So, I talked about this one in the past but there was an enterprising Amiga user that created his own RTG video card for his Amiga 2000 due to the rarity and crazy prices of the few still on the market. It’s called the MNT VA2000 and is a Zorro II card that can work in Zorro III machines.
Batch #2 is now taking pre-orders: Pre-order page link
Here’s a link to the drivers: Drivers link
Here’s a video of the Vampire 500 board on an Amiga 500, surfing the web with the latest Netsurf 3.6 by Arti (there is another Netsurf 3.6 by Chris, author of the OS4.x version of Netsurf)
It appears that Hyperion has made enough progress on OS4.1 for X5000 to make an announcement. See this –> link <—.
This appears to be just enough to get the OS working on the X5000. There is no mention of extended features, as there was also an announcement that a full update for all OS4.1FE users will be available by the end of the year. Let’s hope that happens.
So, I saw this video from a link about the latest version of Netsurf 3.6 (the 68k SDL version found –> here <–). I’m a fan of this browser and encourage everyone with a classic machine to try it out.
The test video shows the author using this on an Amiga 500 that has the Vampire 2 accelerator and a plipbox (ethernet over parallel port).
Hyperion announced yesterday that you can now purchase an official copy of Workbench 3.1 and Kickstart 3.1 without going through Cloanto (or less legal methods). And the most amazing part of this is that there ware updates, although minor.
Compared to the Boing Bag expansions for 3.9 that have been continued by Amiga Projects (–> here <–), it seems like not much of an update. The BetterWB is also a 3.1 update that is a great update too.
I’ve not posted in a while but I did see this interesting project that combined the hardware for a MorphOS machine (I have the feeling it is one of the bPlan Efika boards, but it may be an apple product, combined with a minimig.
The builder has worked some software and hardware switching to cause a game floppy icon clicked to open on the minimig and switch the video over. The controller signalling is shared somehow as well. Very interesting project. I hope he explains more soon.
Check out the improvements and performance of the new SILVER6 core update for the apollo core for the Amiga 600 Vampire 2 accelerator (with RTG and HDMI)
It appears the search for RTG cards continue as the available supply on the market continues to shrink. A few years ago, I could find a PicassoII card on Ebay occasionally for $200USD or less. These days, if they ever show up, they are going for $300USD or more.
So, with the fracturing of the Amiga community between Amiga (Classic), Amiga OS4.x, MorphOS and AROS, it seems that new programs need to be ready to provide a build of the code for each platform out there for best performance. Both OS4.x and MorphOS can run classic software as long as it doesn’t hit the old custom chipset (if it does, then emulation is in order). AROS also can run via emulation or needs a recompile for the target platform.
I stumbled across this link to a page where someone recently found the original, UAE 0.1 version of source code and was able to get it working on Windows 10 just to see what it was like.
Read –> here <– to see their experience.
Can’t believe I ran the first UAE I could get hold of 21 years ago