Spot the mistake... #4

It doesn't boot. What am I doing wrong? ;-)

* * *

Wanna spot another mistake? Click here.

Fantastic animation: "Dance of the Stumblers" (Steve Segal, 1987)

It doesn't happen too often that one stumbles [pun!] upon Amiga material from 1987, and is genuinely surprised. "Dance of the Stumblers" is a staggeringly beautiful, dynamic Amiga-generated animation that just has to be seen.

According to the video's description/comments, Mr. Segal (no, not the similarly named actor), award-winning animator and filmmaker,  created this animation with Aegis Animator on an Amiga 1000, using cues that he had written down from the music track beforehand. Due to high demands on the hardware, playback was slow, so it was set to 1 frame per second, and photographed at the same rate with an animation camera. (See links below for more information.)

The result is an amazing example of Amiga creativity!  

"Dance of the Stumblers" (1987)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bQJu97qxLw

Make sure you check out Mr. Segal's YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@SSegal

...and his website:
https://www.segaltoons.com

Find out more about his vita & work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Segal

Denise V2.0 Amiga emulator

"Denise" is a new Amiga (and C64) emulator for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. And it's surprisingly good!

Development of "Denise" seems to date back to around 2017, when it started as a Commodore 64 emulator. In March 2023 author PiCiJi released version 2.0, which adds Amiga 500 and 1000 emulation. Running Fedora Linux, I gave it a quick try.

Apart from downloading and extracting the archive, no program installation was required. Just double-clicking "Denise" program icon, and selecting Kickstart ROM file and ADF in the preferences, I was able to nicely play a round of "Tinyus", with sound, and without any glitches or performance issues (i7-4790T, 2.7GHz). 

Double-click icon, select Kickstart ROM, select ADF, and play. Nice!

"Denise" has a little bit of history, which certainly helps when a new emulated platform is created. Preference and menus need a little more work (localization, graphics), but nothing's missing, and everything (still) looks very clearly structured with the added Amiga-related items. (Most?) changes to preferences take effect immediately.

When playing "Tinyus", I had to make a little change to the input configuration: "Tinyus" needs the Space-bar key, which is occupied by Joystick-Fire-Button per default. Assigning a new key just took a couple of seconds without reading instructions. Perfect.

"Denise" preferences: C64 and Amiga cores

"Denise" feels as if it has been designed with a lot of modularity in mind. For example it looks as if the (emulated) video output section from the existing C64 emulation is being used for Amiga video, too - which totally makes sense, as both machines generate quite similar video signals. And there is a "core selection" setting - future new cores can probably be expected.

More "Denise" preferences

Emulation performance was perfect with "Tinyus", which is also reflected by SysInfo's speed test results: "Denise" runs cycle-exact. (No further performance tests were done by me at the current point in time.)

SysInfo: That looks pretty cycle-accurate.

To round it up, here's a shot of "Denise"'s C64 emulation running "Destroyer", and the C64 settings window.

"Denise" C64 emulation and preferences

It's still a bit rough around the edges, and a bit limited, but, wow, "Denise" is a fantastic new Amiga 500 and 1000 emulator! And you get a great C64 emulator along the way! Try it, it's great!

You can download "Denise" from its sourceforge website

https://sourceforge.net/projects/deniseemu/

If you like to read some program code you can visit "Denise"'s git repo:

https://bitbucket.org/piciji/denise/src/master/

Additional sources:
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2023-04-00113-EN.html

AMIGA A1100 - new, awesome Amiga 1000 mainboard!

Awesome news from the hardware scene: After numerous FPGA Amiga implementations, re-imagined Amiga 500 and 1200 mainboards, all sorts of new accelerator designs, and so on, the Amiga 1000 gets a major overhaul with "AMIGA A1100".

Miguel "Estrayk" Fides from Spain has just published information about his "A1100" mainboard, which is designed to fit a Amiga 1000 case. Using modern components along with some original ones, this new mainboard looks quite different from the original Amiga 1000 PCB - and it has a lot of impressive new features:

• CPU Motorola 68020@14Mhz (PGA)
  
• OCS/ECS chipset (original Paula / Agnus / Denise required)
• 2MB ChipRAM
• 64MB FastRAM
• 2.5'' IDE controller
• support for single and dual Kickstart ROMs (three sockets total)
  
• built-in flickerfixer and scandoubler with RGB, cinch and VGA connectors
• A1000 (86pin) and A1200 (150pin) expansion connectors
• A1200 clockport
• ATX power supply connector

According to SysInfo the A1100 is easily twice as fast as a stock Amiga 1200.

It looks as if currently there's no distribution or anything planned, but that doesn't mean it won't happen, the developer is evaluating possible options.

Here's a video showing the A1100 in action (2021-02-10):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP2rrnZsDm8

Very nice, certainly a great piece of Amiga hardware to keep an eye on!

Sources:
http://www.retrowiki.es/viewtopic.php?t=200036585
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2021-02-00016-DE.html
https://www.amigafuture.de/app.php/newsportal/?ulg=de&news_id=38632