Jim Qode's sporadically updated geeky blog

I got meself a PAL DTV recently. These things are pretty cool out of the box. But if you want to get more out of your DTV, there are many hacks around the net. Here is a checklist of the hacks I want to make for mine. It may prove useful to some people.

I'll add my experiences doing these hack here somewhere when I find the time to do them.  

1- Fix the colors:

    PAL version of the DTV is cursed with a buggy video generator. White is not white at all, and some colors are very hard to distinguish. If you don't like your DTV with ghetto colors, try spacman spiff's easy colorfix: (scroll down to easy and better fix)

Spaceman Spiff's DTV colorfix

Note: I have tried this hack with limited success. You can read about it here.

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Popularity: 50% [?]

Amigaguide is a hypertext document file format designed for the Amiga, files are stored in ASCII so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software. However it's not pretty to read it with a text viewer, because links don't work and formatting clutters the text.
This little tool I wrote converts uploaded amigaguide files to html and displays them directly on your browser for viewing. If there are external files linked in the document you can just save the output page to the same directory as your guide file and links will work.

I hope you find it useful.

Amigaguide to HTML converter @ SymbolEngine

Popularity: 37% [?]

MMC64. Should you buy it? Here I have listed pros and cons of this cartridge after using it for longer than a year:

Pros

• Inexpensive storage
  SD cards are really cheap nowadays and they are easy to find. A 1gb sandisk that costs about 15$ holds all the HVSC archive and all my games and still have 500mb free space. 

• Really fast loading times
  Faster than 1581, 64hdd and ide64. Actually the only thing it cannot beat must be a cartridge =)

• Cheap, cheap, cheap
  Considering the other options, this is the most cost effective modern storage solution for c64. Shipping is also cheap because of its:

• Small size
  It fits in a standart C= cartridge case. It just needs to be slightly modified to make an sd card slot. It is pretty light so you dont have to put something underneath the cartridge for the fear of breaking the edge connector.

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Popularity: 55% [?]

ACME was the longstanding winner in crossassembling tools for c64, until now that is. Kick Assembler is 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 2.25 Homepage
• KickAssembler 2.25 @ Symbol Engine

Popularity: 35% [?]

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…

Popularity: 27% [?]