Procrastination, blessed be your name! Or rather, the side quests you bring: Instead of cleaning up my office, I suddenly had the urge to try a little hardware modification. To my surprise, I didn’t break anything, and was rewarded with a flicker-free, phosphor-bright display option for my Amiga 500.
Needless to say: That hardware task itself had also been simmering in the “maybe later” stash for some time. I think it was two Revisions ago when I bought me an Indivision ECS V4 at the Individual Computers booth, a flicker fixer for non-AGA Amigas. The VGA output modes are fully configurable, your precious Amiga pixels get neatly scaled, and it can add filters and configurable scanlines if you’re into that. Plus, everything can be configured from within the Amiga. Neat, eh?
The manual started off with a bunch of warnings I had to ignore (“installing the product is very complicated […] steps require a lot of experience and skills”) because what was the alternative, clean my office?
Sadly, my package didn’t come with the right CIA adapter, I’ve only got a small square one suitable for Amiga 600s. This means the Indivision cannot intercept mouse and keyboard inputs, and I get no magic key combination to enter the live configuration mode. Too bad, but probably my fault (as I said, I bought it at Revision, i. e. drunk). Also, the supplied configuration tool is pretty great, maybe I don’t have to tweak the settings on the fly that often.
The installation went well. Basically, you only have to remove the socketed Denise chip with a rusty screwdriver (carefully), and then jam the flicker-fixer board into the socket with a hammer. I was relieved when the Amiga booted up again! It was already looking great on a TFT flatscreen:
Then I remembered there was an old PC monitor tucked away next door: An ADI MicroScan from around 1997, barely thirty years old! Now we’re talking! The colors, the picture stability, the vibrancy, and the vibe are top notch!
Even better: Since the Indivision is a fully functional Denise replacement, the original monitor output still works, and I can connect a TV and the VGA monitor at the same time. It’s fantastic. This setup even makes sense in a way: The TV runs at a clean 50 Hz and has sound; the PC monitor doesn’t do any weird postprocessing and is just a joy to look at.
Now there’s a naked Denise chip lying around I don’t need anymore. Poor thing. I can’t help but wonder about all the graphics it has seen in the years…
I don’t care if this reads like an ad for this product (well, it is great), I just wanted to share my excitement. In the mid-1990s, I didn’t really see the value of flicker fixers – just buy an AGA Amiga?! Three decades and two dead 1084 CRT monitors later, I am finally convinced they have their place. :)
The Old Web™ is awesome: lovely self-made home pages, doing your own hosting, quirky designs, oldschool forums, curated hyperlinks – all that stuff. I feel like I’m seeing more and more people turn (return?) to the golden old ways… Do we live in a renaissance of the Old Web™? I wish!
Well, yes, I wish that. Period! But whether it’s wishful thinking or not, here’s a cool, recent project for the DIY web scene:
- Wander Console - Discover the Small Web
Embrace the Old, erm, the Small Web! Embrace serendipity! Discover awesome content made by fellow humans!
As a website owner, you just need to download two files, add some links, and you’re part of a modern-day webring – only cooler and more advanced!
I’ve added a Wander console of my own: heckmeck.de/wander/
It contains many links from my What’s Cool? blog post series, and of course some of my own projects (I’ve already seen that I need to make some adjustments here and there so they can run in an IFrame – damn you, CORS!).
Since the latest Wander release allows you to customize the CSS a bit, I had to put in some AmigaOS-style chunky buttons. And I took the time to properly emulate disabled buttons while I was at it:
The CSS got a little tricky (maybe there’s a better way?), but at least I now know how to improve the disabled buttons in Coppenheimer for the next update. :)
| CSS | Image |
|---|---|
button {
border-image: url(border.png) 2;
border-width: 2px;
position: relative;
} |  |
button:disabled::before {
content: "";
display: block;
width: calc(100% + 4px);
height: calc(100% + 4px);
position: absolute;
top: -2px;
left: -2px;
background-image: url(disabled.png);
} |  |
While I’m still in the process of a Coppenheimer update (as in: gathering motivation), I’ve learned of a new profiling/debugging suite: ENGINE9000
Awesome name! :) It supports Neo Geo and Mega Drive as well, and the Amiga core is based on WinUAE (via PUAE). Hence, the visual debugging starts off with similar visualizations and DMA masks (to disable single bitplanes, sprites, or audio channels), but then adds a whole bunch of custom helpers: There’s a pixel-exact copper inspector, a flashing blitter highlighter, a sprite info feature, etc.
Here’s a cool video showcasing some of the visual debugging aides: Brian the Lion (Mode 7ish).
ENGINE9000 does much more than visual debugging: There’s source-level debugging in C or assembly language, per-frame controls (forward and backward stepping, looping), profiling, etc. You have to get used to the UI, I guess, and sometimes I ran into graphics glitches – probably just a configuration issue.
Once you get it to work, the blitter visualizer alone sure is trippy:
A great project, and lots of nifty features!
Coppenheimer has its own niche and value; for example, the live memory dump can help you understand the “Brian the Lion” logo effects way better than the video linked above. But it sure could use some new features! Maybe something like that blitter visualization, but also in the memory view, and for all DMA channels?
Specifically: Where’s my Bacon number?
I was catching up on the latest coder porn, i. e. the excellent tech write-up for Bacon of Hope by platon42 and gigabates. What a treat! I haven’t even finished it yet, but it already gave me two ideas:
- Oooh, so that’s how you draw fancy anti-aliased lines on the Amiga!
- Mmmmh, bacon… wait, don’t I have a Bacon number?
I remember looking it up decades ago (well, one decade at least), but the Oracle of Bacon doesn’t find it anymore. Last time I checked, I thought I had one, by means of:
- My IMDb entry for Die PARTEI (playing myself) *
- Helge Schneider starring in it, too
- Some early other film where Helge Schneider co-starred with a later German Hollywood star
- Some big-ass Hollywood movie with that actor and Kevin Bacon himself
I had a good laugh when I found out why I couldn’t find myself anymore. (Hmm, is that “ego-baconing”, like ego-googling?) The “Die PARTEI” movie is categorized as a documentary now! Hehehe. Well, where do you want to draw the line? With documentaries re-enabled, I got my number:
There’s even more than one path: The one I remembered was with Helge Schneider and Udo Kier in Mutters Maske, and then Armageddon and Apollo 13, giving me a number of 4. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel and former US president George W. Bush link me to the Bacon in three steps only, but that’s a lame documentary-only path. :)
Well, enough with the bacon vanity. More Amiga coding!
*)
PARTEI, what is that? Well, it’s a long story! Hmm, I guess that’s bacon-induced idea number three: Document my past as a politician a bit…
As I was browsing Tonsky’s blog for yesterday’s post, I noticed the pretty mouse pointers. Are those new? Better yet: When you click, they change their shapes! That’s something I’ve only seen in games so far. How fun!
Two questions:
- Wouldn’t this be cool to have in your operation system? Or is this already a thing? In some application maybe?
- How is this done in HTML and CSS? I only know about the
cursorproperty in CSS, is there acursor-pressedproperty as well?
Okay, that was more than two questions. As for the implementation, it’s an
:active pseudo-selector applied to some usually-not-clickable elements, including the page body.
Cool, I didn’t know you could do that!
body { cursor:url('pointer1.png'); }
body:active { cursor:url('pointer2.png'); }
See it in action: Click around in the area below, or try it on a separate page. (Sorry, mobile or tablet users: This only works with a mouse or trackball…)
Good thing I made the perfect test picture for that in 1998! :)
