Portal:Amiga/Selected article
Selected article 1
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/1 The Guru Meditation is an error notice displayed by early versions of the Commodore Amiga computer when they crashed. It is analogous to the "Blue Screen of Death" in Microsoft Windows operating systems, or a kernel panic in Unix. It has later been used as a message for unrecoverable errors in software such as Varnish and VirtualBox.
When a Guru Meditation is displayed, the options are to reboot by pressing the left mouse button, or to invoke ROMWack by pressing the right mouse button. (ROMWack is a minimalist debugger built into the operating system which is accessible by connecting a 9600 bit/s terminal to the serial port.)
The alert itself appears as a black rectangular box located in the upper portion of the screen. Its border and text are red for a normal Guru Meditation, or green/yellow for a Recoverable Alert, another kind of Guru Meditation. The screen goes black, and the power and disk-activity LEDs may blink immediately before the alert appears. In AmigaOS 1.x, programmed in ROMs known as Kickstart 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, the errors are always red. In AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, recoverable alerts are yellow, except for some very early versions of 2.x where they were green. Dead-end alerts are red in all OS versions. (Full article...)
Selected article 2
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/2 Kickstart is the bootstrap firmware of the Amiga computers developed by Commodore.
Most Amiga models were shipped with the Kickstart firmware stored on ROM chips. Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a bootable volume, such as a floppy disk.
Commodore's AmigaOS was formed of both the Kickstart firmware and a software component provided on disk (with the software portion often termed as Workbench). For most AmigaOS updates the Kickstart version number was matched to the Workbench version number. Confusingly, Commodore also used internal revision numbers for Kickstart chips. For example, there were several Kickstart revisions designated as version 2.0. (Full article...)
Selected article 3
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/3 AmigaOS is the proprietary native operating system of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions of AmigaOS required the Motorola 68000 series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors. Later versions were developed by Haage & Partner (AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9) and then Hyperion Entertainment (AmigaOS 4.0-4.1). A PowerPC microprocessor is required for the most recent release, AmigaOS 4.
AmigaOS is a single-user operating system based on a preemptive multitasking kernel, called Exec. It includes an abstraction of the Amiga's hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS, a windowing system API called Intuition and a desktop file manager called Workbench.
The Amiga intellectual property is fragmented between Amiga Inc., Cloanto, and Hyperion Entertainment. The copyrights for works created up to 1993 are owned by Cloanto. In 2001 Amiga Inc. contracted AmigaOS 4 development to Hyperion Entertainment and in 2009 they granted Hyperion an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to develop and market AmigaOS 4 and subsequent versions. (Full article...)
Selected article 4
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/4 Workbench is the graphical file manager of AmigaOS developed by Commodore International for their Amiga line of computers. Workbench provides the user with a graphical interface to work with file systems and launch applications. It uses a workbench metaphor (in place of the more common desktop metaphor) for representing file system organisation.
The Amiga Workbench uses the metaphor of a workbench (i.e. a workbench of manual labor), rather than the now standard desktop metaphor, for representing file system organization. The desktop itself is called Workbench and uses the following representations: drawers (instead of folders) for directories, tools for executable programs, projects for data files; and a trash can as a folder intended to contain deleted files. These representations may be considered somewhat unusual by a modern user, but at the time there were no commonly accepted metaphors and Commodore chose to use different idioms from their competitors (Apple had already pursued legal action to prevent other software companies from offering graphical user interfaces similar to its own). Additionally, in 1985 computer graphics capabilities were more common in high end "workstations", and the Amiga was a multimedia/'creative' machine rather than an office machine, which may have provided further inspiration for the metaphor. (Full article...)
Selected article 5
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/5 Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, including digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer (most taking advantage of the platform's unique attributes and capabilities), and were not ported from other platforms.
During its lifetime, the number of applications exceeded 2,000, with over 10,000 utilities[1] (collected into the Aminet repository). However, it was perceived as a games machine from outside its community of experienced and professional users. More than 12,000 games were available. New applications for the three existing Amiga-like operating systems are generally ported from the open source (mainly from Linux) software base. (Full article...)
Selected article 6
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/6 Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' FTP sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web. According to Aminet, as of 1 April 2013, it has 80592 packages online.
In January, 1992 Swiss student Urban Müller took over a software archive that had been started by other members of a computer science students' club. Soon the archive became mirrored worldwide and in 1995 started being distributed on monthly CD-ROMs. Reports of daily additions to this software archive were posted automatically to Usenet (de.comp.sys.amiga.archive), or could be requested as an email newsletter. Most of the programs on Aminet were public domain or shareware, but software companies made updates and demo versions of their programs available as well. Now Aminet is complemented by platform specific sites archiving software for AmigaOS 4, AROS or MorphOS only. (Full article...)
Selected article 7
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/7 Intuition is the native windowing system and user interface (UI) engine of AmigaOS. It was developed almost entirely by RJ Mical. Intuition should not be confused with Workbench, the AmigaOS spatial file manager, which relies on Intuition for handling windows and input events.
Intuition is the internal widget and graphics system. It is not implemented primarily as an application-managed graphics library (as most systems, following Xerox' design, have done), but rather as a separate task that maintains the state of all the standard UI elements independently from the application. This makes it responsive because UI gadgets are live even when the application is busy. The Intuition task is driven by user events through the mouse, keyboard, and other input devices. It also arbitrates collisions of the mouse pointer and icons and control of "animated icons". Like most GUIs of the day, Amiga's Intuition followed Xerox's lead anteceding solutions, but pragmatically, a command line interface was also included and it extended the functionality of the platform. Later releases added more improvements, like support for high-color Workbench screens and 3D aspect. Replacement desktop file managers were also made available, such as Directory Opus Magellan, or Scalos interface. (Full article...)
Selected article 8
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/8 ARexx is an implementation of the REXX language for the Amiga, written in 1987 by William S. Hawes, with a number of Amiga-specific features beyond standard REXX facilities. Like most REXX implementations, ARexx is an interpreted language. Programs written for ARexx are called "scripts", or "macros"; several programs offer the ability to run ARexx scripts in their main interface as macros.
ARexx can easily communicate with third-party software that implements an "ARexx port". Any Amiga application or script can define a set of commands and functions for ARexx to address, thus making the capabilities of the software available to the scripts written in ARexx.
ARexx can direct commands and functions to several applications from the same script, thus offering the opportunity to mix and match functions from the different programs. For example, an ARexx script could extract data from a database, insert the data into a spreadsheet to perform calculations on it, then insert tables and charts based on the results into a word processor document. (Full article...)
Selected article 9
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/9 Hunk is the executable file format of tools and programs of the Amiga Operating System based on Motorola 68000 CPU and other processors of the same family. This kind of executable got its name from the fact that the software programmed on Amiga is divided in its internal structure into many pieces called hunks, in which every portion could contain either code or data.
The hunks in an Amiga executable file could exist in various types. There are 32-bit hunks, 16-bit hunks, and even some 8-bit hunks.
Types of hunks were standardized in AmigaOS, and well documented in The AmigaDOS Manual edited by Commodore to explain to programmers how to code on the Amiga, during the years in which Commodore manufactured Amiga computers. Their structure was officially codified and could be changed only by a Commodore committee, which then communicated the modifications to the developers for new releases of the Amiga operating system.
The structure of an Amiga hunk is very simple: There is a header at the beginning of the hunk indicating that that kind of "portion of code" is a known and valid Amiga hunk type, then follows an ID which indicates the length of the hunk itself, and at the bottom is the segment of the hunk which contains the real code or data. (Full article...)
Selected article 10
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/10 The XAD system is an open source client based unarchiving system for the Amiga. This means there is a master library called xadmaster.library which provides an interface between the client and the user application and there are clients handling the special archive formats. Three different types to handle file and disk archives and also disk image files (filesystem) are possible. They can be made by anyone. The master library itself includes some of these clients internally to make the work somewhat easier for the package maintainer and the user installing it.
The XAD subsystem was officially included in AmigaOS 3.9 along with a simple ReAction GUI based tool for unarchiving supported file archives. It is also part of MorphOS since version 2.0. The Mac OS X frontend is called The Unarchiver. (Full article...)
Selected article 11
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/11 A Bob (contraction of Blitter object) was a graphical element (GEL) first used by the Amiga computer. Bobs were hardware sprite-like objects, movable on the screen with the help of the blitter coprocessor.
The AmigaOS GEL system consisted of VSprites, Bobs, AnimComps (animation components) and AnimObs (animation objects), each extending the preceding with additional functionality. While VSprites were a virtualization of hardware sprites Bobs were drawn into a playfield by the blitter, saving and restoring the background of the GEL as required. The Bob with the highest video priority was the last one to be drawn, which made it appear to be in front of all other Bobs.
In contrast to hardware sprites Bobs were not limited in size and number. Bobs required more processing power than sprites, because they required at least one DMA memory copy operation to draw them on the screen. Sometimes three distinct memory copy operations were needed: one to save the screen area where the Bob would be drawn, one to actually draw the Bob, and one later to restore the screen background when the Bob moved away.
An AnimComp added animation to a Bob and an AnimOb grouped AnimComps together and assigned them velocity and acceleration. (Full article...)
Selected article 12
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/12 AmigaGuide is a hypertext document file format designed for the Amiga, files are stored in ASCII so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software.
Since Workbench 2.1 an Amiga Guide system for O.S. inline help files and reading manuals with hypertext formatting elements was launched in AmigaOS and based on a viewer called simply "AmigaGuide" and it has been included as standard feature on the Amiga system. Users with earlier versions of Workbench could view the files by downloading the program and library AmigaGuide 34 distributed with public domain collections of floppy disks (for example on Fred Fish collection) or it could be downloaded directly from Aminet Amiga Official Repository on the web. Starting from AmigaOS 3.0 the AmigaGuide tool was replaced with more the complete and flexible MultiView.
AmigaGuide is the default tool for viewing AmigaGuide files used with AmigaOS 2.1, and is also a basic text viewer for ASCII documents. It can handle multiple files thanks to cross-linking tables called XREF.
Multiview is basically a void container and a natural GUI for the various datatypes that open Multiview as a default tool when any media file (including AmigaGuide files) are invoked by mouse clicking and recognized by the existing correspondent datatype. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/13 AmigaDOS is the disk operating system of the AmigaOS, which includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface, and file redirection.
In AmigaOS 1.x, AmigaDOS was based on a TRIPOS port by MetaComCo, written in BCPL. BCPL does not use native pointers, so the more advanced functionality of the operating system was difficult to use and error-prone. The third-party AmigaDOS Resource Project (ARP, formerly the AmigaDOS Replacement Project), a project begun by Amiga developer Charlie Heath, replaced many of the BCPL utilities with smaller, more sophisticated equivalents written in C and assembler, and provided a wrapper library, arp.library. This eliminated the interfacing problems in applications by automatically performing conversions from native pointers (such as those used by C or assembler) to BCPL equivalents and vice versa for all AmigaDOS functions. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/14 AmigaBASIC was an interpreted BASIC programming language implementation for the Amiga, designed and written by Microsoft. AmigaBASIC shipped with AmigaOS versions 1.1 to 1.3. It succeeded MetaComCo's ABasiC, which was included in AmigaOS 1.0 and 1.1, and was superseded by ARexx, a REXX-style scripting language, from AmigaOS version 2.0 onwards.
AmigaBASIC provided not only the common BASIC language, but also attempted to provide an easy-to-use API for the Amiga's unique graphics and sound capabilities. OBJECT commands, for example, made it easy to create moving objects – sprites and bobs that could be drawn with an external drawing program, Object editor, that was supplied with AmigaBASIC. An unusual feature of the language is that it theoretically allowed the calling of handwritten assembly language subprograms; however, this feature never worked because of a bug that failed to align the assembly language instructions correctly on a word boundary, as required by the Amiga's native MC68000 processor. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/15 Exec is the multitasking kernel of AmigaOS. It enabled pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 256 KB of memory (as supplied with the first Amiga 1000s). Exec provided functionality for multitasking, memory allocation, interrupt handling and handling of dynamic shared libraries.
It acts as a scheduler for tasks running on the system, providing pre-emptive multitasking with prioritized round-robin scheduling. Exec also provides access to other libraries and high-level inter-process communication via message passing. Other comparable microkernels have had performance problems because of the need to copy messages between address spaces. Since the Amiga has only one address space, Exec message passing is quite efficient. The only fixed memory address in the Amiga software (address 4) is a pointer to exec.library, which can then be used to access other libraries. Exec was designed and implemented by Carl Sassenrath. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/16 WarpOS was a multi-tasking kernel for the PowerPC architecture developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It ran on PowerUP accelerator boards developed by phase5 which contained both a Motorola 68000 family CPU and a PowerPC CPU with shared address space. WarpOS ran alongside the 68k-based AmigaOS, which could use the PowerPC as a coprocessor. Despite its name, it is not an operating system (OS), but a kernel; it supplies a limited set of functions similar to those in AmigaOS for using the PowerPC. When released its original name was WarpUP, but was changed to reflect its greater feature set, and possibly to avoid comparison with its competitor, PowerUP.
It was developed by Sam Jordan using 680x0 and PowerPC assembler.[8] It was distributed free of charge.
In 1997, Phase5, an Amiga hardware manufacturer, launched their range of PowerPC (PPC) accelerators for the Amiga. Because AmigaOS was not yet PowerPC native, as a stopgap measure the PowerUP boards were dual-processor boards, incorporating the PPC and a 68K processor (68LC040, 68040 at 25 MHz or 68060 at 50 MHz). They carried the PowerUP kernel on board in an EPROM, a similar kernel designed to allow AmigaOS applications to use both PPC and 68k applications through an API library called ppc.library. AmigaOS still required a 68K processor, while the PPC was in effect used as an extremely fast coprocessor that carried out specific instructions. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/17 The Amiga 500, also known as the A500 (or its code name "Rock Lobster"), is the first "low-end" Commodore Amiga 16/32-bit multimedia home/personal computer. It was announced at the winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1987 - at the same time as the high-end Amiga 2000 - and competed directly against the Atari 520ST. Before Amiga 500 was shipped, Commodore suggested that the list price of the Amiga 500 was US$595.95 without a monitor. At delivery in October 1987, Commodore announced that the Amiga 500 would carry a US$699/£499 list price. In Europe, the Amiga 500 was released in May 1987. In the Netherlands, the A500 was available from April 1987 for a list price of HFL1499.
The original Amiga 500 proved to be Commodore’s best-selling Amiga model, enjoying particular success in Europe. Although popular with hobbyists, arguably its most widespread use was as a gaming machine, where its advanced graphics and sound were of significant benefit. Amiga 500 eventually sold 6 million units worldwide. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/18 The Commodore Amiga 1000, also known as the A1000 and originally simply as the Amiga, is the first personal computer release by Commodore International in the Amiga line. It combined the powerful 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU with one of the most advanced graphics and sound systems in its class, and ran a preemptive multitasking operating system that fit into 512 KB of memory.
The A1000 has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from later Amiga models: It is the only model to feature the short-lived Amiga "check mark" logo on its case, the case is elevated slightly to give a storage area for the keyboard when not in use (a "keyboard garage"), and the inside of the case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers (similar to the Macintosh); including Jay Miner and the paw print of his dog Mitchy. The A1000's case was designed by Howard Stolz. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/19 The Commodore A1060 Sidecar is an expansion hardware device developed by Commodore and released in 1986 for the Amiga 1000 computer. It features a complete PC XT-clone system mounted in an expansion case which connected to the expansion bus on the right side of the Amiga 1000 computer, sitting beside it similar to a motorcycle's sidecar, hence the name.
The PC side of the Sidecar was built around an Intel 8088 processor. All I/O procedures from the PC side are performed by the Amiga. Software was included to allow data to be exchanged easily between the PC and the Amiga side of the system. The Sidecar was available with an internal hard disk which was accessible from both the MS-DOS and AmigaOS environments. This was the first hard drive produced by Commodore for the Amiga. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/20 AROS Research Operating System (AROS – pronounced "AR-OS") is a free and open source multi media centric implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 APIs. Designed to be portable and flexible, ports are currently available for x86-based and PowerPC-based PCs in native and hosted flavors, with other architectures in development. AROS, in a show of full circle, was also ported to the m68k-based Amiga 1200, and the Raspberry Pi series.
AROS originally stood for Amiga Research Operating System, but to avoid any trademark issues with the Amiga name, it was changed to the recursive acronym AROS Research Operating System. The mascot of AROS is Kitty created by Eric Schwartz and officially adopted by the AROS Team in December 2, 2002. Used in the core AROS About and installer tools, it was also adopted by several AROS community sites and early distributions. Other AROS identifiable symbols and logos are used around the cat shape, such as IcAROS logo which is stylised cat Eye, or AFA (Aros for Amiga). (Full article...)
Selected article 21
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/21 CrossDOS is a file system handler for accessing FAT formatted media on Amiga computers. It was bundled with AmigaOS 2.1 and later. Its function was to allow working with disks formatted for PCs and Atari STs (and others). In the 1990s it became a commonly used method of file exchange between Amiga systems and other platforms.
CrossDOS supported both double density (720 KB) and high density (1.44 MB) floppy disks on compatible disk drives. As with AmigaDOS disk handling, it allowed automatic disk-change detection for FAT formatted floppy disks. The file system was also used with hard disks and other media for which CrossDOS provided hard disk configuration software. However, the versions of CrossDOS bundled with AmigaOS did not support long filenames, an extension to FAT that was introduced with Microsoft's Windows 95. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/22 The Smart File System (SFS) is a journaling filesystem used on Amiga computers and AmigaOS-derived operating systems (though some support also exists for IBM PC compatibles). It is designed for performance, scalability and integrity, offering improvements over standard Amiga filesystems as well as some special or unique features.
SFS uses block sizes ranging from 512 (29) to 32768 (215) bytes with a maximum partition size of 128 GB. Its good performance, better than FFS, and lack of need for long "validation" in case of an error, is achieved by grouping multiple directory entries into a single block and by grouping meta data blocks together into clusters. A bitmap is used to keep track of free space, and file data is kept track of using extents arranged into a B+ tree structure. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/23 Amiga E, or very often simply E, is a programming language created by Wouter van Oortmerssen on the Amiga. He has since moved on to develop the SHEEP programming language for the new AmigaDE platform and the CryScript language (also known as DOG) used during the development of the video game Far Cry.
Amiga E is a combination of many features from a number of languages, but follows the original C programming language most closely in terms of basic concepts. Amiga E's main benefits are fast compilation (allowing it to be used in place of a scripting language), very readable source code, flexible type system, powerful module system, exception handling (not C++ variant) and Object oriented programming.
A "hello world" program in Amiga E looks like:
PROC main()
WriteF('Hello, World!')
ENDPROC
Amiga E was used to create the core of the popular Amiga graphics software Photogenics. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/24 NewIcons is a third-party extension to the icon handling system for AmigaOS 2 and newer. NewIcons was first invented and developed by the Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. Subsequent development was done by Eric Sauvageau. The need for NewIcons arose from the poor overall quality of icons in AmigaOS versions prior to 3.0.
While the AmigaOS GUI had been revolutionary when it was first launched in the early 1980s, other operating systems such as Mac OS and Microsoft Windows quickly caught on and started to become more professional-looking. Standard AmigaOS Workbench icons were plain and uninteresting: limited to four colours, having no standard size, and viewed from a straight-on perspective that left them looking two-dimensional. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/25 ReAction GUI it is the name of the widget toolkit engine that is used in AmigaOS 3.5-4.1. It is an evolution of ClassACT, which is an object oriented system of classes that enhanced the aspect of the Workbench 2.0 GUI of AmigaOS. The native Amiga windowing system is called Intuition, which manages the rendering of screens, windows and basic widgets. However, until AmigaOS 2.0 there was no standardized look and feel, and often application developers had to write their own non-standard widgets (both buttons and menus), with Intuition providing little support.
Intuition was later enhanced with gadtools.library (AmigaOS 2.0 and later), which provides a set of standard widgets. AmigaOS 2.0 also introduced a standard dialog system called ASL (Amiga Standard requester Library) and the Amiga User Interface Style Guide, which defined how applications should be laid out for consistency. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/26 In computing, a rigid disk block (RDB) is the block on a hard disk where the Amiga series of computers store the disk's partition and filesystem information. The PC equivalent of the Amiga's RDB is the master boot record (MBR).
Unlike its PC equivalent, the RDB doesn't directly contain metadata for each partition. Instead it points to a linked list of partition blocks, which contain the actual partition data. The partition data includes the start, length, filesystem, boot priority, buffer memory type and "flavor", though the latter was never used. Because there is no limitation in partition block count, there is no need to distinguish primary and extended types and all partitions are equal in stature and architecture.
Additionally, it may point to additional filesystem drivers, allowing the Amiga to boot from filesystems not directly supported by the ROM, such as PFS or SFS. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/27 Ultimate Soundtracker, or Soundtracker for short, is a music tracker program for the Commodore Amiga. It is the creation of Karsten Obarski, a German software developer and composer at a game development company EAS.
Soundtracker started as a tool for game sound development for the Amiga. The program allowed for four-channel hardware mixing on all Amiga computers, but unlike subsequent versions, limited the number of samples/instruments in a song to 15. It allocated the four channels in strict fashion: melody (lead), accompaniment, bass, and percussion. It could export the tracks as a sequence of assembly instructions. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/28 WHDLoad is a software package for the Amiga platform to make installation of software to a hard disk easier, for such things as demos or games. Allowing for better compatibility for Amiga software, which can sometimes have hardware incompatibilities making them hard to use in emulated environments due to the widely varying hardware specifications of the Amiga product line across its history. WHDLoad basically circumvents the operating system in the Amiga for greater compatibility and preserves the original program environment.
WHDLoad makes it possible to autostart an installed floppy disk image by clicking an icon.
Two special parts are required, each one especially written for the client program: To install media, it must be read from the original disk and written to an image file on the hard drive by the "Imager". Then the installed program can be run from a virtual disk drive with the "Slave" interface. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/29 YAM (short for Yet Another Mailer) is a MIME-compliant e-mail client written for AmigaOS based computers. It supports multi-POP3, APOP, SMTP, TLSv1/SSLv3, multiple users, PGP, unlimited hierarchical folders, filters, a configurable GUI (based on MUI) and an ARexx interface and many other features which are common for Mail User Agents (MUA) today.
The first version of YAM, developed by Marcel Beck, was released to the Amiga public in 1995. While it was usable, it was relatively basic in terms of functionality. The 2.x release featured a major redesign of the user interface and added a lot of new features. It was (and still is) the most commonly used email client on Amiga computers, thanks in part to the fact that it was always a freeware application. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/30 Grapevine was a disk magazine for the Commodore Amiga published by the demo scene group LSD. The first eight issues each came on a single floppy disk, but as the magazine became more popular and more articles were submitted by its readers, it required two to three disks per issue after that point. The editor of Grapevine was known as Parasite, later PaZZa/LSD. The magazine was originally coded by Monty Python, and then re-coded with a mouse driven interface later in the series by Shagratt.
Grapevine existed at a time when Internet use was not widespread in its native UK or abroad, and hence editions of the magazine were hotly traded amongst the demo scene. LSD sent out hundreds of floppy disk copies on each release, and most PD libraries at the time were keen to include the latest issues as soon as they were released. As a result of this, 17Bit PD library cut a deal with PaZZa to ensure distribution at a fair price, they were "paid" a box of 50 floppy disks per issue for this, which were used by LSD for file distribution (the days before modems for many people). (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/31 DragonFly BSD is a free and open source Unix-like operating system created as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began work on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003.
Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the methods and techniques being adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor system performance and cause maintenance difficulties. He sought to correct these suspected problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to ongoing conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the FreeBSD codebase was eventually revoked. Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together contributing bug fixes, driver updates, and other system improvements to each other. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/32 The Amiga CD32, styled "CD32" and code-named "Spellbound", is the first 32-bit home video game console released in western Europe, Australia, Canada and Brazil. It was first announced at the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom on July 16, 1993, and was released in September of the same year. The CD32 uses CD-ROM media, and was developed by Commodore, creator of the Commodore 64 computer. It was based on Commodore's Advanced Graphics Architecture chipset, and is of similar specification to the Amiga 1200 computer.
Using third party devices, it is possible to upgrade the CD32 with keyboard, floppy drive, hard drive, RAM and mouse, turning it into the equivalent of an Amiga 1200 personal computer. A hardware MPEG decompression module for playing Video CD was released. In the Christmas period following its launch, the CD32 accounted for 38% of all CD-ROM drive sales in the UK, exceeding sales of the Mega-CD; however it was soon overshadowed by CD-ROM based games consoles from other companies, and was discontinued as Commodore went into bankruptcy. (Full article...)
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Portal:Amiga/Selected article/33 Hyperion Entertainment CVBA (formerly Hyperion Entertainment VOF) is a Belgian software company which in its early years focused in porting Windows games to Amiga OS, Linux and Mac OS. In 2001, they accepted a contract by Amiga Incorporated to develop AmigaOS 4 and mainly discontinued their porting business to pursue this development. AmigaOS 4 runs only on the AmigaOne systems, Commodore Amiga systems with a Phase5 PowerUP accelerator board, Pegasos II systems and Sam440 systems.
Hyperion Entertainment was founded in February 1999, in their own words, "After Belgian lawyer Benjamin Hermans wondered why no one had ever tried to license PC games to do Amiga ports." Hyperion does not maintain programmer staff but sub-contracts software programmers for projects as necessary. Hans-Joerg Frieden, who had previously worked on ports of the games Descent and Abuse as well as the Warp3D library, was contracted to be Hyperion's main developer. For the next few years, Hyperion would port several game titles to the Amiga and later Linux and the Macintosh, starting with Heretic II. (Full article...)
Selected article 34
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/34 AmigaOS 4, (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4), is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partner. "The Final Update" (for OS version 4.0) was released on 24 December 2006 (originally released in April 2004) after five years of development by the Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment under license from Amiga, Inc. for AmigaOne registered users. During the five years of development, purchasers of AmigaOne machines could download pre-release versions of AmigaOS 4.0 from Hyperion's repository as long as these were made available.
On 20 December 2006, Amiga, Inc abruptly terminated the contract with Hyperion Entertainment to produce or sell AmigaOS 4. Nevertheless, AmigaOS 4.0 was released commercially for Amigas with PowerUP accelerator cards in November 2007 (having been available only to developers and beta-testers until then). The Italian computer company ACube Systems has announced Sam440ep and Sam440ep-flex motherboards, which are AmigaOS 4 compatible. Also, a third party bootloader, known as the "Moana", was released by Acube on torrent sites; it allows installation of the Sam440ep version of OS4 to Mac Mini G4's. However this is both unofficial and unsupported as of today, and very incomplete, especially regarding drivers. During the judicial procedure (between Hyperion and Amiga, Inc), OS4 was still being developed and distributed. (Full article...)
Selected article 35
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/35 Hold-And-Modify, usually abbreviated as HAM, is a display mode of the Commodore Amiga computer. It uses a highly unusual technique to express the color of pixels, allowing many more colors to appear on screen than would otherwise be possible. HAM mode was commonly used to display digitized photographs or video frames, bitmap art and occasionally animation. At the time of the Amiga's launch in 1985, this near-photorealistic display was unprecedented for a home computer and it was widely used to demonstrate the Amiga's graphical capability. However, HAM has significant technical limitations which prevent it from being used as a general purpose display mode.
The original Amiga chipset uses a planar display with a 12-bit RGB color space that produces 4096 possible colors. (Full article...)
Selected article 36
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/36 The Original Chip Set (OCS) was a chipset used in the earliest Commodore Amiga computers and defined the Amiga's graphics and sound capabilities. It was succeeded by the slightly improved Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and greatly improved Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). The original chipset appeared in Amiga models built between 1985 and 1990: the Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000, Amiga CDTV, and Amiga 500.
The chipset which gave the Amiga its unique graphics features consists of three main "custom" chips; Agnus, Denise, and Paula. Both the original chipset and the enhanced chipset were manufactured using NMOS logic technology by Commodore's chip manufacturing subsidiary, MOS Technology. According to Jay Miner, the OCS chipset was fabricated in 5 µm manufacturing process while AGA Lisa was implemented in 1.5 µm process. All three custom chips were originally packaged in 48-pin DIPs; later versions of Agnus, known as Fat Agnus, were packaged in an 84-pin PLCC. (Full article...)
Selected article 37
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/37 CyberGraphX (pronounced "cybergraphics"), is the standard ReTargetable Graphics API available for the Amiga and compatible systems. It was developed by Thomas Sontowski and Frank Mariak and later adopted by Phase5 for use with their graphics cards. Many other graphics card manufacturers who offered hardware for Amiga and compatible systems used it as well.
AmigaOS version is no longer actively maintained and CyberGraphX V4 was the last release for that platform so far. AROS implements CyberGraphX V4 compatible API. Alternative RTG APIs are Picasso 96 and Enhanced Graphics System, the first is used in AmigaOS4 and implements the CyberGraphX V4 API with some V5 extensions. (Full article...)
Selected article 38
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/38 The Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) is the second generation of the Amiga computer's chipset, offering minor improvements over the original chipset (OCS) design. ECS was introduced in 1990 with the launch of the Amiga 3000. Amigas produced from 1990 onwards featured a mix of OCS and ECS chips, such as later versions of the Amiga 500 and the Commodore CDTV. Other ECS models were the Amiga 500+ in 1991 and lastly the Amiga 600 in 1992.
Notable improvements were the Super Agnus and the Hires Denise chips. The sound and floppy controller chip, Paula, remained unchanged from the OCS design. Super Agnus supports 2 MB of CHIP RAM, whereas the original Agnus/Fat Agnus and subsequent Fatter Agnus can address 512 KB and 1 MB, respectively. The ECS Denise chip offers Productivity (640×480 non-interlaced) and SuperHires (1280×200 or 1280×256) display modes (also available in interlaced mode), which are however limited to only 4 on-screen colors. Essentially, a 35 ns pixel mode was added plus the ability to run arbitrary horizontal and vertical scan rates. This made other display modes possible, but only the aforementioned modes were supported originally out of the box. For example, the Linux Amiga framebuffer device driver allows the use of several other display modes. Other improvements were the ability of the blitter to copy regions larger than 1024×1024 pixels in one operation and the ability to display sprites in border regions (outside of any display window where bitplanes are shown). ECS also allows software switching between NTSC and PAL video modes. (Full article...)
Selected article 39
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/39 Hombre is a RISC chipset for the Amiga designed by Commodore, intended as the basis of its next generation game machine called CD64. Commodore also planned to build a 3D accelerator PCI card based on Hombre. Hombre was canceled along with the bankruptcy of Commodore International.
In 1993, Commodore International ceased the development of the AAA chipset and began to design a new 64-bit 3D graphics chipset based on Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC architecture to serve as the new basis of the Amiga personal computer series. It was codenamed Hombre (pronounced "ómbre" which means man in Spanish) and was developed in conjunction with over an estimated eighteen-month period. (Full article...)
Selected article 40
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/40 Commodore International (or Commodore International Limited) was a North American home computer and electronics manufacturer. Commodore International (CI) along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines (CBM) participated in the development of the home–personal computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The company developed and marketed one of the world's best-selling desktop computers, the Commodore 64 (1982) and released its Amiga computer line in 1985.
The company that would become Commodore Business Machines, Inc. was founded in 1954 in Toronto as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. For a few years he had been living in New York, driving a taxicab and running a small business repairing typewriters, when he managed to sign a deal with a Czechoslovakian company to manufacture their designs in Canada. He moved to Toronto to start production. By the late 1950s a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies to cease business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines. (Full article...)
Selected article 41
Portal:Amiga/Selected article/41 Minimig (short for Mini Amiga) is an open source re-implementation of an Amiga 500 using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
Minimig started in secrecy around January 2005 as a proof of concept by Dutch electrical engineer Dennis van Weeren. He intended Minimig as the answer to the ongoing discussions within the Amiga community on implementing the Amiga custom chipset using an FPGA. The project's source code and schematics were released under version 3 of the GNU General Public Licence on 25 July 2007.
The original Minimig prototype is based on the Xilinx Spartan-3 Starter Kit, the Original Amiga Chipset is synthesized in the FPGA. Two printed circuit boards are attached via the FPGA kit expansion ports. The first one holds a 3.3V Motorola 68000 type CPU. The second has a MultiMediaCard slot with a small PIC microcontroller acting as a disc controller that supports the FAT16 filesystem and does on-the-fly Amiga disk file (ADF) decoding.
The prototype was shown at an Amiga meet and loaded most Amiga programs although bugs did exist. Van Weeren's personal preferences led to the use of verilog instead of VHDL on a PC using Xilinx Webpack software for code development. (Full article...)