Thursday, May 11, 2023

Long time no see :P

 Hey my friends...

Took me quite a few years to return to what I loved most, but the past weird years, the community dragged me back and since October of 2022 I'm back on track!

During these months I bought AmigaOS 3.2, and updated up to 3.2.2.1 replacing ALL my previous OSes to one new build from scratch. 





We also got a lot of new cores for my Vampire V4SA with added features so timing was great :)

I have many things I wanna share from the last 6+ months but I hope in the next days/weeks to start writing and tinkering again with my blog.

So thanks all for sticking all this time, and stay tuned for more...


Friday, November 4, 2016

A600: Paula NMI Piggyback adapter

Hi my friends.

Recently I got a message from my friend highpuff that he created an NMI adapter for A1200 that piggybacks to Paula!
I was amazed since I didn't knew that the IPL0, IPL1 and IPL2 signals that were needed for NMI header were also available on Paula as well!

Yesterday I got a package on my mailbox out of the blue sky...



OMG, I was really happy that Highpuff sent me one kit for testing it on my beefy A600!
After all... Paula on A1200 and A600 are the same so why wouldn't it work?

Here's the adapter on it's full glory...




Really simple design but elegant and effective!
Time to remove my floppy dual drive combo, and plug the adapter to Paula.
Once it was ready, and switch was put in the adapter header it was time to give it a spin!



Hohohoho! After some custom kickstart fun, just pushing the button gives us HRTMon 2.36 (even from Early Startup Menu! Awesomeness!



For some people who will simple say... WTF is that, it's an Action Replay clone that can give some info and alter some address in RAM for hacking some stuff.

ACA630 had an NMI adapter by default that I showed in the past as well, but since Vampire doesn't have an NMI header the only solution to get the signals so far, was to get the signals from Vampire's Piggyback 68k socket (not something for the fainthearted doing).
Getting the header from another IC is a really awesome solution without affecting at all the rest of the setup. Good thing also is that the adapter is really low profile and doesn't mess with the height of the floppy drive (even my dual drive combo sat really well) and case closed just fine :)


Thanks a lot highpuff my friend... You rock!

Thursday, August 4, 2016

A600: Some RTG love and recent ClassicWB 3.9 enchancements

Hi my friends.

So many things, so little time but hopefully I'll try and post more stuff from now on.
All this time I'm tinkering my lovely Vampire and my beloved ClassicWB 3.9 system.

I made many changes so I might not remember all but here are some highlights:

  • Updated a lot of libs, utilities and programs to latest versions
  • Changed whole iconset from MagicWB to Ken's Icons (OMG only that alone is TONZ of work)
  • Added "Theme Support". This includes the following options:
    • <None>
    • VisualPrefs (with a new OS4.0 theme edited by myself)
    • AfA OS (it still doesn't work since it requires FPU but if you mount the system to WinUAE and add FPU then it works just fine). Also it's ready for when FPU implementation is done on the Vampire.
  • Updated a lot my Startup-Sequence cleverly so I can mount my CF card both on Amiga and my PC (via WinUAE) using the same system without any changes. IT ROX so much having the same environment without having to change monitor, screenmode, settings etc, and what's best... either in real A600 or WinUAE every change is saved in each environment!
  • Changed many options on ToolPrefs menu adding stuff like:
    • Converting images to icons (thumbnails)
    • Replacing backdrops on the fly either on windows or workbench screen
  • Replaced ToolsManager Dock with WBDock by Thomas Rapp
  • Added many utilities and tools. Some I remember are:
    • SwazInfo that replaced RawWBInfo (I like it more)
    • PowerWindows (for moving windows wherever I want on the screen)
    • ReqAttack for changing all requesters
  • Changed all my assigns from all places to be managed by MCP
  • Installed Clould Handlers (after also registering them just for the support)
  • Made a lot of new backdrops with Vampire theme (lol) which I will put at the end of the post for anyone that wants to grab any :)
You can check the video bellow that shows some of these features live. I suggest to open it on YouTube where you can also view it up to HD (1080p) quality.




Here are the backdrops that you can grab :)