This is version 2.4.2.

PUAE242Beta20120926.dmg

I will provide a build of 2.5 Beta in the next few days…

The Amiga is a pretty unique collection of very tightly coupled hardware, with each component providing certain functionality but needing the other bits to make it work.  The trinity of Paula, Agnus and Denise provide IO, sound, graphics, manipulation and display, all with little or no CPU intervention thanks to the magic of DMA.  The highly interconnected nature, the multiple threads of execution, the sheer complexity of the hardware means emulating an Amiga to a high degree of accuracy is a difficult thing to do.  Don’t be fooled by me stating that multiple threads means that stuff can be easily processed in parallel: simply put, it can’t, as the whole environment needs such a high degree of synchronisation that any advantages in a parallel approach are rapidly negated.

A 68k Mac, or Atari ST, can be easily emulated thanks to the relative simplicity of the hardware.  Standard chips and little tailoring in such machines mean the emulation is simple to achieve and prove.  The Amiga’s custom chips lead to the power that made the machine attractive in the first place, but at the expense of simplicity.

The State of the Art for Amiga emulation has, and I assume whilst Toni Wilen is alive, will be represented by WinUAE.  This is a magnum opus that has consumed Toni for years and will continue to do so, and Toni himself is proud to be standing on the shoulders of giants.  The sheer completeness of emulation achieved is quite astonishing considering the complexity involved.  It works – dare I say it – perfectly.  Of course, Toni is still developing this and at the time of writing he is working on version 2.4.1 beta to address small inconsistencies and enhance usability.

All well and good, but what about Mac and Linux users?

Well, we’ve been running E-UAE, from Richard Drummond, for years.  It works, and works well enough but has nowhere near the feature set of WinUAE.

PUAE, from Mustafa Tufan (GnoStiC) has the ambition to be a portable version of WinUAE, based on modern WinUAE code.  Given the complexity of WinUAE, this is a hugely ambitious project, and Mustafa has achieved wonderful results.  I’m pleased to have helped in a very small way by providing precompiled OSX binaries.

Most recently, Frode Solheim has undertaken to develop a version of UAE based on a modern WinUAE with a focus on games, and suitability for media centre use with a suitable “10-foot interface” that will run on Windows, Linux and MacOS.  In a very short space of time Frode has achieved his goal, thanks in no small part to focus and relying on the work of others, and has released FS-UAE.  There’s few times that I’m genuinely speechless, however when I first ran FS-UAE I can safely say that I was.

FS-UAE now runs natively under MacOS, emulating both ECS and AGA Amigas, pretty much perfectly.  Using SwitchResX I was able to create a 50Hz screenmode for my Macbook Pro, and FS-UAE runs with perfect PAL VSYNC.

With Version 1.1, Frode is adding support for non-game features such as Picasso96: more on that later, as I intend to write a howto for P96 to make things simple.

So the options for non-windows UAE have expanded wonderfully in the last 18 months.  Both PUAE and FS-UAE are ambitious, and have achieved a huge amount.  Myself?  I’ll keep pestering Mustafa for a new push to the git hub for PUAE, but I am also enthusiastic for FS-UAE.

Variety.  It’s great!

At some time in their life, every Amiga user whether beginner or expert finds themselves cursing their machine for not being more self-explanatory and reaching for the manual. Shortly afterwards, the manual is normally cursed for either not being where you put it or not containing the relevant information. The only solution has been to fork out on some dedicated book to solve the conundrum : enter the Amiga On-line Reference Manual (called AORM from here on), a product which claims to be the answer to many questions and contain some darn good information to boot. The package comes on two disks with a single sheet of instructions and a registration card which needs to be sent to the states and is basically 1.5MB of AmigaGuide files.

AORM: it's all there...

Installing AORM to hard drive or floppy is painless, making use of Commodore’s standard “Installer” utility. In Expert Install mode, options exist for everything from what type of icons to install (either normal or the “Magic” workbench style) to which parts of the package to install. A nice option is to have the program appear every time the “Help” key is pressed. As the package uses the AmigaGuide format, it comes with the software to read the files for pre-WorkBench 3 users and installs this automatically if necessary.

Launching the program is done by either double clicking on its icon or by simply pressing the help key (if you elected to have that option installed). From here, you can move to any part of the package by clicking on hypertext links of the AmigaGuide files (these look just like gadgets). It’s worth mentioning here that the largest file of the 1.5MB coll

ection is only 160KB, so multitasking is not impaired too much on a machine without vast amounts of memory. The initial page contains links to prefaces, appendices and the main areas, these being: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs); Hardware; the OS; Workbench; Software products; ten Amiga advantages; Using the Amiga; List of Famous uses and the Video Toaster.

The first thing that strikes you after using the package for five minutes is the size and completeness of it – then the next thing that strikes you is the fact that it’s all set out very logically with every possible cross reference made. Whenever possible, links to the glossary are made to explain jargon.

The AmigaDOS section is most worthy of mention – it lists every command available in the reference along with how to use it and also has a very good stab at an introduction and overview of what a shell is through the FAQ section. The glossary is complete in every way, sorted on alphabet. The index section is excellent with many useful tables from the alternative character set to the refractive indices of various translucent materials. Arexx is covered well again with a reference and introduction. The FAQs are on the whole excellent and provide excellent example answers along with good reading.

All in all, this package is very good. It’s much easier to use than any book and comparitively priced. The only minor niggles are a couple of links are missing (for example a few Workbench-related bits), but the author assures me that these will be fixed in the next upgrade. It’s even worth looking through in a dull moment as there’s a lot of very interesting information in there. Highly recommended for both beginner and expert alike.

Rating: 90%.

By now, you’d have had to be completely cut off from the world not to have noticed that the World Wide Web (hereon known as the Web) has been growing at a rate bigger than exponential. We’re talking explosion proportions, here. Massive does not really come close…

However, you may still be wondering something along the lines of “Yes, but how do I get involved and publish on the Web?” in which case this article should answer your question.

The World Wide Web uses a standard language to transfer it’s hypertext data around the net called HTML, short for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is a subset of SGML (that’s Standard General Markup Language) and was brought into being by CERN where they also play with particle accelerators and other expensive toys. You can tell this is new because the acronyms have moved from being three letters to four – must be something special…

The Web is basically a huge example of client/server computing: multiple clients can be furnished by one server. There are many different clients that can be used to interpret the data sent to them by the server, and the Amiga has an excellent one of these.

The most popular client has to be Mosaic, which has been already described as the Internet’s killer application and with good reason – the use of the Web rose by 300,000% in 1993 and is still rising.

AMosaic is a port from the NCSA Mosaic package, originally found in the *NIX world with X Window systems. The beauty of this package is that it will run with practically any protocol stack (such as AmiTCP or DNet) seamlessly, meaning you can use AMosaic on an ethernet network or via your dialup SLIP/PPP link from a service provider.

On the other side of things, publishing Web data means that you need a server to listen for requests for pages to be sent. Again, NCSA’s HTTPdaemon has been ported across to the Amiga but before you start rushing for your copy of httpd, think if you’d really want your Amiga constantly connected; just imagine the phone bills! The only current way to get Web space is to pay a provider to store your data for you which is slowly coming down in cost. Alternatively, if you’re at an academic establishment you may just be able to persuade the powers that be to attach your pages to the WWW. You’d be amazed how much the application of beer to support staff makes them more amenable to this sort of suggestion.

GnoStiC is looking into this, however this may not be a quick fix.  In the meantime I recommend going back to an older build, such as from May: http://www.binarydevotion.com/binary/PUAE233Beta110516.dmg

GnoStiC has been busy, and has rolled up changes from Toni Wilen’s 2.3.3 beta series into PUAE.

Here’s an OSX Build for your delectation.  Usual rules apply: I just build this!  Please provide bug reports at EAB or on GitHub

Build date: 21/6/2011
Commit: c3c13e54b8062f208ef8baff8e7520789135b8c8

PUAE-2.3.3-110621.dmg

(For posterity, the 2.3.1 build will be available)

Commit version: 850759c4ed4285cefd851f96ae7aca428c884481
Build date: 16/06/2011
Built with: xcode 4.0.2 on Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Changes (from GnoStiC): several bugfixes, but most importantly new core cpu and disk emulation fixes.

This is a development snapshot, so is inherently unstable. If it crashes, mocks the Pope and disappears with your significant other it’s no-one’s problem but your own…

LibSDL is included as a Framework within the package – a separate install of LibSDL is no longer needed.

Current version: PUAE-231-20110616

Previous verion:PUAE-231-20110516

Unarchiver Icon

What is important is that archiving has been embraced for decades now, and there are myriad formats around: some are still alive, some are moribund, and some are locked into specific legacy platforms with little support in the modern world.  Worse still in some people’s eyes is that some (and I’m looking at you here, RAR) use proprietary algorithms with no open solution to properly decode them.

And along comes The Unarchiver from Dag Ågren, which – as the apt app name suggests – looks to be the tool you need to extract stuff from your archives.  It’s an open source, free, LGPL piece of software for MacOS X weighing in at 5.5MB of source and 4.5MB of executable.  A command line version is available for Windows and Linux, should those be your predilection.

What does it do?

It unarchives, decompresses, extracts stuff.  Zips, RARs, sits, tars, tgz… You name it, it probably is covered.  But what is really interesting is that it’ll do just that to legacy formats, such as Amiga ADFs, DMS, LHA, etc.  Of course it will only unarchive ADF or DMS files that contain a well known filesystem (Amiga OFS), but it does it.  And it does it well.

Options, options

This is a well considered application.  At first run you select the file extensions you wish to associate with The Unarchiver – useful, as by default Mac OS X will take care of ZIP files and the like with the system default Archive Utility and you may want to keep such associations untouched.

You can also select how archives are extracted: where they’re extracted, whether they get their own directory – with an option to create a directory if there’s only more than one item in the archive’s root directory, which is neat -, what the timestamps should be, and whether to open the extracted folder and move the archive to trash.  It’s all good, and well thought out.

With every format I tried, it simply worked.  It deals with password protected archives as you’d expect (unlike UnRarX), it handles ADFs and DMSs well and if it’s not a DOS disk that you’re working with it tells you politely.

Conclusions

I really like this application, and it has become my default unarchiver on my mac for the simple reason that it just works.  It’s interesting to note that the author has also written a file viewer compatible with the Amiga file formats…  More on that elsewhere!

Author: Dag Ågren
Product homepage: http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver
Rating: 10/10 – does exactly what it should do, and well!

Well, yes.  Get over it.  There’ll be more coming, too.

Jens Schoenfeld is something of a legend in the Amiga community: his Individual Computers brand is responsible for ‘good hardware for good computers’ and he’s certainly delivering.  This is a rarity in the Amiga world, which is more used to promises of big things with no execution.

The Buddha Flash Phoenix Edition is the latest incarnation of the venerable Buddha controller.  Compact and bijou – in fact, most un-Buddha-like  – it is an inoffensive little card with quite a bit of power.

Simply put, it’s an IDE controller for your Zorro 2 equipped Amiga.  What’s more, with a little bit of jiggery pokery, it will work on an Amiga 500 or 1000, too, or even with the GB A1000 board, or Phoenix board.

The device comes in a neat Individual Computers box, with an IDE cable and, if you’re lucky, a driver disk.  You can download the disk from Individual Computers if you don’t receive the disk, so it’s no great hardship.  The manual is conspicuous by its absence.

The device provides a 44-pin connector for 2.5″ hard drives, and a 40 pin connector for your common or garden IDE connector.  If using the 2.5″ connector, power is provided on the extra pins for the drive, however you are strongly advised to also connect a power supply to the board’s floppy-drive style power input.  Also on board is a clock port, which is a nice addition opening up a new range of expansions to your big box Amiga.

The ‘flash’ in the title is due to the fact that the EPROM on this board is programmable; with a little bit of software you can upgrade the drivers and firmware stored in the flash: a neat touch.  Finally, there’s a single jumper that controls whether the flash memory is write protected (jumper open) or write enabled (jumper closed)

Plugging the Buddha in is a case of, for want of a better expression, just plugging it in.  It works, and will instantly boot from an appropriately partitioned drive plugged in thanks to the wonders of Amiga standardisation and RDB.  Any Kickstart from 1.3 or higher will support autobooting.  With 1.2 you need an appropriate disk to load the basics then transfer booting to the Buddha-attached drive.

Two drives are supported, a master and a slave.  The 44 pin and 40 pin connectors share common lines so you need to set master and slave appropriately, irrespective of whether you are using different connectors or not.

Performance-wise, it’s about as good as Zorro II gets: DiskSpeed reports read peaking at 1,909, 443bytes/s with 0% CPU available (!) on a WarpEngine equipped 4000.  For comparison, the same CF card natively on the 4000 IDE interface manages 2,279,513bytes/s with 0% CPU available.  The Buddha does write significantly faster than the 4k in most instances, but takes more CPU to do so (eg 1,400,272b/s with 25% CPU available against 664,857b/s with 72% CPU available…)

The ‘Phoenix’ portion of the name relates to using this device on the Amiga 1000 phoenix board. There are points on the card to fit an 86-pin ‘Zorro 1′ connector suitable for the front slot of the Phoenix, or GB A1000, however there are no instructions on how to do this at all which is a little disappointing.  It also appears that this could be used on the Amiga 500 by fitting an appropriate connector, however it would not physically clear the A500′s case if taking this approach.

With a simple Zorro to Zorro 2 adaptor, available from a seller on Amibay, this works well on the 500 and 1000.  When acceleration is brought into the mix, such adaptors can cause problems because of the lack of termination on what is essentially the CPU bus: the Buddha is not alone struggling here.

The card is great, it works, it’s cheap, it’s performant.  There is, so far, only one serious downside that I’ve found to the Buddha: it does not support CF cards that register themselves as ‘removable’.  This is somewhat understandable in the strict interpretation of the IDE standard, however in this day and age  – where CF is the de facto storage medium for the Amiga as a silent, low power and good value choice – it is not acceptable.

Thankfully, someone with the technical acumen to fix this agrees, and has created a patch for the firmware which can skip around the problem.  The inimitably useful and wonderfully monikered ‘Doobrey’ has done the necessary research and published the patch file and tools on his website.  Combined with the original firmware and flash tool, this solves the problem perfectly.  Just don’t forget to put the firmware ‘write enable’ jumper on the card!

In conclusion, I’d recommend the Buddha to anyone wanting to put a decent IDE solution on their 2000 or 3000.  For those seeking a boost for their 4000, this is not the answer.  Do use Doobrey’s patch for CF cards, though, as CF really is the way forward!

This Broadcaster Elite is incredible. Unbelievable. Superlative; in fact, you’d run out of superlatives trying to describe it.

For the technically minded, it’s a non-linear, broadcast quality video editing card. All this means is that it records video directly to hard disk and can spit the images back out in whatever order you require at a rate of 25 frames a second (or 30 for NTSC work). This does not sound incredible, but if you think that the keywords here are non-linear and broadcast you’d be lucky to pay under fifty thousand pounds for such a system.

What you get for your five grand (plus VAT) is a card for the A4000, some software, a manual and an expander box to plug all your different sources into ranging from broadcast quality YUV to humble composite video.

You’ll also need a serious amount of processor and hard disk power to be able to handle the volume of information necessary to record the stuff to disk. A Warp Engine 68040 accelerator with a Seagate Barracuda (2 or 4 Gigs) drive hanging off it will do. For sound work, the Broadcaster will take control of the AD516 sound card completely. Don’t forget a lot of memory to run ADPro quickly on large images, oh and another drive dedicated to sound.

So, all in all, including the Amiga a complete setup would be around £11,000. That’s a lot of pocket money.

But! What this machine would give you the ability to do is master any type of video without touching an editing desk. And! As all editing is done from hard disk, signal degradation is literally impossible* as we’re working on digital stuff now, not analogue.

How the Broadcaster works is it records from video directly to hard disk, compressing as it goes along. It needs to use compression as a raw 24 bit image would take over 1MB, and it needs to grab twenty five of these a second. No hard drive is this fast (and the Amiga bus would struggle, too!) so compression has to be used. The Broadcaster uses the industry standard JPEG compression, writing multiple images to one file called a Jstream. Apparently, JStreams are used in satellite broadcasting to send images up to the satellite to keep down bandwidth and decompressed at the satellite, so high tech is also a word to describe this process.

These JStreams can then be subdivided, sequenced in any order, reversed, faded between and, most usefully, split into component frames or fields (half a frame). Once the JStreams have been “busted out” (it’s american for broken up) into individual images, something like Art Department can be set to work on making all sorts of nice effects such as ripple, perspective and all the usual ADPro things. Then, the JStreams are rebuilt and the video is put together.

I’ll freely admit that I know nothing about editing video, so it’s a testament to the system that I could knock up a sequence without having anything more than a five minute demonstration. It really is that easy. Point and click is the name of the game, along with dragging objects around.

Once you’ve got your JStreams to edit, you simply drag them from your source list into your edit decision list. Now, you can visually piece these together using the excellent time line which gives a visual representation of your edit. To start a clip seventeen frames from it’s recorded start, drag the start box; similarly with the end of a clip. You can also switch between clips easily using a predefined fade, such as crossfade or simple wipe. How these work is they need to be rendered – the system precalculates the resulting images and saves them as another jstream, but whilst the renderer is working you can still edit your video; an excellent example of what multitasking should be. If you work with audio too, your audio clips will stay linked to your video clips if you want them to be, making syncing very easy.

On the subject of output quality, you can alter the compression ratio of the incoming video stream. The higher the ratio, the worse the quality. The broadcaster software will happily allow you to record in around eight different compressions, ranging from draft (or “you can just about make out a face”) to master (over the top). “Pro” will do the job and also gives a compression of around 7:1. Supposedly independent pros have put the output quality as excellent, but this information was gleaned from a demo tape from the makers…

The Broadcaster Elite is one of a kind – a truly professional piece of kit which puts the Amiga in the spotlight again. The ease of use for such a system is astonishing. It’s simplicity itself!

It’s good to know that this stuff is being done on the Amiga. If however this has whetted your appetite and you would like more information, have a word with White Knight as they’re very nice people for the serious, professional side of Amiga things. They can be contacted on 01920 812321.

* – Yes I am aware that recompression of stuff will cause a potential quality issue…