Good old fun. That’s how I would describe Mikey Does the 80’s Again!!! (Take 2) show from Thursday 27-6-2013.
I had a great time and it was a real blast from the past. I talked about it before but when we still lived in Thailand I listened to Mikey’s show a lot. So this one brought back some really great memories. I hope he does another one (Christmas?) and for sure I will be tuning in.
Commando is a game that just won’t work with WinUAE. I had not upgraded to the latest version for some time but today I thought I would do so and while doing this I thought it might be a good idea to try Commando again. And what a surprise it was that it worked. So far I just tried the first bit of the game so it could be it fails later on in the game. This type of game is really my favorite. Sadly the C64 had more of these type games compared to the Amiga. I use the word sadly not to offend the C64 but for the fact I had no C64.
So far I posted two articles that contained video(s). One was about Licence to Kill and the other about Run the Gauntlet. I will use it more often as it gives the articles that extra touch of greatness. I am already working on a new article which will include a video that will just give it that extra bit. You will see.
Trevor posted a new article on his blog in which he talks about the Silicon Dreams/VCF 2013 (UK tech show) taking place on 5-7 July 2013. They hope to show a few interesting things but no promises. I will keep an eye on the this next weekend and hopefully we do get to hear about some interesting things.
This week I had a go at recording Amiga games in WinUAE. I want to use some bits and pieces in some upcoming articles. Having a video to show what you are referring to is such a great asset to the story. I came across a site called Games4enthusiasts which has a great tutorial on how to setup WinUAE for recording games. I wish I came across it sooner as my first attempts on getting it working was a disaster. Even if I recorded something it was hundreds of megabytes for a few seconds and it looked horrible. Not to mention the game got really slow once I was recording it. All I had to do was to install the Xvid Codec and I was up and running.
Having a video is one thing but you always want to edit them. I needed a simple editor that will let me cut a section from the video that I want. After trying a few programs that really frustrated me I came across a program called Kate’s Video Toolkit that did exactly what I wanted. Not only that, it was really easy to use.
License to Kill
I wanted start a new section called “Most memorable gaming moments”. Moment or moments in a game that just are really special to me and I want to share. And having a video is essential in this since it will show readers exactly what I am talking about. I will upload the videos to my Flickr account and embed them in to the story. For the first entry in this new section I will have Licence to Kill. I should have this one done and posted this weekend.
Run the Gauntlet
Next up has to be Run the Gauntlet. I can hear you thinking, the intro. 🙂
NovaCoder released an Amiga AGA 68k port of SDL v1.2.3 over at
Aminet. I never tried SDL and I am not really a fan of using it. I guess seeing so many SDL ports and not “native” created stuff has put me off. But seeing the news about this port for the classic Amiga has got me thinking. I do want to create some stuff for the classic Amiga later this year so it might be worth to have a look into this.
I wanted to play a bit with Amos and since I don’t have any room, actually table, to setup my A1200 I have to use emulation. Instead of using WinUAE I thought I would try to set it up on my A1SE with OS4.1. I got really excited about it and setting it all up using two hard drive files, one for the Workbench installation and the other to have Amos installed, was just great. Since I want to write some Amos tutorials I need to transfer the source code files to OS4.1. I was thinking about using a folder as hard drive but thought I would give the hard drive option a try. You can mount this as a drive in OS4.1 so that should enable me to get the source code files. I am not sure but I remember from last time that Amos would not let itself be installed in a folder that is being used as a hard drive. I was not sure but I thought I better go for the hard drive file option. I already mounted the file and it worked perfectly but about this more later on.
All this happened just a few days before the weekend that we would go to France. Not that I was not excited to go to France but being all worked up and everything worked the first time I tried I could not help thinking that I would have to wait till after the trip to continue. That was last week and the long weekend to France was absolutely marvelous. That great that I did not give much thought to my Amos emulation project.
At my first attempt I succeeded in mounting my hard drive file that contains the Amos installation. It was no fluke since each other attempt after this also worked. This will enable me to access the source code files I want to use for my tutorials. It just feels better and is more fun to emulate the classic Amiga on the new Amiga. There is just a lot of excitement doing it this way. Since I also have a partition on my OS4.1 installation called development I need to make sure I unmount the HDF file since rebooting will case some start-up errors. Mountdiskimage will also mount the HDF file again on the next boot of OS4.1. Since everything is up an running now it is time to start playing around with Amos. Hopefully I can do a new tutorial soon.
I was delighted to receive a gift from OldSchoolGameBlog. It is just the kind of game I love. I have some great memories playing Leatherneck as well in single player mode as two player mode. This game will be the next game I will do a review about. Looking forward to start on this. Thanks to OldSchoolGameBlog!
I also installed the latest NetSurf (version 3) version. I have to admit I use mostly OWB and it has been some time since I used NetSurf. From now on I will use NetSurf 3.0 to see how it behaves on my A1SE. Time to play some Leatherneck and do some coding.
I did not even count on it any more since I had ordered it over a month ago and there was no response from the on-line reseller. But to my surprise I got a mail on Thursday 11-10-2012 apologizing for the lack of response and that they would ship it the same day. That would mean they should deliver it the next day (Friday) and they did. The € 18,75 I paid for it included shipping which seems like a good deal to me.
It is the so called Summer and Winter games edition and comes with a disc with those two games and also 33 Amiga Classix (that’s what the box said) games.
Competition Pro USB – installation menu
The installation for the games started in German. Since I can read German it is not a problem for me. During the installation there is no option to select the language. The printing on the box is also in English so you should be able to install it with the English language. Even so just clicking a few buttons will get you through.
The included games are: “Anstoss; Arkanoid; Course of Ra; Defender of the Crown; Eliminator; Fussball Total; Goal; Grand Monster Slam; Hanse; Hard ′n′ Heavy; Hollywood Pictures; Hybris; It came from the Desert; Logical; Lords of the Rising Sun; Lure of the Temptress; Mighty Bombjack; Mission Elevator; M.U.D.S.; Nebulus; Paperboy; Patrizier; Pinball Dreams; Pinball Fantasies; Rings of Medusa; Slam Tilt; Space Harrier; Stadt der Löwen; Super Skidmarks; TV Sports Basketball, TV Sports Football; Vroom; Winzer”
Amiga Classix game menu
Once you click on the game it will start WinUAE (if you have it installed) but starting it you will get a message from WinUAE saying you need to installed a floppy disk image. I will just start WinUAE and browse for the games myself. Not really a big issue for me since I care about the joystick and the added games are just a bonus.
The joystick is really great. I could never love a modern joystick. I just feel at home with a classic joystick. Now I can play all the classic games with a classic joystick using WinUAE or even Janus-UAE on Aros. Jumping to Aros I can say it was detected just fine on my Icaros desktop. I can really recommend purchasing the Competition Pro USB.
Coder's Blog 