Few post early, i talk about some russian diskmag (oldgames7), which are based on the panorama engine done by Crhis Dragan, which lately was ported to the SDL/Freetype/etc by Ransom (Ransom was a member of some old and welknown in the past in amiga demoscene group IRIS (they do Eurochart and tons of quality demos)). He and Crhis kindly give me the sources of all their stuff, and so i port it to os4/mos/aros, what mean that any diskmag based on the Panorama will works on any of our amiga oses. And "oldgames7" was kind of first cross-platform test.
So, few days ago, HUGI 37 was released. HUGI is very old and wellknown diskmags which till the issue 34 was avail for Windows only, but since i have good contacts with authors (currently its Magic who works on hugi mostly, together with Adok) i annoy them to release amiga versions as well. Issue 34/35/36 are avail for amigaos4 only, but now AROS time is coming as well ! (for morphos there was also some port back in past).
To be honest, you can use with the current .exe any version of hugi starting from the very old issues when panorama start to be use (i think its around 15-16 or co). Through till issue 34 there wasn't a lot of amiga articles. But when Magic take a rule on diskmag, its start to be filled with more scene related content and with many (in compare with previous issues) amiga related articles.
Issue37 is intersting to read for some oldschool diskmag fans, but if you want jump to amiga articles only, then you can check those ones:
from HeadLines
Revision 2012 Warm UP: Evens & Releases. What to Expect: chapter "Other Platform releases
Special Effects in the Moview with Danny of TBL
from Behind The Scene
Desire - Comeback to the demoscene
The Making of "We Come In Peace"
Dismag Galore #2 : chapter about amiga releases
GUI on Amiga today
Amiga in 2012 - Present days
Viva Amiga Party 2012
from Interviews
Blast from the past: Mantronix of Phenomena
Top Personality: Ubik of Elude
from PartyZone
Revision 2011 report
The Amiga 25 years party
BreakPoint 2010 report
Issue37 also have a lot of good and quality music done by real proffesionals, specially for that diskmag. To add , issue have a lot of good design, art and any kind of articles, reports and interviews. Just take a look on how it looks like (screens from aos4):
You can download amiga version of diskmag (i.e. that one, for aos4/mos/aros) here:
Yesterday i publish one more aos4-programming related article, where i cover some low-level stuff such as: ppc assembler in brief, programming on assembler on os4 in different ways, disassembly, debugging, ELF file internals and ELF loader internals (all of course in meaning of os4, as its topic of article), differences beetwen different libc realisations, and some other bits here and here.
Article are not for newbes, but for someone who have basic coding skills. Even better to have exactly "coding", not "programming" skills. Old-scholl hackers can find it interesting to read.
You can read article on os4coding.net HERE , or download PDF with all the samples included HERE
Bit thanks going to Trixie , who do pretty hard work to fix my english grammars and rephrase some parts where it was necessary, and to Frank Wille (yeah, VBCC author) for his never endles, never egoes, and never tired help.
Few days ago one of russian person who in interest about amiga and related stuff, release a russian diskmag called "oldgames" issue7. Diskmag works initially only on windows (there is win32 version), and while it sound strange that amiga-related mag works only on windows, amiga vesion of that was planned, but due to all the problems, and that it for first was oriented on the classics only and only for russians, all attempts die in rest somethere in beetwen and only windows version are done.
The easy way with win32 version wasn't because someone code win32 engine from scratch, but just because engine for mag use welknown and open diskmag engine called Panorama done by the Crhis Dragan. For example diskmags like Hugi, latest EuroChart, latest ShowTime and some others use that engine. And for our surprise, some time ago, Ransom from IRIS (that one who do EuroChart), get sources of engine from Crhis, and make a SDL port. At that time, it was a bit buggy in few parts, implemenation of SDL on amigaos4 was buggy like hell, not saying that AROS on that times was out of question as something totally not mature (only year ago AROS get decent SDL support). Only on Morphos it was more or less fine.
1.5 year ago, after a lot of tryes to find out Crhis and Ransom, i found both, and get from them all the necessary code, which, i just recompile for os4 with new SDL, and release a new version of EuroChart 48, as well as few versions of latest HUGI: Hugi34 and Hugi36. Engine still a bit slow, and only on normal machines like with 800mhz and more it will be usable fine (i am sure there is a lot parts which i can change to speedup it, but that not done yet). But you can see it for yourself on the videos of hugi36 on os4 in action, on "25 years of amiga" aprty in Holland:
Not ultrafast, but still usable. I hope to speed up it radically in near future (with adding opengl stuff, profiling bad parts of sdl code and co.), but for now it works at least and can bring some fun to amiga users.
And so, few days ago one man release a russian diskamg which based on that engine, and ask "if someone will intersest to port it to amiga, let me know". And as i already have panorama port, i of course was in interest to help, even, if diskmag still only in russian (that of course the big problem for the all the amiga users, but hey, you can navigate over, and listen some good and welknown music).
The problems with which i meet , was fonts and cyrilic support. Fonts its something boring and un-interesting all the time, but at this time i dig in to found the solution. Problems lies in the code of engine (again), which just use Freetype for text parsint (so .ttf fonts), but just without meaning in mind cirilic at all. By standards all the .ttf fonts should be unicode-kind, but of course, its still possible to create some self-modified fonts, which will not follow to standart, but will still works. And so, i just follow the easy way , and except of changing a code of engine (yeah, a bit lame, but i just want to make it works fast, without waiting till engine code will be changed, adapted and tested) i just create self-made ttf fonts with necessary cp1251 codepage (the codepage #1 for russians) and with fixing of some bugs, create a working aos4 version.
But as we all know that aos4 is not only one os in the amiga world, i trying to support in last time all the modern and popular amiga and amiga like oses (that is aos4, morphos and aros-i386), and because of that i create new version of morphos engine, and, what is most important and for sure interesting first version of egine for aros-i386 ! Of course, on aros with modern and fast hardware, you will not have any kind of slowdowns, or problems with speed. Its all will be fast and good, just like on win32 with original engine by Crhis. Should i add that for aros all what i change its only makefile and endian fixes (as it little-endian, not as os4/mos which are big-endian) and nothing more ? That show us that AROS also reach some level for now. The level, when you can easyly build some code without problems, and without jumping to aros-specific problems. Wish that someday it will be the same for all the aros parts.
So, enough of talks, let's check screens !
AOS4:
AROS:
MORPHOS:
Of course many of you will undestand nothing on russian, but you at least can plays with it. Keys 1,2,3,4,5 are used for swith beetwen music tracks (so even if you do not know russian, you can run it, and enjoy some music while browsing the articles and trying to understand what is all about :) ).
As for quality of diskmag itself, i think we can mark it as "middle". Not that bad to call it bad, and not as good to call it quality. Music are used in are wellknown and not done specially for, the design itself a bit "ok", but still its all a lot of effort to put all together, write articles and so on. I know that for myself from my past expirience with diskmags.
You can get fully working archive here with 3 bins for aros/os4/mos here: oldgame7 amigang
Lately i start to write some research-kind article about aos4 internals from the 3d party coder perpective, and while i still works on it, i found that few parts of articles can fits to some small ones, about different aspects. Just something which can be interesting to read for some beginners. And so, as result i just make first one, which cover some first steps with GDB, for someone who not familiar with it, or just want something aos4 specific only.
If you in interst, check this out on os4coding.net there
