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Download win UAE and CC64.

There were some great two/multi players

Wizball
Bruce Lee
Defender of the Crown
Mario Bros [orignal version!]

Hope this helps!

The only thing worse would be to have the UAE issue a similar report. :-)

Oh no too late :O

Actually, UAE stands for Universal Amiga Emulator (or some slight variations depending on who you ask). Those Arabian folks really should quit hogging the namespace ;)

As a couple of Anonymous Cowards have said, the T-shirts have shipped. Maybe when I get home I'll actually try digging my Amiga out of the cupboard and see if it still works (the 1084 monitor does, it's being used with a Playstation). I might even get as far as making a ROM file and playing with UAE sometime, and/or AROS.
But buy a new Amiga? What for?

So there was no point in anyone trying, as to hack the screen drawing code is not viable, as so much depended on the syncing and timing in the C64 days.

So conceivably, that old DOS mode 'pokes and peeks the VGA buffer itself' type code could now hope to be ported to this sort of screen.

I'm struggling and struggling to think of one app that would not have been superceded by something superior. But should one exist, it could not without it's hardcoded minimum resolution.

Keep this going, I could run Lionheart under UAE on an NGage VII.

My money's on emulators like DOSBox; if the beloved Atari ST and Amiga can live on, then by gum, we're not going to lose Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, or Starflight, either.

Isn't it only a matter of time before my PC can achieve the (arguably ridiculous, but surely wonderful) ability to emulate its 486-based ancestors at speed?

I prefer WinUAE for all my Amiga needs. :-)

Works perfectly fine with lots of games and even demos functional to 100%. It's still in development (last update just two months ago) and contains numerous features to extend the OS with, although it still feels and functions probably more like the Amiga you came to know than this "AmigaOS 4.0". You can even choose which ROM to use (which aren't freely available, but sold by the old Amiga software company Cloanto) to make it anything from an Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3 to an Amiga 1200 with AGA and Kickstart 3.0!

Best of all, the emulator itself is free, fast (or emulates the speed an Amiga would have if you wish), and can be run like a regular program on your existing partition where floppy disks are just simple Megabyte-sized image files.

WinUAE is based on UAE which is open source software, with downloadable binaries for Linux.

An OS of interest might be AROS with a goal to be a full-blown AmigaOS 3.x compatible OS. However, I have a feeling you'll have less problems with the emulator.

http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/?

If you have the UAE Amiga Emulator, you can find hundreds of legitimately-released games at Back 2 The Roots, enough to keep you entertained for years!

The old price was DM , while the new price is EUR 2.50

Other recommendations for places to eat and simular stuff should be available on our local LUG-Site (http://www.karlsruhe.linux.de/) when the event arises.

Sven

> Im sitting here desperatly trying to get
> settlers (the first in the series) to run under
> dosemu

Not sure if this helps, but the Amiga version works fine under Win32 and Linux using UAE - and AFAIK it's almost identical to the PC version (looks a bit worse, sounds quite a bit better, plays exactly the same).

Cool game.

Presumably, the TCPA-specific parts of your new AMIBIOS8 will be intellectual property that your company will guard closely, and if not, working around it to get a LinuxBIOS/OpenBIOS working will surely be a violation of the DMCA. So how will this affect the LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS projects?

Check out UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator) or WinUAE and you should still be able to run most of these demos. Considering how complex the Amiga is, UAE gives amazing results.

I understand this is not the CPU but the GNU people are already working on open hardware ...

OpenBios

Story on /. about this too, but I am much to lazy to look it up

You forgot UAE .

Recent versions of this emulator can be used on daily basis. Genesi stated that they'll include a PPC version in the official release of MorphOS.

You can buy the x86 supported edition (with legal kickstart ROMs and a fully functional workbench) at Cloanto's. I used it once and it made a very good impression on me. :-)

do you mean something like OpenBIOS?

Well, good luck in trying to avoid Phoenix (the company) in the future. Trying to avoid a particular BIOS company is like trying to avoid books with a certain type of paper.

In the long run, closed-source BIOSes have to be replaced by open source ones anyway, for a variety of reasons, such stability, flexibility, usability, security, etc. In other words, all the same reasons that made it necessary to replace proprietary operating systems with open ones.

This trend is already beginning.

you can easily perform a hot-swap of the bios chip to flash it. I have done it at least 20 times for I-opener hackers around here. Boot with good bios , load the flash program. yank good bios chip. insert target chip CORRECTLY. flash it.

Or, just use /dev/bios and stop with the kludges. It's particularly useful on systems where the BIOS is soldered in (like my Dauphin Orasis V1 motherboards with TQFP flash chips).

IMHO the work they're doing would be better spent creating methods for Amiga users to continue using Amiga hardware and software on modern machines (Read: make me an amiga FDC pci card, port AmigaOS to native x86 and let me run my win32/ELF binaries in a modernised 32bit workbench GUI).

They may not be doing this work, but others are:

• The Catweasel PCI card will read Amiga disks on a PC.
• Amithlon is a very effective way of running AmigaOS on a PC without needing a host OS, and has the ability to run x86 Amiga software.
• And of course UAE for more conventional emulation.

Also I believe AmigaOS currently works fine on 32bit screens.. I can do it okay on WinUAE here.

The product to which you refer, Amiga Forever, is still available. It's a very useful investment if you still have a lot of Amiga software you want to run under UAE.

Oops, missed out the link. It's called OpenBIOS

There is this effort OpenBIOS which tries to do just that. It's an independent implementation of Open Firmware, which is the boot code (i.e. BIOS) used on Apple and Sun machines (amongst others). What's really cool and geeky about it is that it's a FORTH system. There's a small nucleus of words coded in native assembly language and the rest is all portable FORTH!

What, you have to pay for the UAE now?

OpenBIOS might work on your board.

OpenBIOS will be a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among it's features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without any native binary code. Thus it is OpenBIOS' goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, Alpha, x86-64 and IA-64. Additionally OpenBIOS targets the embedded systems sector, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal. Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Apple, IBM, CodeGen and others. More information on OpenBIOS is available on the About OpenBIOS page

Try WinUAE for Windows or UAE for Linux. And for demos Back2Roots is a good source.

I just read on the german linux site linux.de that former kernel hacker Dieter Von Ostrich has done the impossible - Backreferencing Deterministic regular expressions!

This is great news for perl -- tests with complex regex matching and replacing show a speedup up to 600%, and even simples regexes get a 5-10% boost. Larry Wall has indicated he may incorporate them into perl6, once support for excluded matching is added.

WTG!

As I recall, poweron to Linux in single user mode was less than 5 seconds. That speed was largely a factor of how fast the code could be read from the EEPROMs.

Please ask Dell, HPQ, IBM, Gateway, and your favorite mother board manufacturers to dump the crappy old BIOSes and migrate to something modern.

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thefl74@netscape.net, elbardo@libero.it, clem131@libero.it, t-i-e@bigfoot.com, gng74@libero.it, moz.party.20.gnes@spamgourmet.com, ema.cerqui@libero.it, ubertob@tin.it, mozparty.20.anagoor@spamgourmet.com, gianpaolo@preciso.net, ian@deepsky.com, marco@porciletto.org, planetx2100@hotmail.com, billabong@tiscalinet.it, piofree@libero.it, skunkyboy@tiscalinet.it, vincenzo@mondopiccolo.net, macmatteo@interfree.it, contreras@jce.it, hereandnow@libero.it, pza@students.cs.mu.oz.au, caedwa@students.cs.mu.oz.au, mgi@students.cs.mu.oz.au, bah@humbug.net, mfp@cs.mu.oz.au, nospamplease@indevelopment.org, peter@simplyit.screaming,net, pmj@users.sf.net, xanni@sericyb.com.au, agh@kalcium-is.com, felicityconsult@ozemail.com.au, lucas@lucaschan.com, andrewg@nopninjas.com, andym@abnormal.com, ts@meme.com.au, jasonpell@hotmail.com, syngin@gimp.org, mhammond@skippinet.com.au, szutshi@devraj.org, rmoonen@bigpond.net.au, fawad@fawad.net, ufs@softhome.net, kotrade@yahoo.com, ben@benscorp.com, stevesmith@columbus.rr.com, kkimmelosu@yahoo.com, neal.lindsay@peaofohio.com, pat@linuxcolumbus.com, chrisbaker@iname.com, hiroki2c@yahoo.com, seth@remor.com, jsohn@columbus.rr.com, ross@nanonet.net, mark@cushman.net, swinghammer.2@osu.edu, roberto.12@osu.edu, farhat@hotmail.com, pgunn@dachte.org, jwagner@gcfn.org, bp@osc.edu, joepletch@postmark.net, dsherman@iwaynet.net, glenn@uniqsys.com, bernstein.46@osu.edu, trent_reznor@nothing.com, erikniklas@bobanddoug.com, walters@gnu.org, timo@bolverk.net, annek25@aol.com, jlamb@leader.com, bart@osc.edu, jason@mcvetta.org

I'm not really sure of any documentation of emulation in itself but the following are free and fairly well documented:

Bochs, the IA-32 x86 emulator, intereting because it really is a software PC.Unix Amiga Emulator and Windows Unix Amiga Emulator are both interesting because they are running totally alien machines. Incedently if you can get hold of the required Kickstart ROMS (very easy on Google allegedly), there are huge number of Amiga Games now legally in the public domain. Being a skinflint and an ex-Amiga owner this has saved me having to buy a PC game for a few months now.

Anyway. Good luck.

In the VAST majority of cases (pun?), the motherboard/chipset is the culprit for instability!

Makes sense too. The choice of motherboard is more important than the choice of CPU (I'd still choose an Athlon XP over a Pentium 4 but that is not relevant here).

So many motherboard manufacturers release shoddy motherboards. Some do so knowingly! They don't take proper responsibility for poor hardware and just hope problems "disappear". Without getting too far off-topic/off-post, Asus are the most honest manufacturer, admitting problems with their Ali-based socket 7 motherboard and offering free repair (sans postage cost) and offering instructions online for more ambitious people.

I wish I had more choice over how my motherboard is designed. Openhardware/OpenBIOS anyone?

why the hell is everybody so intent on making some sort of BE/Linux hybrid?

Not to "save" the BeOS legacy/religion/apps obiously, but to save the linux kernel with all its drivers/features/fans/developers/sponsors/bouty from becoming a platform used for running nothing but posix webservers on headless pc hardware while it can be better (in design) then OSX for (even old) pc hardware.

This BefrankensteinAtOS is just a step toward what is my dreamworld:

- a cheap Nforce like mainbord with onboard graphics(nvidia, nuff said),audio(dolby 5.1 encoder),network(100mbit is 100mbit) and firewire (usb is now a "legacy connector" ;-))

- A dvb-c card

- two or four Clawhammer cpu`s

- Cooling that makes sense, not noise

- a linux-based kernel that loads directly from eeprom instead of an ugly old bios that doesn`t even understand todays harddrives. but still load ms-dos 3.00

- no more X, just every bit of experiance nvidia has with performace drivers

- A really fast gui, just try going back from Be`s Beos to windows

- a simple gui and cli shell that doesn`t eat more reasorces then it offers functinality but has a noice look and feel

- configurable translators

A filesystem that is fast, doen`t need complex journaling couse the oswrites metadata in a recoverable order and the hardware is fast enough to offer reasonable fast recovery anyway and has optional metadata (like the BeFS mime filetype)

I think this is really close to what others on slashdot want, note the lack of "evil" technology (except for perhaps nvidia).
After reading it back I found it also lacks girls and a social life but then again you can`t have it all ;-)
I guess for now I will have to do with the dano leak....

Burn your own

I never had an Amiga, but I'm fascinated by "old" computers (anything older than 3 years is ancient history, right? <grin>)

Anyway, for people looking for a slightly lower cost (but legal) solution, check out Amiga Forever, a commercial distribution of UAE that comes with *every* version of the Amiga Kickstart ROMs and Workbench disks! And this isn't a warez CD either... these are legitimately licensed from (insert current company that owns Amiga's IP). I believe it also includes some commercial software and software that will allow you to mount Amiga hard drives as network drives under Windows. Might be worth a look for former/current Amiga fans.

I sure had my share of good times on the ol' Amiga, with games like Pinball (Dream|Illusions|Fantasies). Why don't you go get the Unix Amiga Emulator and get hold of any of these games?

Because they saved a LOT of the videogames story. Project like
mame,
uae,
mess is simply amazing,
and thanks to any others that contributes.

You should try out /dev/bios. It's a very cool little kernel module. I recently used it to flash the bios on one of my linux boxes that didn't have a floppy installed. Just cat the file out to /dev/bios and reboot. It's a beautiful thing, though obviously you probably wouldn't want to have it installed all the time :-)

It's more of a tools problem than anything else; removing surface-mount devices without damaging anything requires either a desoldering device that can heat up all the pins simultaneously, or a very fine pointed soldering iron and lots of patience. The original author is at MIT, where there are lots of people around who do hardware. That helps.

From an intellectual property standpoint, Microsoft can't object if you replace their ROM contents with something else, like a boot loader for Linux. Something like OpenBIOS.

Damn borken extrans mode.

Apple uses Open BIOS</A>.

Do you have links handy for the UAE emulator (ideally source) and for details of the amiga hardware (ideally complete)?

For UAE, you can go here:
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/

UAE is released under the GPL, and full source is available.

Fot the amiga hardware details, I don't know any web sites with details. I have the Amiga Hardware Manual at home, which explains almost everything.
I googled out this reference:
amigarealm which seems to have the complete book online, on .txt format. The book looks more pretty :-)

Everything about the UAE is here:
http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/

you do of course mean "uae amiga emulator"?

Unfortunately it looks like OpenBIOS hasn't updated in 14 months, and it's hard to tell if they ever actually achieved anything ...

The LinuxBIOS project (http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/) looks more promising (originally covered in this slashdot article ...

Yet another reason to switch to OpenBIOS.

It's probably cheaper to find a used Amiga on ebay. Last time I checked, the going price for an A500 was around $20 + shipping. An Amiga is capable of reading & writing to 720K MS-DOS floppies - you can copy your amiga software over to 720k floppies and sneakernet it over to your PC. Another approach is to build yourself a null modem cable to connect your Amiga and PC via SLIP, PPP, or PLIP (if you want to use the parallel port). You will have to make the cable yourself - the Amiga uses a non-standard pinout on it's serial and parallel ports (Don't forget to hook up the ground!). I used a null-modem SLIP connection to copy floppy images over to my PC and burn them to a CD-ROM; it took a while but I only had to spend about $15 on the parts to make the cable.

For amiga emulation under Linux (and BSD, and BeOs, etc.), use UAE or WinUAE if you are running Windows. If you want legal Amiga ROM images (and a lot more), get Amiga Forever from Cloanto. Illegal (or at least questionable) ROM images can be found easily enough with a Google search. (The proof is left as an exersize for the student.)

The big one is cloning. Every time a really good new program idea comes out and someone tries to sell it, a thousand hackers jump on it and clone it, guaranteeing that the originator won't make a dime. Sometimes, the clone is even inferior, but at $0 it's impossible to compete against.

If you're interested, take a look at the work of the folks at the Open BIOS project. They're seem to be mainly talk at this point, but the wishlist is acting as a discussion group right now and there's an ongoing debate between lots of features and a minimalist approach.

I'll admit that I'm a graphical weenie (personally, I'd prefer a Mac-like experience from the get-go), but if more developers got involved, we could all have our choice.

i was about to recommand you using unix amiga emulator (uae for short) which is btw excellent for playing amiga games but i noticed this on their homepage:

4 x 3.5" floppy disk drives (DF0:, DF1:, DF2: and DF3:). It's not possible to read Amiga disks, so these are emulated with disk files."

there is a site here that has more info on techniques that might enable you to read those disks on pc.

There are good examples of this already. UAE is an Amiga hardware emulator, which runs AmigaOS and AROS (I'm hoping to try OpenBSD on it soon ;) It passes through serial and parallel port access.

Harder would be CDROMs and other such devices. Especially in Multi-User secure environments. You would have to open up permissions on a variety of devices to allow Plex86 to use the passthrough if it were running in an unpriviledged user's process.

Definately a good thing, if you can get it, though.