Daedalus2097

Yeah, in the US things were a bit different (and that is the topic to be fair...), Europe very much saw the low-end Amigas in the same sphere as games consoles. Indeed, the rapid development of the PC killed off any chance the Amiga might have had later on, and pretty much every other platform too - the Mac was on the verge of extinction too only to be saved not least because Microsoft needed to have some sort of credible competition for Windows. Even if Commodore management had poured the money into R&D that they should have, at best it would only have been where the Mac was then, on the brink of bankruptcy. Regarding 3D games, it took until the era of the Gamecube / Unreal Tournament for the graphics to feel enjoyable for me. And that class of PC in the late '90s wasn't cheap. I know the Pentium PC I had at the time didn't have a hope, and only the CAD workstations in my uni had enough CPU and GPU grunt to run it well...

To be fair I was never a fan of Doom or bought into the hype, though I understand very well those who did. I found (and still find) graphics like that ugly, and 3D only really started to make sense for me in the late '90s (though I appreciate the evolution that went into getting it to that level). Like I said, it was already too late then, so absolutely, they wouldn't have saved the Amiga. If enough people had upgraded their Amigas for it to have been a legitimate target platform for a mainline release, it wouldn't have needed saving, it would have been a healthy ecosystem in its own right. I get the point about upgradability with the small Amigas, but there were the big-box Amigas which where made to be upgraded the very same way as a PC, only easier: instead of ISA there was Zorro. Finding upgrades was a different story of course - I generally mail ordered for mine, though there were a few computer shops in the bigger cities that carried Amiga stuff. Upgrading the "console" Amigas is a little trickier (beyond the chip RAM etc.), but you're into the realm of buying a new machine then anyway, in the same way as upgrading a console. The A500 could be upgraded without opening the case but it was an expensive business involving sidecar modules. They were available with significant CPU and RAM steps up over the internal CPU. The A600 didn't even have that option (though it did include a very convenient internal IDE port), but the A1200 was much better, allowing CPU and RAM expansions to be easily fitted internally as well as a laptop IDE hard drive. Of course, none of that was a problem for the big-box Amigas, which all had dedicated internal slots for CPU and RAM upgrades. In the '90s I was also using Telnet for various services on my Amiga. I wouldn't have even bothered trying on an Amiga without a hard drive, just as I wouldn't have bothered on a PC without a hard drive. While the A500 was a decent machine as a home computer in the '80s, it really needed to be expanded for the more serious business. A 1MB floppy-only setup with OS 1.3 is always going to be painful for everyday use. And of course, likewise for a PC - you won't try anything like that on a 512kB 8080 with two floppy drives and MS-DOS 2. And this is the thing really, stepping up from a near-stock A500 to a PC was a massive leap in comfort, performance and capability, but it was also a massive leap in cost so the big gulf in experience was to be expected. If someone was to drop that money on upgrades for the Amiga, there would be a huge difference in experience too. Not that that was a particularly viable route for everyone- in the latter part of the Amiga's commercial life, equivalent spec upgrades for the PC were much cheaper, but it was certainly possible and without any soldering.

I was using my Amiga into the '00s, though I also had a PC and PowerMac at that point to start taking up the slack with certain applications and websites that couldn't be used on the Amiga. Granted, I had greatly expanded the A1200 at that point too (hard drives, Zip drives, CD burners, graphics cards, sound cards, network cards etc.), so it could hold its own - it even acted as the internet gateway for the other machines during the dial-up era. It was only when CSS and heavy Javascript became commonplace that the web started to move out of the Amiga's reach, and even then it was still great for email, IRC and so on. Still have that machine here, still going strong... Edit: I guess part of the point I was making was that with the Amiga and the ST, users tended not to upgrade, whereas the PC was a different story. Amigas and STs were treated more like games consoles for pirated games than fully fledged computers, and people generally weren't interested in upgrading RAM or CPUs because most of the (probably pirated) games they played worked just fine on the base level machine. In the PC world, there was already a culture of upgrading from before - they didn't start out all-singing and all-dancing, so people were more likely to upgrade their hardware to play new games. As a result, the Amiga and ST dropped from being the lead platforms, and instead received cut-down versions of PC games because the market for upgraded machines was so small. A vicious circle for the Amiga and ST. I upgraded my Amiga instead and got to play Doom and Quake on it in the '90s, but that was already too late...

Interesting(ish). Might be worth noting that they've dropped (or tried to drop) using the Commodore Engineering name - their Facebook page has been renamed to Commodore Industries and their LinkedIn page also uses Commodore Industries (Twitter uses Commodore Inc.), though their apps in the app store and their Youtube channel still carry the Commodore Engineering name, and it crops up in their historic posts and LinkedIn profile too.

Only a few days to go until this jam starts, and the Jam's Discord server is already quite busy. I've also streamed a few Blitz Basic tutorials on my Twitch channel to help people get started with Blitz and hopefully help them with their entries. They can be rewatched on my channel, and are also available in this playlist on my Youtube channel.

Yeah, the Cocolino and Micromys have supported the wheel for many years but they're both PS/2. I have heard recently however that a recent MouSTer beta firmware has support for the wheel, so it might be worth checking that out and experimenting.

Just to clarify, the OS support means that mousewheel events are recognised by the OS. You still need a driver to generate those events from funky hardware, since the hardware itself doesn't natively support the scrollwheel and there isn't a standard implementation that covers all hardware. WinUAE provides the scrollwheel events directly, which is why you don't need a driver there. While almost all PS/2 adaptors (including USB in PS/2 mode) support the scrollwheel and have done for decades, not many HID USB adaptors support it. I can't see any mention of scrollwheel support on the mouSTer, so that's probably your problem. No driver will fix the problem if the hardware simply doesn't support it.

Zooperdan is hosting a Blitz Basic Game Jam, with the aim of increasing knowledge and awareness around Blitz Basic and its open-source successor, AmiBlitz. There's no specific theme or genre, and the finished game should run on a classic Amiga under AmigaOS. Use of 68k acceleration and RAM is permitted, but requiring specific upgrades beyond that (e.g. OS4, PPC, Vampire, RTG) isn't permitted. The jam starts 31 May and runs for three months, finishing at 11pm on 31 August. The judging panel includes AmigaBill (Amiga streamer / YouTuber), Sven Dröge (current AmiBlitz maintainer), Darren Doyle (of Bitmap Soft and PhoenixWare, publishers of retro games), John Kayanas (of AmigaLive), John Girvin (Nivrig Games), and Dan Thoresen (indie game developer and host). The final scoring will be based on a community vote with an extra "Judges' Pick" category, and the prizes include an A500Mini, Monster joystick, and the opportunity to have a boxed version of the game published by Bitmap Soft. Full details on the jam can be found on its page: https://itch.io/jam/abbgjam

Noise like that is typical of a switching PSU that has excessive levels of noise. It doesn't necessarily mean it's not providing enough power. A decent switching PSU shouldn't produce that noise. I've occasionally seen that sort of thing (and similar audio noise) when using PicoPSUs with laptop chargers. Switching the charger for another solved the issue.

I haven't seen that particular sampler before, but most (possibly all) parallel port samplers support the same basic protocol and work with almost all software. No harm in trying it. I used SoundTracker Pro 2 back in the day with a sampler I built myself and it worked fine - I'm pretty sure ProTracker or OctaMED would work too.

Those cables are okay, I've used them for a few things, but they are definitely cheap in quality terms, and they're not particularly flexible so less suitable for mice.

The adaptor will likely be a big part of it - most such adaptors aren't made for gaming but for connecting to projectors for Powerpoint presentations, where lag doesn't really matter. Complexity, and thus price, go up dramatically when you reduce the lag. Look at it the other way around, going from RGB to HDMI: You can get reasonable results from a £20 adaptor that adds several frames of lag, or you can get better-looking results with lag within one frame with a £120 OSSC. Essentially, removing 4 or 5 frames of lag costs £100.

Indeed he does, the first of which was posted after my post, and at a similar time to his first post about the jam on EAB. Maybe I'm helping

The number of flashes of the power LED have no significance and don't point to any particular fault, and just signify that the OS has gurued. The number of flashes is hard-coded and the last long pause is the machine resetting. There are lots of guides that appear to be repeated again and again about things like the power LED flashes and the error colours that are often misleading and sometimes plain wrong. Nice work on the fix, I guess there was some sort of bad connection in the Gary socket then? It's probably a candidate for a new socket to make it reliable for the future. Those wires underneath appear to be just a fix - those pins are connected as they should be on the PCB, so maybe there are some scratches or damage to the top of the board between the CPU and the ROM?

Not this one, no. I don't support people profiteering off other people's work.

"Freely downloadable" does not mean freely distributable or free for commercial use. And the seller has plenty of prior history with such dubious claims, selling other packs of copyrighted software.

Well it doesn't paint a particularly competent picture of the company's PR abilities really since the news they post here will and does find its way to other sites, possibly not in the exact form they would like and without any obvious presence in the community to answer questions, people will fill in the blanks themselves. Also, it appears there's more to posting here than just testing the waters regarding a game jam. The AmiGameJam for this year only finished at the weekend just gone - there could have been scope for sponsorship for the final presentation, but a better option might have been to wait the extra two months and sponsor the next AmiGameJam instead of overlapping it by several months. They're gonna need something big to lure developers away from the established event. Of course it offers more by also covering the C64 and VIC-20 - that's quite the spread of capabilities though and in any other competition they'd be in very separate categories (with separate prizes), or have separate game jams for the significantly different platforms. Fair enough, I'm not very familiar with the Intellivision scene, but I do hope this isn't his project...

Perhaps, but the various other Commodore attempts have also had prior business experience. Once again, it seems very odd that this sort of thing is being promoted on an Atari community website and not on any of the mainstream Amiga community websites or social media groups. It also seems just a little out of touch to be positioning this as a community initiative while appearing unaware of the various other game jams in the Commodore and Amiga communities. Surely if the purpose was community enrichment, then sponsorship of funding or prizes to various already established community endeavours would be better?

There doesn't seem to be any mention of the purpose of the jam on that page, i.e. to find an IP that you can develop for other platforms (presumably for profit). With that in mind, could you tell us what exactly the situation is with the IP of any entries? Does the IP of any entries remain entirely with the creator, or are any rights forfeited by entering? What other stipulations will be applied? The recently finished AmiGameJam had the stipulation that all entries must be open source, for example.

Yup, the controller ports are more or less identical to any other Amiga, meaning mice work fine on the CD32, and CD32 controllers work fine on any Amiga.

Grounds being independent of each other is less important since they're mostly bound together inside the Amiga anyway (the A1200 has a separate ground for video and sync for example, but the A500 does not), and likely inside the display / OSSC too. But individual screening of the red, green and blue signals is particularly important for image clarity, especially with longer cables, and you'll see that construction in any decent quality VGA or SCART cable, even if they're all connected together at each end. Providing a separate ground (and preferably screening) for the sync will reduce or eliminate noise as a result of the digital nature of the sync signal. At both the SCART and RGB ends there are individual pins provided for red, green and blue grounds, and they're located in convenient positions for making cables. That's what I do when I build a cable, even though they're connected together inside the devices. It's likely the OSSC doesn't need the extra switching signals and is tolerant of the high CSync voltage because it's made specifically to cater for a wide variety of retro machines, many of which (like the Amiga) had cables back in the day that lacked them. The OSSC also has lots of configurability, so things like RGB mode and widescreen mode can easily be set manually. It's really for use on more modern TVs where they're designed to automatically adapt to whatever input with a minimum of user interaction that you'll need those extra parts. That's my thinking too. Butchering the socket wasn't the way to do it though :/

I haven't heard of any plans to do an Amiga native version of either, but USB to native Amiga adaptors are readily available and should allow you to use either the controller or the mouse on a real Amiga, since they use standard USB protocols. For native controllers, check out the KTRL-CD32 pads: https://www.daemonbite.com/product/ktrl-cd32-gamepad/ They're SNES pad-shaped rather than CD32 pad-shaped, but they're nice to use, work really well and include nice remapping and autofire options. They're currently out of stock, but they do become available in batches now and again.

Any TV that has SCART will support a 15kHz signal so no issues there. I haven't used it myself, but many people seem to be happy with Retro Computer Shack's cables - they've a good reputation in the community: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/254623532468 That's not a particularly good schematic, so don't bother with it. There are several people these days who sell good quality Amiga SCART cables, and they will invariably be based on the diagrams you can find here: http://ianstedman.co.uk/amiga-scart-guide/ Yep, a SCART cable for an old 1084 or similar monitor will only have the bare minimum as the 1084 doesn't need the switching signals used by many TVs Well, it's not as simple as that. Many TVs need additional signals to correctly configure the SCART input. Sometimes this can be done manually via the TV controls, but on many TVs there's no option. In these cases, you also need power connections from the Amiga's RGB output and some resistors at some point on the cable, otherwise the TV might not display the SCART signal, or might try to show the composite input instead. See my link above for what is the de facto standard these days for an Amiga SCART cable. Additionally, there are multiple ground connections, and while you don't strictly need more than one ground connection, the quality of the signal will be improved by using proper grounding - Individual screen for the red, green and blue signals and a separate digital ground for the sync line. It's the NTSC/PAL select pin, and it's relatively common to mod A500s to allow NTSC and PAL running. But IIRC this Agnus is too old for that mod to work, so it's pointless. Regardless, the socket doesn't look healthy all the same with the nearby pins and they could indeed be causing issues. Likewise with the Gary socket; if someone's using such inappropriate parts, they're probably not taking all that much care with the job and there's a good chance there are issues in the area.

Yeah, they're the data bus to the custom chips (including chip RAM). Strange that everything's checking out. Do you have a scope? It might be worth checking if the interrupt line is actually triggering during the test. It's unusual but it does happen that Paula can be faulty.

Yeah, it's pretty simple to do on the rev. 6a boards. I've done it on several boards without any issues. There are two jumpers involved. The first (JP2) is beside the CPU and the setting of that determines where the extra RAM is mapped. By default it's set for "slow" RAM, so that needs to be swapped to the opposite setting by cutting the existing connection and connecting the other contact to the middle. This will mean that any expansion RAM is seen as chip RAM. The other jumper is JP7a, which is near the trapdoor memory connector. This is used to enable or disable the detection of RAM in the trapdoor slot. This one simply needs to be cut so all connections are isolated. This one is probably optional if you don't have anything plugged into the trapdoor. Essentially, they extra RAM positions on the motherboard are wired in parallel with the connections to the trapdoor slot, so either position can be used. Doing the chip RAM mod (JP2) and just using the trapdoor expansion is a lot easier than soldering in all the extra RAM chips, so a lot of people just opt for that. There's no performance advantage either way.