====================================================================== ________ _________ ____ _|__ __ __|_______ _________ __\ _____ \\\\ \_ _/ //___// _____//______\ _____ \\ // \\\\ /. \\\\__ \/ __// \\ \\____. /// \\\\ /. \\ \\___\¯ /___///___\ /___\ \\_________//\\___\¯ /___// ¯ \/ ¯ ¯ \/. |¯ ¯|z!o ¯ ¯ \/ ¯ A M I G A | 040131 | U P D A T E |________| "SO THE WORLD MAY KNOW" ====================================================================== AMIGA and the Amiga logo are trademarks of Amiga, Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- C L O A N T O G O O D I E S F O R O S 4 . 0 M O R E F R O M C L O A N T O M E D U S A U S B F R O M I O S P I R I T C O M P U S H E R E D E A D - L A C K O F I N T E R E S T ? N E W V E R S I O N F O R L A M E F A N S N E W F O R M E D I A T O R F R O M E L B O X T H E R E ' S P I C S H O W V 1 . 3 0 . . . . . . A N D M I N I S H O W P I C T U R E V 1 . 5 J A B B E R W O C K Y 1 . 4 R E A D Y F O R U S E A M I G A A M P 2 . 1 1 F O R A H I S Y S T E M Editor's Thoughts and Introduction: Well, looks like we're off to a quiet start for the new year. Not a lot to report this time around. Some months are like that. There is interesting software news and a sense that lots of folks are working on other exciting things, and that there should be more goodies headed our way soon. We've picked up a strong feeling of many developers working on products for OS 4.0, which may be one reason there's not that much to report right at the moment. Besides those reported below, there was one other software release of interest to some Amigans, one where we didn't get a press release or much information from websites. The folks who took over the old Blitz BASIC and turned it into the freeware Amiblitz2 have a new release. If interested, you can check it out at this URL: http://no.aminet.net/pub/aminet/dev/basic/amiblitz_ful.lha So, there are things to keep your mind active as the year begins. Down the road, we're quite certain things will heat up considerably for Amiga users in 2004. Personally, I'm waiting for a chance to put this newsletter together for you under Amiga OS 4.0 on an AmigaOne. I have no doubt it'll happen with one of the 2004 issues. We hope you enjoy this (made on Classic Amiga ;-) issue. Brad Webb, Editor =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- C L O A N T O G O O D I E S F O R O S 4 . 0 6 January, 2004 Amiga Inc. and Cloanto are delighted to announce that Personal Paint 7.1 will be available on the upcoming AmigaOS 4.0 operating system. The Personal Paint series of 2D graphics and animations applications has been a mainstay of the application base for the Amiga platform ever since its introduction in 1992 and it is also a star attraction of the Cloanto Amiga Forever package. As Cloanto considers a new version of the product for AmigaOS 4.0, it has decided to show its commitment to the Amiga platform and community by making the source code of the current version available to Amiga Inc., allowing them to create a PowerPC native version for the upcoming AmigaOS 4.0 product. The created binaries will be owned by Cloanto but will be made available for free download from the Amiga and Cloanto web sites. Cloanto and Amiga are also in talks concerning a new version of Amiga Forever, as well as a special version of Amiga Forever for AmigaOS 4.0, which aims to provide chipset-level Classic Amiga compatibility integrated with the new generation Amiga operating system and hardware. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- M O R E F R O M C L O A N T O 13 January, 2004 Cloanto announced today that it entered into a licensing agreement with MPEG LA, LLC to use MPEG-4 Visual technology, and with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. and Microsoft Corporation to use HighMAT technology in its products. Cloanto plans to use MPEG-4 to produce high quality cross-platform encodings of a new series of Amiga Forever videos, and HighMAT for quick access and indexing of such video files on the next version of the Amiga Forever CD-ROM. The growing list of third-party items already licensed for use in Amiga Forever includes the portfolio of Amiga patents, copyrights and trademarks, technology such as GIF/LZW by Unisys Corporation (used in Cloanto's Personal Paint) and hundreds of contributions such as Amiga applications and other items of historical interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- M E D U S A U S B F R O M I O S P I R I T 10 JanUARY, 2004 "IOSPIRIT announces the immediate availability of Medusa USB, a driver package enabling the use of OnBoard- and PCI-USB-controllers under Amithlon and other supported PCI-solutions. Medusa USB contains full versions of the USB-stack Poseidon, the PCI-USB-driver ArakAttack and special full versions of the IOUSB DigiCam and IOUSB Scanner packages. Medusa USB enables users of Amithlon and other supported hardware, to completly avoid the purchase and installation of additional USB-hardware and instead make use of already existant OnBoard-controllers, thereby saving precious PCI-slots. About Poseidon The Poseidon USB Stack is a software solution that unleashes the possibilities of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and the devices with USB interface. It is intended to be a solution for all systems. Poseidon has a modular design that fits into the AmigaOS environment very neatly. It is no port of an existing system (like the Linux USB stack), but has been created with the unique features of AmigaOS in mind that make the operation system so efficient. Already in 2002 Poseidon received the Amiga Award as best Amiga software. About ArakAttack ArakAttack is a USB driver-package for Poseidon, with which USB shall be made possible on every PCI-capable AmigaOS. The supported standards currently include UHCI and OHCI. Nearly every PCI-USB-board or USB-OnBoard controller are compatible with one of these standards. A list of already tested devices can be found in the respective subpages of the Medusa USB product pages. About IOUSB Scanner and DigiCam Package As a bonus, the IOUSB packages, which for the first time allow the use of USB-scanners and -digicams, are contained in special SE-versions (equal to the full versions in functionality). However, since it's a free bonus and testing with all possible hardware combinations was impossible, these SE-versions come without support and functional guarantee. Compatibility ArakAttack usually should work with every OnBoard- and PCI-controller supported by PowerPCI (Amithlon) and OpenPCI. Nonetheless, it is possible that in certain constellations and especially with PCI-solutions not, not fully or not error-free supported by OpenPCI (Mediator, Prometheus, G-Rex), there can be compatibility problems. It is thus recommended to download the demo versions of Poseidon and ArakAttack and to test it for compatibility with the hardware in use prior to the purchase. Availability Medusa USB is immediately available as downloadversion for 34,99 EUR and as package version (with certificate) for 44,99 EUR. Dealer inquiries desired." http://www.iospirit.de/index.php?mode=view&obj_type=newsitem&obj_id= 30&sid=51713Ge2237980e891f8f1&ios_lang=en ---------------------------------------------------------------------- C O M P U S H E R E D E A D - L A C K O F I N T E R E S T ? 26 January, 2004 Compupshere is cancelled! There were too few of you who paid in advance. We had to make the decision today. Sorry, all of you who planned to join us. We will be back however! All money back of course! {Here's the original press release announcing the now cancelled show, which was being set up by Amiga Computer Group Gothenburg. We wish them better fortune next time, and appreciate the effort. Brad} 5 January, 2004 It was a beautiful day back in 1984 when the very first Amiga saw the light of day. Although back then, it wasn't called Amiga - it was called Lorraine. It was made by a little company called Hi-Toro, a company led by a man named Jay Miner. Thankfully, the machine was renamed to Amiga just before launch in 1985 by Commodore, who had bought the Amiga company, and the rest is history. The demoscene embraced the Amiga with open arms, they could do effects that had never ever been done before, graphics that were mindboggling and music that swept you away - only the imagination set barriers to what could be done. At the time, the coolest Mac could display 2 colors at the sametime, the bleeding edge PC could muster all of 16 colors on the screen and had sound that was like a moped horn. The Amiga, on the other hand, could display 4096 colors and play stereo sound. Not to mention multitasking OS and sporting a number of other neat features like "plug and play" (which actually worked). Talk about being ahead of its time! Unfortunately, some 10 years later, in 1994 Commodore went belly up. Somehow the Amiga survived, and things were still manufactured. Add-ons and accelerator boards helped keep the Amiga fairly up to date. In late 2001, work began to port the old Amiga OS 3 to the PowerPC processor. Now, we're really close to the culmination of the tremendous effort of porting old Motorola 680x0 assembly to C code and modernizing the whole operating system. It is amazing that people still are using AmigaOS today, and it proves that it has passed the test of time. AmigaOS is probably best described as tidy, clean and easily understood. At Compusphere 14, Amiga Computer Group Gothenburg has the pleasure of demonstrating the capabilities of Amiga OS4 running natively on the new AmigaOne for the first time ever in Sweden. We will demonstrate the OS,various preference programs, utilities such as mail programs, browsers,and much, much more. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- N E W V E R S I O N F O R L A M E F A N S 12 Jan 2004 .- LAME v3.95.1 LAME is an LGPL MP3 encoder. The Open source development model allowed to improve its quality and speed since 1999. It is now an highly evolved MP3 encoder, with quality and speed able to rival state of the art commercial encoders. http://amiga.sourceforge.net/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- N E W F O R M E D I A T O R F R O M E L B O X MediatorUP 3.9 30 January, 2004 The MediatorUP 3.9 update for Mediator PCI 3/4000T, Mediator PCI 4000D, Mediator PCI 4000Di, Mediator PCI 4000, Mediator PCI 3000D, Mediator PCI 1200 SX, Mediator PCI 1200LT4, Mediator PCI 1200, Mediator PCI 1200LT and Mediator PCI ZIV has been made available today. The MediatorUP 3.9 update includes new tools: · MedConfig ver. 1.0 · PowerOff MedConfig helps configuring all Mediator jumpers and all variables of Mediator drivers for the PCI cards. PowerOff switches off the computer equipped with Mediator PCI 1200SX and ATX PSU. The update includes new versions of: · pci.library · Voodoo.card · MediatorNET.device Changes: pci.library ver. 6.2 - many internal changes Voodoo.card ver. 2.20 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added MediatorNET.device ver. 2.8 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added Mediator MM CD UP 1.25 30 January, 2004 The MM CD 1.25 update for users of Mediator PCI 3/4000T, Mediator PCI 4000D, Mediator PCI 4000Di, Mediator PCI 4000, Mediator PCI 3000D, Mediator PCI 1200 SX, Mediator PCI 1200LT4, Mediator PCI 1200, Mediator PCI 1200LT and Mediator PCI ZIV busboards, who are registered owners of the Mediator Multimedia CD, has been released today. The Mediator Multimedia CD UP 1.25 includes a new configuration tool: · MedConfig ver. 1.0 MedConfig helps configuring all Mediator jumpers and all variables of Mediator drivers for the PCI cards. The update includes new versions of: · Voodoo.card · fm801.audio · sb128.audio · mixer.library · FastEthernet.device · tv.library · tv.vhi Changes: Voodoo.card ver. 4.23 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added - drawn line with pattern function accelerated - Voodoo4/5 SDRAM initialisation changed - protection against second driver start added - switching between PPC and 68k accesses to the Voodoo card accelerated fm801.audio ver. 4.5 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added sb128.audio ver. 4.11 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added mixer.library ver. 1.9 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added FastEthernet.device ver. 1.13 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added - compatibility with ShapeShifter added tv.library ver. 3.4 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added - problem (from ver.3.0) with YAM solved - S-Video output initialisation procedure changed tv.vhi ver. 1.3 - support for Mediator PCI 1200LT and LT4 added The current developer documentations for tv.library and mixer.library are enclosed with the MM CD 1.25. http://www.elbox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- T H E R E ' S P I C S H O W V 1 . 3 0 . . . 18-Jan-2004 This program is meant to be configured as picture viewer in directory tools like DirOpus or DosControl. It shows the doubleclicked picture in a borderless window on the specified custom screen. The remarkable about this program is that it reads the whole directory the picture is in and you can then choose other pictures out of this directory from a menu or by pressing the cursor keys. PicShow can also be used as a simple slide show program. It can display pictures either in sort order or randomly. When run on its own screen there are also some nice blend effects. New since Version 1.21: ======================= - choose whether the zoom factor should be kept for the next picture or not - option to let the ppc do the scaling, even with interpolation disabled - key definitions allow parameters - record and save key definitions - save pictures as jpeg (needs jpeg.library) - new option: if directory contains no pictures the file requester can be shown - cut & paste support - print support - pictures are preloaded. - picture can be saved as Workbench wallpaper. - directories can be read recursively. - lots of improvements I don't remember. 17-Jan-2004 improved interpolation algorithm (better + faster now) added option to use bicubic interpolation 18-Jan-2004 added option to automatically quit picshow after all pictures have been shown in a slide show http://home.t-online.de/home/thomas-rapp/amiga/beta3.html#picshow ---------------------------------------------------------------------- . . . A N D M I N I S H O W P I C T U R E V 1 . 5 {Posting found at http://amigaworld.net. Pay them a visit if you haven't recently, it's well worth it. Brad} 21 January, 2004 Version 1.5 of the picture viewer MiniShowPicture has been released. Read more for some details. MiniShowPicture is a great way to view pictures on your Amiga or Pegasos. You simply select a directory containing pictures, and the filenames will be displayed in a listview. You can click on the filenames or cursor up/down through them, and the pictures are viewed automatically and quickly. There are options to scale the pictures, etc. This is probably one of the best ways to selectively view a lot of pictures on AmigaOS that I've found so far. added: -you can see pictures in full screen changed: -preferences are saved in ENV -picture draw routine is faster Check out the screenshots on their site: MiniShowPicture website And download it here: MiniShowPicture archive http://www.ppa.ltd.pl/software/software-msp.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- J A B B E R W O C K Y 1 . 4 R E A D Y F O R U S E 17 January, 2004 Jabberwocky is a jabber client software for Amiga Computers. It is open source and released under the GNU GPL License. Jabber is an instant messaging system, similar to ICQ or AIM, yet far different. It is open source, absolutely free, simple, fast, extensible, modularized, and cross platform. Server modules (transports) allows cross messaging between other networks (AIM, ICQ, MSN, IRC, etc). You can also login on different (or even the same) computers at the same time by changing the resource info. 17 January, 2004 Jeff Gilpin made a new ARexx Script. This script will check the status of your Jabberwocky connection if you are using a Jabber server that sends connection checks. You wil find this script in the download section. 4 January, 2004 Short after the Release of 1.4 we got the hungarian catalog. We don't want to wait for the next version to include it so we distribute it as single archive in the donwload section till the next version is ready. 4 January, 2004 The Final Version of 1.4 is now available. Changes since V1.3: Support for 8 bit Latin-1 characters. Fixed transparency of icons in roster window (thanks to Jeff Gilpin). Fixed long standing enforcer hit when removing contacts (also thanks to Jeff Gilpin as a side effect of the transparency fix). Some support for displaying errors in the roster (but I haven't actually had any errors that trigger it, so it either doesn't work, or I haven't had any errors). Fixed enforcer hit on startup when autoconnect is on and there is no account information (introduced in 1.3). Roster displays the event icon until all unread messages have been read. Roster icons may be loaded from disk (thanks to Jeff Gilpin). Roster icon set by Martin 'Mason' Merz. Iconified icons by Jeff Gilpin. Fix for initial iconified icon (thanks to Jeff Gilpin). Deutsch Translation by Matthias Muench Nederlands Translation by Djordje Slocuk (s.slocuk1@chello.nl) Polski Translation by Kamil Niescioruk (kniescio@biotop.umcs.lublin.pl) and Mariusz Danilewicz (mandi@interia.pl) Portuguese translation by Raul Silva (luarsilva@mail.telepac.pt) Srpski Translation by Djordje Slocuk (s.slocuk1@chello.nl) Spanish Translation by Roger Barranco (cebollino@lycos.es) Online help activated (thanks to Jeff Gilpin) Only one subscription request per user will be displayed at any one time (thanks to Jeff Gilpin) http://jabberwocky.amigaworld.de/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A M I G A A M P 2 . 1 1 F O R A H I S Y S T E M 12 Jan latest version Short: MPEG audio player with GUI (68k/PPC) Uploader: Thomas Wenzel Author: Thomas Wenzel Type: mus/play Version: 2.11 Introduction ------------ You want an audio player that really makes use of your high spec Amiga? Here it is! AmigaAMP is a GUI based MPEG audio player using mpega.library on the 68k processor or the amp decoding engine in the PPC version. Additionally it can make use of sndfile.library to play AIFF, WAV and 8SVX files. Playback is done through the AHI audio system. If you've got problems not related to the user interface but with AHI, AsyncIO or mpega.library, PLEASE contact the corresponding author directly. I wouldn't be able to help you in this case. Important: AmigaAMP is optimized for visual appearance and accuracy, not for extremely low cpu load! What does that mean? Well...if there's a percussion hit, you see it on the analyzer immediately. Not half a second later, not half a second earlier. People who say "I don't care about this, I just want to see some movement in the display" should use another player :-) However, if anyone has a fast PowerPC and a fast graphics card which ain't got nothing to do but run the PPC version of Heretic-II, AmigaAMP is just right :) Requirements (not included in the archive!) ----- AmigaOS 3.0 or higher 68030-50MHz processor or better asyncio.library (Aminet:dev/c/AsyncIO.lha) AHI audio system (Aminet:mus/misc/ahiusr.lha) For most of the skins: - picture.datatype v43 - ilbm.datatype v44 - bmp.datatype v40 For the guigfx loading routines (optional) - guigfx.library v16 - render.library v30 For popup menus (optional) - popupmenu.library v9 For compressed (wsz) skins (optional) - xadmaster.library v12 For MP2/MP3 support on 68k systems (optional) - mpega.library (Aminet:util/libs/mpega_library.lha) For AIFF, WAV and 8SVX support (optional) - sndfile.library v1 http://www.amigaamp.de/Binaries/AmigaAMP211.lha =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 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 2004 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 ======================================================================