Mini Game Review - Aquaria on X1000

Continuing on my recent interest in X1000 gaming front, this weekend I discovered a game called Aquaria by Bit Blot. I had never heard of this game until yesterday and now I love it! Let's take a closer look!

Aquaria was ported to AmigaOS4 in late 2010 and is available for download for free from AmigaSoft.net. Please note that this website does restrict downloads to around 30k per second so it will take quite some time to download. They also have a lot of other games of interest too but it is not the focus of this review!

Originally released for Windows and Macintosh back in 2007, it is also recently available on iPad too.

Please note that you do need to have MiniGL support for this game to work, which means if you are running an X1000 you need to have a dual graphics card setup with a Radeon 9250 PCI graphics card and firmware update. I have included more detailed information on this process and how to set up the X1000 Dual graphic card configuration in my previous blog entry here.

Once you have unarchived the downloaded game, you need to run the included Install Support Libs installer icon in the Aquaria folder to install libraries necessary for the game to work. It will also backup you current libraries (it tells you this) to restore back if needed:

In this game you control Naija, an underwater dweller looking for her family. The game is set underwater and you use your left mouse button to move Naija around the various caves, collecting clues and avoiding enemies.

During the game there is a voice over from Naija which helps you get started and explains how to do things such as singing, combinations, restoring energy and saving your game position.

Below are some gameplay screenshots. When you click the right mouse button some icons appear. If you keep the mouse button pushed down and move the mouse around the icons clockwise or anticlockwise, Naija sings a tune which attracts other creatures to help you. In addition, this is also how you can sing a spell when you collect spells during the game.

You can access your spells and what combination of singing notes are needed to reproduce it in the Spell Menu, accessible by pressing the ESC key during play:

Next, if you double click on the Circle map icon on the bottom right of the normal gameplay screen you can view the map of the cave system you are in. This helps orient yourself to find which way you need to go to get to the end of one cave system to another:

Below I am descending deep into the cave system. On the left is a orange flower. This matches the flower icon in the right click Sing Menu. If you sing that note when close to the flower, the flower opens and you can get a new spell! The colours and graphics are wonderful and suit the game very well:

In places the cave system gets quite dark and moody with some fish that can kill you quickly if you touch them:

When you reach a save game point Naija will let you know so you can save your game progress:

Along the way you meet some interesting characters - in this case you are briefly transformed into a different type of creature which is a lead on to later in the game. Unfortunately I didn't make it far enough yet to see what that is:

The graphics are beautiful and the level of detail is high. The speed of the game is good and no noticeable slowdown I could see during my testing of it.

The background music is soothing, high quality and enjoyable, and the singing Naija does during the game complements the music perfectly. You can even listen to all the songs and download the Aquaria game music soundtrack composed by Alec Holowka for USD$5 here. I bought it because I really liked the music in the game.

The gameplay is simple but there is a lot to this game exploring the caves, learning spells and more things I didn't get to yet..

I surprised myself playing this as 3 hours went past really quickly - it hooked me in I admit! I appreciate this type of game may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I have to say I really enjoyed it.

Aquaria is highly recommended!

Game Preview - Balance Blox on X1000

I know it seems I am focused on games on my AmigaOne X1000 lately, and perhaps that is true. After the past few months difficulties with my wife's cancer, I have been keen to enjoy playing games on my X1000.

Today I was given the opportunity to preview the soon to be released game Balance Blox from AmiBoing:

Recently AmiBoing have been quite busy with the release of games like Tap Jewels and A Frog Game. It is exciting to see new games being so regularly released on Amiga!

Balance Blox's game concept is essentially balancing blocks on a tipping frame!

The gameplay is simple but deceptively difficult to execute well! You position and drop blocks according to colour and weight to keep the the frame in balance. If the left or right edge of the frame touch the ground then the game is over.

If three blocks of the same colour are placed together in a line (horizontal or vertical) then they are removed from the frame and your score goes up accordingly. This needs to be done carefully as the weight distribution changes very quickly when blocks are removed.

AmiBoing has explained how to play the game within the game, as below:

As with other AmiBoing games, high scores are logged to your AmiBoing login id which you provide when launching the game.

I have included some screenshots of the gameplay below. At this stage I am doing well with positioning - the next block to position is shown in the triangle below the frame and the colour behind indicates the colour of the following block making it possible to plan ahead the next positioning:

Unfortunately when I removed a block set on the right hand side I just had too much on the left and couldn't drop enough blocks quickly enough to stop the left side touching the ground - Game over:

There are also a number of awards available to be unlocked in the game as below:

As you can see I got the Bronze award but still a long way to go!

The gameplay is excellent and the game runs smoothly with no issues during my testing. The soothing background music was appropriate for this game and I didn't turn it off while playing. The game can also be paused if you need to do something else and return later!

Some suggestions I have for the developers is to break up the game into levels (perhaps level ends tied to score) with each level having increasing difficulty grades to give game players level progression and perhaps tied to some additional awards too. The initial game menu should probably have some text for the various icons but to be fair it is not that difficult to work out!

I found this game very challenging and very enjoyable to play. The stategy to correct block placement and the quick actions needed when removing a line of blocks makes the game challenging and keeps hooking me in to have another go. I am not very good yet but I keep trying!

When Balance Blox is released for Amiga I definitely recommend getting it!

Mini Game Review - Ami-Ingenious on X1000

I found another game released on AmigaOS4 recently called Ami-Ingenious. This game is an adaption of a German board game called Simply Ingenious.

There is a good wikipedia article here to get you up to speed on the board game details, rather than me repeating everything there on here!

The game is downloadable from www.os4depot.net and was written by mrdarek. His website containing this and other games is located at http://www.lineapolis.dizzy.pl/other.shtml

Being from Australia, I had never heard of this board game before today, and was intrigued to find out what it was like to play on my X1000 and wrote this Mini-review!

The game runs in a window on the AmigaOS4 Workbench screen. It would be nice to have a full screen option for this game in my opinion - I think it would suit it better. Having said that the main game itself looks quite professional even in a window and runs well with no issues encountered while writing this mini-review.

You get a group of 6 joined hex tiles (each turn) which have different symbols that can be matched to whatever is on the board to get points. You can rotate the joined tiles by hitting the spacebar when positioning on the board for the best points. The matched tiles are highlighted when positioning the tiles over the board so you know what score is possible. You can position one tile set on each turn, and the tiles available to you change for your next turn.

It has an unusual victory condition - the highest lowest score wins. So for each type of tile, when the board is full the lowest count of your tile types is taken. Whoever has the highest score then wins! It means the strategy is to keep a even number of scores across all the tile types, not just one or two types!

If you manage to match 18 tiles in one turn, you get a bonus turn! I managed this a few times but could never get a decent score on the bonus turns!

The game supports up to 3 players at one time. when you launch the game you get to choose the number of players, whether they are human or computer controlled and their names, as below:

The map can also be small or medium sized depending on whether you have 2 or 3 players.

First I show the gameplay when using 2 players, starting with the initial screen:

 

 The game is progressing fairly evenly at this stage:

Starting to lose badly now!

 Game over - I lost the game unfortunately!

Next I tried the three player mode which in my opinion was more fun to play. Initially the board looks like below, ready to start:

Now the game is well underway and I am already falling behind the other two players:

Next screen shows the game over as there are no more 2 tile spaces available on the board - I was beaten yet again!

There are some spot sound effects here and there during the game, but no music.

The game is donationware, with a PayPal donation of just 1.49 Euros to get a registered file from the author which removes the nag screens every couple of minutes when playing the game. I registered straight away - I believe this is a very small price to pay for an interesting Amiga game!

I have to admit I enjoyed playing this game on the X1000 - the strategy in the game really makes you think carefully for each move!

Mini Game Review - Tap Jewels for X1000!

It's great to be back blogging about AmigaOne X1000 related stuff again.

After turning on my X1000 today, I noticed that game developers AmiBoing has brought out a new game for AmigaOS4 called Tap Jewels.

As regular readers may know I previously reviewed another game from Amiboing called Swamp Defence here.

Tap Jewels is a puzzle game and is great for a quick game when you have a few free minutes to play a game. I found it is quite a lot of fun once you get into it!

This game runs in a window on the AmigaOS4 workbench screen. Unfortunately there is no option to run it full screen. I hope it is added in the future, though I should stress it isn't that important given the type of game it is.

As with all the AmiBoing games I am quite impressed with the quality of the graphics - they look great, bright and detailed.

The gameplay is essentially clicking on similar jewels that are next to each other, which then removes them from the board and new random jewels are added. Below is a screenshot of the gameplay in Survival mode:

There are special items that appear from time to time also, which when clicked clean out that item's row, column for example.

There are three gameplay modes - Puzzle Quest, Survival and Time Challenge. The game itself has a How To Play section which explains well how each mode works so you can hit the ground running, as shown below:

Below is a Puzzle Quest mode game in progress. not doing too well at this point:

I admit I found the Survival mode the most fun of the three, as I prefer the no time limit and the extra difficulty of selecting 3 or more jewels to prevent running out of life (and thus ending the game).

There are also awards than can be unlocked when you reach certain scores or achievements in the game. Unfortunately I wasn't good enough to get one yet! The awards are shown below:

My personal opinion is that the background music is quite repetitive, but fortunately there is an option to turn it off at the main menu and just have sound fx.

As with other AmiBoing games, Tap Jewels high score system is linked to your user id on AmiBoing's website to register high scores for all players around the world. You are prompted for your AmiBoing userid and password when launching Tap Jewels and you can also opt to play in offline mode where the scores are not uploaded. As you can see below I am not at the top of the high score list yet but I am working my way up as I get better!

In summary, for 8 Euro (around AUD$11) it was worth the money to buy Tap Jewels. There is a free demo of the Tap Jewels available on their website if you want to try it out first.

I am glad to see new games are still being released for the Amiga in 2012 and I encourage AmigaOS4 users to support AmiBoing by buying their games and encourage further games to be developed! For me personally I would love to see a good car racing game - any takers? :-)

Anyway, I will go back now and give Tap Jewels another go and see if I can beat that top score in Survival mode...

Life getting back on track!

Hi All,

I am very relieved to be able to say that the my wife's cancer has been successfully removed after some major surgery. She is now mostly recovered and recently returned to work!

So our lives are getting back to normal and I hope to add some new AmigaOne X1000 articles soon - as I type this I have fired up my X1000 for the first time since August so I have to catch up on all that has happened since then.

For those attending the Amiwest event this weekend, I hope you have a great time! Wish I could be there...

Sometimes life takes a unexpected turn.

Unfortunately I have some non-AmigaOne X1000 news which will have a hopefully temporary effect on this blog.

Personally we have had some bad news - my wife has been diagnosed with cancer and it has turned our world upside down recently.

I still enjoy my AmigaOne X1000 and I will continue this blog when I have time to do so, but as I hope you can appreciate, it will slow down now while I am totally focused on my wife's cancer surgery, treatments and supporting her recovery over the coming months.

Thanks for your patience, and I am really sorry in advance that the updates will slow down. I wanted you all to know why it is happening - it is not because of a lack of interest in the Amiga scene. I still enjoy it more than ever!

UADE Plugin for TuneNet on X1000

I am very excited today because there has finally been a release of a UADE (Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator) and a UADE TuneNet plugin!

It is called uade.lha and is available on OS4Depot.net. I believe UADE port and the TuneNet plugin were ported to X1000 by Fredrik Wikstrom. Thank you very much for this plugin - you made my day!

Up until now I have had to use a very old version of Delitracker on the X1000 to play Amiga custom modules. It needed a lot of configuration to get it working properly and still isn't perfect, as detailed in my previous blog entry here!

UADE is command line based player and I have been hopefully waiting for a TuneNet UADE plugin to make it much nicer to use! And now it is here!

It means that I can finally play most of the Amiga custom formats using TuneNet's UADE plugin now, as shown below!

It has an installer which installs UADE into the folder of your choice, and adds a UADE: assign to that location in your s:user-startup file (I picked Sys:utilities/UADE):

 It then also prompts if you want it to install the TuneNet plugin, which it will do for you as well when you supply the correct TuneNet folder location!

When this is done and you run TuneNet you can go into the settings menu option and select the Plugins tab to verify it is running, as shown below:

I have all the TuneNet plugins installed that are available on OS4Depot.net. It is well worth installing them to get TFMX, SID tune, OGG, FLAC, WMA and other audio format support within TuneNet.

After verifying the plugin for UADE in TuneNet, I then tried out quite a few module formats - a few still don't play, like SMUS and a few other strange ones (Eg. OLD DW format - newer DW files are ok), but now most of the Amiga custom modules can be played in TuneNet using the UADE plugin!

It plays well in the background and I haven't noticed any audio breakup issues that I noticed in the older version of UADE, so very good news!

I have not worked out how to play custom module subsongs manually in TuneNet yet - the next subsong options { and } in the menus don't work and there are no buttons to click for subsongs in the GUI.. It seems the plugin in TuneNet simply plays each subsong in sequence automatically.

So there is still some room for improvement with the UADE plugin but I am very happy that the plugin works and I can now play nearly all my various music formats in TuneNet on the X1000!

MIDI using Edirol USB and MIDI Keyboard on the X1000

Today I wanted to take a quick look at playing back MIDI music on real MIDI hardware on the X1000.

For those who don't know what MIDI is, this wikipedia entry will help get you up to speed!

Back in the early 1990's I used to use a MIDI Yamaha PSS-51 keyboard connected to a MIDI device using the parallel port of my Amiga 2000. I then used a MIDI sequencer called Sequencer One, a free program on an Amiga Format coverdisk. It worked really well and I enjoyed playing with it to make songs and playback midi songs using my Amiga!

Fast forward to 2010, and I bought a Edirol UM-1X USB MIDI device for my Macbook Pro to connect my original Yamaha PSS-51 Midi keyboard to a modern day sequencer called Reason 4 (now I use Reason 5).

With the recent purchase of the AmigaOne X1000, it got me thinking about whether I could set up the X1000 to use the UM-1X USB MIDI device and keyboard with a AmigaOS4 MIDI sequencer.


It turns out I could, as shown below!

To do this set up I needed to download some files from OS4Depot. They are:

CamD.lha             (camd.library ported to AmigaOS4)
CamDTools.lha    (some useful utilities for seeing what is happening real-time with MIDI)
CamDPlay.lha      (a MIDI file player that support the CAMD library)
USBMidi.lha        (USB support drivers for USB MIDI devices such as the Edirol UM-1X)
Horny-base.lha    (Base package for Horny - extract first)
Horny.lha             (Midi Sequencer - extract into the horny-base.lha extracted folder)

CamD.lha, USBMidi.lha should be extracted to RAM, as they both have an installer, as shown below:

These two installers are very simple and self explanatory - they work correctly without issues on the X1000.

The other files should be extracted where you want them - I chose sys:utilities/ to keep everything together. I put the CamDTools and CamDPlay in the same place to keep it neat.


There is a switch on the USB Edirol UM-1X MIDI device to disable the Advanced Driver. This needs to be disabled for the device to be recognised on the X1000.

When I connected the Edirol USB device to the X1000 it was picked up automatically with the correct name and can now be used!

Initially I used CAMDPlay and MidiActive utilities in the CamdTools folder. CamDPlay plays back MIDI files via the USB MIDI device to the MIDI keyboard. MidiActive shows what is being output to the MIDI device in real time. I used this tool to confirm the output was working as expected.


So my first test was playing back Axel-F via CamDPlay and it worked perfectly, as shown below (click to expand):

Having proven that it worked well, I moved on to extract the HornyOS4 Midi Sequencer archives. As mentioned earlier make sure that you have the two archives installed to the same place to see the icons correctly in the GUI. When I ran HornyOS4 I was quite surprised - it is very nice and modern and it reminds me a bit of Apple's Garageband software for the Mac. I have imported an Axel-F MIDI song into HornyOS4 as shown below (click to expand):

It occured to me while writing this that demonstrating MIDI playback on the X1000 with screenshots only is pretty pointless so I have taken a video of the playback using my X1000 running the HornyOS4 MIDI sequencer so you can watch it and hear it for yourself here!

I used a Panasonic Camera's video function for this recording so the audio quality is not as good as it could be if I had a line in, but hopefully you get the idea!

I was very pleased to have my Edirol USB and Yamaha MIDI keyboard setup working on the AmigaOne X1000 and look forward to playing around with it some more in the future - I know there are other AmigaOS MIDI sequencers to try out too!

Installing Radeon 9250 PCI for 3D Games on X1000

One of my big annoyances with the X1000 is that I can't use 3D hardware acceleration with the included Radeon HD graphics card under AmigaOS 4.

I knew this when I bought the X1000, and I also know it should be fixed in AmigaOS4.2, when it is eventually released for the X1000.

However, in the meantime a solution has been found to enable me and all X1000 owners to enjoy 3D hardware accelerated games right now!


I have implemented this solution successfully and wanted to share some more details with you and what to expect after getting it running!

The solution lies in a firmware update and Dual Display Guide published by A-Eon for registered X1000 owners on their website. The solution also requires buying two pieces of hardware, both inexpensive. I got mine very cheaply from Ebay, both brand new - total outlay less than AUD$50.

First, you need:

1. Radeon 9250 PCI Card (256MB) with DVI/VGA/TV-Out. (We only plan to use the DVI out):

The Radeon 9250 PCI card already has Warp3D and MiniGL support under AmigaOS4 for the older SAM440 and SAM460 hardware previous to the X1000.

We can install this card in the X1000 and have dual display support and also run the 3D hardware accelerated games on the 9250 card!

A-Eon has published a dual display guide for registered X1000 owners on their website a-eon.com (You need to be registered on the website, and to do this requires your X1000 serial number). I won't detail the process of setting up the dual display since it is clearly covered in the step-by-step guide from A-Eon. It also needs a firmware update to enable dual display support which also has a step-by-step guide. I can confirm this all works, as you will see below!

So all sounds great, right? nearly.

The issue I found is that because the X1000 already has it's two PCI slots filled with the network card and sound card, there are no free slots for the Radeon 9250 PCI card to go into without losing sound or network support!

Not good.

However, a solution is at hand. The X1000 has three PCI-e slots, all unused in the First Contact systems as delivered.

So the next piece of hardware you need is:


2. A PCI-e to PCI bridge card (this one is generic brand):

 This card allows us to connect a half-height PCI card to the PCI-e slot on the X1000. The bridge card has a molex power connection, which needs to be connected to one of the many spare molex power connectors inside the X1000 to function.



First, I attempted connecting the Radeon 9250 (as it is half-height) to the PCI-e bridge card but the card was too heavy and didn't sit well. (As shown below)

 
So I decided not to do this, and instead to relocate the network PCI card in the X1000 to use the bridge card, and then connect the 9250 graphics card to the PCI slot the network card was using. This solution for the PCI-e bridge card with PCI network card connected was much better, as shown below:

Before installing the Radeon 9250 PCI card or the PCI-e bridge card in the X1000, I had to make sure I was running the latest firmware and followed the configuration steps in the A-Eon Firmware upgrade guide.

Updating the firmware gives you a newer boot logo from the original logo, but obviously plenty of other behind the scenes changes - the most important addition for me is to support the dual display configuration that I am doing here.

Note: I found that you need to use a USB stick less than 2Gb for it to update the X1000 firmware correctly. I tried 4Gb and 8Gb USB sticks and they didn't work for me.

That done, I then copied the original Warp3D.library back to the libs: folder to replace the Wazp3D software library I was using, since I now have a display card with Warp3D hardware support available!

I then updated the Radeon HD 2D graphics drivers and applied the Dual display Monitor configuration set in AmigaOS4 as per A-Eon's guide.

So after all that work I now have the PCIGraphics and Radeon 9250 monitors configured as per the Dual Display guide, ready to go:

So next I powered off, opened the X1000 case and got to work! I chose to use the second PCI-e slot from the top of the motherboard, the one closest to the Xorro Slot. Below you can see shots of the PCI-e bridge card with PCI network card installed in the X1000 and the Radeon 9250 PCI card in the bottom PCI slot:

So now, ready for power up. I am using one Display, with DVI input from the 9250 and VGA input from the Radeon HD card (using a DVI to VGA converter).

On power on, the X1000 boot logo now appears on the display of the 9250 PCI card, but appears in blue instead of red, as below (the A-Eon guide mentions this as an effect on the 9250 card, but not a big problem in my opinion):

The Workbench boots up as normal, now using the 9250 PCI card as the primary display instead of the Radeon HD card. Both cards are active in the Workbench and I can choose to use either one, as shown below in the Screenmode preferences:

I found while checking this that the 9250 does have some horizontal graphic glitches that flash up on the screen from time to time (not permanent), especially when moving windows around the screen. A-Eon mentioned this in the Dual Display guide also.

I minimised this issue on the X1000 by changing the GUI preferences in the Prefs folder to use the 3D acceleration in the effects section, which couldn't be enabled on the Radeon HD card. This is shown below:

The network card worked perfectly, having moved slots. No reconfiguration was needed and I could access the internet and other computers as normal.

So now, finally, I am ready to try out some 3D hardware accelerated games on the X1000 for the first time! Previously I couldn't run these games at all, or they run very slowly on the Wazp3D software library.

So here are some screenshots of some games I tested using the 9250 card on the X1000 and they work perfectly!

Epiar

X-Moto

 

SuperTuxKart

I should mention that when I tested the preview version of Flare today on the 9250 it was a lot slower than on the Radeon HD card. Fortunately with the dual display setup I can change to using the HD card to run this game.

I also tried out F1 Spirit which worked - previously I couldn't play the game as nothing came up when the main game screen at the track started...

I tested Elude's We Come In Peace demo which now runs perfectly using the 9250 - previously on the HD card it is was quite slow.

I plan to do some more games testing and report on how they run on the X1000 using the 9250 PCI card like Quake I/II/III and other 3D games too! I ran out of time for today though!


I look forward to AmigaOS 4.2 and having this same 3D hardware support on the Radeon HD card as well...In the meantime I can now play 3D hardware accelerated games on the X1000 and I am very happy about it!