Symbol Engine

Your favorite statistics plugin is back. This minor revision implements an RSS tracker function that lets you tracker your visitors in near-realtime using an rss reader software. Also the annoying undeletable filtered IP bug is fixed. Thanks go to Mitch Powell for pointing it out.

Quick Stats is a configurable and embarassingly easy to install statistics plugin for wordpress that shows live statistics about referrer data, content hit count and browser versions back to a configurable number of hits. Individual hits are also shown with ip address and hostname. 

Quick Stats is not meant to be a full featured log analyzer. It is intended to show realtime statistics on a recent time window. It does all the analysis on demand and shows them on an easily accesible single page.

Installation 

1. Upload `quickstats.php` and `quickstats` directory to your plugins folder, usually `wp-content/plugins/`2. Activate the plugin on the plugin screen

Upgrade

Just overwrite the old file and be sure to visit options page once. 

Screen Shots

Amigaworld.net hardly releases any news that is not in amiga.org newsfeed so I decided to drop it for the sake of simplicity.

ACME was the longstanding winner in crossassembling tools for c64, until now that is. Kick Assembler 2.12 is the first released version of a crossassembler with a truly original idea. Forget about switching to other tools and programming languages to precalculate your vectors, unrolling your loops, converting your data etc. Kick Assembler is a unique combination of a very good macro assembler and a scripting language.

I feel obliged to spit out an example of this powerful stuff. And when you see the power of scripting combined with assembler on a single source file, I believe you will never look back. This code below is the mandelbrot example that is in the zip file. 
It calculates the mandelbrot set and fills character memory accordingly

.pc = $0400
.function toRe(i) .return -2+2.7*[i-floor(i/40)*40]/39
.function toIm(i) .return -1.6+3.2*floor(i/40)/24
.function mandelbroot(re,im) {
.var zr = 0
.var zi = 0
.var iter=0
.for(;[zr*zr+zi*zi]<4 && iter<20;iter++) {
.var newZr = zr*zr-zi*zi + re
.var newZi = 2*zr*zi + im
.eval zr = newZr
.eval zi = newZi
}
.var colors = List().add($20,$0f,$20,$08)
.return colors.get(iter&3)
}
.fill 25*40,mandelbroot(toRe(i),toIm(i)) 

Edit: Kick Assembler now support user defines pseudo commands (Yeeeeaay! 16 bit operations with one opcode!) and DTV specific opcodes.

Impressive isn't it? Here are the links if I convinced you: 

• KickAssembler 2.23 Homepage
• KickAssembler 2.23 @ Symbol Engine

This should come in handy for programming the 1541 drive. It is fully commented and jmp's are crosslinked. Nice job by Frank Kontros.

• Here is the original: Commodore 1541 Floppy Drive ROM dissasembly
• Here is my local mirror: Commodore 1541 Floppy Drive ROM dissasembly @ Symbol Engine

• New and faster RSS grabber. That means no more slow hits and a more often updated Planet Retro.
• HTML parser support means we can bring you news from many sites that dont have rss feeds. (Like c64.sk and C= Homestead)
• Search!

Planet Retro is now beta testing. Planet Retro aims to smash retrocomputing related weblogs, news and podcasts scattered through the net into a single, easily trackable feed and website.

Contructive feedback is most welcome at this stage of development.

If you also happen to run a web site about retro computing and you are not in the roll use  "suggest a feed" link on the sidebar. if you are on the roll but dont want to be please drop me an email.

I can be contacted at < jim [at] planetretro [dot] org >.

This version is no longer supported. QuickStats 1.1 is now available here. 

Quick Stats is a configurable and embarassingly easy to install statistics plugin for wordpress that shows live statistics about referrer data, content hit count and browser versions back to a configurable number of hits. Individual hits are also shown with ip address and hostname. 

Quick Stats is not meant to be a full featured log analyzer. It is intended to show realtime statistics on a recent time window. It does all the analysis on demand and shows them on an easily accesible single page.

Installation 

1. Upload `quickstats.php` to your plugins folder, usually `wp-content/plugins/`
2. Activate the plugin on the plugin screen

Screen Shots

Wordpress now comes with a WYSIWYG editor! If you can get it to work, that is. Because no matter what I did, I couldn't. So I started to look around for a more stable and feature packed editor plugin. I found mudbomb WYSI-Wordpress plugin. It is a giant leap forward comparing to wordpress' default one. Some of its features:

Recently i got meself my childhood dream. Amiga A1200! It has a smaller form factor than a500 but you can even fit a 2.5 harddrive inside. Actually some people did fit a laptop cdrom in there (Amiga 1200 Internal CDROM). Anyway, I carried it home, opened the case, put it together, switched it on. Aaaaand, now what? What do you do with a barebone A1200? By barebone I mean:

I learned that I needed kickstart 3.1 to run OS 3.5 or OS 3.9. They are modern operating systems for amiga. But they also need a fast cpu and tons of ram anyway. But Workbench 3.1 runs fine. MagicWB is out the question because it needs some fast ram, but MUI programs work fine.

CD-ROM
I also connected a cdrom to my amiga using a 2.5 => 3.5 ide cable. You also need a iso-9660 cd filesystem for amiga. I used AmiCDROM-1.15 from aminet. It worked fine. It mounts the cdrom as CD0: and you can access it just like any other device. Drive access speed is pretty good. You can also play whdload games and demos directly from cdrom. Which takes us to the subject of

WHDLOAD
Whdload is a harddisk installer system for trackloader games and demos that naturally dont have harddisk installers. It really is a breeze playing moonstone from the harddrive without all those long loading delays. Almost all A500 games work with whdload. Even the ones that exclusively need kick 1.3 work with internal kickstart emulation. If you get a not enough memory error, try booting with no startup-sequence. Of course no luck with AGA games and demos because almost every one of them needs all 2mb of chip ram and some of it is used by the operating system and whdload.

KingCON
This is a replacement for CON, which the console driver of your amiga. Amiga's default console is nice but it's a bit dated. And when you see nice features of modern shells like tab completion and scrollback buffer you cant help but want them on your amiga. This software does it all:

To be continued…

I know some people still like the feeling of the original C64 keyboard when they code assembly but memory problems and frequent crashes while directly accessing resources on a real C= give coders who dont own a ram expansion or a cartridge one hell of a headache. Cross development on a PC is a nice alternative. Here is my Cross development toolbox:

Relaunch64 IDE
This IDE is strictly for C64 assembly crossdevelopment and has very nice features. It has syntax highlighting and can easily be configured to use a number of CrossAssemblers, Crunchers and Emulators. The editor has some weird bugs, but if you dont want to configure giant editors like EMACS to do what you want, then this is what you want.