Amiga Thread.

[TrashyMG]

@Ian J I saw some in Currys the other day, still sold for cameras. Unless I'm mistaken by the PCMCIA bit, they're just CF cards right?

The Compact Flash interface is a 50 pin subset(vs 68 pin) version of PCMCIA(PC card) , but from what I understand there is still some other mode differences as well... so you need an adapter.

 

[Ian J]

Okay, it looks like it's not just me, so I've had no luck getting PCMCIA CF cards to work as storage. I've tried a 4GB one from Amigakit and a variety of 16 to 64GB Sandisk Ultra/Extreme CF cards. It recognizes the CF adapter just fine. but right now I'm using the PCMCIA with an ethernet adapter, just using an IDE to CF adapter.

The 4GB transcend (fat 32) I have works fine in the Amiga using an internal adaptor as a Hard-Drive partitioned into 3 but I cannot get it to be recognised by the PCMCIA adaptor, I also have a 129mb card (fat 32) that the adaptor recognises fine but I wanted to use the PCMCIA as swappable media using it mainly for CD images so minimum I need is 1GB.

@Ian J I saw some in Currys the other day, still sold for cameras. Unless I'm mistaken by the PCMCIA bit, they're just CF cards right?

Correct but due to the Amiga age modern cards don't appear to be compatible.

Can you see enough of it to format it to something of your liking?

Not a thing, tried using HDToolbox to partition it in case it was too large but that doesn't see it either.

Looking round the net it appears that 4GB is the limit but even smaller cards can have issues.

It's a real pot luck situation, some cards from manufacturers work on one Amiga but with the same adaptor won't work on another.

I fear I may have left it too late to get one and will have to get an older one 2nd hand to ensure compatibility.

 

[Ian J]

I swore I'd never buy memory from eBay but that's the only place I can find SanDisk Compact Flash cards around 4GB.

Very tempted as reading reports SanDisk are the most compatible.

 

[Ian J]

I've tested the following CF cards:

Sandisk Extreme 8GB - Works fine in PCMCIA adaptor, only showing 4GB but I need to backup the files on it before I start to play as it's not my card

Digistor XL-Pro 128MB - Works fine in PCMCIA, and I can see the full 128MB

Transcend 4GB 133x Ultra Speed

I purchased two of these at the same time from the same shop, one worked in the internal IDE to CF adaptor and the other was not seen at all by the Amiga, neither worked in the PCMCIA adaptor.

 

[ashdjones]

The original cardbus spec is 16bit, as is the Amiga itself.

Maths limit of 4gb suggests 32 bit number comprised of a low 'word' combined with 'high' word as was used by earlier non IBM Windows. Why rewerite in 32bit when you can double up 16bit code and recycle it?

Beneifit of this is compaitiblity of very old code. For instance you can still compile mid 80's Reversi code example for Windows CE. It now needs to be rewritten, as I read about with open sourced Winfile done in 64bit.

Considering the Amiga is 16bit, they were fairly reasonable in providing first gen cardbus outside 68000 range. But reports say it isn't the most reliable driver? Well you wouldn't expect that to work on old Win3 or Apple Mac, so probably the best effort of anyone at the time. Except perhaps 200lx, which runs 4gb mostly okay. Possibly corrupted it at some point, but I did recover that disk. It would be nice to claim I used Linux Gparted or other, but the most bulletproof application for this in my experience is the disk utility in OSX. Inherited from arch rival BSD or not, can't say.

 

[___]

well the amiga cpu is a mixed beast. 32bit cpu architecture but 16bit ALU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Central_processing_unit

the A1200 pcmcia port has a 16bit bus, but it also has regular IDE if you want to use you CF card with an adapter.

and although the default disk partitioning tool of the amiga is a bit fiddly and you need additional filesystem drivers, you can use pretty big harddrives/CF cards if you set up the partitions carefully. obviously so much space is not ever needed on an amiga, but I had to use a 20gb HDD because it was the smallest IDE drive I still had lying about and I didn't want to waste a bigger one.

 

[sm0kew0n]

Amiga 500 cases live stream QandA -

https://youtu.be/ZvtG7aHDXIU

Now, 17:00 20/05/2018

 

[Ian J]

Loving the look of this, really need to bring Amiga downstairs & connect it to main TV to play this in all it's pixel glory.


Reminded me of the Vulcan Software Valhalla games, I'd love to see some more of those, anything similar currently available?

EDIT Reminded me from viewpoint, not game-play.

 

[TrashyMG]

@Ian J - Max Knight is not a top down game,but this is a new ( last year ) OCS/ECS title.
http://hol.abime.net/6223

 

[levi]

They could really do with stopping restarting the music at the start of each level, especially if you're watching a speedrun like that.

 

[Ian J]

@Ian J - Max Knight is not a top down game,but this is a new ( last year ) OCS/ECS title.
http://hol.abime.net/6223

Nice I'll give that a go.

Just visited Vulcan Software's site and an iOS version of the Valhalla is in development but nothing new.

 

[Ian J]

Micro Gotek - Move over chunky Gotek Floppy Emulator it's time to go Micro

Looks like a much nicer solution for running ADF's

 

[pmprog]

I'm sure there was some chat on here about Amiga development... so in case anyone is interested, I found this little gem. Sourcecode to some Amiga demos
https://www.generationamiga.com/2017/06/19/source-code-of-50-amiga-intros-released/

 

[levi]

Nice, here's the forum source link: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=37706

Lots of 68k assembler code, woot!

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi all

A nice article on hothardware.com :

https://hothardware.com/news/commodore-amiga-revitalized-with-new-retro-hardware

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[levi]

There seems to be some video noise in that Vampire V4 prototype video linked from there, which I'd not seen before. It's most obvious when the youtuber is playing tracker mods, and ranges from about an inch in a single scanline to whole frames being filled with rubbish. It does look more like analogue noise to me than digital artifacts though, and it could always be his capture card at fault. Odd that when he comes to play games, the ones with apparently tracker music seem fine to me, but Flink which doesn't have music shows a couple of issues.

 

[TrashyMG]

There seems to be some video noise in that Vampire V4 prototype video linked from there, which I'd not seen before. It's most obvious when the youtuber is playing tracker mods, and ranges from about an inch in a single scanline to whole frames being filled with rubbish. It does look more like analogue noise to me than digital artifacts though, and it could always be his capture card at fault. Odd that when he comes to play games, the ones with apparently tracker music seem fine to me, but Flink which doesn't have music shows a couple of issues.

It's possible that they're still working out some timing issue with HDMI and the new "Pamela" Audio core that allows audio through the HDMI output. The timings may be too aggressive too. I've played with a x13 multiplier core on the V2 vampire on my A600 and had some HDMI glitches, had to go back to the x11 core.

 

[levi]

Ah is that an HDMI-based recording? I assumed the resolution which looked to me to be something like 256 lines but scaled to something like 4x (judging by the window size at my end) meant it was originally an analogue source. I guess raw digital artifacts might look something like analogue glitches to my old eyes though, and it's only post-compression artifacts that are identifiably other to my eyes.

The vampire boards don't actually have an analogue out do they? At least the latest boards, which I guess settles it.

 

[TrashyMG]

Ah is that an HDMI-based recording? I assumed the resolution which looked to me to be something like 256 lines but scaled to something like 4x (judging by the window size at my end) meant it was originally an analogue source. I guess raw digital artifacts might look something like analogue glitches to my old eyes though, and it's only post-compression artifacts that are identifiably other to my eyes.

The vampire boards don't actually have an analogue out do they? At least the latest boards, which I guess settles it.

If it's either running the new AGA core or running RTG mode (saga driver) then the output is on the FPGA going through the Vampire's HDMI port. If it's running an OCS/ECS application then it's going through the real Amiga chipsets. I believe the AGA mode will have a scanline mode. Since the AGA core is not yet available on the V2, I'm only going on what I read in IRC and forum posts.

 

[levi]

There are no scanlines that I could see - it was a straight nearest neighbour upscale. He does run four old games to show it off, but they all have headers (or something) that look like the code's been patched. Whether that's a patch so they can run in native AGA, or so they can be WHDloaded, or something else that was done to them since they were originally released in the early 90s I can't tell though.