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`20.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 20 - Robert Smith It's getting close to Christmas and we open the 20th door with an anecdote from Robert Smith. The developer is probably best known for his project, initially called "Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer": this uses a microcontroller - in this case an Arduino board - to read and write Amiga floppy disks with a connected, commercially available PC floppy disk drive. In mid-2021, he then renamed it "DrawBridge" (Disk Reader and Writer Bridge). Since the beginning of 2022, he has also made a plug-in available with the "FloppyBridge", whereby the emulators WinUAE and Amiberry can work with real floppy disks (video about how it works). Apart from that, he deals with a wide variety of topics and tries to explain facts and backgrounds to users through videos. For example: How Data is Encoded and Stored on Floppy Disks How Floppy Disk Copy Protection Worked How easy is it to make your own joystick using a 3D printer? Do-it-yourself: Adapter for connecting DB9 joysticks How to program Wordle in AMOS on the AMIGA or from yesterday Programming "Santa's Present Drop 2" in AMOS Thank you Robert for your informative videos and your various projects. Continued success and joy. His anecdote: "Whilst I was at college (high school) I started to develop my interest in computers, and having received an Amiga 500+ for Christmas. I quickly became interested in programming rather than just playing games. As if “computers” wasn’t enough of a reason to be picked on at school for being a geek or nerd, programming was like the ultimate, but I was not discouraged. A few years later I went to university, a difficult time, especially if you’re shy, as you’re surrounded by lots of new people. It was also during the time when most of us were slowly transitioning away from the Amiga after commodore went bankrupt and was (it felt like) constantly being sold to yet another company with empty promises. On the one hand I had all this great Amiga knowledge, but on a dead platform. It doesn’t take long to meet other like-minded people with similar skills, and you soon realise they’re just as useful on other machines as they were on the Amiga. We were all geeks and nerds though, and you could sometimes feel a bit of an outcast in some situations. One day I had a revelation whilst sharing a drink at the student union bar. Sitting there, listening to the table next to us, was a group of guys discussing the football match that had occurred the night before. The level of enthusiasm, passion, anger, competitiveness and raging going on regarding the players, the referee, and the various different teams they supported, along with the intimate knowledge they seemed to have about the skills of each individual player made me smile. I sat there thinking, we’re all geeks in our own way. Merry Christmas." (dr) [News message: 20. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`19.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 19 - Oliver Roberts We start the Christmas week with the 19th door and Oliver Roberts. Without Oliver Roberts we would not have the best and fastest browser for AmigaOS 3 and no current AmiSSL. But in the 90s Oliver was still in Formula One fever (and maybe still is?): In 1994 he started programming and publishing a first beta version 0.2 of F1GP-Ed, an editor for the Amiga version of the games Formula One Grand Prix or World Circuit by MicroProse Software. The homepage is still online and the editor was developed up to version V3.44 in 1999 (History). 1999 was the start for the development of his Warp Datatypes with WarpJPEG: he is still developing the datatypes distributed as shareware. The image formats JFIF/JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Windows BMP, PCX, PSD (Adobe Photoshop®) and WebP are supported; further formats are planned. The main feature of the datatypes, especially on PowerPC systems, is their decoding speed (hence the name Warp) and the AltiVec acceleration. The very efficient memory usage in turn benefits 68K systems. The main project, however, is undoubtedly the browser IBrowse, which is available for both AmigaOS 3 and MorphOS, as well as AmigaOS 4, and can be tested in each case as a demo version. Just a few days ago Roberts and his team released the current version 2.5.8. The browser has a long history: Originally developed by Stefan Burström for Omnipresence Intl. from 1995 and distributed by HiSoft, from 2003 IOSPIRIT (until 2007) took over the distribution and the IBrowse developer team around Burström and Roberts took over the development. During this time, at the end of 2006, IBrowse 2.4 was released. In 2008, development was temporarily at a standstill due to Burström's retirement. Due to various reasons, the release of version 2.5 could only happen in 2019. From now on, not only were updates released regularly again, Roberts also took over the development of the encryption software AmiSSL, a port of OpenSSL for AmigaOS, from Jens Maus in 2020. This gives applications SSL/TLS/HTTPS support. For your perseverance and long-lasting support of Amiga systems, a heartfelt thank you, Oliver. Your story: It's never too late to upgrade If you're anything like me, I tend to upgrade electronics only when absolutely required, especially if your needs are being fulfilled by what you already have. This is somewhat true for my Amiga systems too, but it is great to know that there are still a variety of options out there, allowing us to upgrade and fix our Amigas. What follows is a summary of my Amiga upgrades over the past 15 years or so. My A1200, purchased in 1995, has gone through many upgrades over the years, but not really much since I made a custom tower case for it and added a BlizzardPPC 68060 603e/240MHz/SCSI card + BVisionPPC. This was quite some years ago considering I bought the BlizzardPPC as soon as stock was available! This all worked great and I had maxed out the upgrade options at the time. Then, in 2015, the A1200 motherboard went faulty - I had managed to deduce that an area of the 2Mb chip ram had gone bad. To cut a long story short, I managed to find brand new replacement chips and eventually my motherboard was repaired in 2019. Unfortunately, a few days later, the main SCSI hard drive died and would not power up. Luckily, I managed to find the exact same drive model on eBay, so ordered a reconditioned one on the off-chance that swapping the logic boards over would revive my drive - it did and all data was intact! (I did actually have an slightly out of date backup anyway). This is where my latest A1200 upgrade journey began. Not knowing why the logic board on the hard drive had died, as a precaution I replaced the tower's aging AT PSU with a new ATX one (same model as I put in my AmigaOne XE - more on that later). This involved buying various power adapters, including Ian Steadman's excellent ATX to Amiga power adapter board. Next up, I didn't want to rely on the hard drive anymore and new SCSI hard drives were by then impossible to buy, so I switched to using a SCSI2SD v6 along with a 64Gb SD card. At the same time I retired my IDE HDD, replacing it with an IDE to CompactFlash adapter. This has hopefully future proofed my A1200 for quite a few more years. Why bother maintaining a 25 year old system? It holds a lot of history for me, where I created most of my Amiga software, including WarpJPEG, later leading to all the Warp Datatypes, plus IBrowse 2.4 development. It also happens to be the very first A1200 in the world to successfully boot AmigaOS 4.0, after I managed to fix the 603e specific TLB exception handlers in the kernel for Hyperion. I still find my A1200 invaluable for testing and development, despite not being my main development system any longer... Since 2005, my main development machine has been an early AmigaOne XE G4. Again, until recently I have not needed to upgrade this much, except when I first obtained it in 2005. I kitted the case out with two 120mm cooling fans running at low speed via a bay based controller, replaced the stock wobbly CPU cooler with something much better (Zalman VF900), added two temperature sensors, bought a larger new IDE HDD and replaced the stock 256Mb dram with 1Gb. Later, in 2013, I swapped the PSU out with a brand new one, which fixed instability and freezes that had started happening. It has been running perfectly fine since then and I had not considered upgrading anything, especially not a new Amiga motherboard since I would miss the G4's Altivec. However, only a few weeks ago, something strange happened - I chose to upgrade it when I didn't really need to! It all started when I needed to access a faulty laptop HDD - I didn't have a spare SATA connection in anything and the drive would not respond when used with SATA to USB adapters. I decided to buy a cheap SATA card for an old PC that I had in storage. This is pretty old and took PCI cards - yes, the same cards that the A1XE takes. The plan was to buy a A1XE compatible SATA card, which would also work in the PC and I managed to find a sii3114 card on Amazon for under 4 Euro. My IDE HDD was still running fine with no apparent issues or SMART errors, but it is over 15 years old and I'm sure it sounds louder than it used to. To preempt a potential failure, I bought a Kingston SSD for the sii3114 card and transferred everything from my HDD across. I was surprised at how cheap the lower capacity SSDs are these days - it was much cheaper than buying a SATA HDD, especially as I do not really need much space. As an added bonus, the SSD uses only 3W of power, 10W or so less than my old HDD. Finally, having noticed the CPU reaching higher temperatures than usual this year, my next task was to remove the G4 cooler to renew the thermal paste that I had last applied over 15 years ago - a delicate and somewhat dangerous task, akin to open heart surgery. The operation went smoothly and now the G4 runs even cooler than I remember at 28 degrees idle / 31 degrees full load - hoping this will help extend the life of my A1XE further still. In case you're wondering what happened with the laptop HDD, Linux diagnostic tools confirmed it as non-recoverable and dead, but as it was 2 weeks before the expiration of the 5 year warranty, I quickly sent it back to Seagate for a free replacement. After these efforts to keep my Amigas up and running, this allows me to continue with Amiga software development and I'm hoping to not need to open them up at all for many years to come! My first Amiga was actually an A600, which desperately needs attention too - a few years ago, I bought a CF card adapter to replace its dead HDD, but have yet to get around to installing it. There is still much we can do to fix and improve our aging hardware and maybe this article will help provide some inspiration. There are a variety of solutions available, allowing us to use the latest hardware and it is not necessarily expensive either - we can utilize cheap PC components from many retailers online and we fortunately have a few Amiga hardware retailers left too. Who would have thought that when we bought our floppy based Amigas many years ago, before HDDs were affordable or widespread, that it would be possible to use today's latest flash-based memory technology instead. It's never too late to upgrade... (dr) [News message: 19. Dec. 2022, 09:28] [Comments: 1 - 20. Dec. 2022, 08:22] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`18.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 18 - Marcus Sackrow For the fourth Advent, Marcus 'ALB42' Sackrow is our storyteller. Marcus is a Free Pascal programmer and has managed a lot of projects over the years, which he regularly informs about in his blog. In 2014, he started porting Free Pascal first to AROS and later also to AmigaOS 3.1. Most recently, he released Free Pascal 3.2.2 for all Amiga systems in May 2021. Likewise, in 2015 he started working on his text editor EdiSyn with syntax highlighting for AROS (latest version 0.54. In mid-2016, he began working on his OpenStreetMap viewer Mapparium, which he further developed to version 0.8 and also made available again for all Amiga systems. His extensive creative output also includes his free Pascal programme Leu for loading and limited editing of Excel (xlsx), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ods), TurboCalc (tcd) and ASCII (csv) files. The list could go on, but of course his current project AmiTube must be mentioned: a YouTube client for all Amiga systems that makes it possible to watch YouTube videos on an Amiga. To do this, they are converted into Commodore's CDXL format and downloaded. To shorten the time until Christmas a little, he has kindly put another game behind his 18th door: his "Amigale" is a conversion of the well-known "Mastermind" (or logic trainer) with words for Amigas from Kickstart 1.3, which is currently popping up everywhere as "Wordle". The task is to guess a word, whereby the programme tells you whether a letter is included or even in the right place. "Amigale" (download at the end of the story) contains both a German and an English dictionary: (I should definitely have some more lessons in English...: what is "Spahi"??) Thank you very much, Marcus, and keep up the good work on your projects! And with his anecdote, we wish him and all our readers a happy fourth Advent: Amiga, Chemistry and Internet In 1997 I started studying chemistry at the University of Siegen. My professor in the General Chemistry lecture (Prof. Meixner) was quite new at this university and had a lot of interest in computers and the internet. He had a nice new idea for a new website and a student for it. But since he was new at the university, he only knew us first-year students and someone from my fellow students probably gave him my name when asked. So I introduced myself for the job. The general chemistry lecture I had with him is a very basic lecture on chemistry, a bit of repetition from chemistry classes (so that everyone is on the same level) but also new things quickly so that it doesn't get too boring. One feature in contrast to later lectures was that it contained a lot of chemical experiments as a presentation on the professor's desk. And there were really many, sometimes 5-6 per lecture hour. Especially popular, of course, were all the experiments that had something to do with fire or explosions. (The phophore explosion left a deep memory, after the whole lecture hall had a whistling in their ears for 20 minutes, not healthy). Professor Meixner's idea was to give the students a better way to prepare or review the lecture, which works best via the experiments. Of course, films work much better than simple pictures and text, so the idea was to record the experiments and put them on the internet with an explanation. I was to be responsible for the technical implementation, i.e. creating the films, converting them and creating the HTML pages. To show that I can do this well, I should first create the website for his research group. At that time I only had my Amiga 1200, at that time still with modem as connection to the university's network. So I created and tested the whole page on my Amiga and then uploaded it via FTP to the university's server. The HTML texts themselves were all created with a plain text editor (GoldED), I tried some of the HTML editors but wasn't that satisfied. Especially since I tested the pages against the online HTML validator (HTML 3.2 was still quite new back then). Professor Meixner had such a key phrase for his research, "Espionage in the world of molecules", for which I had designed a logo: a water molecule with a magnifying glass in front of it. And since I had just read some 3D course in an Amiga magazine, I implemented the logo as a 3D animation (Lightwave for the 3D, ADPro for converting/shrinking images, MainActor for the GIF animation). I was satisfied and the professor was thrilled. Later versions of the page are still available on archive.org (a little warning: 90s wepage-overload ;)) For the actual project, money was now requested, a computer with frame grabber card and a very cheap (PAL) camera were bought - cheap USB cameras did not exist yet, hence this combination. The camera was chosen because some of the experiments were very dangerous and we had to expect that the camera would be destroyed or at least damaged. However, this did not happen, as we were always quite careful and protected the camera extra, partly with its own, additionally protective housing. There were three people involved in total, a technical assistant who prepared and carried out the experiments (she had a lot of experience there as she also did this for the lecture). An advanced student (I think he was about to graduate) for the technical support and texts on the website and me as the person responsible for the technology and the actual website "programming". The basic idea was to record the experiments, then put pictures of them and descriptions on the web, and if possible even the videos themselves. But we quickly ran into the problem that almost all students only had access to the internet via modem (like me with my 33,600 modem). This meant that the films could not be too big. On the other hand, there were hardly any video formats that could be played universally. So we decided on MPEG, because you can almost always find a player there (even on the Amiga) and, as a stopgap, GIF-Anim. Professor Meixner set the file size limit at 500 Kb. The Amiga was again used to create the web pages and especially the GIF animations (including the background image, which was also created on the Amiga with PPaint). The recording and processing of the experiments took several months, and later the descriptions of the experiments were translated into Spanish and French and supplemented with small quiz questions. A funny anecdote at the end: when the site went online, the university was very worried because it described how to make explosives (black powder is one of the experiments, but also phosphorus or termite; they are pretty violent experiments). So they didn't want to see these experiments on the free internet, we had to install an IP filter so that only students of the University of Siegen could see these experiments. A few years later, nobody was interested any more. The website still exists today, on archive.org, but also as a copy on my own site. Download: Amigale1c.zip (88 Kb) (dr) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 1 - 18. Dec. 2022, 18:43] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

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