====================================================================== ________ _________ ____ _|__ __ __|_______ _________ __\ _____ \\\\ \_ _/ //___// _____//______\ _____ \\ // \\\\ /. \\\\__ \/ __// \\ \\____. /// \\\\ /. \\ \\___\¯ /___///___\ /___\ \\_________//\\___\¯ /___// ¯ \/ ¯ ¯ \/. |¯ ¯|z!o ¯ ¯ \/ ¯ A M I G A | 030831 | U P D A T E |________| "SO THE WORLD MAY KNOW" ====================================================================== AMIGA and the Amiga logo are trademarks of Amiga, Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- M C E W E N M E S S A G E O N M O S M E S S A M I G A S H O W B E N E L U X I N O C T O B E R A M I W E S T O S 4 A N D A U - C O R R E C T I O N P O S E I D O N S I N K S E L B O X S U P P O R T A C I D 6 4 P L A Y E R 1 . 1 A N D 1 . 1 A D I G I T A L A L M A N A C U P D A T E I M A G E M A G I C K 5 . 5 . 7 A V A I L A B L E W A R P D T - N E W P A C K A G E S O U T W I N U A E C O N T I N U E S T O I M P R O V E Editor's Thoughts and Introduction: This has been a quiet month in the Amiga community, except for the continuing infighting. We managed to get involved in that with the editorial in our special issue for AmiWest. You'll see that in the letters section below. We did some editing, indicated, to keep things in more readable pieces. Please note that all replies to the letters printed should be taken as editorial opinion. Long time readers know we don't usually get involved in controversies because our thrust is to bring you Amiga news. Some issues, however, are so close to being life and death issues for the community that we have no choice. When that happens, we'll make AU's opinions known and why they are held. But that will never be allowed to interfere with bringing you Amiga news. And we do have some interesting items of Amiga news for you below. We hope you enjoy this issue. Brad Webb Editor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- E-mail to the E-ditor: 10 August, 2003 Thanks, Brad, for supporting the Amiga. It's nice to hear a sane voice out there. Justin > Editor's Thoughts and Introduction: > {requotes snipped for space. Brad} > We were left wondering about some attendees, however. We simply > cannot understand what the MorphOS/Pegasos team was doing there. For {Snip again} Justin, Thanks for the kind words. I was pleasantly surprised how many people expressed similar thoughts. Many also stated they were keeping their thoughts to themselves in order to avoid flame wars, etc. Very interesting. More on this topic below. And, in case anyone is wondering, the writer is not the Justin associated with AU. Brad ====== 13 Aug 2003 i've just been reading (on amiga.org) the reaction to your editorial remarks concerning MorphOS/Pegasos in the last newsletter. While i may disagree with your opinion, i don't think you should be trashed for having it. my feeling is that MorphOS/Pegasos will be a good thing for amiga. and i ALSO wish the OS4 people all the luck. this may seem polyanna-like but i think a positive attitude is healthier than a negative one. cecilia Cecilia, Thank you for that response. I would like nothing more than for Genesi to be a positive force in the Amiga Community. They do have great talent. But I'm afraid it isn't. Please see the answer to the next letter, and the item from Bill McEwen, for more. As for the trashing, it's become an Amiga Community Standard Practice to flame those you don't agree with. I actually found it amusing. Ad hominems are simply the least gracious way to admit you've been found out as having no valid argument. Maybe time will prove my concerns about Genesi were invalid. I doubt it very much, but I would actually like to be wrong on this. Brad ====== 13 Aug 2003 > As far as "why was MorphOS at AmiWest", I sympathize with > your comments emotionally. But, real world, you're sounding > a bit naive. Why were they there? They have a product that > they want to sell to their best market, Amiga users. > Paul {Letter above edited for size. Brad} Paul, Excellent letter, good questions. The "why were they there" question was asked from the perspective of why where they invited, not why did they want to attend. I suppose it's really a rhetorical qustion - if they requested attendance, then the folks at AmiWest probably couldn't have refused them even if they wanted to. Earlier Amiga "clones" were providing product when there was nothing new from Amiga, and no direction either. That's not the case now. Genesi's efforts can only hurt the first real direction forward we've had in years. Plus, I don't recall any of the others actively taking legal action against Amiga. Not much of a partnewship there, and a tremendous waste of resources that could go into product development etc. Finally, the Amiga market is so much reduced now that any "bleeding" of resources potentially could kill what remains. This is my main objection to Genesi's presence at Amiga shows. If the people behind Genesi were really concerned about Amiga's future, they would be working to strengthen it, not weaken it. That would be to their long term benefit also. It makes no sense for Amiga supporters to help Genesi with their plans. Now, if the Amiga market were strong, Amiga Inc. were larger and doing very well with well established products, a bit of extra fat so to speak, I'd actually enjoy having someone around to pester Amiga Inc. In those circumstances, they'd be providing what would likely be a productive irritation to Amiga. But that's not the situation we're in at present. We won't be there until OS 4 and beyond have taken on a life of their own, if that ever happens. Whether Genesi could fill that role in the future is impossible to say at this point. Sadly, for Genesi, if Amiga dies they probably will too. All they really have is a successful clone. They have put themselves in a postion where they really do need Amiga to provide a context for their own existance, at least to date. The people who invested in their products could well end up losing as much as the Amigans. The Amiga Community now is so small that the failure of Amiga Inc. will not pass the torch to a successor as has happened in the past, but will simply pass the community into history. If it isn't already too late. I don't think this view is naive. Rather, it's viewing from the perspective of keeping a business alive. Bottom line, Amiga is a business, even if the folks running it are doing it as much out of passion as a desire for profit. See our leadoff item from Bill McEwen below. It should add additional persepective to this. Brad ===== 11 August, 2003 > ... We simply > cannot understand what the MorphOS/Pegasos team was doing there. For > that matter, we cannot understand what they are doing at any Amiga > show... Just wanted to say Amen to that, brother! Heck, Commodore might still be around today if Atari hadn't invaded and depleted their market with the ST. Is Bill Buck an agent for MicroSoft or something? (That wouldn't much surprise me, BTW. I'm sure ol' Visa Bill Gates's realized by now that the only thing that ever hurt Amiga's market was another Amiga.) One thing's for sure; Genesi will Never get any of my business! Thanks for all your hard work, Allan Allan, Nor mine, at least not without some fundamental changes. Yours is a provacative letter. I'm sure we could get some intersting discussions going on the topics you mentioned. There is no doubt the ST cut into the Amiga market. However I'm not sure we could accuse Atari of doing anything illegal or unethical, although the possibility exists. I've mentioned in the past that the ST was in many ways a "grown up" Commodore 64. I've often wondered if there were patents infringed, etc., but no such accusations were ever made that I am aware of. In the final analysis though Commodore committed suicide as the company was systematically bled of its profits and operating capital. There's lots to this story. How Atari in the ST days came to be owned by the founder of Commodore. How the founder of Atari came to work for Commodore sometime later. And of course, the fact that the Amiga is really a "grown up" Atari 800. For feuding rivals, the intertwining of the two companies was amazing. Maybe there'll be a book someday. I don't doubt that Microsoft is watching Amiga despite the vast size difference between them. Large companies do such things (just note the suit by GE on behalf of its Hummer against the revived Studebaker - a vehicle most people have never even heard of). However, at this point Microsoft has very little to worry about so will probably leave it alone - for now. And Amiga is actually making money off Microsoft. That brings a smile to my face. Brad =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- M C E W E N M E S S A G E O N M O S M E S S 2 August, 2003 Dear Friends: It has come to our attention that Mr. Bill Buck has made several statements about the on-going litigation between our firms. He has stated that he has won the case, and that we have agreed to port AmigaDE to Pegasos, as well as making certain claims that he has rights to our logos and trademarks. The facts are that the legal process is continuing, we have not lost and we have not agreed to port AmigaDE to Pegasos. The statements made are false and misleading. I should also like to remind the community, and those users of the Amiga Operating System, that the End User License Agreement clearly states that the license for use is only valid, on Amiga branded machines. Therefore if the Amiga operating system is being used on a non-Amiga branded machine the use would be prohibited. We look forward to the release of Amiga OS 4.0, and we look forward to continuing our efforts moving forward. God bless, Bill McEwen President/CEO Amiga, Inc. {Note: on the Amiga website, this item is listed as being about Thendic - Amiga litigation. Thendic folded into Genesi. Brad} ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A M I G A S H O W B E N E L U X I N O C T O B E R 9 August, 2003 After a very succesfull show in June 2001, the Benelux Amiga Show will return in 2003. Due to the incresing popularity of the Pegasos, the show will bascially consist of two events combined into one; The Benelux Amiga Show and the Benelux Pegasos Show. The Show will be held on the 4th and 5th of October from 10:00 till 17:00, in Engels Rotterdam - on the eight floor in the Royal Residence. Engels is a business/culinary centre for more than a century and can be found next to the Rotterdam Central Train Station. The Benelux Amiga/Pegasos show will be the biggest Amiga related show that has been held in a long time. At this point 1000 visitors or more are expected to attend. Exhibitors and VIPs: -Computer City (in and export of Amiga computers in the Benelux) -Genesi, producer of Amiga-compatible PowerPC computer Pegasos and desinger of the AmigaOS-compatible MorphOS operating system. -Amiga Scene, Dutch Amiga magazine -Amiga Plus, German Amiga magazine -Vesalia, German Amiga dealer - Hamminkeln -e.p.i.c. interactive entertainment gmbh, Amiga and MorphOS software titles -Fun Time World, German Amiga Dealer -GGS-Data, Swedish Amiga Dealer -Oliver Hanaford-Day, designer of the Coldfire Project, a new accelerator board for the 'classic' Amiga computers. -Ebay Nederland, -Amiga.org, leading Amiga newssite and community portal -Hellcoder, Software group -IOSpirit, Software company -HCC Commodore Gebruikers Groep, largest user-group in Holland -Individual Computers - Jens Schoenfeld, designer of Amiga hardware and manufacturer C-One Commodore-64 compatible reconfigurable computer. More information: A number of other potential exhibitors have shown interest. More info can be found next week at the official website. Internet connections are available during the show and multiple exhibitors will be giving away prices at the end of each day. Events during the show - AmigaOS4 demonstration - Pegasos demonstration - Amiga museum - Lan-party (hosted by Genesi) Conclusion Make sure not to miss the greatest Amiga show this year! Bring your friends, family and everyone who might be interested in Amiga computing ... because this show will be something that you cannot afford to miss !! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A M I W E S T O S 4 A N D A U - C O R R E C T I O N In our special issue on AmiWest earlier this month, we got our facts wrong. The board loaned for demonstration of OS4 actually went to Mr. Hardware Computers for their demonstration held later in New York. The demonstrations held at AmiWest were on equipment provided by Louie Dituri and Ray Zarling, who get high marks for their Amiga volunteer spirit. Well done gentlemen! We regret any confusion we may have caused. Brad. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- P O S E I D O N S I N K S E L B O X S U P P O R T 1 August, 2003 As of 01-Aug-03, further support for Elbox hardware has been dropped for all times. No keyfile can be obtained anymore that will work with the Spider. Users, who have registered before this date are not (yet) affected. Eventually, the free updates will cease at some point (but not this year). I've said this before, but I think I have to say this again: Users of USB solutions, that come with an OEM-Licence (this includes Subway, Highway, Algor and Pegasos), are not affected at all and will have full support as long as Poseidon is available as a product. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A C I D 6 4 P L A Y E R 1 . 1 A N D 1 . 1 A 21 August 2003 ACID 64 Player version 1.1a released. A bug fix release for the Catweasel MK3 card. 20 August 2003 ACID 64 Player version 1.1 released. It now supports the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper card. Some new features: - Changing device will not restart the sid tune anymore - HardSID frequency adjustment for exact PAL/NTSC frequency like a real C64 - Display/Change of PAL/NTSC frequency - Support for switching output device to correct SID type (6581/8580) - RSID file format support (still no digi's and will not work for all tunes yet) - Deadlock detection - Improved muting (real silents when voices are muted!) - Improved SID type check - Improved layout for filter setting and device setting ACID 64 player is a Commodore 64 music player for Windows that can play SID tunes on sound cards with a real SID chip, like the HardSID card and the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper card. It emulates the MOS 6510 micro processor to run the code of a SID tune and controls the SID chip (6581/8580) for playing Commodore 64 music. This project started in 1995 with the SidCard. The SidCard is a hardware module with a real SID chip that can be connected to the parallel port. However, this hardware project is discontinued. The software written for this project is ported to Windows and supports now all the HardSID cards and the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper card. Features - Supports all HardSID cards and the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper card - Support for multiple cards - Emulation of all 6510 instructions including all undocumented opcodes - Exact timing for normal speed and multi speed songs! - Exact frequency playback like a real C64 (PAL/NTSC) - SID signal indicator for each voice (Note trigger) - Up to 20 times fast forward - Real muting of voices! - Easy solo voices, change volume and toggle filter on/off - Switch easy between devices without restarting the song - Drag & drop support for multiple files - Minimize to system tray for background playing - Go back and forward in the history of played songs - Easy short cuts to change settings on the fly - And much more... What's new in version 1.1a - Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper card support - Changing device will not restart the sid tune anymore - HardSID frequency adjustment for exact frequency playback like a real C64 - Display/change of PAL/NTSC frequency - Support for switching output device to correct SID type (6581/8580) - RSID file format support (still no digi's and will not play all sid tunes correctly) - Deadlock detection - Improved muting (real silents when voices are muted!) - Improved SID type check - Improved layout for filter setting and device setting http://www.xs4all.nl/~boswme/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- D I G I T A L A L M A N A C U P D A T E 25-Aug-2003 New version of Digital Almanac The new version DA III V5.4 has been released. You can find it in the download area. Here is a short list of changes that have been made: City list has been rewritten. The list contains all countries of the world with their flags (optional). The format of the list has changed, so the list is now independent from the Locale settings. The moving of cities was very buggy before. Now it works without any problems. Online information of the countries are available from the CIA World Factbook. Improved ephemeris of the Saturnian satellites Helene, Telesto and Calypso with the help of the HTC20 theory. Online informationen about the planets and satellites of the solar system can now additionally be accessed from the planet filter in the preferences window. IFF-ILBM savings are done via Datatypes. This saves about 10 kB code and is more system-friendly. BUGFIX: In the calendar, meteor showers were shown at a wrong date. BUGFIX: In previous versions, when the program was started from a Shell, the DOS parameters were analyzes wrong. This bug is now fixed. BUGFIX: Program could crash when drawing too many Deep-Sky objects (PPC only). http://www.digitalalmanac.de/english/home.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I M A G E M A G I C K 5 . 5 . 7 A V A I L A B L E 3 August, 2003 ImageMagickTM is a robust collection of tools and libraries offered under a usage license to read, write, and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 87 major formats) including popular formats like TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, and GIF. With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically, making it suitable for Web applications. You can also resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image or image sequence and save your completed work in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++, Perl, or Java programming interfaces. Here are just a few examples of what ImageMagick can do: Convert an image from one format to another (e.g. TIFF to JPEG) Resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image Create a montage of image thumbnails Create a transparent image suitable for use on the Web Turn a group of images into a GIF animation sequence Create a composite image by combining several separate images Draw shapes or text on an image Decorate an image with a border or frame Describe the format and characteristics of an image -- You can access ImageMagick functions directly from the command line using the ImageMagick tools convert, mogrify, montage, composite, or identify. Finally you have access to the various image manipulation methods directly from the most popular application development environment: Perl, C++, C, Python, C, PHP, or Java. These programs, and much more, are discussed in detail. Just follow the appropriate link on the official ImageMagick WWW site. You can subscribe to the mailing list or register with the Web-based discourse server. Here you can ask questions and get advice from other ImageMagick users and see announcements of bug fixes, enhancements, and new releases. ImageMagick is copyright ImageMagick Studio LLC, a non-profit organization. ImageMagick is available for free, may be used to support both open and proprietary applications, and may be redistributed without fee. http://amiga.sourceforge.net/ImageMagick/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- W A R P D T - N E W P A C K A G E S O U T The WarpDT package comprises of a collection of picture datatypes, and an accompanying easy-to-use preferences program. The image formats currently supported are JFIF/JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Windows BMP, PCX and PSD (Adobe Photoshop®), although support for more formats is planned. One of the key features of the datatypes is their superior decoding speed (hence the name Warp), especially on PowerPC equipped systems, and most importantly not at the expense of power and features. Fast, powerful 24-bit picture datatypes for AmigaOS® 68K (OS 3.x & Amithlon) and PowerPC (WarpOS, OS 4.0* & MorphOS) 25 August 2003 - WarpPCX V45.1 released Today, a new addition to the WarpDT family was born (and free to existing registered WarpDT users). As the name suggests, WarpPCX can read ZSoft PC Paintbrush files (PCX). A new version of WarpDTPrefs is also available, providing support for WarpPCX. 1 August 2003 - WarpTIFF V45.4 released A new WarpTIFF is now available, with the following new features: · Added support for files using the old-style JPEG compression scheme. · Implemented preliminary support for Xerox image files (XIF), which use a proprietary format, but is actually extended from standard TIFF format - PC scanner software, Pagis Pro, uses this file format. http://www.warpdt.co.uk/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- W I N U A E C O N T I N U E S T O I M P R O V E 24 August, 2003 The latest version of WinUAE (0.8.22R9) has just become available. Bugs fixed: compiler misoptimization of some rare instructions (affected 0.8.22R8 only, usually caused GURUs) bsdsocket emulation (connection freeze, IRCD, AmyGate etc..) NTSC vsync sound Windows 2K/XP CD detection problems in non-ASPI mode more compatible audio emulation (TBL's Tint, some demos playing only noise) ticking/unticking 68000 "more compatible" checkbox on the fly does not crash the emulated Amiga anymore AVI capture sound sync New features: software 2x filters (Scale2x, SuperEagle, 2xSaI and Super2xSaI) and manual screen position adjustment. separate windowed and fullscreen mode width and height 100% exact blitter block mode cycle diagram (cycle-exact mode only) r eplaced "run at higher priority" with priority selection select box added CAPS support to mini-version automatic AVI splitting http://amiga.nvg.org/uae/releases/WinUAE/InstallWinUAE0822R9.exe  =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Amiga Update on the net: All back issues available at: http://www.globaldialog.com/~amigaupdate/index.html Stop by and check out our archive! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2003 by Brad Webb. Freely distributable, if not modified. ====================================================================== _ __ _ <>_ __ _ A M I G A /\\ |\ /|| || / ` /\\ A M I G A U P D A T E /__\\ | \ / || || || ___ /__\\ U P D A T E / \\_ | \/ ||_ _||_ \__// / \\_ amigaupdate@globaldialog.com ======================================================================