Symbol Engine

I recently won a GP2x handheld linux console at NightShift'07 demo party and started developing right on. The most close-to-hardware library I found so far is rlyeh's minimal library. It has support for the coprocessor, internal joystick and direct framebuffer access. The latest version on the web is 0.B preview (weird versioning scheme huh?). There is an online documentation on the web but it is for the 0.A version. I'm tired of having to search for the files when I want to have a quick peek at the documentation. So here it is:

Rlyeh's minimal library 0.B preview documentation @ SymbolEngine

Here is the original web site of Rlyeh's minimal library:

Rlyeh's minimal library home @ Retrodev Forum

Popularity: 71% [?]

Here is a C64 font editor I wrote in JAVA. It supports 1×1, 1×2 and 2×2 hires fonts.

Download it here: Ascraeus Font Editor V1.2

Popularity: 27% [?]

8-bit ladies and pixel gents, please welcome our new feed additions:

aMiGA rETRO Sounds from Germany is an amiga style modcast,
World of Spectrum is the largest Sinclair Spectrum resource on the net and is ever expanding,
C64Stream.com brings c64 demos and intros to your pod in mpeg format. 

I had to add a captcha to suggest a feed page, because some spambots discovered it and started filling my suggestion database with pharmaceutical ads. Sorry for the annoyance.

A total rewrite of the planetretro engine is in progress. New version will bring the power of wordpress to planetretro.org . That means comments and trackbacks and casino spams and some more!. But please don't hold your breath. It's bad for your health. 

Popularity: 45% [?]

3 more feeds have been dropped from planetretro feed list because they haven't been updated for a long time. I suppose they're dead. It's always sad to see retrocomputing sites closing down but I'll be adding some fresh feeds nowadays. I'm negotiating with feeds' owners and writing html parsers for some news sites that dont have an rss feed. 

Here is the dead list: (R.I.P)

Oliver's Personal Blog, no updates since 2006-03-02
theMODcast, no updates since 2006-05-02
The Darkcourt, no updates since 2005-10-04

By the way did you notice we have a "suggest a feed" link at planetretro.org? 

Popularity: 50% [?]

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

Popularity: 55% [?]

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

Popularity: 18% [?]

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

Popularity: 33% [?]

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

Popularity: 56% [?]

• 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!

Popularity: 24% [?]

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 >.

Popularity: 32% [?]