AOS4
luett-font.lha text/bfont 4K 68k Small HiRes font (8x8, all co...
Vim_9.0-ppc-amigaos.lha text/edit 15M OS4 The ubiquitous text editor
Vim_9.0-ppc-morphos.lha text/edit 14M MOS The ubiquitous text editor
NAFCYI1991S1-01.zip text/pfont 1.8M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-02.zip text/pfont 1.8M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-03.zip text/pfont 2.4M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-04.zip text/pfont 1.9M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-05.zip text/pfont 1.9M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-06.zip text/pfont 2.1M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-07.zip text/pfont 2.0M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-08.zip text/pfont 2.1M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-09.zip text/pfont 2.0M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-10.zip text/pfont 1.9M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-11.zip text/pfont 2.0M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-12.zip text/pfont 2.1M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-13.zip text/pfont 1.7M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-14.zip text/pfont 1.7M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-15.zip text/pfont 2.1M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-16.zip text/pfont 1.8M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-17.zip text/pfont 1.8M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-18.zip text/pfont 1.7M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-19.zip text/pfont 1.7M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-20.zip text/pfont 2.1M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-21.zip text/pfont 2.0M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-22.zip text/pfont 2.2M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-23.zip text/pfont 2.1M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-24.zip text/pfont 1.9M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-25.zip text/pfont 2.0M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-26.zip text/pfont 1.9M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-27.zip text/pfont 1.7M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
NAFCYI1991S1-28.zip text/pfont 1.8M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
avalanche.lha util/arc 81K AOS ReAction unarchive GUI for xf...
Albatros.lha util/boot 34K 68k Lock your AMIGA by a keyword
MuRedox.lha util/boot 140K 68k MuLib based math speedup patc...
MMULib.lha util/libs 773K 68k Library to ctrl the MC68K MMUs
SoftIEEE.lha util/libs 77K 68k math lib&881/882 FPU emulator...
AmiKick.lha util/misc 49K Check Kickstart images under ...
VATestprogram.zip util/misc 2.8M 68k Versatile Amiga Testprogram
AnalogClock.lha util/time 39K 68k Resizeable analog transparent...
(snx)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 07:05] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
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OS4Depot uploads until 14.01.2023
The following files have been added until 14.01.2023 to OS4Depot:
hdaudio_ahi.lha dri/aud 245kb 4.1 Generic HD audio driver for Amig...
flashmandelng.lha gra/mis 34Mb 4.1 Mandelbrot & Julia fractals ...
zip_lib.lha lib/mis 185kb 4.1 Library for reading/writing zip ...
smb2fs.lha net/sam 126kb 4.1 Filesystem for accessing files u...
beebase.lha off/dat 8Mb 4.0 Programmable relational database...
avalanche.lha uti/arc 81kb 4.1 Simple ReAction GUI for xadmaster
vim_mui.lha uti/tex 15Mb 4.1 The ubiquitous text editor
(snx)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 07:05] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
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MorphOS-Storage uploads until 14.01.2023
The following files have been added until 14.01.2023 to MorphOS-Storage:
Chrysalis_3.17r4.iso Chrysalis This pack allows you to...
DescentII_1.2.lha Games/Shoot3D MorphOS port of Descent...
BeeBase_1.0.7.lha Office/Database Programmable relational...
Lucy_2.33.lha System/Ambient/Commodi... A small commodity that ...
tdcc_0.3.lha System/Ambient/Utilities tdcc_0.3.lha
Vim_9.0.1158.lha Text/Edit A highly configurable t...
PageStream5-Tips_FR.lha Translations French translation of P...
(snx)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 07:05] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
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WHDLoad: New installers until 14.01.2023
Using WHDLoad, games, scene demos and intros by cracking groups, which were originally designed to run only from floppy disks, can be installed on harddisk. The following installers have been added until 14.01.2023:
- 2023-01-14 improved: Atomix (Thalion) trainer options added, WHDLoad v17+ features used, typo in end-sequence text fixed (Info)
- 2023-01-14 fixed: Elvira 2 - The Jaws of Cerberus (Horrorsoft/Accolade) soundtracker replay music fixed (dma wait value, audio volume), game can run with ntsc option now (Info)
- 2023-01-09 improved: Universe (Core Design) supports another version, ecs slave uses 512kb chip/512kb fast now, solution included (Info)
- 2023-01-08 new: Chariots Of Wrath (Impressions) done by DJ Mike (Info)
(snx)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 07:05] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
David Brunet (ANF)
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Obligement: Update of Amiga Games List
The Amiga Games List, a document created and maintained by David Brunet since April 1991, has been updated on January 13th 2023 with the publication of its 53rd edition. Among other new features and corrections, games published or updated in 2022 have been added, and games created with CONK, AmiGen Engine and in Objective-C are now counted. In addition, the "The 2-Clause BSD License" (BSD2) licence have been added. The total now reaches 13,869 entries, be it games, level editors, data disks, extensions and interpreters, which are distributed as follows:
- 13.206 games
- 370 extensions and data disks
- 152 game or level editors
- 141 interpreters
(snx)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 07:05] [Comments: 0]
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15.Jan.2023
Andreas Magerl (ANF)
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Amiga Future: Old Amiga Joker issues online as PDF files
At the title link Amiga Future provides all issues of the German games magazine "Amiga Joker" as PDF files - with the exception of the two own revivals from 2017 and 2019 which are still available for purchase. The scanning of the issues was started in 2009 in the A1k forum, its members Amipeguser, echo, evil, Lomaxx and Tracer participated.
Currently Amiga Future are looking for someone who can create an index of all articles of the Amiga Joker issues. In addition, all articles are to be added to the Amiga Future article database in the course of the year. The latter currently contains about 5,000 entries. (snx)
[News message: 15. Jan. 2023, 07:05] [Comments: 1 - 18. Jan. 2023, 07:48]
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14.Jan.2023
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Puzzle game: Kulki
The developer 'Mirq' has released a conversion of the Windows game Kulki for Amiga (YouTube video). The game runs on any Amiga with Kickstart 1.3 and 512 KB Chip-RAM. (dr)
[News message: 14. Jan. 2023, 06:54] [Comments: 0]
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14.Jan.2023
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Video tutorial: Episode 34 of assembler coding course
'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 34 was published. (dr)
[News message: 14. Jan. 2023, 06:43] [Comments: 0]
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14.Jan.2023
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Video tutorial: Programming functional buttons with AMOS Pro
In another part of his series of short tutorials on AMOS Pro (amiga-news.de reported), retro and Amiga fan 'Yawning Angel' this time shows how to program functional buttons using the function "ZONE$", which creates a screen section around a text. (dr)
[News message: 14. Jan. 2023, 06:38] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jan.2023
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Kickstarter campaign: Delivery of "Tank Mouse" delayed
The Polish designer Lukas Remis had successfully finished a Kickstarter campaign for the re-release of the Commodore mouse 1352 (amiga-news.de reported).
In a recent status update, the developer writes that due to the current COVID situation in China, over 60% of the factory's employees are on sick leave. His suppliers are also affected. He hopes that the Tank Mouse can be delivered in the second half of February. For those who want to bridge the time until they receive the mouse: AmigaBill tested the new Tank Mouse a fortnight ago in a Twitch show (YouTube video).
(dr)
[News message: 13. Jan. 2023, 16:57] [Comments: 0]
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13.Jan.2023
VintageIsTheNewOld
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Competition: Results of Logiker's Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge 2022
For the second time after 2021, the Logiker website organised a Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge, in which a specific Christmas symbol is to be created using multiplication signs in a freely chosen programming language. In this year's edition, a Christmas star had to be formed. Almost 200 participants took on the task using a wide variety of retro systems. There were also two Amiga entries (1, 2), both of which used ARexx. (dr)
[News message: 13. Jan. 2023, 16:32] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jan.2023
GitHub
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ReAction GUI for XAD: Avalanche 1.10 for AmigaOS 3 and 4
Chris Young has released version 1.10 of his ReAction-based graphical user interface Avalanche for the unarchiving system XAD, which also supports the xfdmaster.library and can search for viruses using the xvs.library. The developer has written his tool explicitly for AmigaOS 3.2, but has also been tested under AmigaOS 4. Since it uses a new window.class, it might not work with older OS3 versions. Changes:
- Dragging a drawer into the window now sets the source directory, if an archive hasn't already been opened.
- Fixed some problems opening archives in certain circumstances.
- OS4 build now uses newlib.
Download: avalanche.lha (81Kb) (dr)
[News message: 12. Jan. 2023, 20:46] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jan.2023
itch.io
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Dock: QDock V1.63
At the end of October, Sami Vehmaa published the first version of his start bar "QDock" (amiga-news.de reported), which he continues to develop (YouTube video). Since our last news item the developer has fixed several minor bugs and did some fine tuning. Furthermore now it is now possible to drop an icon on the dock. Vehmaa recommends to completely re-install this version and to delete all old files. His dock works well with a 68030 processor when the reflections are deactivated or a 68060 when activated. In addition, AmigaOS 3.1 or higher, graphics card and 22 MB RAM are required. (dr)
[News message: 12. Jan. 2023, 06:04] [Comments: 0]
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12.Jan.2023
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Tutorial: Using two graphics cards in the AmigaOne X5000
Dutch AmigaOS 4 user Dave 'Skateman' Koelman has been connected to the Amiga since the 1990s, when he bought an Amiga 500 to replace the Commodore VIC20 and later C64. When the AmigaOne X1000 was introduced many years later, he considered taking another leap onto new hardware, which he finally did in 2017 after the release of the AmigaOne X5000 by ordering it.
Since the interest and curiosity in the new PowerPC Amigas was aroused, Dave has been intensively involved with their hardware and software and has also been running his blog SkateMansWorld since that time. With so much expertise it was obvious that Amiga-News.de asked him to discuss the problem of how to run two graphics cards in the AmigaOne X5000 so that you get optimal solutions for using AmigaOS 4 as well as MorphOS and Linux. At the same time he gives one or two more tips on how to work with the X5000 in the best possible way. Many thanks, Dave!
"My X5000 came shipped with the AMD Radeon R7 250 graphics card (Radeon HD series). This card is great for AmigaOS and can also be used with the PowerPC Linux distros, but does NOT support proper hardware acceleration within Linux. This means that OpenGL based software cannot be used. As many games rely on OpenGL the lack of support was not very satisfying. As PowerPC Linux has hardware support for the older line of Radeon graphics cards, it does not for the newer Radeon HD and RX line of cards. Since I have been testing most Linux kernels over the past years which are being compiled by Christian Zygotzky (Xeno74), I wanted to have a graphics card that has Linux hardware acceleration support and was fully supported by AmigaOS. So there we are… AmigaOS fully supports the HD and RX Radeon cards but these cards don't have the proper LInux support. Alternative could be using an older Radeon card that is supported by Linux but then you will be missing out on all the new OS4 Radeon driver developments that Hans de Ruiter for A-EON is doing. And what about MorphOS that does not support the Radeon RX cards at all. It has some support for the Radeon HD cards but without hardware 3D acceleration...
Two graphics cards
As I do not want to change graphics cards each time I boot an alternative OS, I decided to see if I could fit a second graphics card in my X5000. By doing so I could upgrade my primary Radeon R7 250 to a newer Radeon RX 570 card and use a second graphics card for Linux and MorphOS.
Remember that the Radeon RX series are not supported at all by PowerPC Linux and MorphOS
When researching the possibilities for a secondary graphics card, I found that the bandwidth of a PCIe-X1 slot should be more than enough for my Linux needs. See this YouTube-Video to give you an idea of the bandwidth capabilities of the PCIe-X1 slot.
As the X5000 also has a PCIe-X4 slot, this would be preferable. The bad thing is that this PCIe-X4 slot is blocked by most graphic cards due to the big coolers on top of these cards. So my project started with a simple graphics card in a PCIe-X16 to X1 adapter. These adapters are mostly used by Crypto miners and cheap. The model I used is shown in the picture below.
To fit the above adapter in the X5000 we have several slots to choose from. Below a diagram of the X5000 mainboard. As you take a close look at the PCIe slots you see that the first slot is the PCIe-X16 slot where your graphics card is seated. The second slot is the PCIe-X4 slot, but most of the time it's unreachable due to the graphics card cooling solution. The third slot is a combined slot. PCIe-X1 / Xorro. The fourth and fifth slot are regular PCIe-X1 slots.
I decided to give it a shot with a Radeon 7450 Low profile graphics card and used the third PCIe slot (the combined PCIe-X1 / XORRO). Be creative when fitting the card in your machine. I used a simple piece of cardboard. The end result, a working 3D accelerated Linux running on my X5000 using the secondary graphics card. Yeah!
As mentioned earlier, the X5000 also has a PCIe-X4 slot with more bandwidth available but sits directly underneath the PCIe-X16 slot. This makes it very hard to be usable, until I found a PCIe-X16 to X4 cable with a 90 degree connector. See the pictures below.
By using this cable we can use the PCIe-X4 slot for use with a second graphics card.
I have been testing many graphic cards successfully using this cable and VoidLinux ever since. Some of this progress can be found on the Hyperion forum.
Some of these models are:
- Radeon HD 3870
- Radeon HD 4770
- Radeon HD 6770
- Radeon HD 5450
- Radeon HD 7450
- Radeon X1950
- Radeon X1900
- ATI FirePro V3700
Fitting another secondary graphics card in your machine might require some tinkering. I solved it by using materials like motherboard spacers and a tie-wrap.
The spacers are used to position the card above the normal screwhole in the case and still be able to tighten it with a screw. The tie-wrap is used to keep the rest of the card in place. It's not the most elegant solution, but for now it will do.
AmigaOS, Linux and .... MorphOS
It's great to have an X5000 capable of running AmigaOS and Linux each using its own graphics card. But being able to run AmigaOS, Linux and MorphOS with 3D acceleration would be best.
The MorphOS website has a hardware compatibility list and found that one of the most powerful cards with 3D hardware acceleration should be an X19xx series. As my X1950 had some hardware issues I was able to find myself a secondhand X1900 and decided to use this card. Its supported with Linux and should work with MorphOS. Let's go!
I have installed MorphOS on a secondary SSD drive attached to the second SATA port on the X5000. The first SATA port on the X5000 has an SSD drive connected with AmigaOS installed.
The second SATA port is also connected to a FlexiDOCK which makes it easy to swap drives without having to open the X5000. So now I have the ability to insert my MorphOS ssd drive when I want to run MorphOS and Linux for the moments I want to run Linux. The AmigaOS SSD is fitted inside the X5000 and always available. Installing morphos was a bit tricky but seems to be running fine. What i had to do was start the installation from USB like a normal installation but when you get to the partitioning part I used the following:
For MorphOS DH0: I used DH0.1: and for DH1: I used DH1.1:
I gave DH0.1: the name MOSSYS: and DH1.1: MOSWORK:
By using these values it did not conflict with the AmigaOS drive that is also present in the X5000.
Here is the FlexiDOCK that makes it very easy to swap drives without opening your case.
X5000 and Micro SDcard
As some might have noticed, there is some small black box hanging out of the front of my X5000. What you see here is a Micro SD card extender:
By using this I don't have to open my case and fiddle with the Micro SD card and the delicate connector on the X5000 mainboard. I can access my SD card at any moment now.
Final words
So that's the current status of my X5000. Two graphics cards - although I have currently opted for the RX550 instead of the RX570: almost half as small and less resource-hungry -, micro sd extender, FlexiDOCK, 16GB Ram for Linux and several operating systems. Time will tell what else can be done to adapt the X5000. If anyone would like more information, feel free to contact me. I am looking forward to suggestions, comments or further ideas first in the comments here (but you can also find me in the forums of Amigans, AmigaWorld and Hyperion-Support)." (dr)
[News message: 12. Jan. 2023, 05:29] [Comments: 3 - 10. Feb. 2023, 17:31]
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11.Jan.2023
Planet m68k
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Programming: Web based m68k assembler editor
Under the title link you can find a webapp to write, run and learn M68K assembly code based on the framework SvelteKit and the programming language Rust. The project has a GitHub respository which lists the following features:
- Simple code completition and full syntax highlighting
- Run the program or step through it
- Code breakpoints, settings, input/output interrupts, undo, formatter and more
- Inspect the value of each register and memory address to see which was changed with each instruction
- Create new projects and manage them all in the webapp
- Integrated IDE with semantic checks and useful errors to help you learn assembly
- Integrated documentation and IntelliSense with addressing modes, descriptions and examples
- Customisable settings and shortcuts, including theme customization
(dr)
[News message: 11. Jan. 2023, 09:10] [Comments: 0]
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11.Jan.2023
Amigans-Forum
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AmigaOS 4.1: Graphics card driver RadeonRX V2.12
The graphics card driver "RadeonRX.chip" is written especially for selected Radeon RX graphics cards with the Polaris graphics chip. These include Radeon RX 550, 560, 570, 580. Version 2.11 included in Enhancer Software 2.2 has now been updated to version 2.12 and can be installed using A-EON's Updater tool. The update fixes copy routine errors. This should fix the black screen problem in the game "Spencer" on Sam460 boards. (dr)
[News message: 11. Jan. 2023, 07:03] [Comments: 0]
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10.Jan.2023
Twitter
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Game Soundtrack: Albums "The Holocube" and "Time Travellers" released
Génération Delphine is a project to honor the game soundtracks of the French software company Delphine Software International by releasing albums of the restored tracks (amiga-news.de reported). Originally a first album should be released in November 2021, but now two albums has been released at the same time:
"The Holocube" is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the game Flashback and can be obtained for free from Bandcamp.
The second album "Time Travellers" is a tribute to the game Future Wars and can be bought for 7 Euros or more. The physical version is already sold out. (dr)
[News message: 10. Jan. 2023, 06:19] [Comments: 0]
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10.Jan.2023
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Accelerator board projekt: Buffee developer on ARM GCC
In her blog, Renee Cousins, one of the two developers of the "Buffee" turbo card project (amiga-news.de reported), reports on the theoretical and practical basics of the project. In the latest blog entry, she explains with examples that the ARM GCC sometimes delivers problematic results. (dr)
[News message: 10. Jan. 2023, 05:58] [Comments: 0]
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09.Jan.2023
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Editor: MUI-Vim V9.0.1158 for AmigaOS4 and MorphOS
MUI-Vim is a port of the editor Vim. This editor is intended for editing programs as well as plain text files. Multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, block operations and scripting are some of the features. Ola 'sodero' Söder has now ported
version 9.0.1158 of VIM and released it for AmigaOS4 and MorphOS. He has also updated syntax highlighting for Hollywood 9.1.
(dr)
[News message: 09. Jan. 2023, 15:55] [Comments: 0]
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09.Jan.2023
Chris Young (Mail)
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AmigaGuide to HTML converter: GuideML 3.17 for AmigaOS 3/4
GuideML is an AmigaGuide to HTML converter which can convert most AmigaGuides and since v3.1 also has a GUI (amiga-news.de reported). The tool was originally written by Richard Körber and now is available in version 3.17. Changes:
- Add basic support for \ at {system command with openurl command.
- Add colour theme management with new light and dark colour themes in addition to the default AmigaGuide compatible one.
The command line version now requires OS2.1 (but no longer tested by the author) while the GUI version at least requires AmigaOS 3.2. The archive includes also a version for AmigaOS 4.
The program is open source, the source code available on GitHub. (dr)
[News message: 09. Jan. 2023, 04:18] [Comments: 0]
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09.Jan.2023
Amigans-Forum
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AmigaOS 4: Version 6.10 of audio driver for Intel HD Audio
The AHI driver for AmigaOS 4 written by Harald Kanning supports PCIe cards with sound chips that meet the HD Audio specification (amiga-news.de reported). The archive also contains a simple "mixer" which can be used to control the volume. Now the developer has released an update to version 6.10 with the following changes:
- Added Mixer option to limit Recording resolution to 16bit. This is required for programs which do not work with larger recording resolutions (eg. HD-Rec and AE4)
- Added additional Tooltypes for the Docky to position the docky window manually
AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 2 (the author has not tested it under previous versions) and AHI 6.6 are required. (dr)
[News message: 09. Jan. 2023, 03:59] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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AmigaOS 4: SMB2 handler smb2fs V53.3
The Server Message Block (SMB) is a network protocol for file, print and other server services in computer networks and allows access to files and directories located on another computer (Wikipedia entry). Fredrik Wikstrom's SMB2 handler is based on libsmb2 and allows remote access to files via the SMB2/3 protocols (amiga-news.de reported). Version 53.3, released a few momentsa go, includes the following changes:
- Added a workaround for smb2_rmdir() not returning an error when trying to delete a non-empty directory.
- Added support for READONLY switch.
- If the reported f_blocks is larger than INT32_MAX statfs() will reduce it and compensate by making the block size larger (that way at least programs
that use the id_NumBlocks, id_NumBlocksUsed and id_BytesPerBlock fields to calculate used and free percentages will report reasonable results).
The newlib.library V53.40 or newer (or V53.30, included in AmigaOS 4.1 FE) and the filesysbox.library V54.4 or newer are required. (dr)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 19:45] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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MorphOS: Software collection Chrysalis 3.17r4
Yannick 'Papiosaur' Buchy's Chrysalis is a preconfigured collection of programs, games and emulators and now is available in version 3.17r4 for MorphOS 3.17. Changes:
- updated Wayfarer 4.8
- updated Iris 1.5
- updated SDL2 2.26.2
- updated TinyGL (27.12.22)
- added mimetype for Hollywood applets hwa to launch Hollywood Player
- added Image2PDF 1.3
- updated Exutil 1.1.3
- added Croatia country
- updated ZIP 1.2 plugin for Hollywood
- updated XML 2.0 plugin for Hollywood
- updated AmiSSL 5.6 68k
- added PastePass 2.0
(dr)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 19:38] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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Aminet uploads until 07.01.2023
The following files have been added until 07.01.2023 to Aminet:
WiseSpy2.lha comm/cnet 12K Text Adventure for C-Net BBS
amicygnix-base.lha comm/misc 148M OS4 an Unix/X11 environment for A...
amicygnix-base-src.lha comm/misc 22M Sources of the AmiCygnix base...
amicygnix-tools.lha comm/misc 95M OS4 Extension package for AmiCygnix
amicygnix-tools-src.lha comm/misc 2.6M Sources of the AmiCygnix tool...
amicygnix-x11-src.lha comm/misc 67M Sources of the basic X11 system
lookup_mos.lha comm/tcp 9K MOS lookup Network command tool w...
encore_morphever.lha demo/misc 19M MOS Morphever by Encore - demo fo...
encore_morphilia.lha demo/misc 17M MOS Morphilia by Encore - demo fo...
encore_morphobia.lha demo/misc 14M MOS Morphobia by Encore - demo fo...
encore_morphoza.lha demo/misc 12M MOS Morphoza by Encore - demo for...
Inkey_ADE.sh.txt dev/gcc 2K 68k INKEY$ function script for ADE.
CF_Install.adf driver/med 880K 68k Automated PCMCIA CF Driver In...
MCE.lha game/edit 3.6M 68k Multi-game Character Editor
MCE-MOS.lha game/edit 3.9M MOS Multi-game Character Editor
MCE-OS4.lha game/edit 4.1M OS4 Multi-game Character Editor
ScummVM_AGA_060.lha game/misc 7.9M 68k Amiga AGA port of ScummVM 1.9...
ScummVM_RTG.lha game/misc 7.9M 68k Amiga port of ScummVM
AmiVms.lha misc/emu 3.4M 68k Simulates OpenVMS commands
LN4GameOver.lha mods/misc 2.0M 4ch LN4GameOver MED track
NAFCYI1991S1-B27.zip text/bfont 2.4M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (BMP Fonts)
ASE2019_2.05.lha text/edit 205K 68k Text editor
guideml.lha text/hyper 148K AOS HTML converter with GUI
NAFCYI1991S1-27.zip text/pfont 1.8M NAFCYI Spring 1991 (PS Fonts)
MuRedox.lha util/boot 139K 68k MuLib based math speedup patc...
Image2PDF.lha util/conv 6.2M ALL convert JP(E)Gs and PNGs to PDF
zmakebas.lha util/conv 113K AOS BASIC Text to ZX Spectrum/ZX8...
zmakebas_mos.lha util/conv 60K MOS BASIC Text to ZX Spectrum/ZX8...
filesysbox_68k.lha util/libs 58K 68k A FUSE compatible file system...
SoftIEEE.lha util/libs 77K 68k math lib&881/882 FPU emulator...
VATestprogram.zip util/misc 2.8M 68k Versatile Amiga Testprogram
CroatiaMOS.lha util/sys 1K EUR Croatia country for Morph...
AnalogClock.lha util/time 39K 68k Resizeable analog transparent...
Exutil_68k.lha util/wb 1.3M 68k Batch renames picture files b...
Exutil_AROS.lha util/wb 1.6M x86 Batch renames picture files b...
Exutil_MOS.lha util/wb 1.5M MOS Batch renames picture files b...
Exutil_OS4.lha util/wb 1.8M OS4 Batch renames picture files b...
tdcc_MOS.lha util/wb 1.5M MOS Timer for shutdown and blanke...
Turkish_Packs.lha util/wb 41K Turkish Catalog packs some ap...
(snx)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 09:24] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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OS4Depot uploads until 07.01.2023
The following files have been added until 07.01.2023 to OS4Depot:
mce.lha gam/uti 4Mb 4.0 Multi-game Character Editor
zip_lib.lha lib/mis 184kb 4.1 Library for reading/writing zip ...
amicygnix-base.lha net/mis 148Mb 4.1 An Unix/X11 environment for Amig...
amicygnix-base-src.lha net/mis 22Mb 4.1 Sources of the AmiCygnix base pa...
amicygnix-tools.lha net/mis 95Mb 4.1 Extension package for AmiCygnix,...
amicygnix-tools-src.lha net/mis 3Mb 4.1 Sources of the AmiCygnix tools p...
amicygnix-x11-src.lha net/mis 67Mb 4.1 Sources of the basic X11 system ...
exutil.lha uti/mis 2Mb 4.0 An exif based batch renamer
zmakebas.lha uti/mis 113kb 4.0 Make ZX Spectrum .TAP from BASIC...
guideml.lha uti/tex 148kb 4.0 AmigaGuide -> HTML converter ...
image2pdf.lha uti/tex 6Mb 4.0 Convert JP(E)Gs and PNGs to PDF
(snx)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 09:24] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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AROS Archives uploads until 07.01.2023
The following files have been added until 07.01.2023 to AROS Archives:
exutil.i386-aros.lha gra/mis 2Mb An exif based batch renamer pict...
(snx)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 09:24] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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MorphOS-Storage uploads until 07.01.2023
The following files have been added until 07.01.2023 to MorphOS-Storage:
ENCORE_Morphoza_1.2.0.lha Demoscene/ENCORE Demo by Encore released...
ENCORE_Morphilia_1.2.0... Demoscene/ENCORE ENCORE_Morphilia_1.2.0.lha
ENCORE_Morphobia_1.2.0... Demoscene/ENCORE MORPHOBIA by ENCORE
ENCORE_Morphever_1.2.0... Demoscene/ENCORE Demo for MorphOS PowerPC
pdp10-its-disassembler... Development/Cross Tools for analysing PDP...
SDL_2.26.2_Libraries.lha Development/Library All Libraries SDL : SDL...
zmakebas_1.8.0.lha Files/Convert BASIC Text to ZX Spectr...
FreeDroid_1.2.1.lha Games/Action Remake of the classic P...
MCE_14.1.lha Games/Editor Multi-game Character Ed...
Image2PDF_1.3.lha Graphics/Convert Convert JP(E)Gs and PNG...
Exutil_1.1.3.lha Graphics/Tools A small MUI based utili...
Lookup_1.0.lha Network/TCP lookup Network command ...
Wayfarer_4.8.lha Network/Web Wayfarer is the latest ...
Croatia.lha System/Country EUR Croatia country for...
(snx)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 09:24] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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WHDLoad: New installers until 07.01.2023
Using WHDLoad, games, scene demos and intros by cracking groups, which were originally designed to run only from floppy disks, can be installed on harddisk. The following installers have been added until 07.01.2023:
- 2023-01-06 new: Tank Buster (Kingsoft) done by Psygore (Info)
- 2023-01-06 fixed: Elvira - Mistress of the Dark (Horrorsoft/Accolade) sountracker replay routine fixed (dma wait, audio volume), ntsc option support (Info)
- 2023-01-04 improved: Bard's Tale 2: The Destiny Knight (Interplay) DMA wait in replayer fixed, manual and solution included (Info)
- 2023-01-04 improved: Pinball Mania (21st Century Entertainment) supports another version (Info)
- 2023-01-02 improved: Space Ace (Ready Soft) 3 versions supported now, all versions supported in V1.1 work again (V1.2 update broke support for one version) (Info)
- 2023-01-01 improved: Dungeon Master (FTL/Software Heaven) supports more versions, fixed graphical issued (Info)
- 2023-01-01 fixed: Bards Tale (Interplay) imager fixed, manual included (Info)
(snx)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 09:24] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
Andreas Falkenhahn (ANF)
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Hollywood: XLSX plugin manual in German
Andreas Falkenhahn writes: Dominic Widmer and Helmut Haake have been busy again and translated the manual of the XLSX plugin for Hollywood into German. It is available for download at the title link.
With the XLSX plugin for Hollywood you can easily load, modify and save Excel spreadsheets with Hollywood. Thanks to Airsoft Softwair's MetaDoc system, the translation is not only available as PDF file but also in AmigaGuide, HTML and CHM format. (snx)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 09:24] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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Amiga emulator: vAmigaWeb v2.3
vAmigaWeb is an Amiga emulator for the web browser or a Progressive Web App (PWA) based on the Amiga emulator for MacOS vAmiga.
Based on the latest version 2.3 of vAmiga, the developer 'mithrendal' has also updated his application. Changes:
- fixed a bug when system muted the audio while app was being longer suspended in background, now resuming audio context on any user action
- fixed a bug that causes the GPU pipeline to occasionally update the wrong texture in interlace mode
- fixed a bug that caused the CPU to crash on address error double-faults
- improves emulation of mechanical floppy drive delays
(dr)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 07:34] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jan.2023
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Point'n Click adventure: NEONnoir V1.1.1
The English point'n click adventure game "NEONnoir" (video) was developed with AmiBlitz for the Amiga Blitz Basic Game Jam. As a down-and-out private detective, the player has to track down a drug-addicted daughter from a good family (amiga-news.de reported). Now the developer has released a new version with some bug fixes.
Among other things, the dialogue was improved, including the error that cut off some words, and the text in general by correcting spelling mistakes or mixing tenses. (dr)
[News message: 08. Jan. 2023, 07:04] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jan.2023
itch.io
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RTG Solitaire: "Solitare match" V0.93
At the beginning of December, Sami Vehmaa had published a demo version of his graphics card Solitaire conversion "Solitare match" (YouTube video), which is primarily intended for Amiga emulators or Apollo cards due to the high CPU requirements. The demo version contains five levels. With this update, the paid version now provides the targeted 100 levels. Besides, the two difficulty levels easy and hard, a level editor and an Easter egg have been added. (dr)
[News message: 07. Jan. 2023, 06:38] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jan.2023
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Amiga emulator for MacOS: vAmiga 2.3
At Christmas Dirk Hoffmann had published the first beta version of version 2.3 of his Amiga emulator vAmiga for MacOS (amiga-news.de reportedberichtete). Today already the final version 2.3 has been released. Changes:
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug that causes the GPU pipeline to occasionally update the wrong texture in interlace mode
- Fixed a bug that caused the CPU to crash on address error double-faults
Enhancements:
- Improved emulation of mechanical floppy drive delays
The minimum system requirement for his emulator is macOS 10.15. (dr)
[News message: 07. Jan. 2023, 06:34] [Comments: 0]
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06.Jan.2023
Edgar Schwan (ANF)
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AmigaOS 4: X11 environment AmiCygnix 1.7
Edgar Schwan's AmiCygnix is a Unix environment for AmigaOS 4. It is not an emulation, but all programs are compiled natively for AmigaOS 4 (screenshot). AmiCygnix provides a directory and data structure similar to that of a Unix installation.
Version 1.7 contains some innovations around the topic "start of external programs" (remote start), furthermore a Unix and an Amiga shell is now available for the display drivers for the Workbench (screenshot). Besides that some bugs have been fixed by completely reworking the utility library "libaos4util" for AmiCygnix and by adding the coreutils package also some dependencies to the AmigaOS 4 SDK have been removed.
New in AmiCygnix-Base:
- All display drivers for the Workbench now have a menu to start a Unix or an Amiga shell. The environment of these shells is specially adapted to AmiCygnix. Another menu item can be used to open a dialer to change the access rights to the X server (screenshot). These shells can also be started via the "System Tools" menu of the desktop panel.
- Until AmiCygnix 1.6 there were some dependencies to the SDK. The commands of the coreutils package needed by some shell scripts were not included in AmiCygnix. Especially the ROX-Filer was affected by this. These commands are now included and can be used in the shells.
- Due to a bug in Newlib the arguments of some shell commands were not read correctly. Especially the backslash "\" was affected. This has now been fixed.
- The AmiCygnix shell commands compiled with Newlib did not have wildcard support (resolution of "*" in filenames), unlike the AmigaOS 4 SDK versions. This has now been incorporated so that a Unix shell is no longer required for the affected shell commands.
- Now includes an AmiCygnix adapted version of the ABC shell called "acxsh" for better compatibility with AmiCygnix
- In the newly introduced directory "Prefs" is an adjustor for the treatment of the access rights on the X server. Important for calling external programs (remote start).
- A script named "Start_XServer_Only.bat" allows to start an X server without starting an application. This is mainly intended for starting external programs
- Update of the SSL/TLS layer "GnuTLS" to version 3.7.3; this fixes some problems with certificates.
- Updated the integrated root certificates for GnuTLS and OpenSSL.
- Now includes the new GTK+ default theme "Adwaita", which is now also the default theme for GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 programs.
- Support for GTK+ 3 programs was buggy; this bug has been fixed.
- Revised versions of the "myX11Setup" and "myX11SetupLight" setters.
- When using the window manager "dwm" (Dynamic Window Manager) introduced with AmiCygnix 1.5, no key combinations with ALT could be used. For key commands for "dwm" the left Amiga key is now used.
- The library "libaos4util" used in all AmiCygnix programs has been completely reworked and all programs have been linked to it again.
- The support of the old "threads.library" has been removed. This is no longer needed by any of the current programs.
- The printer tool "lpr" could crash; this has been fixed.
- The data for the time zones has been updated.
- With installed AmigaOS 4 SDK the commands of the SDK are preferred now with the environment variable "PATH" of the ABC Shell. Basically general environment variables are set at the start of AmiCygnix only if they are not present in ENVARC:.
- Many other bug fixes.
New in AmiCygnix tools:
- All programs have been relinked with the revised version of the utility library "libaos4util".
- The browser "NetSurf" and the included command "curl" have been linked with the new version 3.7.3 of the SSL/TLS layer "GnuTLS". This should fix problems with certificates and SSL connections.
Download:
amicygnix-base.lha (148 MB)
amicygnix-tools.lha (95 MB) (snx)
[News message: 06. Jan. 2023, 16:07] [Comments: 0]
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06.Jan.2023
Andreas Magerl (ANF)
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Print magazine: Amiga Future, issue 160 - 25th anniversary
The English and German issue 160 (January/February 2023) of the print magazine Amiga Future has been distributed. It can be ordered directly from its editorial office and from Amiga dealers that stock the magazine.
Content of the current issue includes reviews about Aquabyss and the Warp 1240 as well as the first part of a special about Amiga Future's 25th anniversary. (snx)
[News message: 06. Jan. 2023, 15:27] [Comments: 0]
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06.Jan.2023
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Action game: Santa Claus Xmas Season 2022
Amiten Games - among others, platformer game Inca Man, mini-game EmotiWorld or jump'n run NinjFeratu - thanks everyone with the free game "Santa Claus Xmas Season 2022" (YouTube video) for the continued support they have received since founding as Amiten Software in 2011. The game requires an Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM.
The player takes on the role of Father Christmas and must protect his dwelling with collected presents that he throws at intruders arriving from below. The game gets faster and faster as the number of points and levels increases. (dr)
[News message: 06. Jan. 2023, 09:14] [Comments: 0]
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05.Jan.2023
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AmigaOS 4.1: SDL 2.26.1 Release Candidate 2
At the beginning of December, Juha 'capehill' Niemimaki had published the first release candidate of version 2.26.1 of the multimedia library SDL for AmigaOS 4.1 (amiga-news.de reported). The library is intended to make it easier for programmers to develop portable applications and is used by numerous open source games. SDL requires AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition and optionally OpenGL ES 2.0. Today he has published the second release candidate providing the following changes:
- Fix joystick GUID generation and update internal gamecontroller database with new GUIDs. Remove related RC1 workaround. Please use the SDL 2.26.1 RC2 (or newer) library when providing new controller mappings.
- Support SDL_WINDOW_FULLSCREEN_DESKTOP flag. It's implemented as a custom screen (instead of WB).
- Refactor library init/quit routines: initialize thread subsystem using constructor.
- Refactor shared library management: open common libraries in constructor and close them in destructor.
- Require ogles2.library minimum version 2 (instead of 0).
(dr)
[News message: 05. Jan. 2023, 22:19] [Comments: 0]
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05.Jan.2023
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Tool: Image2PDF for all Amiga systems
Bernd Assenmacher has released version 1.3 of his tool Image2PDF, which converts PNG or JPG images into a PDF file. Among other things, A3, A4 or A5 can be selected as the target format. Image2PDF is available for all Amiga systems and requires the Polybios-Plugin. It is sufficient to copy the files "polybios.ext" and "polybios.hwp" to "Libs/Hollywood" (for AROS only the file "polybios.hwp" exists). Changes in version 1.3:
- added icons from Carlo again which were accidently bad converted in V1.2
- corrected "Credits" in terms of the Amikit icon(s) ;-)
- the source folder and the save folder is now memorized when doing more than one picture to PDF
- added requester which asks if it is wanted to do more pictures to PDF
- added requester if the PDF file already exists (overwrite protection)
- on commandline/shell it is no longer neccesary to give the full path of the picture file
- its now checked if the PDF file to be saved ends with ".pdf"
- improved error message in case of invalid loaded picture/file
- added automatic closing of the viewer windows
- added Image2PDF as Hollywood Applet (at least Hollywood Player 9.1 has to be used)
(dr)
[News message: 05. Jan. 2023, 18:13] [Comments: 0]
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05.Jan.2023
Amigaland
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Action adventure: Anniversary Edition of Enemy 1 and 2
At Christmas 2013, the action adventure Enemy 2 - Missing In Action was released as freeware. Technically identical to its commercial predecessor Enemy - Tempest Of Violence, the title offered completely new levels and brought the story begun in the first part to a conclusion. At the end of 2016, there was a Collectors Edition of Enemy 2. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Enemy 1, Anachronia released an Anniversary Edition for Enemy 1 and Enemy 2.
The update contains various optimisations, bug fixes and redesigns of individual rooms. Both parts run on any Amiga with 1 MB RAM. (dr)
[News message: 05. Jan. 2023, 07:12] [Comments: 0]
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04.Jan.2023
Alfred Faust (ANF)
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MorphOS: BarsnPipes 1.2
Alfred Faust wrote: "After several weeks of intensive programming, a new version of BarsnPipes for MorphOS 3.17 has been completed and is available for download at the title link.
Import and export of MIDI files (*.mid) has been integrated into the main programme. The 10 different mouse pointers in the editor have been firmly integrated into the main programme as new 32bit png images. These are now pointers of the same type as the system pointer, ... and much more ...
All available tools (102) and accessories (6) (the plugins of BarsnPipes) for which the source code has been released and whose use with the new version of the main programme makes sense have been integrated. Included in the archive, all available documentation and instructions.
For developers, the "New Rules for Tools" (instructions and all material for programming tools and accessories) have been adapted for MOS 3.17 (and higher). Also an SDK for tools and accessories by Michael Rees, which extends the "New Rules for Tools" and makes them more comfortable.
The "Rules for Skins" (instructions for designing your own surfaces for BarsnPipes), as well as the material for your own translations of the Locale catalogue files are also available for download.
BarsnPipes has thus reached a stage of development that essentially marks an end point. Every possible extension or improvement can be made using the tools or accessories."
(dr)
[News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 18:32] [Comments: 0]
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04.Jan.2023
Twitter
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CDXL video player: AGABlaster 0.9.91
AGABlaster plays Commodore's CDXL video format. According to the author, it uses a customized version of the CDXL format supporting the AGA chipset with 24 bit colors and variable length frames. Customized CDXL files can be generated with AGAConv. AGABlaster is written in 68K Assembly and runs on native Amiga hardware (no gfx card or sound card required). In version 0.9.91 support for PAUSE on startup was added which allows to wait for modern monitors to synchronize at first frame. (dr)
[News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 11:07] [Comments: 0]
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04.Jan.2023
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Floppy disk images on PC and Mac: Greaseweazle Tools 1.5
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. A few moments ago version 1.5 of the Greaseweazle Tools was released providing the following changes:
- User-configurable disk formats: New option --diskdefs
- New disk formats: ensoniq.mirage and sci.prophet
- Fill missing/bad sectors with -=[BAD SECTOR]=- pattern
(dr)
[News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 10:53] [Comments: 0]
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04.Jan.2023
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Video: Amiga 500 with serial number 190
In his latest video, Jan Beta takes a look at what he believes to be one of the first Amiga 500s, as it bears the serial number 190. (dr)
[News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 07:00] [Comments: 0]
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04.Jan.2023
amigaworld.net (ANF)
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AmigaOS 4: Payback ported
After a long development period - announced in V - Apex Designs released their Grand Theft Auto clone Payback in February 2001, including a demo version for 68k and PPC processors (WarpUP). In this, the player slips into the role of a young getaway driver while trying to become a big gangster boss. Seven updates and several new and updated maps were released afterwards. Roman 'kas1e' Kargin had received permission from Apex Designs to port the game to AmigaOS 4, which is now available at OS4Depot under the title link.
The original game and the last update are also required. The procedure for installing the update is available in detail in the description. Kargin writes about the content of the update:
"The original Payback was written in C and built via StormC (meaning GCC 2.95), and a large part of the code was Assembler-based: the 68K version used the 68K assembler,
whereas the PPC/WarpOS version used H&P's Power ASM assembler (this one is with Motorola syntax, so it's PPC assembler with Phxass kind syntax and is incompatible with
GCC's "as"). So I was in needs to port all the C code from old GCC to newer GCC, and then take the Power ASM assembler code used for the WarpOS version and adapt it, so
it can be compiled with self build VASMMOT_PPC (which means VASM with Motorola syntax). Then I used GCC to combine everything into a single OS4 binary. The assembler
code adaptation was minor, but I had to implement a few functions that were not available in VASM's assembler (prolog/epilog, pushgprs/popgprs, etc).
The next major issue was Payback's Warp3D rendering. The codes were once again "old GFX card" based and contained some bugs, so some rewriting and fixing was required.
Yeah, it is not uncommon for game developers from the past to assume that only old kinds of graphics cards will be used (as it was in Exodus: The Last War, for example).
Now, you can use hardware rendering on your RadeonHD or RadeonRX cards with no problems, be it NovaBridge or Warp3D_SI. Thanks to Hans for his help in terms of Warp3D code!
Migration from GCC 2.95 to GCC 11.3 also takes some time because of plenty of deprecated code, old-fashioned use of DOS's anchors, message ports, memory allocations, the
way of calling assembler functions, non-static structs, etc. And, as we were told, the things that were forgiven in GCC 2.95 are no longer applicable in today's GCC, so
changes must be made. On top of that, instead of newlib, I do use Afxgroup's improved CLIB2 fork (more specifically, CLIB2_beta07).
Once things start working, new video modes are added (so you can play HD modes like 1920x1080 too). At the same time, Javier starts writing a new "preference" program that
is now Reaction-based, logical, and visually appealing. Now you can control everything from the PaybackSetupOS4 binary right from the start, as well as later in the game
as before, of course. Also, Javier does help with some bits all over the place as always, so hats off for that!
The following changes are not included in this update, but are planned for future ones:
- Support for window mode.
- Finalizing of the FLC video player with auto-scaling. We do have a working version, but it's not good enough, so we postponed it to a later update.
- Complete the migration from audio.device to the ahi.device. Also, it kind of works already, but not well enough.
- Fixing hardware rendering to works on the older Warp3D classic drivers again (migration to the newer GCC required extensive rewriting, resulting in clumsy hardware mode on real Warp3D).
- to fix bugs that will be found in this update."
(dr)
[News message: 04. Jan. 2023, 06:43] [Comments: 0]
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03.Jan.2023
MorphZone
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MorphOS: ENCORE updated several demos
At the end of October, the demo and game developers Encore (among other 2D shooter Fortis) released its new demo "Morphever", a few days ago the demo "KHESHKHASH" has been updated. Now the developers have updated Morphever, as well as the three other older demos Morphobia, Morphilia and Morphoza to version 1.2.0, which mainly fixes bugs, and features the latest engine and some minor improvements. (dr)
[News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 20:57] [Comments: 0]
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03.Jan.2023
Amigans-Forum
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AmigaOS 4: Accessing the ARexx ports of applications on remote PCs
In a recent blog entry, Andy Broad (among other things, graphics programme SketchBlock) reports on his current project, currently still called "NetRexx", with which one can write Arexx scripts to control applications on remote computers (YouTube video). (dr)
[News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 16:36] [Comments: 0]
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03.Jan.2023
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Amiga emulator: Amiberry 5.5.1
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.
Three days ago, the developer had released version 5.5 (amiga-news.de reported) and now provides an update for that. Changes:
Bugfixes
- Retropie's SDL2 version doesn't have SDL_isupper
Improvements
- added more logging during controller detection
- implemented checking for filenames without charset conversion
- skip files starting with a dot when reading a directory
Build System
- detect revisions in the detected tags
(dr)
[News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 05:47] [Comments: 0]
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03.Jan.2023
Twitter
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Blog: Displaying 24-bit images optimally in HAM mode
For more than 25 years, Arnaud Carré has been programming and as a member of the demo group Oxygene also demos. In his newly established blog, he deals with the problem of displaying 24-bit images correctly and as best as possible on current PC hardware in the Amiga's HAM mode in order to use them in demos, for example. For this, he gives code examples and insights into his converter, which he will publish soon. (dr)
[News message: 03. Jan. 2023, 05:41] [Comments: 0]
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02.Jan.2023
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RTG Solitaire: "Solitare match" V0.89
At the beginning of December, Sami Vehmaa had published a demo version of his graphics card Solitaire conversion "Solitare match" (YouTube video), which is primarily intended for Amiga emulators or Apollo cards due to the high CPU requirements. The demo version contains five levels. With this update, the paid version now has 75 levels. Besides, the game engine was improved. (dr)
[News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 14:09] [Comments: 0]
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02.Jan.2023
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Dock: QDock V1.49
At the end of October, Sami Vehmaa published the first version of his start bar "QDock" (amiga-news.de reported), which he continues to develop (YouTube video). This update fixes several minor bugs. The tool is currently available for 1 Euro or more. The originally high CPU requirements have been lowered so that the dock can also be used with a 68030 processor when the reflections are deactivated or with a 68060 when activated. In addition, AmigaOS 3.2 (the author could not test under AmigaOS 3.1), graphics card and 22 MB RAM are required. (dr)
[News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 14:04] [Comments: 1 - 02. Jan. 2023, 19:38]
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02.Jan.2023
GitHub
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Porting Amiga applications to Linux: AxRuntime 41.5
Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz' "AxRuntime" is a runtime environment for Linux which emulates the AmigaOS-API and therefore enables porting Amiga applications on Linux and developing applications which can be compiled for AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS as well as Linux (amiga-news.de reported). Under Windows it is possible to use it by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which has been generally available for Windows 10 and 11 in the Microsoft Store since the end of November (amiga-news.de reported). The new version is based on the recently released version 20221221-1 of the ABI v11 developer branch and provides minor bug fixes and changes (latest YouTube video). (dr)
[News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 13:53] [Comments: 0]
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02.Jan.2023
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Aracade-Spiel: "Green Beret" update
Green Beret is a conversion of Konami's arcade classic of the same name to the Amiga, written using the Scorpion Engine and won third place at AmiGameJam (amiga-news.de reported).
With this update, the developer wishes all a happy new year. Changes:
- added 2 selectable difficulty levels (Normal and Arcade), because people asked for a less brutal experience.
- "Normal" has a lifebar (which is not a "heresy", since the Japanese version of Contra Hard Corps (Mega Drive) does that too).
- "Arcade" is the same difficulty as previous versions (no lifebar, 1 hit = dead).
- some minor improvements here and there, such as a little flag marking a "save point/spawn point" reached.
(dr)
[News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 13:47] [Comments: 0]
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02.Jan.2023
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Linux: Browser Artic Fox V40.1
Christian 'xeno74' Zigotzky has compiled version 40.1 of the web browser Artic Fox (screenshot) for Linux PowerPC (32 Bit). Basically it runs under the Linux PowerPC distributions Void PPC, MintPPC, Fienix and Ubuntu 10.04 (which are also available for AmigaOne X1000 and 5000. Mainly, the browser is meant for older resp. slow systems (e.g. G3 with Ubuntu 10.04) because it is using an older version of the Goanna engine which has a good performance on slower systems. As a result, certain pages like GitHub cannot be fully displayed.
Download: arcticfox-40.1.linux-powerpc.tar.bz2 (37 MB) (dr)
[News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 07:45] [Comments: 0]
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02.Jan.2023
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Action game: Elf Spirit Hunters released
For the TOY BOX JAM 4, the developer Erik 'earok' Hogan has written the action game "Elf Spirit Hunters" using his Scorpion Engine and released it today. It is inspired by David Crane's Ghostbusters game.
The player's task is to rid the world of the last remaining Halloween ghosts shortly before Christmas. To do this, you have to buy elves as helpers in the shop as well as chests in which the ghosts are trapped.
An Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM is required. (dr)
[News message: 02. Jan. 2023, 07:25] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
Amigans
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AmigaOS 4: Update for Heretic II in development
According to Roman 'kas1e' Kargin, Steffen Häuser is working on updates for the games published by Hyerion Entertainment such as Heretic II and Quake II for AmigaOS 4. He had already worked on the beta test for the original version (amiga-news.de reported). Kargin has now published a first preview video for Heretic II. Among other things, the new version should support HD modes like 1920x1080. In addition, all movies will be scaled and filtered so that there will no longer be 320×240 windows as in the original Warp OS version. (dr)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 14:29] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
David Brunet (ANF)
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New articles on Obligement
The articles below have been added to the website of the French Amiga/MorphOS magazine Obligement during the last two months. All translations are welcome. Please contact David 'Daff' Brunet for more information.
- Novembre/December 2022 news.
- Old articles from AmigaDP 1 to 4: Review of DirWork 1.43, Review of NewZap 3.30, Review of PC-Task 1.10, Demo: Black & White Slide 2, Review of AppServer 301, Review of TurboQuantum, Review of VCLI 3.0, Demo: The Intruder, Review of ABackup 1.40, Review of MED 3.20, Review of Equality, Comparative: File search tools on AmigaOS 1.x/2.x, Demo: Optimus Maximus, Review of Magnetic Pages 1.3, etc.
- Interview with Alfred Faust (BarsnPipes developper).
- Interview with Stoo Cambridge (Cannon Fodder/SWOS graphist).
- Hardware: X500 Evo.
- Hardare: Eclipsis.
- File: Amiga history (update of the year 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985).
- File: Trecision history (3rd part).
- Tutorial: Installation of Warp3D Nova, Nova Bridge, MiniGL, OGLES2 and WarpOS Emu on AmigaOS 4.1.
- Tutorial: LightWave - Create a perfect Boing Ball.
- DIY: Use of the new LEDs on the Replay FPGA Arcade.
- Programming: Getting Started with Lua on MorphOS.
- Special quizz about Workbench.
(dr)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 14:03] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
Amigans
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AmigaOS 4: Version 6.9 of audio driver for Intel HD Audio
The AHI driver for AmigaOS 4 written by Harald Kanning supports PCIe cards with sound chips that meet the HD Audio specification (amiga-news.de reported). The archive also contains a simple "mixer" which can be used to control the volume. Now the developer has released an update to version 6.9 with the following changes:
- Added support for Sound Blaster Audigy FX (V2) (alc1220 based). This is the best card supported to date with a SNR of 120dB
- Added Install script
- Added Titlebar Docky
- Added workaround for AHI quirk that always selects a monitor input '0' and control monitor volume when you want to play a sound. This can potentially result in a lot of noise when playing sounds -> Added "Mute inputs" as monitor input 0
- Small speed improvements
AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 2 (the author has not tested it under previous versions) and AHI 6.6 are required. (dr)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 14:00] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
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Aminet uploads until 31.12.2022
The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to Aminet:
enc_sce_kheshkhash.lha demo/misc 22M MOS Kheshkhash by Encore & Scenic
ASMPro1.19.lha dev/asm 109K 68k ASM-Pro v1.19 (update)
pdp10-its-disassemble... dev/cross 7.1M MOS Tools for analysing PDP-10 IT...
vCPUComp.lha dev/cross 14K 68k Gigatron asm compiler
COP.lha dev/debug 166K 68k Low Level Debugger
libpng1639_a68k.lha dev/lib 1.5M 68k Lib for reading/writing PNG
PcmciaCD.lha driver/med 15K 68k ATAPI PCMCIA CD driver Sony Vaio
ScummVM_AGA_060.lha game/misc 7.9M 68k Amiga port of ScummVM
ScummVM_RTG.lha game/misc 8.0M 68k Amiga port of ScummVM
StefADV.lha game/text 52K 68k Little italian text adventure
invasionespaziale.lha game/wb 217K 68k Space Invasion Game
AmiArcadia.lha misc/emu 4.6M 68k Signetics-based machines emul...
AmiArcadiaMOS.lha misc/emu 4.9M MOS Signetics-based machines emul...
AmiArcadia-OS4.lha misc/emu 5.1M OS4 Signetics-based machines emul...
LN4Brisbane.lha mods/misc 12M LN4Brisbane 4ch MED by HKvalhe
LN4Lv10.lha mods/misc 1.1M LN4 Lv10 4ch MED track by HKv...
SamplesCreator.lha mus/edit 44K 68k 8svx samples creation and saving
Tipografia_AROS.lha text/dtp 2.4M x86 Generator of printable signs ...
Tipografia_MorphOS.lha text/dtp 2.4M MOS Generate printable signs usin...
Tipografia_OS4.lha text/dtp 2.9M OS4 Generate printable signs usin...
DisLib.lha util/libs 19K 68k A library based MC68K disasse...
filesysbox_68k.lha util/libs 35K 68k A FUSE compatible file system...
StartBar-ITA.lha util/wb 164K 68k Italian version of StartBar
StartWin.lha util/wb 203K 68k Two bugged workbench launchba...
(snx)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
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OS4Depot uploads until 31.12.2022
The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to OS4Depot:
rave.lha aud/edi 3Mb 4.1 An editor for mono/stereo audio ...
modexplorerce.lha aud/pla 2Mb 4.0 Streaming mod file from Internet...
modexplorerng.lha aud/pla 3Mb 4.0 Streaming mod file from Internet
farewell_e-card.lha dem 5Mb 4.0 This is a demo with a farewell e...
hdaudio_ahi.lha dri/aud 242kb 4.1 Generic HD audio driver for Amig...
amiarcadia.lha emu/gam 5Mb 4.0 Signetics-based machines emulator
amibrixx.lha gam/puz 2Mb 4.0 Puzzle game for the Amiga computer
myblocktetris.lha gam/puz 92kb 4.0 A small tetris-like game
tipografia.lha gra/mis 3Mb 4.0 Generator of printable signs usi...
comicon.lha gra/vie 2Mb 4.0 Simply downloads the comic-strip
smb2fs.lha net/sam 123kb 4.1 Filesystem for accessing files u...
mcamiga.lha uti/fil 2Mb 4.1 Midnight/Norton commander style ...
snoopdos_ita.lha uti/mis 19kb 4.0 Italian catalog file for SnoopDos
(snx)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
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AROS Archives uploads until 31.12.2022
The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to AROS Archives:
farewell_e-card.lha dem 4Mb This is a demo with a farewell e...
comicon_aros.lha gra/vie 2Mb simply downloads the comic-strip...
tipografia.i386-aros.lha off/dtp 2Mb Generator of printable signs usi...
(snx)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
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MorphOS-Storage uploads until 31.12.2022
The following files have been added until 31.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage:
ModExplorerNG_3.82.zip Audio/Players A module player by Jörg.
ENCORE_SCENIC_Kheshkha... Demoscene/ENCORE A demo for MorphOS name...
Nanosaur2_2.1.0.lha Games/Action Pangea Software’s Nanos...
BillyFrontier_1.1.0.lha Games/Action Billy Frontier is an ar...
OttoMatic_4.0.0.lha Games/Adventure OttoMatic_4.0.0 for mod...
CroMagRally_3.0.0.lha Games/Race The wildest racing game...
Woof!_10.5.0.lha Games/Shoot3D Woof! is a continuation...
fheroes2_1.0.0.lha Games/Strategy fheroes2 is a recreatio...
AmiBrixx_2.2.lha Games/Think A puzzle-game for the a...
ComicOn_1.4.lha Graphics/Show ComicOn downloads the s...
Farewell e-card.lha Misc Farewell e-Card from M...
Tipografia_1.2.lha Office/DTP Generate printable sign...
TinyGL-Update-2022-12-... System/Update This is the seventh pub...
(snx)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0]
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01.Jan.2023
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WHDLoad: New installers until 31.12.2022
Using WHDLoad, games, scene demos and intros by cracking groups, which were originally designed to run only from floppy disks, can be installed on harddisk. The following installers have been added until 31.12.2022:
- 2022-12-31 updated: Sink or Swim (Zeppelin Games/Odysseus Software) patch rewritten, real files used, Bplcon0 color bit fixes, interrupts fixed (Info, Image)
- 2022-12-29 improved: Bards Tale (Interplay) sound problems on fast machines fixed (Info)
- 2022-12-29 updated: Ski or Die (Electronic Arts) patch rewritten, files instead of disk image used, disk access disabled, 68000 quitkey support, keyboard routine fixed, fire button 2 support for Snowball Blast event added (Info)
- 2022-12-28 improved: Portal (Activision) now uses real files, fixed blitter issues, skip introduction (Info)
- 2022-12-28 improved: Desert Strike (Electronic Arts) fast memory support added, improved controls, better blitter fixes (Info)
- 2022-12-26 improved: Steel (Hewson) out of bounds blits fixed, access faults fixed (patch works on 68000 now) (Info)
- 2022-12-26 improved: Stardust (Bloodhouse) data directory path in slave corrected (Info)
- 2022-12-26 improved: Stardust (Bloodhouse) correct V1.6 slave included now (Info)
- 2022-12-26 improved: Stardust (Bloodhouse) possible crash after tunnel sequence fixed, minor graphics problems introduced in V1.5 fixed (Info)
- 2022-12-26 improved: Escape from Colditz (Digital Magic Software) chip memory requirements reduced, access fault fixed (Info)
- 2022-12-26 improved: Necronom (LineL) weapons can be selected with fire button 2, 68000 quitkey support (Info)
- 2022-12-25 improved: Space Ace (Ready Soft) supports another version (Info)
(snx)
[News message: 01. Jan. 2023, 08:45] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
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Amiga emulator: Amiberry 5.5
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.
A few moments ago, version 5.5 has been released. Changes:
Bugfixes
- Reverted CD32 autoloader to normal config
- added linefeed in logging errors from CDDA init
- CDDA and AHI wouldn't respect the selected SDL2 audio device
- CDDA audio would fail to init in some cases
- CD32 mode wasn't properly applied when using WHDLoad booter
- fixed passing string to write_log in Panel Paths
- Enumeration of Recording devices would write into sound device ID
- NVRAM path wasn't used in CD32/CDTV configs
- uaegfx blitter was accidentally disabled
- uaegfx masked and overlapping blit fix
- gfx_top_windowed/gfx_left_windowed replacement config entries
- When using Alt-Tab, the keys were not released when returning control
- When selecting a folder/file the contents were not always updated
- Fixed magicmouse without virtual mouse driver
- Changing HDD controller for Hardfile lost the path to the hardfile
- fixed glitches with File and Folder selectors
- Controller axes inverted status was not respected when reading their input
Improvements
- add support for UAE Zorro II RTG boards
- increase Savestate thumb size
- replace sdl2-config with pkgconf
- use 2MB Chip also, for A600 configs with Fast RAM
- major refactoring of whdload booter
- add more descriptive text when remapping controller buttons
- updated WHDLoad XML and GameControllers DB to latest versions
- ShowMessage now supports 3 lines. Added timestamp info when updating XML
- Added more configurable paths in GUI: NVRAM, Screenshots, Savestates
- added nvram and inputrecordings directories in repo
- updated WHDLoad XML to latest version
- cherry-picked various pieces from x86 branch
- cherry pick updates from x86 branch
Build System
- added RPI4 Manjaro separate build
- added inputrecordings and nvram directories in packaging
(dr)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 14:14] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
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Blog: How authentic is the Amiga 1000 in "Stranger Things"?
Carl Svensson always reports in his blog in detail and philosophically profound about various Amiga topics. In his latest article he explores the question of how authentic the shown workbench pictures of the Amiga 1000 are, appearing in the series "Stranger Things" are (amiga-news.de reported). (dr)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 07:25] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
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Video: Status update on BitBeamCannon projects
In a short video BitBeamCannon has informed about the current status of their projects (Metro Siege, DaemonClaw). (dr)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 07:13] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
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Video: 25 popular demos
For all those who want to spend New Year's Eve comfortably at home, a little video tip: the YouTube channel "Casual Retro Gamer" (CRG) (among other things Building a new Amiga 2000) had asked a few weeks ago via its Twitter account what the users think are the most popular demos. The result is a list of 25 demos, which are shown in a video of about 1,5h length. More than half of them are Amiga demos (for example Enigma, Desert Dream or World of Commodore). (dr)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:56] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
MorphZone (forum)
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MorphOS: Web browser Wayfarer 4.8 (2nd Update)
Jacek 'jacadcaps' Piszczek has released version 4.6 of his Wayfarer web browser for MorphOS, which primarily fixes bugs but also improves image dragging alongside updated libraries (cURL, png, webp, sqlite).
Please note that the current openssl3.library is required.
Download: wayfarer.lha (29 MB)
Update: (09:09, 01.01.23, snx)
Meanwhile version 4.7 is available. This one doesn't require latest openssl3.library anymore, but optionally checks for updates of it. Also localization strings cosmetics are included.
2nd Update: (16:41, 03.01.23, dr)
The developer has released version 4.8, which provides a fix for cUrl if Socks Proxies are used. (snx)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:48] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
Puni (ANF)
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AmigaOS 4: Blog summary of December
For the month of November 'Puni' has again published a news summary in the areas of hard- and software for AmigaOS 4 at the title link. (snx)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:38] [Comments: 0]
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31.Dec.2022
Amigatronics (ANF)
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Video review: Junior's Great Adventure
At the title link, Amigatronics has published a short review video of the game Junior's Great Adventure, which was released by Amigamers in spring.
The platform game, created with Backbone, is inspired by the silent movie era in terms of its sepia colours, fits on a single floppy disk and requires 1 MB of RAM as well as at least Kickstart 2.1. (snx)
[News message: 31. Dec. 2022, 06:35] [Comments: 0]
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30.Dec.2022
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Rediscovered: Unfinished Blitz Basic 2 projects
Jake Birkett is the head of indie game developers Grey Alien Games, which has been releasing downloadable games for PC and Mac since 2004. These have included the popular Regency Solitaire, which combines a Jane Austen-style story with various solitaire levels and special powerups that you get by upgrading your ballroom. Or Ancient Enemy, a turn-based battle card game based on solitaire, or from last year T-Minus 30: a 30-minute city builder where you have to save as many people as possible by building rockets before the planet blows up.
And what is this enthusiasm for computer game development based on? Exactly, before this time, Birkett was a passionate Amiga user and programmer.
So in the early 90s he wrote games on his Amigas 1200, which he still owns today, first in assembler, then in Blitz Basic 2, of which he only published one: as a fan of Solitaire under Windows 3.11 he wrote a corresponding implementation for the Amiga (YouTube video).
Besides that, there are quite a few gaming projects started. Recently, Birkett took the 80Mb 2.5" HDD out of the Amiga 1200 and used a 44-pin IDE-to-SATA adapter to plug it into his PC. As he tells us, at first his PC wouldn't boot when it was plugged in. So he told the BIOS to treat it as a hot-swap drive, then booted Windows and plugged it in, and WinUAE was able to recognise it and create a full image of it. He then used the hard disk image to examine all his old code and recompile it to create videos.
First, he turned his attention to games written in Blitz Basic 2, finding, among other things:
- "Oids" (an asteroids clone with a twist that you bounce off the edge of the screen): YouTube-Video
- Platform game: YouTube-Video
"Speed Grind" (a fast-paced vertically scrolling arcade game that is almost done. Only the levels still have to be put in the right order): YouTube-Video
Basically, he is thinking about finishing one or the other project now, even though he admits that he actually wants to spend his free time on other things due to the game development during the week.
Finally, he tells us that he used to make a lot of rave/trance music on his Amiga and he programmed demos with images that pulsed with the music. This example (warning, it has flashing lights) has a cheesy, fun track that works well with the fractal images he used. Each image has 32 colours and is split into 8 colours per Amiga sound channel, and when a note is triggered in each channel, the corresponding 8 colours are pulsed, giving quite an interesting effect!
We look forward to seeing (and reporting) what else Jake Birkett digs up! (dr)
[News message: 30. Dec. 2022, 13:30] [Comments: 0]
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30.Dec.2022
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Motorola68k emulation: Nightly Build von Emu68 für PiStorm32-lite veröffentlicht
Developer Michal Schulz regularly provides background information and status updates on his Motorola68K emulation Emu68 for the ARM architecture on his Patreon page. After the beta version 0.10 released at the beginning of March (amiga-news.de reported) he has now released a correspondingly adapted version of Emu68 as a nightly build for PiStorm32-lite (amiga-news.de reported) published the day before yesterday and reports about it in his current entry.
Download: Emu68-pistorm32lite-20221229-9b18f6.zip (3,6 MB) (dr)
[News message: 30. Dec. 2022, 06:52] [Comments: 0]
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29.Dec.2022
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AmigaOS 4: SMB2 handler smb2fs V53.2
The Server Message Block (SMB) is a network protocol for file, print and other server services in computer networks and allows access to files and directories located on another computer (Wikipedia entry). Fredrik Wikstrom's SMB2 handler is based on libsmb2 and allows remote access to files via the SMB2/3 protocols (amiga-news.de reported). Version 53.2, released today, includes the following changes:
- Added USER and PASSWORD arguments.
- Disabled CTRL-C signal checking in libc and ISocket->WaitSelect().
- Merged latest fixes from the libsmb2 github repo:
- convert system time to little endian in NTLMSSP code.
- convert destination path directory separators in rename function.
The newlib.library V53.40 or newer (or V53.30, included in AmigaOS 4.1 FE) and the filesysbox.library V54.4 or newer are required. (dr)
[News message: 29. Dec. 2022, 14:23] [Comments: 0]
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29.Dec.2022
MorphZone
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MorphOS: ENCORE & SCENIC released KHESHKHASH demo
At the end of October, the game and demo developers from Encore (2D shooter Fortis, among others) released their demo Morphever. Before they now devote themselves to game development again and want to tackle some projects that have been put on hold, they have updated one of their older demos: KHESHKHASH was originally released in 2002 with demo group Scenic, which required an Amiga with PPC and 3D accelerator. Since it was difficult to find hardware capable of playing this demo with high resolution and acceptable frame rate, it was decided to recreate it for a wider range of current MorphOS hardware (YouTube video). (dr)
[News message: 29. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0]
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29.Dec.2022
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68k hardware emulation: PiStorm32-lite with firmware released
Claude Schwarz' PiStorm connects a Raspberry Pi to the CPU socket of an Amiga using an adapter and uses the British single-board computer to emulate a fast m68k processor. The variant for the Amiga 1200 is called "PiStorm32". Yesterday the developer published on GitHub the repository for the PiStorm32-lite variant, which contains all hardware design and manufacturing files including ordering instructions for JLCPCB and the firmware. The lite variant is supposed to take into account the current difficult situation in the procurement of components and in principle be cheaper (amiga-news.de reported).
PiStorm32-lite is compatible with:
- PI3A
- PI3B
- PI4B
- PiZero2 (is to be tested in detail because of the small space around the HDMI connection)
Soon there will be another custom-made CM4 adapter for the PiStorm32-lite (amiga-news.de reported). The custom-made adapter will provide the best cooling in the limited space, as well as convenient access to all IOs (HDMI, USB, Ethernet) through the A1200 module slot near the joystick/mouse ports without modifications to the Amiga case.
As the developer explains to us, the Pistorm32-lite replaces CPU, gives the CPU Fast-RAM and provides, among other things, a virtual graphics card on the Zorro bus. This allows resolutions with Emu68 of up to 1920 x 1080 (PI3) or 4k (pi4). Emu68 is the associated JIT (just in time) compiler that translates the Amiga's Motorola machine code into ARM machine code in real time. AmigaOS runs completely unchanged on it. Everything else is then real AmigaOS drivers, written in 68k code, which talk to the Raspberry hardware.
Asked about the speed the Amiga can achieve with it, Schwarz said: with Emu68, a 68040 at 1.6GHz using a PI3 or about 3GHz using a Pi4. Or on a 68060 scale: a 68060 at 800MHz with Pi3 or 1.5GHz with a Pi.4.
Michal Schulz is continuously improving the RTG driver (amiga-news.de reported), but basically it already works very well. Currently, for example, it is already possible to play a 720p MPEG video smoothly with Riva.
The firmware, called "gateware", is an early first version written by him and Niklas Eckström. It functions very stably, but still needs to be further developed, in which users can contribute with their experiences and thus also follow the progress.
At the moment, the PiStorm is only available as a self-built version, but it is expected that the first prefabricated copies will soon be available for purchase. (dr)
[News message: 29. Dec. 2022, 06:26] [Comments: 1 - 28. Jan. 2023, 17:55]
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28.Dec.2022
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Video: Programming demos with "AProcessing" framework
With the seventh episode, the video series in which 'Prince' (founder of the demo group 'Phaze101', assembler coding course) talks in detail with developer and Resistance member Alessio 'OzzyBoshi' Garzi about his "AProcessing" framework for creating demos and intros is finished. (dr)
[News message: 28. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0]
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28.Dec.2022
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Emulator: vAmigaWeb v2.3 b1
vAmigaWeb is an Amiga emulator for the web browser or a Progressive Web App (PWA) based on the Amiga emulator for MacOS vAmiga.
Based on the latest version 2.3 b1 of vAmiga, the developer 'mithrendal' has also updated his application. Changes:
- can operate 4 floppy drives and 4 hard disks simultaneously i.e. df0-df3, dh0-dh3 for a classic professional amiga workstation environment
- supports extended ADF file format
- upgraded to latest vAmigaCore
(dr)
[News message: 28. Dec. 2022, 06:33] [Comments: 0]
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27.Dec.2022
MorphZone
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MorphOS: Eighth beta version of TinyGL
MorphOS team developer Mark 'Bigfoot' Olsen had offered a bounty project for improved OpenGL support as well as drivers for more Radeon graphics cards under the title link, which has been successfully funded (amiga-news.de reported). Now the developer has released the eighth public beta version of his TinyGL update. Changes:
tinygl.library:
- Library version is now 53.7.
- Fixed multiple issues with GL_RGB5_A1 textures.
- Fixed a problem with ARB fragment programs that caused such programs that used non-consecutive texture image units to fail. For example a program that used texture unit 0 and texture unit 2, but not texture unit 1 would misrender.
- Fixed a problem with mipmapped cubemaps where such textures would get treated as 2D textures rather than cube map textures. This problem only affected textures which are mipmap complete.
r300.library:
- Library version is now 53.10.
- Added support for GL_RGB5_A1 textures.
As the developer wrote, "especially the texture solves a bunch of problems with various different games, both existing games and future game ports. Among the games now working again is Descent Freespace, for example." (dr)
[News message: 27. Dec. 2022, 08:42] [Comments: 0]
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26.Dec.2022
Jan (ANF)
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Workbench distribution: AmiKit XE 11.9.0 for Raspberry Pi 4/400 and Windows
AmiKit has released an update to version 11.9.0 of the Workbench distribution AmiKit XE for the Raspberry Pi 4/400 (changes) as well as for Windows/Mac/Linux (changes) and wished a merry Christmas.
(dr)
[News message: 26. Dec. 2022, 16:09] [Comments: 0]
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26.Dec.2022
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AmigaOS 4: Audio editor Rave 1.4
Daniel 'trixie' Jedlicka has released version 1.4 of the audio editor "Rave" (amiga-news.de reported) and reports in detail about the development of this current version in his new blog entry. Changes of version 1.4:
- Implemented a resampler module with four quality settings
- Each project now keeps an activity log, which can be displayed in the Project Information window
- A reworked Fade plugin with configurable fade curves
- Fixed: User-aborting an operation no longer triggers an error requester
- Loading and saving of empty files is now supported
- Linked with the latest version of libFLAC for improved FLAC support
- Updated documentation
Rave requires AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 2 as well as A-EON's Enhancer Core classes. (dr)
[News message: 26. Dec. 2022, 16:02] [Comments: 0]
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26.Dec.2022
Amigaworld.net (website)
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PDF magazine: REV'n'GE 141 (Italian/English)
Besides the Italian original issue, the PDF magazine REV'n'GE ("Retro Emulator Vision and Game") is also available in English. The magazine's reviews compare, if available, the different ports of classic games to the various platforms of their time.
Amiga-related, the current issue is about "Akira" and "Luma". (snx)
[News message: 26. Dec. 2022, 09:01] [Comments: 0]
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25.Dec.2022
Twitter
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A-EON Technology: Enhancer Software Core Release 2 / Delay of A1222
According to Trevor Dickinson in his latest blog entry, the production of the A1222 Plus continues to delay due to the "ongoing worldwide lack of integrated circuits and other electronic supply chain issues". As he explained: "One small micro-controller which costs $6.83 each in batches of 100+ is only available for delivery at the end of 2023. Although it can be purchased now from another trade supplier for the extortionate price of ~$420 each." ACube and A-EON are therefore still looking for alternative suppliers.
Furthermore, he announces the immediate availability of Enhancer Software Core Release 2, which can be downloaded free of charge on AmiSphere for registered users. It is a free standalone version of the Enhancer software that includes classes, libraries and system files along with a software development kit that allows developers to create their own projects using features of the Enhancer software core components. Included is:
Datatypes:
- Info Datatype
- LogFile Datatype
- MPEGA Datatype
- MOD Datatype
- SimpleHTML Datatype
- Sound Datatype
- WAV Datatype
Gadgets and Classes:
- Anim Gadget Class
- Clock Gadget Class
- DateSheet Gadget Class
- InfoWindow Class
- ListViewer Gadget Class
- OptionButton Gadget Class
- PieChart Gadget Class
- ProgressBar Gadget Class
- Select Gadget Class
- SliderBar Gadget Class
- Shared Image Class
- Thumblist Gadget Class
- TickBox Gadget Class
- Time Gadget Class
- ToolBar Gadget
System:
Utilities:
Libraries:
CLI Commands and Tools:
- LDCK
- RequestChooser
- SystemReboot
Preferences:
Finally, the full commercial version of Enhancer Software v2.2 will be offered at a 30% discount until 31 December 2022. Likewise, users who have already purchased version 2.2 in December 2022 will receive a 30% credit on their Amistore accounts. (dr)
[News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 11:24] [Comments: 1 - 26. Dec. 2022, 13:34]
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25.Dec.2022
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Aminet uploads until 24.12.2022
The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to Aminet:
ApolloExplorer.zip comm/tcp 26M 68k Apollo Explorer
ZitaFTPServer.lha comm/tcp 14M OS4 A fast and secure FTP(S) server.
COP.lha dev/debug 166K 68k Low Level Debugger
HWP_ZIP.lha dev/hwood 286K ALL Read and write ZIP archives
parForth.lha dev/lang 394K x86 pForth compiled with AROS fun...
REDPILLGameCreator.lha dev/misc 3.0M 68k Game Creator with AGA support
Fussball-WM-2022.lha docs/misc 10K TurboCalc Spreadsheet WM-2022...
worldcup.lha docs/misc 655K Soccer World Cup statistics 1...
StefACS.lha game/demo 162K 68k Adventures creator, working i...
DeadMetal2.lha game/strat 16M 68k Strategy game sequel - 12 bat...
WhatIFF1.08.lha mags/misc 469K What IFF? #1.08-December-2022
AmiArcadiaMOS.lha misc/emu 4.9M MOS Signetics-based machines emul...
AmiVms.lha misc/emu 3.4M 68k Simulates OpenVMS commands
AmigaAMP3.lha mus/play 2.0M OS4 Multi format audio player wit...
AmigaAMP3-68k.lha mus/play 403K 68k MPEG audio player with GUI
AmiModRadio.lha mus/play 3.0M 68k Play modules from Internet so...
avalanche.lha util/arc 84K OS4 ReAction unarchive GUI for xf...
LHArchiver.lha util/arc 4.6M 68k create lha archives intuitively
SteBaseConv.lha util/conv 46K 68k Numeric base converter for an...
IconLib_46.4.lha util/libs 1.1M 68k free icon.library in optimize...
IdentifyDev.lha util/libs 66K 68k Identify hardware and more
IdentifyUsr.lha util/libs 98K 68k Identify hardware and more
SoftIEEE.lha util/libs 76K 68k math lib&881/882 FPU emulator...
AmiKick.lha util/misc 46K Check Kickstart images under ...
igame_fr.lha util/misc 7K 68k French catalog for iGame v2.2.0
VATestprogram.zip util/misc 2.8M 68k Versatile Amiga Test Program
(snx)
[News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0]
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25.Dec.2022
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OS4Depot uploads until 24.12.2022
The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to OS4Depot:
aifc2wav.lha aud/con 19kb 4.0 will save IMA4, SOWT and SDX2, A...
gym2vgm.lha aud/con 13kb 4.0 Converts GYM, SSL, and CYM files...
gym2vgmv.lha aud/con 13kb 4.0 Converts GYM, SSL, and CYM files...
amigaamp3.lha aud/pla 2Mb 4.1 Multi format audio player with GUI
libsamplerate.lha dev/lib 4Mb 4.0 Library for sample rate conversion
arabic_console_device... dri/inp 3Mb 4.1 An arabic console device, line &...
paybackupdate.lha gam/act 877kb 4.1 Native version of Payback for Am...
colorit.lha gam/puz 2Mb 4.0 A small games with colors
breakhack.lha gam/rol 15Mb 4.1 Breakhack is a small roguelike game
hwp_zip.lha lib/hol 286kb 4.0 Read and write zip archives for ...
aya.lha net/mis 2Mb 4.0 Access wolfram alpha answer mach...
smb2fs.lha net/sam 122kb 4.1 Filesystem for accessing files u...
zitaftpserver.lha net/ser 14Mb 4.1 A fast and secure FTP(S) server.
fuppes.lha net/ser 15Mb 4.1 Free UPnP Entertainment Service
avalanche.lha uti/arc 84kb 4.1 Simple ReAction GUI for xadmaster
avalanche_ita.lha uti/arc 5kb 4.0 Italian translation for Avalanche
lharchiver.lha uti/arc 5Mb 4.0 Create LhA archives intuitively
airscan.lha uti/pri 107kb 4.1 Native Amiga scanner utility
hex2.lha uti/sci 867kb 4.0 Simple calculator with variables...
thumbnailmaker.lha vid/mis 6kb 4.1 Arexx script for ArtEffect, gene...
(snx)
[News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0]
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25.Dec.2022
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AROS Archives uploads until 24.12.2022
The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to AROS Archives:
parforth.i386-aros.lha dev/lan 394kb pForth v27 compiled with AROS fu...
worldcup.lha doc/mis 655kb Soccer World Cup statistics 1930...
zip.i386-aros.lha lib/mis 286kb Plugin allows Hollywood scripts ...
(snx)
[News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0]
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25.Dec.2022
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MorphOS-Storage uploads until 24.12.2022
The following files have been added until 24.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage:
HWP_ZIP_1.2.lha Development/Hollywood/... Read and write ZIP arch...
AmiArcadia_29.34.lha Emulation A Signetics-based machi...
LHArchiver_1.7.lha Files/Archive Create lha archives int...
Freedroid_1.0.2.lha Games/Action Remake of the classic P...
SuperTux_0.1.3.lha Games/Platform SuperTux_0.1.3.lha
194X_0.7b.lha Games/Shoot2D 194X_0.7b.lha
MahjonggTiles_1.2.lha Games/Think MUI based Shanghai type...
Mesa-demos.lha Graphics/TinyGL Mesa demos for TinyGL
Fireflies_2.06.lha Graphics/TinyGL FireFlies (MorphOS Tiny...
Scout_3.6.lha System/Monitoring This is the official co...
TinyGL-Update-2022-12-... System/Update This is the seventh pub...
(snx)
[News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:46] [Comments: 0]
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25.Dec.2022
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WHDLoad: New installers until 24.12.2022
Using WHDLoad, games, scene demos and intros by cracking groups, which were originally designed to run only from floppy disks, can be installed on harddisk. The following installers have been added until 24.12.2022:
- 2022-12-24 new: Hoi (Hollyware) done by StingRay (Info)
- 2022-12-22 improved: Kid Gloves (Logotron) fix player weapon, keyboard handling fixed, quitkey improved, audio player fixed, trainer added, extra button support added (Info)
- 2022-12-20 new: Dragons of Flame (Strategic Simulations Inc) done by StingRay (Info)
- 2022-12-18 improved: IK+ (Archer MacLean) bouncing ball samples fixed (Info)
(snx)
[News message: 25. Dec. 2022, 07:45] [Comments: 0]
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24.Dec.2022
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Video: Digitising printed AMOS source files
In another part of his series of short tutorials on AMOS Pro (amiga-news.de reported), retro and Amiga fan 'Yawning Angel' this time takes on the task of how to get AMOS code he wrote in the 90s and printed out on a dot matrix printer back into his Amiga A1200 to run the code. (dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 14:46] [Comments: 0]
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24.Dec.2022
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Amiga emulator for MacOS: vAmiga 2.21 and 2.3b1
With the release of version 2.21 of his Amiga emulator vAmiga for MacOS, its developer Dirk Hoffmann fixes two small bugs of version 2.2 released in early December:
- Snapshots containing more than 512 KB Slow Ram were reported as being corrupted.
- Memory footprint is back to normal.
At the same time, he has released a first first beta version for version 2.3. Changes:
Bug fixes:
- When drive mechanics were emulated, invalid SYNC words sometimes showed up.
- Snapshots containing more than 512 KB Slow Ram were reported as being corrupted.
- Memory footprint is back to normal.
- Fixes an activity monitor drawing bug in CRT mode.
Enhancements:
- Extended ADFs with misaligned sync words can be read.
- Warp mode can be switched on or off via keyboard shortcuts.
- RetroShell offers a special debug mode, now.
The minimum system requirement for his emulator is macOS 10.15. (dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 14:27] [Comments: 0]
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24.Dec.2022
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ACube Systems: UBoot 2015.b for Sam460EX/Sam460CR/Sam460LE boards (update)
Press release Bassano del Grappa, Italy - 23 December 2022
ACube Systems is pleased to announce a new release of the U-Boot firmware for its Sam460 line of motherboards. New in this version
- added support for the Sam460LE board
- improved support for Radeon 2xx series (R7 240, 250 etc...)
- solved a bug in the PCI Express init routine
- added support for new u-Boot eeprom chips
The updated installation guide describes in detail the usual installation method (ISO image) and alternative methods (TFTP).
Direct download of the installation archive: Sam460_updater_ 2015b.zip (1,3 MB)
Additional informationen:
Please note: UBoot and UBoot updater make use of GPL code and thus are both published under GPL.
Direct download of the source codes: u-boot-2015.b_prod.tar.gz (4,9 MB)
With this release, ACube wishes all its customers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Thanks for sticking with us and for your incredible support. An exciting 2023 awaits all our fellow Amiga users and friends. Stay tuned and keep following us for new products and announcements in the next year!
Update: (26.12.2022, 08:15, dr)
According to ACube Systems, the download is currently unavailable due to user-reported problems. If you need help, please contact ACube by mail. (dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 14:07] [Comments: 0]
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24.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 24 - Michael Rupp / Amiga-News.de wishes Merry Xmas
The Christmas door and thus the conclusion of our Advent calendar premiere is Michael Rupp.
More than a year ago, Michael familiarised himself with the Hollywood programming language and wrote SonosController, an application for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS that can be used to control the "speakers" distributed by Sonos. In the meantime, he has further developed this to version 1.2, which now also supports AmigaOS 3.
But his main project is certainly a different one: at the beginning of 2001, and of course we reported on it, Michael Rupp published the result of his work on TAWS - The Amiga Workbench Simulation - for the first time publicly with version 0.5: a JavaScript project with the aim of bringing the look and feel of the Workbench to the browser. The idea came from the fact that many Amiga-themed pages are based on the Workbench for their navigation, which he aims to perfect with this. Michael has been working on the project for over 20 years now and we would like to mention a few "milestones":
- Version 0.9: Firefox support
- Version 0.11: the first application, "Clock", which look like the Amiga original but offers some additional options
- Version 0.13: support for Opera and AppleWebKit browsers (Safari, Google Chrome and OWB),
MultiView loads JPEG, GIF, PNG, HTML and Text
- Version 0.16: complete simulation of AmigaOS 1.2
- Version 0.17: complete AmigaGuide interpreter
- Version 0.23: all AmigaOS versions are simulated
- Version 0.26: Simulation of Amiga Shell
- Version 0.30: TAWS Early Preset Selection
- Version 0.31: new AmigaOS 3.1.4 Preset
- Version 0.34: MultiView support for IFF-ILBM files, new presets "AROS One" and "OS 3.9 AfA One"
On the occasion of his Advent calendar door, he has today put the current version 0.35 online and, in addition to numerous new features and improvements, has also included a little Christmas surprise at our suggestion. Before we close our calendar with the last anecdote, we would like to use it to thank everyone who participated in the calendar once again. We hope it was a welcome change for everyone away from the usual news ticker.
We wish our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We would like to thank you for your continued loyalty over the years and would like to encourage you to continue to contribute in the new year: both with feedback on the software and hardware projects presented here by the developers, but also with news reports via our Amiga News Feed (ANF). On the one hand this makes our voluntary work easier and on the other hand it is a service to the community and an expression of appreciation. Thank you very much! And now please, Michael :)
"Pirate copies
Yes, that's right, I said the unword:
Pirate copies
No "backup copies" or "not-quite-empty disks", but plain and simple:
Pirate copies
And the following story tells us that these can be dangerous. Even if it is somewhat different from what one would expect ... but everything in order:
Trading pirated copies was the most natural thing in the world for us at the age of 14 (ok, yes, even later). There was a reason that we had not saved up a stupid console with its impractical cartridges, but a real computer with recordable floppy disks. Buying originals didn't even occur to you, the thought was so absurd. They cost a fortune! No, the money was needed for the memory expansion, everything was already expensive enough: over 200 francs for 512 kilobytes, just imagine.
But I still think that all the piracy at the time contributed to the success of the Amiga to an extent that should not be underestimated, at least for the hardware manufacturers. Less so for the software producers, of course. In other words, success and decline rolled into one. Well.
And where better to do this than in the schoolyard, before, after or even during lessons? Exactly. Nowhere. So there was nothing unusual about always having a few floppy disks at hand at school.
So, one fine summer's day in 1989, the following happened: No, wait, I have to go a little further:
I grew up in a rather rural area, in Teufen, an idyllic village of 5,000 souls in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, which already counted as a somewhat larger village in Switzerland (at least at that time). The school was undergoing renovations, so some subjects had been moved to a provisional location, including the cooking class, which I was supposed to switch to during the break. However, the provisional school was on the other side of the main road from the school itself, and the school itself was on a hill. And nice weather meant I was on my bike (CH German for "bicycle"). So, that brings us to all the important facts.
I ask you to visualise this: We have a hill, a steep road that leads across the well-travelled main road incl. tram to the makeshift. And at the top you see young Michi swinging onto his bike, in his left hand a pack of freshly exchanged disks with ... right:
Pirate copies.
"Everything's easy", I think to myself, I can brake well with my right hand, and off I go, down the steep road. The main road quickly approaches, I pull on the brake, and it does:
Whack!
Brake cable snapped and there is no time left for further reflection, only reflexes remain. And these tell me that I must not let go of the disks under any circumstances, because at that age they were worth more than pure money. And apparently also more than life and limb.
The road is rushing towards me, luckily there is no tram coming, but while I'm chasing across it, a station wagon gets in my way, so I slam into its side with full force. Suddenly I can fly, and then the lights go out for a moment.
When I wake up, the police are already there and the ambulance is not long in coming, and I wonder how long I was away.
As it turned out, I had probably not been unconscious for a minute, and there was a very specific reason why the police were at the scene of the accident faster than anyone would think possible:
The car was the police
Of all the vehicles whizzing past, I had actually chosen the police car to demonstrate the full power of kinetic energy.
By the way, Yvonne, who I secretly had a huge crush on, had observed the whole thing, and she immediately informed my parents. In retrospect, I often thought that I should have used this circumstance somehow to get closer to her. But at the time I was probably just embarrassed, and unfortunately nothing ever came of it.
And the disks? The ...
Pirate copies?
They were scattered all over the road, but the nice policeman, who seemed a bit worn out himself, collected them for me and gave them back to me. A car must have driven over one of them, it was gone, but all the others were still in perfect working order!
I still find it remarkable today - and somehow also sweet - how absolutely clueless the authorities were about this issue back then, at least in rural Switzerland.
Oh yes: About a year later I received an official letter informing me that a case against me had been dropped, of which I had known nothing at all. But even then it was only about the damage to the police car and not about ...
Pirate copies!" (dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 07:26] [Comments: 2 - 24. Dec. 2022, 13:55]
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24.Dec.2022
Michael Rupp (ANF)
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Javascript: TAWS - The Amiga Workbench Simulation 0.35
TAWS ("The Amiga Workbench Simulation") is a Javascript simulation of the Amiga-Workbench 1.0 - 4.1 FE for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Apple-WebKit-Browser (including Odyssey).
Any kind of feedback the author Michael Rupp would very appreciate. His work can be supported by a little donation from inside TAWS.
Version 0.35 includes among others the following changes:
- HippoPlayer (in Work):
Thanks a lot to (www.wothke.ch) for his open source
player routines.
Features:
- The following playback routines (https://bitbucket.org/wothke) are implemented,
each of them supporting many tracker formats:
- adplug
- asap
- ds
- snes
- nez
- psx
- sid
- sc68
- uade
- vgm
- xmp
- zxtune
- And besides: A Christmas surprise! Many thanks to Daniel Reimann from amiga-news.de who persuaded me to do this. The effort was... um... bigger than expected, but it was worth it!
(dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 07:03] [Comments: 0]
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24.Dec.2022
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RTG Solitare: "Solitare match" V0.85
At the beginning of December, Sami Vehmaa had published a demo version of his graphics card Solitare conversion "Solitare match" (YouTube video), which is primarily intended for Amiga emulators or Apollo cards due to the high CPU requirements. The demo version contains five levels. The paid version has meanwhile grown from ten levels to 50 and is currently available for 1.50 Euro. (dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 06:09] [Comments: 0]
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24.Dec.2022
Hans de Ruiter
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AmigaOS 4: FTP server ZitaFTP 1.36
Hans de Ruiter has released version 1.36 of his commercial FTP server "ZitaFTP". He wrote:
"One user said he didn't want the status icon, and asked how to remove it. Now that he mentioned it, having control over the docky/SysTray icon is obvious. I just didn't think about it earlier. Anyway, v1.36 adds this missing ability. So, if you're someone who doesn't want the status icon flickering on your Workbench/Desktop, you've now got the power to disable it.
Another user managed to lock himself out of his own server by entering the wrong password one too many times. He asked if it were possible to unban clients via the UI. The answer was no at the time, but it's possible now.
One user had a lengthy list of things he didn't like. I suppose some developers would hate users like this, but I appreciate knowing what it is that people want. Some of this feedback has been implemented, while others ended up on the to-do list. Still other feedback was already on the to-do list, but the priorities have been tweaked.
So, ZitaFTP Server users (including trial users), if you have suggestions, feedback, or think you've spotted a bug, then please use the built-in "Submit Feedback/Bug" button in the UI. It's a bright orange button in the lower right corner, so you can't miss it. You can also find it by right clicking on the docky/SysTray icon."
A single licence of ZitaFTP Server' costs around 47 euros. The programme can be tested free of charge for 30 days. (dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2022, 05:41] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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Game Construction Kit: RedPill 0.9.15
RedPill, developed by Carlos Peris, is a game construction kit written in Amiblitz 3.9, which allows the development of games from various genres (see short tests of two Redpill games). 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.
Among others the new version 0.9.15 offers sprite backgrounds with up to 8 different levels of parallax and a new FX layer for games with less than 256 (32 in ECS) colors (YouTube-Video). (dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 16:13] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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AmigaOS 4: Status update on WebKit port
In keeping with today's Advent calendar door, George 'walkero' Sokianos has just given a status update on the work on the WebKit port for AmigaOS 4 which started at the beginning of November (amiga-news.de reported):
According to this, the team around him would have reached one of their milestones by successfully compiling the JavaScriptCore (JSC) library together with the test binaries. Afterwards, he would have successfully tested it on his system under various conditions, with one exception (pthread).
On GitHub the problems are documented which the team was faced as well as information on the development environment can be found.
As a next step, he would now try to make changes to be able to compile the files with newlib as well. If this is not possible, he will provide all the necessary information so that missing parts can be added. (dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 14:44] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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Porting Amiga applications to Linux: AxRuntime 41.4
Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz' "AxRuntime" is a runtime environment for Linux which emulates the AmigaOS-API and therefore enables porting Amiga applications on Linux and developing applications which can be compiled for AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS as well as Linux (amiga-news.de reported). Under Windows it is possible to use it by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which has been generally available for Windows 10 and 11 in the Microsoft Store since the end of November (amiga-news.de reported). The new version is based on the recently released version 20221221-1 of the ABI v11 developer branch and introduces, among other things, the Zune prefs V0.2 and the editor V1.1 (YouTube video). (dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 12:55] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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Tool: identify-library 41.0
A few moments ago, Richard Körber has released version 41.0 of his identify.library (amiga-news.de reported). Changes:
- Removed IDTAG_Secondary (has never been fully realized anyway)
- VMC Amithlon is detected
- Updated Vampire names
- Warp1240/1260 is detected
- OCS was not correctly detected on very fast machines, (hopefully) fixed
- dos.library was closed incorrectly in all tools, fixed
- Other minor bugfixes
Downloads:
IdentifyDev.lha (66 kB)
IdentifyUsr.lha (98 kB) (dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 11:23] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
Andreas Magerl (ANF)
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APC&TCP: Amiga37 DVD
A DVD of Amiga37, which took place in October 2022 in Mönchengladbach, is now available at APC&TCP at the title link. More precisely, it is two pressed data DVDs in DVD-9 format with a total playing time of over 5 hours. The majority of the proceeds is intended to go to the organisers for a follow-up event.
Content:
- Amiga Future Special Issue Amiga37 (PDF)
- Amiga37 Documentation
- Amiga37 Photos
- Amiga37 Tour, Part 1 & Part 2
- Amiga37 Speech of Dave Haynie and Ron Nicholson (ENG)
- Amiga37 Speech of Hannes Seifert (GER)
- Amiga37 Speech of Jon Hare and Mev Dinc (ENG)
- Amiga37 Speech of Martyn Brown and Andreas Tadic (ENG)
- Amiga37 Speech of Tim Wright and Mike Clarke (ENG)
- Amiga34 Documentation
(snx)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 11:02] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 23 - George Sokianos
One more time we will be awake...;) George 'walkero' Sokianos will shorten the time until Christmas Eve with his story for our 23rd door.
George is currently the driving force behind many AmigaOS 4 projects and it is always surprising how varied his software theme choices are and where he finds the time to tackle it all. In addition, he has also been providing MorphOS versions of his software lately. At least here with us, his "career" began with the release of Comicami, a viewer for comics in .cbr and .cbz formats for AmigaOS 4.
George tirelessly tries to improve the user experience under the Amiga operating systems and to make standards from the PC world available for the Amiga with smart ideas:
For example, he has released aiostreams ("All In One Streams"), a collection of Python scripts that make it possible to watch retro streams on Twitch.tv and Mixer.com also under AmigaOS 4, AmigaOS 3, MorphOS and AROS instead of on the PC. Likewise, he publishes and updates scripts for the Odyssey web browser (AmigaOS 4 port) on his website, which succeed in displaying, for example, GitHub or itch.io websites.
However, he is also venturing into the really big chunks that could make his just-mentioned efforts obsolete at some point: as we reported at the beginning of November, he has formed a small team that has started porting WebKit.
The developer is also significantly responsible for the Software Development Kits for AmigaOS 4.1, ports the Editor Lite XL for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS and maintains iGame, his MUI-based frontend for launching WHDLoad titles. Using MediaVault, online radio stations can be streamed and podcasts listened to.
We also want to mention his ported games, for example BreakHack, which was only released yesterday, BlobWars: Attrition or The Battle for the Solar System - The Pandoran War.
On his Ko-fi website you will not only find a lot of interesting background information, but also the possibility to donate a coffee or more to him as appreciation (of which he gives 50% back to the community at the end of each month by supporting projects or developers). We wish George continued joy and success with his projects and look forward to many more interesting news here with us. His anecdote:
"I'd like to share a little story of how I got into the Amiga NG scene. As I've been an Amiga user since around 1989, I was watching all the news for our beloved machine, and of course, I was drooling watching videos of the AmigaOS 4 running on PPC computers back then. I wanted... No. I needed an Amiga capable to run that operating system.
So every day I was watching those youtube videos people were uploading from their AmigaOne XE and SE. Every day I was thinking about how I could buy one. Back then there were not many computers left to buy, as the availability was reducing dramatically. And there were no announcements for new machines to be released.
The cost was high. That year was crucial for me since in May that year I got married to my wife, and we were expecting our first kid around October. So the family expenses were at a high grade. But I could stop thinking that fabulous computers with this exceptional OS.
The funny thing is that I remember that every day I was going to work and I was visiting the online Amiga shops to check the availability. Every day I was filling up the order form and kept my hand from hitting that "Submit" button. Every day I was sooooo close, but yet so far.
The nightmares started when shop by shop began to show the "Not available" label beside the AmigaOnes photos. That awful red label made my sweat grow and my heartbeat increase. Up until a hot day in June 2005 when that "Submit" button finally got clicked. For one more time, I was visiting the website of GGS-Data in Sweden and I was drooling at the photos of a microAmigaOne. And YES... that microAmigaOne became mine. I completed all the necessary payments and got the confirmation for my order, saying that everything was fine.
The next day I visited the shops' web pages again and I was looking at the red label without caring anymore. That label appeared on the GGS-Data's website as well. Was the microAmigaOne I bought the last one that was for sale? Did I manage to get the very last AmigaOne back in 2005? What would happen if that day I didn't click that "Submit" button at the end of the order form? Would I be here with all of you developing software for the AmigaOS?
I guess we will never learn what would happen. The only thing that I know is that while I am writing those words, I have that microAmigaOne beside my desk, ready to put a smile on my face, as it did 17 years ago.
And most importantly, I survived my wife's menace to tell you the story. Take care of your Amiga computers and have fun with them." (dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 08:37] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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SCSI-SD adapter: ZuluSCSI firmware 1.2.0
ZuluSCSI is a new generation of file-based SCSI hard disk and CD-ROM drive emulators. ZuluSCSI emulates a SCSI-I or SCSI-2 hard disk using an SD memory card (amiga-news.de reported). Version 1.2.0 of the firmware was released yesterday. Changes:
- RP2040 write performance improvements and bug fixes
- Optional GPT partition support
- Add the ability to disable the status LED
(dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 06:25] [Comments: 0]
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23.Dec.2022
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AmigaOS 4: SMB2-Handler ported
Server Message Block (SMB) is a network protocol for file, print and other server services in computer networks and allows access to files and directories located on another computer. The SMB2 handler ported by Fredrik Wikstrom for AmigaOS 4 is based on libsmb2 and allows remote access to files via the SMB2/3 protocols. The newlib.library V53.40 or newer (or the V53.30 as included in 4.1 FE) and the filesysbox.library V54.4 or newer are required. (dr)
[News message: 23. Dec. 2022, 06:08] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2022
deadwood
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AROS x86_64: Update of ABI-v11 developer branch
The AROS developer Krzysztof 'deadwood' Śmiechowicz had given his stable branch of AROS for 64-bit Intel and AMD processors the code name 'ABIv11' to distinguish it from the in-progress ABIv1 version in the main AROS repository. It has now updated this to version "20221221-1". The new release includes improvements and fixes made since March 2022. Among improvements is the major work done on Scalos during summer to fix multiple compatibility, stability and 64-bit problems. (dr)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 21:04] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2022
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Blog: Amiga Kit's Christmas entry
At the beginning of October, Amiga Kit had started its own blog. In the new entry published yesterday, one remembers games suitable for the Christmas season and takes a look at various Amiga specials. (dr)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 20:51] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2022
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ReAction-GUI for XAD: Avalanche 1.9 for AmigaOS 3 and 4
Chris Young has released version 1.9 of his ReAction-based graphical user interface Avalanche for the unarchiving system XAD, which also supports the xfdmaster.library and can search for viruses using the xvs.library. The developer has written his tool explicitly for AmigaOS 3.2, but has also been tested under AmigaOS 4. Since it uses a new window.class, it might not work with older OS3 versions. Changes:
- Add "snapshot window" option:
- note that the position is not saved unless save is clicked in prefs
- Add ToolType to disable the ASL hook (filters ASL req to only show archives)
- Add ToolType to set the initial drawer visible in ASL requester
- Fix iconify
- Rebuilt with optimisations
(dr)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 19:28] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2022
Mike Battilana (E-Mail)
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Amiga Forever 10: Update 10.0.10.0
The emulator package Amiga Forever 10 (amiga-news.de reported) was updated on December 20 with version 10.0.10.0. By including WinUAE 4.10.0, the integration of a virtual modem was rounded off on the Amiga side, so that it can also be used with the programs NComm and Term.
Those who already use Amiga Forever 10 can carry out the update under "Help/About" or download the installation program again. (snx)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 13:02] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2022
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AmigaOS 4: BreakHack released
According to George 'walkero' Sokianos in his latest Ko-Fi blog entry, he started working on porting a game called BreakHack some time ago and finally decided to release it. It is a Roguelike game developed by Linus Probert. The latter describes the game as "a casual roguelike intended to provide entertainment for 10-30 minutes when you are taking a break from anything else in your life. It's easy to learn but hard to beat, no extra lives no fuss. Just enter the dungeon kill the monsters and get the loot."
Sokianos received permission from the original developer to include all assets.
Direct GitHub download: breakhack-OS4_4.0.3r1.lha (15 MB) (dr)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 11:48] [Comments: 0]
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22.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 22 - Jacek Piszczek
Willkommen zum 22. Türchen, für das Jacek 'jacadcaps' Piszczek eine kleine Anekdote verfasst hat.
Even those who have never or only marginally dealt with the MorphOS operating system will have heard about Jacek's impressive work on his e-mail client Iris and web browser Wayfarer. As exciting as his projects are, the interview we conducted with him in the middle of this year is also worth reading and we would like to recommend it here.
We hope you will find as much time for your projects in the future, Jacek. We wish you much joy and continued positive feedback. He wrote the following hardware anecdote:
"It was 1998 and I finally managed to buy an A1200 with a PowerPC. Of course at that time it was already becoming a little hard to just get everything from one store, so it took a while to get the motherboard, the Infinitiv tower case and so on. Once everything was finally there, I was very eager to replace the A500 I’ve since outgrown.
I’ve known, of course, that the aging hardware was a little finicky and tried to be patient with it. Still, I didn’t expect smoke to come out of the computer on the first power on. Turned out it was the Micronik power adapter cable which was either soldered incorrectly or didn’t get a good enough fit. The result: the cables literally burst and I had to get the power adapter repaired. It’s bugged me several times since, before I was able to replace the whole tower for an Elbox one:
Another attempt. Got the cable repaired and assembled everything back again. Power on. Smoke comes out… OK… deep breath… Turns out that in my haste to get it all working I’ve managed to shift the IDE plug by 1 pin. Since Commodore cheaped out when building the Amiga and didn’t use a shrouded header it wasn’t exactly hard to do. Unfortunately, this fried the IDE chip on the A1200 motherboard, so now I’ve had a nice, working, A1200 with a PowerPC card and only a floppy drive to run software from. A much faster A500, ha ha.
In the end it was easier to just add an Elbox FastATA to the set than get the A1200 motherboard repaired. Think it all cost me over a month and way too much money. Still, that Amiga was what eventually let me start working on MorphOS and I’ve used it daily until about 2004." (dr)
[News message: 22. Dec. 2022, 11:29] [Comments: 0]
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21.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 21 - Frank Wille
The 21st door goes online and for this one Frank Wille has taken time out with an anecdote.
If you want to take a look at Frank Wille's wealth of work, his Homepage is the best place to start. For more than 20 years he has been working together with Volker Barthelmann on vbcc, a highly optimised, portable ISO C compiler for Amiga 3/4 and MorphOS, last updated in March this year. The vbcc distribution also includes the portable linker vlink and the portable assembler vasm.
In any case, one should not forget to take a look at the "Other Projects" to get an impression of Frank's versatility: he is responsible for the game Solid Gold and the Amiga conversions of Retroguru games such as the Sqrxz series (1, 2, 3), Giana's Return, Xump or Fruit'Y, but also for the assembler PhxAss, the involvement in the Amiga and Pegasos versions of the operating system NetBSD as well as for ppclibemu ppclibemu. He was also involved in the beta test of the Pegasos II adaptation of AmigaOS 4.1. Furthermore, he indirectly supports the Sonnet-Amiga project through corresponding adaptations of vasm and vlink.
Many thanks also to you, Frank, for your long-lasting commitment. We read your story:
"I have been in love with Denmark for decades. Wonderful nature and carefree freedom. All is still right with the world. It's no wonder that the Danes are considered the happiest people in the world. I'm sure that's true of the rest of Scandinavia too, but Denmark is the best place for me to be. Because of all the time I spend there, I have also learned the language - well, at least I don't have any problems understanding everything - and I have also become a fan of the Danish charts, which you can listen to on long drives in the car. I have written many titles on a USB stick, so that I can remember them here on journeys as well.
Back to the Amiga: With our games (Solid Gold, Sqrxz, Trap Runner, Celtic Heart, etc.) I attach a lot of importance to the classic feeling, with trackloader from disk. I.e. the game starts already in the bootblock, loads a 2nd-stage bootloader, which then shows the team logo and loads the main part.
The boot block has 512 bytes and still has some unused space. Then I remembered that some programmers in the past liked to put hidden messages in such areas, like the ROM song in the flash ROM on Phase5's CSPPC (and BPPC?) cards. I think it was something from Morissette at the time.
So in each boot block of our games, I put a verse of various songs from the Danish charts that I just happened to have in my head. Among others, from the following artists: Celina Ree, Medina, Jokeren, Rasmus Seebach. All in Danish. Only Celtic Heart has a verse in English by Tuomas Holopainen (Nightwish) "The Life and Times of Scrooge", which of course was not in the charts. :)" (dr)
[News message: 21. Dec. 2022, 16:21] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2022
Thomas Wenzel (ANF)
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Audio player: AmigaAMP 3.33 released
Thomas Wenzel wrote: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! :)
Bug fixes:
- Fixed repeat track/all functionality.
Corrected error message for unsupported stream format.
Fixed wrong memory deallocation when closing the about requester.
Revised automatic runtime switching between AHI and MHI output.
New features:
- Added pulldown menu items for repeat track/all and shuffle.
Better handling of AHI modes with different limitations.
AHI has some peculiarities in that the maximum volume depends on the mode used (stereo++ or not) and the number of mixing channels. Until now, you always had to be careful not to turn it up too loud, because otherwise it would suddenly get quieter again, and with a bit of bad luck you wouldn't hear anything at all. The aim is that you don't have to worry about this any more because AmigaAMP determines the necessary limits itself. Hopefully it works for everyone. :) (dr)
[News message: 20. Dec. 2022, 21:43] [Comments: 0]
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20.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 20 - Robert Smith
It's getting close to Christmas and we open the 20th door with an anecdote from Robert Smith.
The developer is probably best known for his project, initially called "Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer": this uses a microcontroller - in this case an Arduino board - to read and write Amiga floppy disks with a connected, commercially available PC floppy disk drive. In mid-2021, he then renamed it "DrawBridge" (Disk Reader and Writer Bridge). Since the beginning of 2022, he has also made a plug-in available with the "FloppyBridge", whereby the emulators WinUAE and Amiberry can work with real floppy disks (video about how it works).
Apart from that, he deals with a wide variety of topics and tries to explain facts and backgrounds to users through videos. For example:
Thank you Robert for your informative videos and your various projects. Continued success and joy. His anecdote:
"Whilst I was at college (high school) I started to develop my interest in computers, and having received an Amiga 500+ for Christmas. I quickly became interested in programming rather than just playing games. As if “computers” wasn’t enough of a reason to be picked on at school for being a geek or nerd, programming was like the ultimate, but I was not discouraged.
A few years later I went to university, a difficult time, especially if you’re shy, as you’re surrounded by lots of new people. It was also during the time when most of us were slowly transitioning away from the Amiga after commodore went bankrupt and was (it felt like) constantly being sold to yet another company with empty promises.
On the one hand I had all this great Amiga knowledge, but on a dead platform. It doesn’t take long to meet other like-minded people with similar skills, and you soon realise they’re just as useful on other machines as they were on the Amiga. We were all geeks and nerds though, and you could sometimes feel a bit of an outcast in some situations.
One day I had a revelation whilst sharing a drink at the student union bar. Sitting there, listening to the table next to us, was a group of guys discussing the football match that had occurred the night before. The level of enthusiasm, passion, anger, competitiveness and raging going on regarding the players, the referee, and the various different teams they supported, along with the intimate knowledge they seemed to have about the skills of each individual player made me smile. I sat there thinking, we’re all geeks in our own way. Merry Christmas." (dr)
[News message: 20. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 0]
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19.Dec.2022
WinUAE Homepage (ANF)
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Emulator: WinUAE 4.10.0
Version 4.10.0 of the Amiga emulator WinUAE has been released. Changes:
Major update
- 68000 based unexpanded (with optional Slow or Fast RAM expansion) configurations are now 100% cycle-accurate.
- Big thanks to ross for writing test programs that required perfect cycle accuracy. Lots of expected and unexpected hardware features found and implemented.
Featute updates that got delayed but will be implemented in 5.0
- OCS and ECS Denise mid screen resolution changes are not pixel perfect, correct chip model specific bit pattern is not emulated yet. AGA is pixel perfect.
- Not all blitter line draw width != 2 (invalid line draw configuration, normally not used) conditions are 100% accurate.
- Disk status/interrupt timing is not fully confirmed yet.
New hardware emulation features and update
- 68000 emulation is finally fully cycle accurate, last missing part, interrupt level change detection timing, is now cycle accurate.
- Custom chipset interrupt timing is now cycle accurate.
- CIA emulation is now fully cycle accurate. Timers were accurate previously but now also interrupt timing, TOD counting, CPU/E-clock sync, and more, including undocumented side-effects are cycle accurate.
- Serial port internal timing, interrupt timing, including SERDATR status bits are now cycle accurate (I used serial port interrupts as a timer in my cputester real 68000 interrupt timing tests)
- Audio interrupt timing is now cycle accurate (Was almost fully accurate previously).
- Blitter timing is now cycle accurate (previously startup behavior and interrupt timing was not fully accurate).
- Blitter line mode with invalid settings (for example width not 2, octant and line direction mismatch etc) is now almost accurately emulated. Some conditions are not fully correct.
- Copper is now cycle accurate, previously some special cases were not handled correctly.
- More undocumented chipset features implemented.
- A1000 Denise bug emulated: sprites end horizontally 1 lores pixel later than bitplane horizontal window end. Currently enabled when A1000 Agnus is selected.
- OCS/ECS vs AGA EHB on/off mid screen change different behavior emulated.
- Emulated chipset mode display is blanked if programmed mode is active but has invalid configuration (for example too short or too long sync pulses or missing syncs, genlock sync enabled without genlock, etc).
- Optional display mode change resync black screen delay.
- Programmed custom chipset modes again use also blanking timing to position the display in addition to vsync and hsync (Most real world SVGA monitors do the same).
- Max allowed programmed mode non-interlaced vertical line count is now 800 (increased from 592), special 700+ line programmed modes are possible and compatible with real SVGA monitors.
- Refresh cycles conflicting with bitplane DMA is now accurately emulated, including all display and audio related glitches it can cause.
- Optional Chip RAM and Slow RAM power up pattern emulation, enabled by default.
- Color palette is now filled with pseudo-random contents at power up (was all black previously).
- Monitor type selection. Composite sync or H/V sync. ECS Agnus/AGA programmed display modes can generate different C-Sync and H/V sync signals.
New other features and updates
- RTG (uaegfx) Picasso96 v3.0+ mixed mode screen draggging is enabled by default.
- RTG (uaegfx) blitter emulation now supports previously unsupported less common blitter operations.
- RTG (uaegfx and emulated boards) automatic integer scaling support.
- On the fly FloppyBridge drive change to normal or back now triggers automatic disk change condition.
- Harddrive panel Full drive/RDB mode is now normal checbox. Hopefully it is less confusing than button that didn’t look like a button.
- Larger default GUI size and slightly larger font if Windows desktop is large enough (at least 1600*1024).
- CD audio is now always mixed with Paula audio. Separate CD audio output support removed.
- Some American Laser Games didn’t have ROM descrambling support, also added missing ROM variants.
- Added American Laser Games Quickstart support.
- Added NVRAM path to Paths panel. Arcade/CD32/CDTV hardware NVRAM files default to this path.
- Keyboard reset change, reset state is kept until at least one key is released.
- CTRL+C in console log/debug window does not anymore close WinUAE. CTRL+C in newer Windows versions can be used as a Copy operation.
- Changed CTRL+F12 fullscreen/windowed switch: If already switched from full-window to window. Next CTRL+F12 will return back to full-window, not fullscreen.
- Optional interlace mode filter profile added.
- DirectDraw mode was replaced with GDI mode. GDI mode does not support exclusive fullscreen but supports basic scaling modes and uaegfx hardware cursor that DirectDraw mode did not support.
- Palette mode screenshot support. If enabled and screen has <= 256 colors, palette mode screenshot is created. It also attempts to preserve first 32 color entries if possible. RTC is automatically enabled if chipset extra= and system has fast ram, slow ram or chip ram expansion.
- Save MSM6242B RTC model control registers to RTC file if they are modified. Previously only RF5C01A (Used in big box Amigas) control registers (and NVRAM) was saved.
- If Quickstart ROM based Arcade hardware config (Arcadia or ALG) is selected, NVRAM file name is automatically set to ROM name. Genlock video file path is also set if ALG ROM is selected. Config files are not affected.
- ROM file list sorting changed, added grouping, sort by group priority first (KS ROMs, extended KS ROMs, freezer ROMs etc..), then alphabetically.
- Sometimes old graphics was temporarily visible in RTG modes if RTG had visible black borders (depends on scaling mode) and screen was switched and new screen had larger size/resolution.
- Added “Slow” flag to RAM panel. If set, selected memory bank has Chip RAM timing but is not Chip RAM capable. Advanced chipset panel “C00000 is Fast RAM” removed, it is not needed anymore.
4.9.x bugs fixed
- Sprite to playfield and playfield to playfield collisions were unreliable.
- RTG (uaegfx) overlay was not drawn. 32-bit Windows only.
- Magic mouse mode without virtual mouse driver installed: mouse position was incorrect in RTG modes and it also ignored scaling modes.
- If hardware emulated RTG board VRAM was immediately (no gap in address space) after any RAM/ROM region and JIT direct was enabled: first 4096 bytes (host CPU page size) of VRAM was not fully JIT direct compatible and any direct read or write to first 4096 bytes would not access VRAM correctly, causing unexpected graphics glitches.
- Quickstart panel floppy bootblock check used current track of drive (not track 0). Broken when FloppyBridge support was added.
- Hires resolution and hires BPLCON1 bit set (or shres and shres BPLCON1 bit): single pixel horizontal offset may have appeared in right side of screen. AGA and non-subpixel mode only.
- CD32/CDTV Quickstart mode “remembered” previous DF0: setting and didn’t disable it by default (even if Quickstart panel showed it as disabled).
- CD32/CDTV Quickstart panel DF0: was not possible to select/enable.
- Z2 RAM configuration was unreliable.
Older bugs fixed
- CHD CD image CD audio timing fix.
- Direct3D11 with custom shaders leaked memory.
- Directory filesystem softlinks fixed.
- 68060 without FPU or disabled FPU and executing FPU instruction that uses -(An) or (An)+ addressing mode: D7 was modified when exception stack frame was created.
- Reading from non-existing custom register always returned 0xFFFF instead of data that previous cycle’s possible DMA access transferred.
- Higher 68000/010 integer clock multipliers (4x+) in CE mode: chipset access timing was not accurate.
- Second 1M extended ROM bank is now internally split to two 512k banks. Non-aligned bank start and size caused problems in some configs.
- Hardware emulated RTG boards that have physically swapped red and blue output (Spectrum, Piccolo, Piccolo SD64) had wrong colors in 24/32-bit modes.
- Piccolo Z3 and Piccolo SD64 Z3 had wrong autoconfig board logical size (which crashed the driver).
- CD audio was not resumed if WinUAE was unminimized and minimize was configured to pause emulation.
Debugging related updates and fixes
- Ultra extreme overscan mode. Shows complete full raster including blanking regions. Horizontal and vertical blanking disabled. COLOR0 changes are always visible.
- DMA debugger shows CIA accesses (including cycles lost due to E-Clock sync) and Chip RAM RAS/CAS addressing values.
- DMA debugger shows CPU memory access type (instruction fetch or data access). Interrupt level and interrupt level change detection are included.
- DMA debugger shows CPU opcodes in basic form (“NOP”, “MOVE” etc), vertically. Which can look a bit weird…
- Added CPU STOP state information to DMA debugger (| = STOP idle cycle, + = STOP idle cycle and higher IPL detected = STOP ending soon)
- Visual DMA debugger shows conflicting cycles as blinking red pixels.
- Horizontal and vertical position are now included in debugger history output (H/HH)
- Added OR, AND and XOR operators to debugger calculator (|, &, ^).
- sp command parsed attached sprites incorrectly.
- It was not possible to enter debugger anymore if CPU was stuck in stopped state after entering and exiting the debugger once.
- Tracing STOP instruction now works differently, each single step executes one internal STOP “round”.
- Memwatch break point that crossed 64k “bank” didn’t map last 64k “bank” if it was only partially needed.
- Self modifying code (smc) debugger feature now clears detected modifications if 68020+ instruction cache is flushed.
- DMA debugger (both console and visual) better support for variable/toggling horizontal and vertical line counts.
(dr)
[News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 20:53] [Comments: 0]
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19.Dec.2022
PPA-Forum
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Preview video: Pinball Dreams 2 in development
Polish programmer 'Tukinem' - known among others for his platform game Ami-Tower or the farming simulation Farmiga - has started to port Pinball Dreams 2, released in 1994 only for the PC, to the Amiga in Blitz Basic 2. Target platform is an Amiga 1200 with 8MB Fast Ram (preview video).
As he wrote, he chose this pinball version mainly because of the "cool music". The goal is to write universal code that can be used in other pinball games. For the physics of the game, however, he says he will need at least another month. (dr)
[News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 17:49] [Comments: 0]
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19.Dec.2022
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ACube Systems: Production of Sam460LE-Boards completed
Press release: Hello dear customers and friends,
December brought us some gifts that you will soon have on your desk: the first batch of Sam460LE. These boards have brilliantly passed all functional tests from the assembly line, and now we are manually testing every single unit as per our quality assurance standards.
As we complete testing the boards, we will start shipping in chronological order starting from top to bottom of our orders queue.
We are almost there, just a bit more patience and the first customers should start receiving the Sam460LE before the end of the year.
We are confident that yours patience will be rewarded by a well-tested product that you will surely enjoy using. (dr)
[News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 15:55] [Comments: 0]
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19.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 19 - Oliver Roberts
We start the Christmas week with the 19th door and Oliver Roberts.
Without Oliver Roberts we would not have the best and fastest browser for AmigaOS 3 and no current AmiSSL. But in the 90s Oliver was still in Formula One fever (and maybe still is?): In 1994 he started programming and publishing a first beta version 0.2 of F1GP-Ed, an editor for the Amiga version of the games Formula One Grand Prix or World Circuit by MicroProse Software. The homepage is still online and the editor was developed up to version V3.44 in 1999 (History).
1999 was the start for the development of his Warp Datatypes with WarpJPEG: he is still developing the datatypes distributed as shareware. The image formats JFIF/JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Windows BMP, PCX, PSD (Adobe Photoshop®) and WebP are supported; further formats are planned. The main feature of the datatypes, especially on PowerPC systems, is their decoding speed (hence the name Warp) and the AltiVec acceleration. The very efficient memory usage in turn benefits 68K systems.
The main project, however, is undoubtedly the browser IBrowse, which is available for both AmigaOS 3 and MorphOS, as well as AmigaOS 4, and can be tested in each case as a demo version. Just a few days ago Roberts and his team released the current version 2.5.8. The browser has a long history: Originally developed by Stefan Burström for Omnipresence Intl. from 1995 and distributed by HiSoft, from 2003 IOSPIRIT (until 2007) took over the distribution and the IBrowse developer team around Burström and Roberts took over the development. During this time, at the end of 2006, IBrowse 2.4 was released.
In 2008, development was temporarily at a standstill due to Burström's retirement. Due to various reasons, the release of version 2.5 could only happen in 2019.
From now on, not only were updates released regularly again, Roberts also took over the development of the encryption software AmiSSL, a port of OpenSSL for AmigaOS, from Jens Maus in 2020. This gives applications SSL/TLS/HTTPS support.
For your perseverance and long-lasting support of Amiga systems, a heartfelt thank you, Oliver. Your story:
It's never too late to upgrade
If you're anything like me, I tend to upgrade electronics only when absolutely required, especially if your needs are being fulfilled by what you already have. This is somewhat true for my Amiga systems too, but it is great to know that there are still a variety of options out there, allowing us to upgrade and fix our Amigas. What follows is a summary of my Amiga upgrades over the past 15 years or so.
My A1200, purchased in 1995, has gone through many upgrades over the years, but not really much since I made a custom tower case for it and added a BlizzardPPC 68060 603e/240MHz/SCSI card + BVisionPPC. This was quite some years ago considering I bought the BlizzardPPC as soon as stock was available! This all worked great and I had maxed out the upgrade options at the time.
Then, in 2015, the A1200 motherboard went faulty - I had managed to deduce that an area of the 2Mb chip ram had gone bad. To cut a long story short, I managed to find brand new replacement chips and eventually my motherboard was repaired in 2019. Unfortunately, a few days later, the main SCSI hard drive died and would not power up. Luckily, I managed to find the exact same drive model on eBay, so ordered a reconditioned one on the off-chance that swapping the logic boards over would revive my drive - it did and all data was intact! (I did actually have an slightly out of date backup anyway).
This is where my latest A1200 upgrade journey began. Not knowing why the logic board on the hard drive had died, as a precaution I replaced the tower's aging AT PSU with a new ATX one (same model as I put in my AmigaOne XE - more on that later). This involved buying various power adapters, including Ian Steadman's excellent ATX to Amiga power adapter board. Next up, I didn't want to rely on the hard drive anymore and new SCSI hard drives were by then impossible to buy, so I switched to using a SCSI2SD v6 along with a 64Gb SD card. At the same time I retired my IDE HDD, replacing it with an IDE to CompactFlash adapter. This has hopefully future proofed my A1200 for quite a few more years.
Why bother maintaining a 25 year old system? It holds a lot of history for me, where I created most of my Amiga software, including WarpJPEG, later leading to all the Warp Datatypes, plus IBrowse 2.4 development. It also happens to be the very first A1200 in the world to successfully boot AmigaOS 4.0, after I managed to fix the 603e specific TLB exception handlers in the kernel for Hyperion. I still find my A1200 invaluable for testing and development, despite not being my main development system any longer...
Since 2005, my main development machine has been an early AmigaOne XE G4. Again, until recently I have not needed to upgrade this much, except when I first obtained it in 2005. I kitted the case out with two 120mm cooling fans running at low speed via a bay based controller, replaced the stock wobbly CPU cooler with something much better (Zalman VF900), added two temperature sensors, bought a larger new IDE HDD and replaced the stock 256Mb dram with 1Gb. Later, in 2013, I swapped the PSU out with a brand new one, which fixed instability and freezes that had started happening. It has been running perfectly fine since then and I had not considered upgrading anything, especially not a new Amiga motherboard since I would miss the G4's Altivec.
However, only a few weeks ago, something strange happened - I chose to upgrade it when I didn't really need to! It all started when I needed to access a faulty laptop HDD - I didn't have a spare SATA connection in anything and the drive would not respond when used with SATA to USB adapters. I decided to buy a cheap SATA card for an old PC that I had in storage. This is pretty old and took PCI cards - yes, the same cards that the A1XE takes. The plan was to buy a A1XE compatible SATA card, which would also work in the PC and I managed to find a sii3114 card on Amazon for under 4 Euro. My IDE HDD was still running fine with no apparent issues or SMART errors, but it is over 15 years old and I'm sure it sounds louder than it used to. To preempt a potential failure, I bought a Kingston SSD for the sii3114 card and transferred everything from my HDD across. I was surprised at how cheap the lower capacity SSDs are these days - it was much cheaper than buying a SATA HDD, especially as I do not really need much space. As an added bonus, the SSD uses only 3W of power, 10W or so less than my old HDD. Finally, having noticed the CPU reaching higher temperatures than usual this year, my next task was to remove the G4 cooler to renew the thermal paste that I had last applied over 15 years ago - a delicate and somewhat dangerous task, akin to open heart surgery.
The operation went smoothly and now the G4 runs even cooler than I remember at 28 degrees idle / 31 degrees full load - hoping this will help extend the life of my A1XE further still. In case you're wondering what happened with the laptop HDD, Linux diagnostic tools confirmed it as non-recoverable and dead, but as it was 2 weeks before the expiration of the 5 year warranty, I quickly sent it back to Seagate for a free replacement.
After these efforts to keep my Amigas up and running, this allows me to continue with Amiga software development and I'm hoping to not need to open them up at all for many years to come! My first Amiga was actually an A600, which desperately needs attention too - a few years ago, I bought a CF card adapter to replace its dead HDD, but have yet to get around to installing it. There is still much we can do to fix and improve our aging hardware and maybe this article will help provide some inspiration. There are a variety of solutions available, allowing us to use the latest hardware and it is not necessarily expensive either - we can utilize cheap PC components from many retailers online and we fortunately have a few Amiga hardware retailers left too. Who would have thought that when we bought our floppy based Amigas many years ago, before HDDs were affordable or widespread, that it would be possible to use today's latest flash-based memory technology instead. It's never too late to upgrade... (dr)
[News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 09:28] [Comments: 1 - 20. Dec. 2022, 08:22]
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19.Dec.2022
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Video tutorial: Programming "Santa's Present Drop 2" in AMOS
Last year, Robert Smith showed how he ported a game from HTML 5 to AMOS in a four-part video series. The result was "Santa's Present Drop". In his latest video, he shows how he programmed the second part of the game in AMOS. (dr)
[News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 06:35] [Comments: 0]
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19.Dec.2022
Andreas Falkenhahn (ANF)
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Hollywood: ZIP plugin 1.2 released
Version 1.2 of the ZIP plugin for Hollywood is now available for download. This is a minor update which mostly contains bugfixes and optimizations. The plugin is now available for free download from the official Hollywood portal. Thanks to Hollywood's cross-platform plugin system versions for AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, MorphOS, WarpOS, AROS (x86), Linux (arm, ppc, x86, x64), macOS (ppc, x86, x64), Windows (x86, x64), Android and iOS are provided. (dr)
[News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 06:21] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
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Aminet uploads until 17.12.2022
The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to Aminet:
AmiGemini.lha comm/net 152K 68k Gemini + Spartan + Gopher bro...
CloudDav_1.9.lha comm/net 990K MOS A WebDav client
rasm.lha dev/cross 890K MOS Roudoudou's Z80 Assembler
PatchWork.lha dev/debug 48K 68k Validate library calls with A...
libsamplerate.lha dev/lib 3.9M OS4 Library for sample rate conve...
c2plib.lha dev/misc 185K 68k chunky2planar as an Amiga sha...
Sensei.lha driver/oth 37K 68k Displays I2C Sensor informati...
nblood.lha game/shoot 1.0M 68k Blood Amiga Port
ham_convert.zip gfx/conv 4.2M HAM graphic converter
WhatIFF1.08.lha mags/misc 421K What IFF? #1.08-December-2022
AmiArcadia.lha misc/emu 4.6M 68k Signetics-based machines emul...
AmiArcadia-OS4.lha misc/emu 5.1M OS4 Signetics-based machines emul...
mednafen.lha misc/emu 12M OS4 Mednafen
Avalanche_FR.lha util/arc 7K French catalog for Avalanche 1.8
AvalancheDE.lha util/arc 1K German catalog for Avalanche 1.8
AmiSSL-5.6-OS3.lha util/libs 3.3M 68k OpenSSL as an Amiga shared li...
AmiSSL-5.6-OS4.lha util/libs 3.1M OS4 OpenSSL as an Amiga shared li...
AmiSSL-5.6-SDK.lha util/libs 2.3M AOS OpenSSL as an Amiga shared li...
DisLib.lha util/libs 19K 68k A library based MC68K disasse...
AmiKick.lha util/misc 45K Check Kickstart images under ...
Anno.lha util/time 291K 68k Reminder and calendar utility
newmeter.lha util/wb 28K 68k Shows free RAM and storage as...
(snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
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OS4Depot uploads until 17.12.2022
The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to OS4Depot:
nes_8to1v2.lha aud/con 10kb 4.0 Converts 8-bit samples to NES...
amissl-sdk.lha dev/mis 2Mb 4.0 SDK for AmiSSL
amiarcadia.lha emu/gam 5Mb 4.0 Signetics-based machines emulator
mednafen.lha emu/gam 12Mb 4.1 Mednafen Emulator
igame_fr.lha gam/uti 7kb 4.0 French catalog for iGame v2.2.0
amissl.lha lib/mis 3Mb 4.0 OpenSSL as an Amiga shared library
sshterm.lha net/mis 172kb 4.1 SSH client with builtin terminal...
(snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
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AROS Archives uploads until 17.12.2022
The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to AROS Archives:
whatiff1.08.lha doc/mis 421kb Magazine on AmigaGuide Format
(snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
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MorphOS-Storage uploads until 17.12.2022
The following files have been added until 17.12.2022 to MorphOS-Storage:
RASM_1.8.lha Development/Cross Roudoudou's Z80 Assembler
TuxRacer_0.61.lha Games/Race TuxRacer_0.61.lha
SoulFu_1.5.2.lha Games/Role SoulFu port for MorphOS
BeastieWorker_0.4.lha Games/Think 3D Sokoban
AmiSSL_5.6-68k.lha Network/SSL OpenSSL as an Amiga sha...
CloudDav_1.9.lha Network/Streaming A WebDav client
TinyGL-Update-2022-12-... System/Update This is the sixth publi...
(snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
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WHDLoad: New installers until 17.12.2022
Using WHDLoad, games, scene demos and intros by cracking groups, which were originally designed to run only from floppy disks, can be installed on harddisk. The following installers have been added until 17.12.2022:
- 2022-12-17 updated: Back To The Future 2 (Imageworks/Images) patch rewritten, keyboard routine rewritten, game does not freeze anymore, trainer options added, highscore load/save added, DMA wait in replayer fixed, source code included (Info)
- 2022-12-16 fixed: Escape from Colditz (Digital Magic Software) random crashes fixed, debugkey handling removed from keyboard interrupt (Info)
- 2022-12-16 new: Wrong Way Driver (pink^abyss) done by JOTD (Info)
- 2022-12-16 improved: Fighter Bomber (Activision) uses fast memory, new install script, added manual, hints, cheats (Info)
- 2022-12-16 improved: Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters (Tengen/Teque) fire button 2 can be used for bombs, manual included (Info)
- 2022-12-14 improved: Edd the Duck 2 (Zeppelin Games) support for SPS 1726 added, 68000 quitkey support (Info, Image)
- 2022-12-14 improved: Solid Gold (Night Owl Design) ButtonWait support for level info screens added (Info, Image)
- 2022-12-13 improved: Akira (ICE) supports another OCS version (Info)
- 2022-12-13 improved: Venus the Flytrap (Gremlin) crash on 68000 machines fixed (happened if CUSTOM2 was not used), support for fire button 2 added (Info)
- 2022-12-13 fixed: Assassin (Team 17) graphics problem in title screen fixed (caused by wrong Bplcon0 color bit fix) (Info)
- 2022-12-13 fixed: The Power (Demonware) new approach for random generator fixes, no more access faults (Info)
- 2022-12-13 updated: Edd the Duck (BBC) patch rewritten, replayer bugs fixed, keyboard bugs fixed, trainer options added, highscore load/save added, source code included (Info, Image)
- 2022-12-11 improved: Hellrun Machine (Amiga Fun) keyboard interrupt rewritten to work on 68000 machines, 68000 quitkey support (Info)
- 2022-12-11 updated: The Power (Demonware) patch rewritten, trainer options added, 68000 quitkey support, CPU dependent delays fixed, source code included, OS stuff patched (Info)
(snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
Andreas Magerl (ANF)
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Print magazine: Amiga Future, issue 160 - 25 years - preview and excerpts
Preview and excerpts of Amiga Future issue 160 (January/February 2023) have been published online meanwhile at the title link. Content includes a preview of Reshooot Proxima 3, a review of Apollo Manticore and an event report from Amiga37.
Amiga Future magazine is available as an English and a German printed magazine and can be bought directly from the magazine's editorial office as well as several Amiga dealers. (snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
Amiga Future (website)
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German Amiga Podcast: Issue 10
The tenth edition of the "German Amiga Podcast" (GAP) reports from the Amiga Meeting in Neumünster and looks ahead to the Amiga Ruhrpott Convention 2023. (snx)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 07:40] [Comments: 0]
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18.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 18 - Marcus Sackrow
For the fourth Advent, Marcus 'ALB42' Sackrow is our storyteller.
Marcus is a Free Pascal programmer and has managed a lot of projects over the years, which he regularly informs about in his blog.
In 2014, he started porting Free Pascal first to AROS and later also to AmigaOS 3.1. Most recently, he released Free Pascal 3.2.2 for all Amiga systems in May 2021.
Likewise, in 2015 he started working on his text editor EdiSyn with syntax highlighting for AROS (latest version 0.54.
In mid-2016, he began working on his OpenStreetMap viewer Mapparium, which he further developed to version 0.8 and also made available again for all Amiga systems. His extensive creative output also includes his free Pascal programme Leu for loading and limited editing of Excel (xlsx), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ods), TurboCalc (tcd) and ASCII (csv) files.
The list could go on, but of course his current project AmiTube must be mentioned: a YouTube client for all Amiga systems that makes it possible to watch YouTube videos on an Amiga. To do this, they are converted into Commodore's CDXL format and downloaded.
To shorten the time until Christmas a little, he has kindly put another game behind his 18th door: his "Amigale" is a conversion of the well-known "Mastermind" (or logic trainer) with words for Amigas from Kickstart 1.3, which is currently popping up everywhere as "Wordle". The task is to guess a word, whereby the programme tells you whether a letter is included or even in the right place. "Amigale" (download at the end of the story) contains both a German and an English dictionary:
(I should definitely have some more lessons in English...: what is "Spahi"??)
Thank you very much, Marcus, and keep up the good work on your projects! And with his anecdote, we wish him and all our readers a happy fourth Advent:
Amiga, Chemistry and Internet
In 1997 I started studying chemistry at the University of Siegen. My professor in the General Chemistry lecture (Prof. Meixner) was quite new at this university and had a lot of interest in computers and the internet.
He had a nice new idea for a new website and a student for it. But since he was new at the university, he only knew us first-year students and someone from my fellow students probably gave him my name when asked. So I introduced myself for the job.
The general chemistry lecture I had with him is a very basic lecture on chemistry, a bit of repetition from chemistry classes (so that everyone is on the same level) but also new things quickly so that it doesn't get too boring. One feature in contrast to later lectures was that it contained a lot of chemical experiments as a presentation on the professor's desk. And there were really many, sometimes 5-6 per lecture hour.
Especially popular, of course, were all the experiments that had something to do with fire or explosions. (The phophore explosion left a deep memory, after the whole lecture hall had a whistling in their ears for 20 minutes, not healthy).
Professor Meixner's idea was to give the students a better way to prepare or review the lecture, which works best via the experiments. Of course, films work much better than simple pictures and text, so the idea was to record the experiments and put them on the internet with an explanation.
I was to be responsible for the technical implementation, i.e. creating the films, converting them and creating the HTML pages. To show that I can do this well, I should first create the website for his research group.
At that time I only had my Amiga 1200, at that time still with modem as connection to the university's network. So I created and tested the whole page on my Amiga and then uploaded it via FTP to the university's server. The HTML texts themselves were all created with a plain text editor (GoldED), I tried some of the HTML editors but wasn't that satisfied. Especially since I tested the pages against the online HTML validator (HTML 3.2 was still quite new back then). Professor Meixner had such a key phrase for his research, "Espionage in the world of molecules", for which I had designed a logo: a water molecule with a magnifying glass in front of it. And since I had just read some 3D course in an Amiga magazine, I implemented the logo as a 3D animation (Lightwave for the 3D, ADPro for converting/shrinking images, MainActor for the GIF animation). I was satisfied and the professor was thrilled.
Later versions of the page are still available on archive.org (a little warning: 90s wepage-overload ;))
For the actual project, money was now requested, a computer with frame grabber card and a very cheap (PAL) camera were bought - cheap USB cameras did not exist yet, hence this combination. The camera was chosen because some of the experiments were very dangerous and we had to expect that the camera would be destroyed or at least damaged. However, this did not happen, as we were always quite careful and protected the camera extra, partly with its own, additionally protective housing.
There were three people involved in total, a technical assistant who prepared and carried out the experiments (she had a lot of experience there as she also did this for the lecture). An advanced student (I think he was about to graduate) for the technical support and texts on the website and me as the person responsible for the technology and the actual website "programming".
The basic idea was to record the experiments, then put pictures of them and descriptions on the web, and if possible even the videos themselves. But we quickly ran into the problem that almost all students only had access to the internet via modem (like me with my 33,600 modem). This meant that the films could not be too big.
On the other hand, there were hardly any video formats that could be played universally. So we decided on MPEG, because you can almost always find a player there (even on the Amiga) and, as a stopgap, GIF-Anim.
Professor Meixner set the file size limit at 500 Kb. The Amiga was again used to create the web pages and especially the GIF animations (including the background image, which was also created on the Amiga with PPaint).
The recording and processing of the experiments took several months, and later the descriptions of the experiments were translated into Spanish and French and supplemented with small quiz questions.
A funny anecdote at the end: when the site went online, the university was very worried because it described how to make explosives (black powder is one of the experiments, but also phosphorus or termite; they are pretty violent experiments). So they didn't want to see these experiments on the free internet, we had to install an IP filter so that only students of the University of Siegen could see these experiments. A few years later, nobody was interested any more.
The website still exists today, on archive.org, but also as a copy on my own site.
Download: Amigale1c.zip (88 Kb) (dr)
[News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 1 - 18. Dec. 2022, 18:43]
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17.Dec.2022
Twitter
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Web browser: IBrowse 2.5.8 for Amiga OS 3/4 and MorphOS
Press release: Happy Christmas to all our loyal IBrowse users and thank you for the continued support. In 2023, we hope to share some exciting plans for the future of IBrowse. In the meantime, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of IBrowse 2.5.8, which may be here downloaded (OS4 users may use AmiUpdate instead). This is the eighth free update for registered owners of IBrowse 2.5. IBrowse 2.1-2.4 and 1.x owners may upgrade to IBrowse 2.5.8 via our store at discounted rates.
Please note: IBrowse 2.5.8 requires AmiSSL 5.5 as minimum, with AmiSSL 5.6 being the latest version at the time of writing, so you are advised to download it before updating IBrowse, otherwise you will be left without HTTPS access.
Due to the bugs that unfortunately crept into the initial 2.5.7 release (although these were quickly resolved with hotfixes) we decided to make a full new stable release. This release contains the previous hotfixes, plus a few more fixes and improvements:
- Unescape the URL before showing it in the popup bubble when the mouse is over links
- Fixed crash that occurs if the info window failed to allocate memory when updating the URL
- Fixed crash that can happen when specifying a non-existent filename on the command line when starting from the shell
- OS4: Reversed the protocol and codec modules file lock change in 25.108, unless at least elf.library 53.35 is detected, due to a relocation issue in older versions
- Fixed Gemini support which stopped working in 25.108
- Include updated Greek catalogs from Aminet
(dr)
[News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 16:08] [Comments: 0]
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17.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 17 - Thomas Claus
Behind the 17th Advent calendar door awaits the anecdote of Thomas 'imagodespira' Claus, who as a graphic designer forms the duo of EntwicklerX together with the programmer Frank Menzel.
When one thinks of EntwicklerX, two things come to mind: the commercial media player Emotion and elaborately written games for AmigaOS 4. And there is something for everyone. A small list:
They started the development of their media player Emotion in 2016 and released a first alpha version soon after. The official version then was released at the beginning of 2017. An update to version 1.9 is available on the developer page. As Thomas told us, more games and remastered versions are planned - but since they are not pure Amiga developers, of course always depending on other projects. We wish good luck and look forward to today's anecdote:
"My first computer was an Atari 130XE. At the time of the German reunification, there was a "welcome money" for GDR citizens and my brother and I begged "our" money from our parents to be allowed to buy a computer in the Intershop. Of course, we had no idea about computers, we just wanted one. When we were standing in the Intershop, there was only one option for the 200 DM (100,- per child). An Atari 130XE for 192,- (the value is burnt into my memory, I hope it's right ;)). So we bought this one. Of course, there were also C64 computers and Amigas in the corner, but financially unattainable.
Once home, the device was connected to the Raduga TV (Russian brand, very explosive). A blue screen came up with the text "Ready". That was it. By trial and error we got into a screen where notes could be seen. Our English skills were close to zero, so we couldn't even translate "Self Test" (I was 13 and we were learning Russian at school). However, Self Test brought us a tune and made us want to hear more. After that, there was some digging in the manual and we found out that we couldn't go on without external media. We needed a "datasette". We begged and pleaded with parents again and were able to dust off my little sister's money for our Atari and thus buy a Datasette XC12 and a game (Kikstart). That was the entry into my computer world. In the course of time we found out that our neighbour had an Atari 800XL and so we got some software. My favourite game at the time was Montezuma's Revenge. Actually, it's still my favourite game. In the meantime I have an Atari 130XE again, Datasette and every now and then I give myself a round of Montezuma...
Back to my youth. As a happy Atari fan, I dreamed of the Atari ST, MegaST and other Atari devices that were also in our computer shops at some point. Amiga didn't interest me at all. But one day my cousin who lived one street over called. "Come over, I want to show you something". No sooner said than done. Now I was standing in his room. There was an old TV on the floor, an Amiga 500 in front of it and Rick Dangerous was playing. I've never seen such graphic splendour, it looked like the real thing. The sound was amazing, especially the dying in the game. You heard that a lot... Yeah, what can I say. It was a quick conversion. After that afternoon, I didn't even know how to spell Atari anymore. I wanted an AMIGA! Some time later I was able to sell the Atari, my brother was in training and gave money for an Amiga 500 and I shovelled out my aunt's coal cellar to be able to buy a memory expansion... From here on there was no turning back.
To get a reference to today: as some may know, I develop small games with Frank Menzel at the EntwicklerX. Also for AmigaOS 4. I already dreamt of this with the first Atari. Here I drew simple pixel pictures in Basic with the commands "Plot" and "DrawTo" (I didn't have a drawing programme). Later I pixelated in Deluxe Paint, mostly small game scenes for platformers. So running levels and obstacles. Montezuma's Revenge but also Rick Dangerous never really let me go and so we were able to finish our "Pyramid Quest" in early 2021 and release it on Windows, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox. My 14-year-old Atari self had already dreamed of this, but would never have thought it possible to pull something like this off. We're not well-known developers, don't have a hit, but get by and still dream of new projects that are viable for 2 people. Often our games are interpretations of old games and game principles that we used to love on the Amiga and still love and enjoy playing.
You can find our projects on various platforms, for example itch.io. You will certainly recognise one or two of the game principles, even if the realisations are often somewhat different and the templates usually remain unattainable...". (dr)
[News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 09:45] [Comments: 0]
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17.Dec.2022
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Puzzle game: AmiBlock
After the Amiga conversion of the game "Wood Block Puzzle" by the Polish developer 'Tukinem' (amiga-news.de reported), 'Szafir' has now released his variant under the name "AmiBlock". It is also written in Blitz Basic 2 and requires an Amiga 500. (dr)
[News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 06:22] [Comments: 0]
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17.Dec.2022
Passione Amiga (ANF)
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Italian Print/PDF magazine: Passione Amiga, issue 11

Press release: With great joy and a bit of excitement we are pleased to announce that the new issue of Passione Amiga, where we celebrate two years of publishing, is now available for purchase!
The entire editorial team has worked hard to get this issue out slightly ahead of the official date, so that Amazon can deliver it under the tree to anyone who wants to read it or give it as a Christmas present. Content:
- Video games: Devil's Temple: Son of Kung Fu Master, Aquabyss, Black Dawn: Technomage, Wonderboy, Wrong Way Back, Chaos Arena, Wood Block Puzzle, Luma
- Reviews: Amiga Duel, Amiga Forever 10
- Special Amiga Blitz Basic Game Jam 2022
- Special Amiga games in physical version
- Blender course, part 3
- AmigaOS 3.2 R4 NDK
- And also: Games news, Tech news, THEA500 Mini news, Tricks and Solutions, Demo scene, New Talents, Mailbox
The magazine is available as digital (3 Euro) or printed version (7,50 Euro, via Amazon). Its current issue consists of 48 A4 color pages. (dr)
[News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 06:19] [Comments: 0]
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17.Dec.2022
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Text adventure: The Daring Rescue of Pacuvia the Sheep
Domenico 'Diduz' Misciagna has released his very first game, The Daring Rescue of Pacuvia the Sheep, a text adventure written in Amos Professional 2.0 that can be played in English and Italian.
As an employee of a mysterious "agency", you find yourself on a dangerous mission: the biotechnically bred sheep Pacuvia must be freed from the clutches of a man who has no idea what he has stolen. For security reasons, all digital tools have been taken away from you and you are limited to purely analogue equipment. And Pacuvia doesn't seem to be quite so helpless either...
The game is available for C64, Amiga, MS-DOS and Tandy M100. The Amiga version requires 512Kb RAM and Kickstart 1.3.
As Misciagna writes, he suddenly realised during the 2020 Corona Lockdown that he had never written a video game before. He has been following and commenting on audio-visual art all his life. His bachelor thesis in 2020 was an academic study on video games. In the same year, he launched his website Lucasdelirium, dedicated to LucasArts adventure games. Moreover, since he had been playing computer games since childhood, it was time to write one himself. And the result is this text adventure. (dr)
[News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 06:08] [Comments: 0]
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16.Dec.2022
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Blog: Review of RadeonHD V5 driver with a X1000
While 'Epsilon' had taken a look back at 40 years of English-language Amiga magazine history in his blog "Epsilon's World" two days ago, he now devotes himself to his AmigaOne X1000 and AmigaOS 4: Thus he acquired the latest Enhancer Software 2.2, the new RadeonHD V5 driver and finally the latest version of DvPlayer in order to test all this on his AmigaOne X1000 under his previous graphics card Southern Island's R7 250X, as well as a newly acquired Radeon HD R9 ASUS 270X PCI-E. (dr)
[News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 20:03] [Comments: 0]
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16.Dec.2022
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MorphOS: Sixth beta version of TinyGL
MorphOS team developer Mark 'Bigfoot' Olsen had offered a bounty project for improved OpenGL support as well as drivers for more Radeon graphics cards under the title link, which has been successfully funded (amiga-news.de reported). Now the developer has released the sixth public beta version of his TinyGL update. He wrote:
"The main change in this update is the completion of project 1: Implement the fixed-function OpenGL pipeline as shaders. This change fixes a variety of rendering problems in various apps and games on hardware that currently supports shaders, meaning R300 and newer.
Unfortunately there are a couple of known regressions in this update as well, but at this point they've reached a number and severity that is low enough that I didn't want to hold off this update any longer before getting it out to you all.
The known problems all affect R300 and newer hardware and are:
- Virtual Grand Prix 2 runs noticeably slower than before, and the rear view mirrors no longer render correctly.
- FooBillard has rendering glitches it didn't have before. However this update also does fix some rendering issues that were previously broken, so this one is a mixed bag.
- Descent Freespace is completely broken.
- Reportedly there's an issue with the plasma blanker, but I'm not entirely sure of the details at this point.
I will probably release one more TinyGL update this year that hopefully addresses all of the above, plus any other regressions that might be reported by you." (dr)
[News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 18:00] [Comments: 0]
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16.Dec.2022
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Kickstarter camaign: Checkmate 19" IPS Retro Monitor successfully financed
Just three days ago, it did not look as if the Kickstarter campaign to finance the Checkmate 19" IPS Retro Monitor could be successfully completed with 138.938 of the required 239.785 Euro paid at that time. Now, about two days before the end of the campaign, 248.781 euros have been received, and the goal has thus been exceeded. (dr)
[News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 09:30] [Comments: 0]
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16.Dec.2022
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Boing Attitude: Interview with John Girvin (NIVRIG GAMES)
Boing Attitude, publisher of the quiz game Ask Me Up XXL and the file manager Dir Me Up, among others, published the fourth issue of the French print magazine "BOING" at the beginning of July. Among other things, it contained an interview with John Girvin, the developer of games like Turbo Santa (Deluxe) or Turbo Tomato, which is now available under the title link.
(dr)
[News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 09:01] [Comments: 0]
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16.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 16 - Günter Bartsch
The 16th Advent calendar door is opened and we look forward to an anecdote Günter Bartsch.
At the end of August 2021, the developer had not only published the source code of his Amiga QuickBasic (AQB) compiler on GitHub, but also a first early version 0.7.0 and aroused great interest in the comments to our corresponding news item. With AQB, the author wants to provide a "modern, clean, OS-compliant and future-proof BASIC. An important feature of AQB are the modules: AQB has only relatively few built-in commands, but a - also syntactically - quite powerful module concept. The modules can be implemented fully transparently in BASIC (AQB) or also in C (GCC) or even mixed; AQB is fully link-compatible with GCC.
As the developer further explains, it should be possible to give AQB different "personalities" - currently only _aqb is implemented, which is intended as a default dialect and is oriented towards AmigaBASIC, QuickBASIC and FreeBASIC. But it should also be possible to give AQB a GFA, Blitz or Amos personality, for example. In general, the focus of AQB (at the moment) would be on system-compliant application development.
With version 0.8.0 he then introduced a source level debugger and since the last, current version 0.8.2 there are now instructions and functions for sound output, new tutorials and also a simple music demo programs.
Even though almost a year has passed since the last version, Günter continues to work on his project. As he tells us, there have already been quite a lot of further developments, which he "only" needs to finally bring into a release-ready state. We keep our fingers crossed for this and for the further development of his project and look forward to many more exciting discussions about it here. His anecdote or, in this case, short story :)
"The year is 1988. At the beginning of the year an event occurred that would
change my life forever: I had gotten an Amiga 500 for my birthday. Ever since
I had watched an episode of "ARD Computerzeit" on public TV in which the Amiga
was introduced I knew: I want that computer and no other. At that time (I was
12) my funds were very limited - but at some point my parents had had enough of
my whining so they fulfilled my wish.
Driven by a lot of euphoria and even more childish naivety and curiosity I had
spent every free minute of the year (and also many minutes in which I was
supposed to do other things) with this dream computer (I still couldn't really
wrap my head around the fact that now one of these actually was sitting in my
bedroom).
A lot of people would probably imagine that I mainly wanted to play games on
the Amiga - but that wasn't the case. In fact I didn't have any games for it
and being a true geek with no friends the temptation to drift into the gaming
world through private backup copies was rather small.
Instead, I did with the new computer what I had done - again in the absence of
other software - with my Commodore Plus/4 which I owned before the Amiga: I
wrote programs in BASIC. On the Amiga that meant coding in AmigaBASIC which was
supplied on the Extras disk.
Despite all the euphoria, I soon had doubts as to whether this really was the
greatest tool for the job. The execution speed of the Programs might have been
OK compared to my Plus/4, but the editor was extremely sluggish. Of course
those were thoughts that I first had never dared to say - after all, the Amiga
was the best and fastest computer in the entire universe and AmigaBASIC was the
official BASIC, which came directly from Commodore, the company where (in my
mind) those gods worked who had created this dream computer - how could there
be anything better?
Luckily I got my hands on a copy of the german magazine "Amiga Magazin". Even
though I certainly didn't understand all the articles in it, from studying it I
did learn that there were other programming environments for the Amiga that
could possibly represent an improvement over the AmigaBASIC.
And so it came about that, together with my mother, I trudged through the
Christmas-decorated downtown Stuttgart heading for department stores and
computer shops looking for a Christmas present. So I described to various
salespersons my troubles with AmigaBASIC and boldly asked them about compilers
and assemblers. Usually the last two terms confused the staff, but at least two
of them knew about the problems with AmigaBASIC so each offered their
respective in-house recommended solution for that. Luckily I had enough doubts
right there on the spot about the "True Basic" which was offered to me in the
local "Karstadt" department store that I encouraged my mother to let us try
again somewhere else. At smaller computer shop called "Schreiber Computer" I
was then offered a product called "GFA BASIC" and the saleswoman actually
succeeded in convincing both my mother as the sponsor and me as the user.
Compared to AmigaBASIC, GFA BASIC turned out to be a downright revelation -
speed, instruction set, documentation - all a difference like night and day, I
was amazed! If there were any last doubts in my mind whether this investment
was the right one (the label "Interpreter" on the box bothered me a bit, as I
much rather wanted to have a true compiler), these were finally scattered on
the day when I got my hands on a copy of the "Sonderheft 3: Basic und Spiele"
issue of "Amiga Magazin". It contained an article comparing various BASIC
implementations for the Amiga in which GFA BASIC did very well.
The first weeks with GFA BASIC were very productive indeed - all those small
sample programs from the manual worked fine, a small vocabulary training
program was implemented just as quickly as various small graphics and sound
experiments.
Accordingly, I felt well prepared and even more motivated, to tackle bigger
projects now. Among other things, I had a painting program in mind, a kind of
DeluxePaint clone in BASIC (now that I have this great programming environment,
I don't need to buy any more software, I can write everything myself - so I
thought). The beginnings of these projects were always done easily, first
successes came - opening screens and windows, drawing pixels using the mouse,
no problem.
However, as the programs grew in size, so did the number of bugs - not
surprising, I knew that even back then. However, those errors turned out to be
increasingly difficult to find: Program functions that just worked perfectly
suddenly refused to work at all, although the code in question was the same.
Yes, even the interpreter's built-in commands occasionally stopped working they
way I expected them to. I debugged deeper and deeper, wrote small test programs
- most of which worked fine - but as soon as I put the code back into my big
program, it suddenly behaved completely differently
or crashed completely.
Of course, that didn't deter me one bit - obviously there was just a lot to
learn for myself, obviously I just kept doing something wrong and that's why my
programs didn't work. I quickly realized that the commands apparently
interacted with each other in complex ways - with this insight I was then able
to solve many of my problems. "Ah, I have to first set the foreground and then
the background color, then it works" - that was the kind of discovery, which I
diligently noted in the manual.
Over time, my hypotheses, with which I tried to explain to myself the
behavior of the interpreter in particular and of the Amiga in general, grew
more and more complex. Apparently there was an enormous wealth of
secret knowledge there to discover about how these miracle machines actually worked.
Of course, such secret knowledge wasn't to be found in the manual, but could
only be acquired laboriously through many experiments and collected from many
sources. I wasn't discouraged - quite the opposite, I was fascinated by the
thought that there was apparently a mystical world to explore there and
motivated by the idea of me maybe someday too would belong to that secret
circle of people who possess this knowledge.
So, undeterred, I kept experimenting and consulted more and more literature.
"GFA BASIC 3.0 - Training for advanced users" was one of the books from which I
hoped for enlightenment. The book - published by GFA Systemtechnik GmbH
themselves, at least - actually opened up new horizons for me. Some of the
techniques in there I had never seen before, some of the commands never heard
of - that most of the example programs on the floppy that came with the book
didn't work for me unless I modified them astonished not me in the slightest.
For one, the programs I had previously typed in from books and magazines hadn't
usually worked right away either and on the other hand I was able to put all
that secret knowledge I had accumulated up to that point to good use to get the
programs running - which actually was successful for most of them.
Despite all these partial successes and insights - a real breakthrough never
seemed to happen for me. My larger programs tended to stay quite brittle and
so very slowly a feeling of frustration set in.
During my literature research I came across the book "AMIGA Programming with
MODULA-2" from Markt und Technik publishing company. There was even a matching
compiler available - though only a very limited demo version - on a fish disk.
That then was once again another revelation: a true compiler, I can write real
programs like the professionals - and they even worked! Everything so clear and
structured everything does what it should, just as it says? Should something
like this be possible should there exist a world without any mystical secret
knowledge?
At that point, GFA BASIC was quickly forgotten in my life - I was fascinated by
Wirth's languages, so I spent the following years happily coding in Modula-2,
Pascal and Oberon, but that's another story.
It was then more by chance that at some point during this period I found out
what was behind my experiences with GFA BASIC: in some magazine article GFA
BASIC 3.5 was reviewed and the author casually mentioned that while the first
versions of GFA BASIC for the Amiga were quite buggy, the situation seemed to
improve with each update. GFA BASIC had errors?! This product I purchased for
money that was packaged so neatly and made by absolute professionals
could have been not perfect? Those many surprising properties that I had so
painstakingly explored could it possibly be that they were not intended at all?
I can hardly put into words what I felt when the full dimension of these
insights slowly dawned on me: I simply had never considered that a bug could
not be my mistake! What's more, probably the only mistake I had made was that I
had never sent back this software registration card that came with the box - so
I was never informed about available updates.
Well, today I like to think back to those days with a smile - those were very
important lessons I learned back then, many of them still guide me to this day.
Without the Amiga, without these programming environments - I would have never
gotten to where I am today, I am very grateful for that." (dr)
[News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0]
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16.Dec.2022
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Emulator: QEMU 7.2.0 released
QEMU is an open source computer emulator and virtualizer. QEMU is able to emulate a complete computer in software without the need of hardware virtualization. So it is possible to emulate Amiga operating systems like AROS, AmigaOS or MorphOS on QEMU. This support is provided by QEMU developer Zoltan Balaton, who gives lots of tips and info on a dedicated webseite (see also our Excursion of Amiga operating systems on non-native hardware).
According to Zoltan Balaton, the now released version 7.2.0 (PowerPC related commits) contains some changes that mainly affect newer Power CPUs, but also those that affect the entire PPC emulation: for example, the command decoding has been changed to decodetree. This is a generic method of describing commands, using general code for decoding instead of the custom code used before. As the developer kindly explained to us, this can lead to better performance, but it does not have to, as Decodetree is not optimised.
Similarly, there were also some changes to the implementation of AltiVec commands that could improve their speed, but it would depend on how it was used and what the host CPU supported. He had done some tests and found that in some cases it could be a few percent faster, but it did not really make a big change. Since sam460ex does not have AltiVec, it only benefits from the PPC instruction decoding changes, he said. Emulation via pegasos2 and mac99 could be slightly better with code that uses AltiVec. However, he says it is difficult to test this with AmigaOS 4, which has no graphics driver for the graphics cards emulated by QEMU in the pegasos2 version. For tinkerers, however, he has an idea that could be tried out:
One would have to copy some drivers to get the output on pegasos2. This means that one has to edit the boot CD or an installed version (which is not so easy, but feasible). You would have to copy the kernel from the AmigaOS-pegasos2 version and update the PCIGraphics.card and siliconmotion502.chip from the sam460ex version, as he erwähnt before. You would then have to create a CD from this. (dr)
[News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 06:08] [Comments: 0]
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