Amiga Appreciation Thread

[new666uk]

On 02/02/2021 at 14:59, Protocol Penguin said:

Any generic blank Double Density floppies were fine for use with the Amiga, it was just the formatting that was different. 

 

(Fun fact: Due to the Atari ST using standard disk formatting, you could load games directly from ST floppies in your PC floppy drive when using ST emulators. A feature that Amiga emulators could never do due to the non-standard Amiga floppy format.)

Playing with fire now I know but was the fancy pants Amiga way any better than the ST and PC way?

[SeanR]

6 minutes ago, new666uk said:

Playing with fire now I know but was the fancy pants Amiga way any better than the ST and PC way?

no, the Amiga way resulted in the drive making a constant chugg-chug-chug noise as it went looking for sectors, whereas the pc  and st were veeet-veeet-veeet.

 

 BUT it did make the Amiga a much better machine for copying st and Amiga disks.

[catinthehat]

On 09/01/2021 at 13:30, Vimster said:

Amiga demoscene book - https://editions64k.fr/

Tempted to pick that one up.

 

That looks interesting.  The postage is pretty steep, but still tempted to pick a copy up.  I'd love to know how much content is actually in there, and how much of it is just pictures, etc.

 

Edit... found a video. Looks ace.  I'm in.

 

 

[Vimster]

I had my shipping notification on Monday, it's coming from France so I'm not expecting to se it this week. 

[catinthehat]

1 minute ago, Vimster said:

I had my shipping notification on Monday, it's coming from France so I'm not expecting to se it this week. 

 

Nice.  I guess there's the risk of import duty as well.  Bah.

[Vimster]

1 minute ago, catinthehat said:

 

Nice.  I guess there's the risk of import duty as well.  Bah.

Yeah not looking forward to that. It was £44 including postage as it is. 

[MikeJ]

I've just put the RGBtoHDMI mod (Raspberry Pi Zero as a scandoubler) into my A2000 - the output quality is astoundingly good and has no detectable lag:

 

 

[gizmo1990]

3 hours ago, catinthehat said:

 

Nice.  I guess there's the risk of import duty as well.  Bah.

 

Afaik you should not get customs charges on books. It’s a standard amongst many countries. Having said that, Brexit has utterly bolloxed everything currently so who knows. For example, Bitmap books has had to stop accepting orders from Europe currently because of the mess the customs situation is in.

[Dudley]

16 hours ago, new666uk said:

Playing with fire now I know but was the fancy pants Amiga way any better than the ST and PC way?

 

20% extra capacity is a reasonable one tbf.

[matt0]

17 hours ago, mikejenkins said:

I've just put the RGBtoHDMI mod (Raspberry Pi Zero as a scandoubler) into my A2000 - the output quality is astoundingly good and has no detectable lag:

 

 

 

Classic MagicWB desktop there!

[Mr Monday]

Here’s a great video on how a much better conversion of Street Fighter 2 could be done on an A1200

 

 

[matt0]

I saw the SF2 video a few days ago and while it's very impressive, it starts to get on to shaky ground at the end with having to share a 16 colour palette for both characters. I reckon you could make a palette with some shared neutral shadows, mid-tones and highlights and then leave maybe 4 unique colours for each character and you'd end up with something pretty decent, maybe similar to the Megadrive version.

 

The copper list background gradient showing through the transparency colour on the sprites was inspired though, I don't think I've ever seen it used that way before.

 

"Better than arcade?" though. There's some mental gymnastics going on there.

[Mr Monday]

Yes, agreed on the palettes for the player sprites.  I’m guessing this could be optimised depending on which fighters had been selected for a particular round.  It would look strange with such amazing backgrounds and the sprites that he showed at the end.

 

[ianinthefuture]

He does talk about theoretically having different palettes for each combination of two characters, which would mitigate the 16 colour limitation somewhat. I put it on half-interestedly then ended  up rapt with the whole thing - even if it's just a tech demo and he maintains it won't be developed into a full thing (and so there's plenty of wiggle room as there's a hell of a lot that doesn't actually have to be done to make it work), it's incredible. Ingenious solutions to so many elements.

[gizmo1990]

Never ever underestimate Swedes! Great video, really nice to see an in depth look at tackling a challenge like that. I agree though that the palette sharing is the problematic part. The dynamic palette he mentions would be a requirement not an option, imo. Otherwise the whole thing would be a bust.

 

The real takeaway is showing what's possible with a truck load of passion and time. As he alludes to in the video, no way could they have achieved those results back then, especially given the 1200's install base and the sheer amount of effort involved. 

[Protocol Penguin]

I don’t think I knew how tiny the 1200 install base actually was until relatively recently. No wonder the ‘special’ 1200 versions of games were just the 500 versions with different colour palettes. And exclusive 1200 games, can’t think of many which weren’t the glut of Wolfenstein/Doom wannabes that appeared in 1995.

[Vimster]

Got my Amiga demoscene book today. Didn't have to pay any duty, thankfully. And this thing is lush, really good quality printing, the demos all look great, covers all the classics but also smaller, more interesting productions. French publisher but the book is in English. It was steep but as someone who was involved in the scene back then this is a good document of that time, something that even today goes largely ignored.

 

Oh yes, and it smells amazing. 

[gizmo1990]

That postage cost is a real party pooper.   Looks great otherwise.

[Vimster]

 

A little misleading as you need a Pi3A+, but that's about £50 all in. Getting one is a bit of a faff as you have to be on some group buy via Discord. Hopefully this will end up commercially available easily sooner rather than later.

[Dudley]

The interesting discussion we were having elsewhere is, at what point does this stop counting as "real hardware".

[matt0]

51 minutes ago, Dudley said:

The interesting discussion we were having elsewhere is, at what point does this stop counting as "real hardware".

 

For me it's when it's not an actual 680x0 CPU coupled with an OCS, ECS or AGA chipset.

[Vimster]

https://hoffman.home.blog/metal-gear/

 

MSX Metal Gear ported to Amiga

 

Quote

 

Based on a full and commented disassembly by Manuel Pazos of the original MSX2 game cartridge, this Amiga port has been built to ensure as near a perfect conversion as possible. Gameplay elements remain intact while additional features have been layered on-top to ensure the fullest experience possible of Metal Gear on the Amiga.

 

Code ported from Z80 to 68000 assembly by Hoffman

Gameplay adjusted to work at full 50hz/60hz

No slow-downs or sprite flicker

Multiple game modes

English Remix Fan Translation

Original European Version

Original Japanese Version

New Spanish Translation by Akira

Enhanced Amiga Soundtrack and SFX by Hoffman

Optional emulated MSX / PSG Music and SFX

Full support for CD32 gamepad for keyboard-less gameplay

Additional character graphics by Toni Galvez

All new ending / credits section

For any Amiga with 512kb Chip Ram + 512k Other Ram

Bootable disk image for low spec Amigas

WHDLoad installer by Psygore

 

 

 

[Lorfarius]

Man that's awesome, I'd have done a full show on it

[Pistol]

Do a special episode!

[Treble]

Not sure if anyone is interested, but a Furia accelerator I ordered finally arrived, 6 months late, after I sold the A600 I'd planned it for had been sold... 

 

https://amigastore.eu/en/480-furia-4033mhz-fpu-for-amiga-600.html

 

 

I'd love for someone on here to buy it, and report back on how cool it is (or not, but I expect it's great!) 

 

[Vimster]

That Amiga Metal Gear port, the soundtrack is available - https://hoffman.bandcamp.com/album/metal-gear-amiga-ost

Some banging sounds there.

[WibbleWorldGiddy]

It's now possible to boot & access Amiga disks in WinUAE, via the Arduino, Catweasel, and Greaseweazel add-ons! A preview build of WinUAE is available at https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ and (apparently) the new plugin will be merged into the official release maintained by Toni Wilen in the near future.

 

I've just bought a Greaseweazel F7 Lightning Plus, but it's a bit fiddly to setup when I need it. The case-less Greaseweasel currently sits on my desk when in use, with the back plugged into a USB cable and the front half connected to a long floppy cable that runs into my tower PC and connects to the floppy drive. By comparison, the custom-built USB floppy drive shown in the video looks much more robust and convenient!

 

 

[centurion]

Amiga was probably the most rapid dev system I ever used; just switch it on with a straight-to-dos disk inserted, and like 1 second later you've got a prompt/text editor and typing assembler for it. We used it for the vdu-out module originally, to get RGB values of different televisions, but it then turned out cleaner and easier to distribute in east-japan, scart-blocks with variable resistors and frequency generators (christmas tree lights). Still, the A600 was really good at doing sub-magnetic scans of damage to my 3.5 disks, shot by some pesky german bloke or other on the way home. couldn't prove it without the curly fractal-shatter patterns as evidence, and then eventually we bought Maxtor before they bankrupted. Who has a use for a flippy floppy 1.4mb loser anymore they said? Oh ho ho. The lols. (it's the same material as a maxtor 160gb hdd). Oh yes, how easily we slipped through Royal Mail's icy grip of death... no sir, this one's a floppy, keep searching.

[gunrock]

Drugs, much?

[Zio]

Centurion is some weird AI bot, right? That's always been my assumption. Annoying having him/her/it shitting up threads though.