Another Week With
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Another Week With Sam Seite !1 von !15 Another Week With Sam I WANT THIS BLOG TO CAPTURE MOST OF THE THINGS I LEARN AND EXPERIENCE ON THE MACHINE AND ON RELATED TOPICS (SUCH AS MY CLASSIC HW). THE TONE SHOULD REMAIN PERSONAL AND I PLAN ON UPDATING AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK. POSTED 07-10-2009 AT 11:18 PM BY LSMART UPDATED 07-12-2009 AT 03:53 PM BY LSMART (UPDATE - JOYSTICK WORKS - BUT NEEDS CALIBRATION) The curtains are still drawn on a quiet Saturday morning. I am sitting in front of my »new Amiga«. It is a Sam440ep-Flex that I bought a few months ago. Behind my back my wife and the dog are still sleeping - wait - well at least she is snoozing. There is a lot to tell about my past experiences with Sam, UAE and Aros. And in fact I have told some of it - in german on my homepage. I think I might mention parts of it when there is a current theme that relates to my earlier posts. Yesterday I downloaded Vice from OS4depot and I am planning on transferring my Geos-Disks to Sam. I just hope I can find the cable. Vice seems to run really well on that little machine. I haven’t found out how to tell it to calibrate the joystick. I won’t play on the keyboard while a USB- Competition-Pro is resting on my desk. I have very fond memories of the classic Competition-Pro. I want this blog to capture most of the things I learn and experience on the machine and on related topics (such as my classic HW). The tone should remain personal and I plan on updating at least once a week. So stay tuned. ! More on VICE POSTED 07-12-2009 AT 01:57 AM BY LSMART UPDATED 07-12-2009 AT 04:38 PM BY LSMART (UPDATE) TAGS C64 , GEOS , VICE There is a big table in our dinette. Now it is crowded with old hardware. While both of my Amigas are strangely absent, the pile is quite noticeable. The cable that connects the VC1541-drive to a standard parallel-port was easily found. But my old PC from 1997 had been with my mother for some years and while it hat some new USB-Ports built in, LPT was removed.! Of course this was just the connector, and I could have bought cable and jack and sticked to my plan on using that box. But I didn’t like the idea. So I plugged the original IBM PS/2 my wife owns and installed SC on the hard-drive using the same 720k floppy three times to get all of the archive from the Mac to the PC. After a few tries on configuring SC I managed to copy some of my old disks: Another Week With Sam Seite !2 von !15 1541 -> XE-cable -> IBM PC -> disk -> iMac -> USB-thumbdrive -> Samantha Not elegant, but functional. It took about 9 minutes to copy a 5,25 floppy disk over and four of them would fit on the 3,5" disk. As I had some GEOS stuff I acquired some time ago on Ebay, I included some GEOS disks in the bunch. And wile some of my old games run flawlessly on Sam (and VICE), GEOS would reset the emulation right after the boot-message. ! I even was able to run a C128 version of the Tron game for the first time. I own the disk since 1986 but never had the machine for it.! So after some fun I started to have a closer look at the GEOS problem. I have an old book, wich in one chapter described booting. There was a short listing that supposedly helped in my situation. I typed it into the emulator. It modified the file "GEOS BOOT", but the size of it now was much smaller. It didn’t help. I checked the original disk on the real C64, which had no problems at all. Then I had a look at an older GEOS-disk, which was in the box of the C64 in 1986. This was version 1.2 while the one from Ebay was labeled GEOS 2.0 . The older version had a smaller (1 Block) "GEOS BOOT" and the emulator had no trouble booting it. ! UPDATE: GEOS 2.0 is available for Download. The downloaded version boots fine. Even the Joystick and Mouse work on VICE now. But the Joystick needs calibration. Maybe I just have to edit VICE.ini for that. The calibration from the global Preferences don’t help here. Of what I don’t know POSTED 07-16-2009 AT 03:54 PM BY LSMART UPDATED 07-16-2009 AT 03:58 PM BY LSMART (OMISSION) During the last few days I didn’t try anything new on Sam. I read the article on OSNews and while I disagree with some of it (I think WORKBENCH is great the way it is) I agree that its difficult to find all the applications you might be interested in. Of course, there are a lot of people who are working to improve the situation and while Microsoft is not interested in porting Silverlight to the Amiga - and thereby giving access to the excellent Feynman stuff they just released - there are at least some solutions for Flash movies out there. No, I haven’t tried flashless yet. Is it easy on Sam? There is so much I don’t know at the moment. What is the best LaTEX for AmigaOS4? Can I use old 68k libraries without problems and why is the narrator.device missing? Is it possible to use SabreMSN to chat with AOL-people? What is the best way to print form Sam? Is there a list of classic Software that is reported to run well on Sam? Is there some admin tool for AmigaOS4 which can list and kill tasks and processes (think xoper)? ! Another Week With Sam Seite !3 von !15 I thought about creating a list of sites that I recommend for new Amiga-stuff, but at the moment I think there is still a lot of research ahead. Just noticed that the old FontEd still runs, while my favorite calculator ARcalc calls the reaper. What calculator do you use? Does it support hex and logarithms? My transfer of C64 disks to Samantha has worked well so far. Sadly AmigaOS4 wouldn’t recognize the USB-floppydrive, so I had to use a Mac to do the copying. Well and the PC - even though it has a HD-drive - refuses to format even DD-disks and can’t write on HD-disks formatted by another box. But none of this is really a problem. LaTeX and the Wardrobe of Geek POSTED 07-23-2009 AT 02:58 PM BY LSMART UPDATED 07-24-2009 AT 02:00 PM BY LSMART (UPDATE) I found a new place for my classic hardware. It is just a small spot between bath- and bedroom hardly more than 2m^2 but cleverly packed it is enough room for two Amigas, two C64, one Plus4 (plus disks and peripherals). Sadly I can’t run them at once. I have to unplug all but one computer at a time. Recently I have been thinking whether I should install LaTeX on Sam. I found that the Amigawiki is very terse on that topic. I tried to run PasTeX from my old MeetingPearls-CD(III) and it runs almost smoothly on Samantha. But I didn’t get LaTeX to work. On UNIX you have a binary called "latex" and you simply use this instead of virtex to do the compiling. PasTeX has a lot of LaTeX2e related files in the distribution, but I just didn’t see how the compiler can be convinced to use it. Didn’t I use LaTeX on my A3000 in the second semester? I can’t remember how I did it, but I remember installing many fonts and some styles afterwards. UPDATE: "latex" is just a script that called texconfig and virtech with the correct parameters. Found the config on my A3000. My wife and I played The Secret of Monkey Island(TM) just the other day on the A500. Today I found the iPhone version and bought it instantly. Still I like the old gfx better. Especially in the close ups! But maybe that´s a generational thing. UPDATE: Monkey Island for iPhone also supports the old gfx. Looks a bit distorted due to resolution differences, but nice none the less. Back from Vacation POSTED 08-05-2009 AT 12:52 PM BY LSMART I have been on vacation and so I had a few days without a keyboard. Now that I am back in town, I bought myself Maniac Mansion, Le Chuck´s Revenge and Rock´n´Roll on floppy for my A500, but Another Week With Sam Seite !4 von !15 didn’t have the time to really try them. No progress on the LaTeX-front and nothing much here nor there. I have brought some ideas for pixel-artwork from my vacation. I really hope I can draw them soon. I haven’t pixeled anything real for decades, so I might have some dust and rust to shake off first. Lately I was getting tired using Wookichat/IRC as a IM replacement. Currently I fire up Meebo.com in OWB to chat with my AIM/iChat- buddies. All the new Amiga-guys seem to use SabreMSN to chat, don’t they? Is it possible/easy to set up SabreMSN so that one can find and chat with AIM-Buddies? Where can one read up on this? jabber.org? Not Winning Auctions POSTED 08-12-2009 AT 02:59 PM BY LSMART TAGS EBAY , WINDOWBLINDS Let´s face it.