First of all apologies for the relative silence. I started writing this update in late April while I was sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight to take me to another Amiga show. To be exact, the VCF SE 5.0 in Roswell, Georgia which is not only an Amiga show but celebrates the whole Retro computing scene in all it's glorious forms.
An this is how things happen. You have an Apollo core and a Vampire team, and Kipper2k and Majsta and all the others, and they just go the way, all the way.
Today has been announced Vampire V4, and what a beast it is: it comes in different flavours, including a Amiga 1200 and a standalone version.
Among it's features are the Altera Cyclone V A5 FPGA, 512MB DDR3 RAM, FastIDE with two connectors (40 and 44-pin), HDMI* video out, dual Kickstart-flashrom, USB, ethernet, and MicroSD storage.
A standalone version! Let this sink in for a moment.
The great compilers on AmigaOS (and for AmigaOS) like SAS/C and gcc (ADE/geekgadgets) are getting some serious competition by the name of vbcc, which is an acronym for "Volker Barthelmann's C compiler".
What makes vbcc great?
It...
...is cross-platform / portable
...can cross-compile for different targets
...is very fast
...produces small binaries
...has a clear concept, working default configurations, and is easily installed
...is actively developed with modern standards in mind
...still supports AmigaOS1.3 and plain 68000
Aah the Sony Playstation, the machine that when launched back in 1994 changed the face of video gaming and the industry itself forever.
Good news, everyone!
So I've made the descision to try to build a TerribleFire TF530r2 accelerator. The TF530 uses SMD components, which are really small, but the overall number of components is quite low. Based on that, I decided that with good eyesight and accepting some fail-rate it should generally be possible to build the thing.
Disclaimer: This is not an instruction. Use at your own risk. No responsibility taken for whatever you do. Safety first. Kids, dont try this at home.
Some many hours of debugging more, I managed to get the first Picasso96 / uaegfx screen to work:
Upon reading the title of today’s blog you may be wondering why upon purchasing a very expensive custom-made motherboard primarily with the purpose of running Amiga OS on it, would you now be wanting to install a rival operating system? Well, for those who were not aware, although the X5000 was designed with Amiga OS as the main operating in system in mind, it will also support other operating systems.
Published by: Mirrorsoft
Developed by: Blitter Animations
For those of you who read one of my previous posts on Rick Dangerous would have spotted a request for more driving games on Amiga OS4. As I use the online moniker of Outrun1978 on various Amiga forums, it should probably come as no surprise that I am a big fan of the racing game genre having been mesmerised from a young age by that big red Ferrari arcade cabinet that was Outrun by Sega.
Today has seen an update to the A-Eon Enhancer Software package that came bundled with my X5000 motherboard to the latest version 1.3. Rather than cover what has been updated on this latest round of updates, I thought I would look at a specific piece of software which comes with the A-EON enhancer pack that has been updated and which forms an essential part of the X5000 experience in terms of it being your main day to day use music player.
After returning from my two week holiday this week with some much needed time to think about things, I have decided to take a break from this blog for a bit. I haven't decided if it is permanent yet.
