Amiga Retro Brisbane December 2019 meeting

Happy New Year 2020 to all. I hope you had a great Xmas and New Years!

I got to visit the Amiga Retro Brisbane group meeting on Dec 30, 2019 while I was on holiday in Brisbane over the new year period.

It was great to meet everyone there, enjoy the Amiga systems on display and I was invited to do a presentation about NG Amiga systems too.

I include a few pictures from the meeting here - please visit the Amiga Retro Brisbane Group page for more photos from this and other Amiga events they host!

Amiberry running on a PS One mini:

Amiga CD32 with SX-1 expansion and playstation controller converter:

Specially made Amiga 500 PCB from scratch - Red Keg Technologies! A working Amiga 500 using the PCB was also at the meeting! Awesome work:

The working Amiga 500 PCB running:

Presentation of the Red Keg A500 board - so much work done and very impressive result.

Busy meeting and much Amiga chatter, just how I like it:

Amiga 2000, a little unhappy but got some TLC during the meeting:

Lemmings on Amiga 1200 using the new black Amiga 1200 case -  I did a full build using the new case last year here.

 Custom arcade cabinet built locally with a Raspberry Pi and emulation station installed, running Amiga emulation with Blood Money:

AmiKit XE running Amiga AGA demos like TBL's awesome demos under emulation on my Surface Go at the meeting:

If you get a chance to attend a Amiga Retro Brisbane event, please do so - it was a great night!

Also, I visited the new AmigaRetro.com Australian Amiga forum website, started by the Amiga Retro Brisbane group members.

I am glad to be part of a new forum focused on Amiga in Australia. If you are in Australia (or even elsewhere) please sign up today!

Skill Grid on AGA Amiga

Today I wanted to take a look at the recently released game called Skill Grid by Retream, available for Classic Amiga AGA systems.

The game is available for purchase from RGCD. I have bought many games for C64 cartridge from RGCD and they focus on producing wonderful packaging for their games.

In 2019 they released Powerglove and Tigerclaw for Classic Amiga, covered briefly in my blog here. For Skill Grid they once again did a great boxed product:

Included is a CD32 bootable CD, floppy disk, instructions, badges, stickers and more! Very nice.

I quickly fired up my Amiga 4000 to try it out. Being an AGA game, you need a Amiga 1200, 4000 or CD32 to play this game:

Instructions for the game are included with the software on the CD:

The tricky part of this game is the positive and negative bonuses which affect your game in different ways. They constantly appear during play and you have to collect as many of the "positive" ones as you can while avoiding the negative ones! The manual below outlines the various bonuses to collect and their purpose.

I found with Retream games you do need to read the manual as they implement some interesting concepts in their games that you need to understand better in order to score well in the game (not just survive!)

The CD includes a HD install version you can just copy to the hard disk and launch. Here is the Skill Grid Title screen on my Amiga 4000:

The game moves fast as it is vertical scrolling shoot em up - but the positive and negative bonuses are a key part of the game play, and separate it from the average shooter that provides occasional power upgrades for your craft. You will likely die very quickly in this game, and often, as I did!

As you start it is quiet enough...

It starts getting busier though as the positive and negative bonuses start filling the screen, along with enemies to shoot/avoid.

I am afraid I am not very good at this game so I couldn't explore it as far as I was hoping to, but I keep on trying. Yep. Died again.

I also tested Skill Grid on my repaired Amiga CD32, and it works very well on it. I think the game is better suited to the CD32 controller to be honest!

Skill Grid is an interesting concept, and surprisingly difficult game to make progress in! That said my shoot em up skills are not what they used to be in 2019! YMMV.

The graphics and sound are good and music is ok too.

Definitely give it go!

Reshoot-R on Classic Amiga

First of all, I am sorry for the long delays between posts.

My wife and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary this year and decided to do the trip of a lifetime to Europe. It was my first time to go to Europe and we saved for ages to be able to go. We had a wonderful time and we were away just over a month in May and early June. This is why the blog (and everything else) took a back seat for a bit.

Among many things we did, I finally got to go to the Monaco F1 Grand Prix in 2019, something I have dreamed to do since I was very young. FYI in case you didn't already know, I am a huge F1 fan, having watched every race since 1988 - it's a bit off topic sorry but here's one picture:

Now that I am back home, I am catching up on the Amiga news and there is a bit to digest!

One thing worth noting quickly though is that this month is now the 7th year I have been doing this blog! I started it back in June 2012 covering the AmigaOne X1000 and expanded it to cover NextGen and Classic Amigas. Amigas are one of my very favourite things to muck around with when not working or watching f1 races :-)

It is amazing that I am still doing the blog, but there is still so much interesting stuff happening in the Amiga world in 2019 - how could I stop now?

I hope you have enjoyed this blog, however long you may have been following it. It is still fun for me to do, and I will continue it as long as it is :-)

Today I wanted to take a quick look at the recently released game called Reshoot-R, which is a shoot em up sequel to the original Reshoot game I looked at on this blog here.

Given the time I have been away, I did a big order a while back for Amiga Future, Reshoot-R and Trap Runner. They all arrived in two packages this week and I was very keen to unwrap!

I have fallen behind a bit with Amiga Future magazines while saving for our trip so I had bought a few issues to catch up with some left over money from our trip!

Since this post is focused on Reshoot-R, it is only fair to check out that first! The cover looks great!

I bought the Signature Edition, which include not only the game on CD (bootable on CD32), it includes an audio CD of the music from the game and a signed postcard from the author Richard Lowenstein! This version costs EUR47.95 which is a bit steep in my view, but it does include the audio cd too.

You can opt for the much cheaper download only version which costs EUR29.95, or the Pure version for EUR34.95 which includes the download version, game CD, instruction manual but not the audio CD.

A closer look at the included CD's, etc inside the box:

 Reshoot-R requires AGA to run, so it needs an Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 or Amiga CD32 to run.

Here it is about to be loaded on my Amiga 4000:

However I did have problems with it on my Amiga 4000. It installed ok, but on launch it would crash and reboot every time. I tried the installer on the CD, and extracted the archive version on the CD too but no luck running it. Maybe it doesn't like the 060 or AmigaOS 3.9? I tried it on my A4000t as well and hit the same issue. I should look into that some more as it is weird.

Anyway, being impatient I copied it to my Amiga 1200/030 running AmigaOS 3.1 via CF card, and I am pleased to say it worked perfectly on that:

My initial feedback on this new version is that Reshoot-R is considerably better than the original Reshoot release. I think the graphics look better and the game dynamics are better too.

You can choose to play the game without music and/or sound fx from the main screen.

The high score table and ability to upload the scores to an internet high score table is a nice touch too.
 

Like most shoot em ups, Reshoot-R is basically shoot anything that moves.

The power ups you can collect along the way are essential as the game gets harder quite quickly. Being able to move quicker, extra weaponry, etc are well implemented.

The included manual explains the game controls using CD32 controller or joystick and keyboard, and also the interesting story of the game development - very interesting read!

The star of the show for me is the music though - I really enjoyed it and it suits the game very well.

I think this game lends itself well to two player, which I was surprised was not included - I hope a later version will include a two player option!

Graphically the game looks good, thanks to the work of Kevin Saunders.

Screenshots don't do the game many favours as it doesn't show the graphics at it's best, but they are good, and the action and frame rate is smooth at all times. The speed of the game is good, and the difficulty level ramps up how you would expect it to.

I think having some additional lives and level stage codes to avoid starting from the beginning again each time would help the game a bit. It made it hard for me to show screenshots from the later sections of the game as I was not good enough and kept having to start again to get to the parts to take a picture!

I borrowed these last few images from the APC&TCP webshop as I couldn't get that far into the game to do them myself - sorry!

Having said that I guess I have to accept I am not as good at shoot em ups as I used to be back in the days of Xenon 1/2, Silkworm, Menace, Blood Money, SWIV, R-type 1/2, Katakis, Hybris, Battle Squadron, UN Squadron, Atomic Robokid, Project X, XP8, T-Zero and many many more too. Sigh, rattling these off makes me realise how many cool shoot em ups there have been on Classic Amiga.

It is great to see a modern shoot em up on Amiga in 2019 and I recommend picking up Reshoot-R! You can buy it from APC&TCP website here

New Computer Rooms in 2019

Hi all, and welcome to my first blog post for 2019. I hope you all had a great Xmas and New Year.

As mentioned in my last blog post in late December 2018, I have been very busy over Xmas and New Year moving house!

This of course meant packing up all my computers including my beloved Amiga systems (and everything else of course!) and setting up from scratch in a new home.

Over the past long weekend I finally made some progress on the new computer rooms in the new place. I am very happy to say I have more than one computer room now! :-)

For those who have been through this (packing up an over-full computer room and setting up again), you would know it is a serious amount of work! You have my respect!

Here is the last photo I took of my old computer room in December 2018 prior to packing it all up:

Looking back at it now I am so amazed I managed to fit everything into this room.

Needing to keep a computer running while packing made for some tricky packing but I managed it..

Previously this Ikea cupboard was filled with software and the top of it covered in screens and computers I couldn't set up in the room due to lack of space.

After we moved house and I unpacked the rest of the house, I could then start work on building my new computer rooms in the new house. One of the key criteria of the new place is that it needed more space for my computers, and I certainly have that now!

I now have three rooms to work with, each one is the same size as the original room I was using in the old house for everything!

One room is for the modern systems, one exclusively for Classic Amiga systems, and the other for "everything else" including the AmigaOne NG systems. I may move the Amiga NG systems into the modern room depending on space requirements - we'll see.

To start with I worked on building the modern room (not pictured). Following that, the Classic Amiga room was next on the list and of most interest for this blog!

Some problems presented themselves quickly, like a lack of desks, lack of network connectivity between rooms, lack of power boards and lack of speakers...when they were in one room I needed much less equipment.

So I got some ethernet over power devices to connect up the three rooms, and connect them to the network and internet in the modern room. I also bought a bunch of speakers and desks...

Anyway, I got to work assembling my old desks and disk drawers which I plan to use in the Amiga room.

I even found my old dining table during the move and decided to re-use it in the Amiga room to save money on desks since I had to spend quite a bit upfront on this stuff (not to mention the house)!

I added my Amiga30 poster to stamp this as an Amiga room, and loaded up my drawers filled with thousands of Amiga floppy disks.

Since my Amiga 1000 had little love in the old place (no room to set it up), I decided to get it running first, along with the Amiga 2000!

Here is the Amiga 2000 up and running again. Something is wrong with the mouse port though. I can click left and right mouse buttons but the mouse does not move on screen. I tried three different working mice and no go.

I can use the manual Amiga mouse workaround on the Workbench screen in the meantime. You can do this by holding down the left Amiga key and cursor keys to move it around and LeftAlt+Left Amiga to left click, etc.

Now is not the time to fix it, so I just got the mod music going on the A2000 and moved on to the next task!

Here is the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 2000 running side by side. I added the ram expansions and two external floppy drives to the Amiga 1000.

Interesting thing I found while doing this is that the Amiga 1000 wouldn't boot any disks with the external disk drives connected together. If I connected each drive one at a time to the Amiga 1000 it worked fine! Strange! 

Anyway, I worked out that one of the external floppy drives caused the problem when it was the first external drive. When I changed it so it was the last drive, everything worked fine! Weird, as the Commodore 1010 has no toggle switch for on/off, etc. Anyway, it works now so I am happy with that!

I promptly got distracted playing demos on the Amiga 1000 for a bit - which is good as I wanted a small break:

Next up is unpacking and building the Amiga 500 and A4000T:

The Amiga 500 has been my focus of late with plenty of blog posts recently on my work on it, with the upgrades and AmigaOS 3.1.4 installation covered, amongst others.

Here it is, the expanded Amiga 500 up and running and working perfectly.

I left some space on the right for the Amiga 1200/Amiga 600. I don't have enough screens for them all right now, so I plan to connected the A1200 via DVI and the A500 via VGA to the two inputs on the screen and switch them as needed in the meantime.

I was planning on doing the Amiga 4000T next but got a bit distracted setting up the CDTV and Amiga 1200 instead:

 One of the reasons for the distraction was the arrival of the recently released boxed Amiga games Powerglove reloaded and Tiger Claw from RGCD for the Amiga 500, CDTV and CD32!

I previously used the ADF version on the gotek when I looked at this game last year on the blog, while waiting for the boxed one to turn up. Unfortunately for me the floppy disk version I got has a read/write error on it :-(

I unpacked and setup the CDTV so I could try out the CD version, which works great:

Tiger Claw also has a CDTV/CD32 version included, which I fired up on the CDTV.

Part of the reason of the positioning of the CDTV and CD32 on the disk drawer is because the CDTV and CD32 discs are in the top left drawer just below it! Easy to access:

The CD32 was working ok on initial test, but when I opened the lid after testing below, the bracket snapped! :-(

Despite this, things are starting to fill up nicely in the Amiga room:

I was going to show a shot from the Amiga 1200 but it appears to have a problem since the last time I used it. It powers on (lights showing) but nothing else. No booting and no insert disk screen. Holding the mouse buttons down on boot yields nothing..I'll have to look at it later.

Next I got to work on the Amiga 4000T setup, which uses a dual display, one for the RTG Voodoo3 PCI card, and one for the native output using an Indivision AGA output:

The system is working, but still has a problem with the data partition (SFS) which decided last year to become unreadable! I need to fix this too! Classic Amigas - everytime you move them you get problems..well, at least for me. YMMV!

Anyway, I moved on to setup the Amiga 4000D. This system has long been in storage as I had no room to set it up. It is nice to finally be able to set it up to use it again:

I am pleased to report it survived storage and the move just fine and works perfectly.

I also hooked up the Amiga 2000, Amiga 4000T and Amiga 4000D to the internet using a network switch I connected in the room to the power over ethernet device. I took the opportunity to download some new releases from Aminet while there:

With that done, the Amiga room is mostly built (in it's initial form anyway!) Phew! Really glad to have it done at last - some more completed photos:

My biggest happiness with the new room is finally being able to use all the Amiga systems at any time, without having to pack up a system, rewire and unpack another one.

I realise that many other Amiga people have much bigger and more complete collections than I do, but I am very happy with the systems I have. I am not hunting for any more. I just wanted to be able to use all the ones I have today!

With the Amiga room now done, I turned my attention to the "everything else" room, which includes the NG AmigaOne systems.

I used all of my previous desks in the modern room and Amiga room, so I had to buy new desks for the other room. I went cheap for these desks, as I don't need fancy desks - just functional. I found these cheapies from Officeworks for under $100 each. I got three to start, but will need more!

As I said, these desks are not fancy. But I have to stick to a budget for these:

Here are the three desks installed. I will add another one later on, but I need to unpack the systems first to make room for it!

Initially I set up the Commodore 64, FM Towns and Commodore Plus/4. The Plus/4 is another victim of lack of space in the old place, rarely seeing use. Now it will be permanently set up! :-)

I also use a switchbox to switch the Intellivision FPGA, Sega Megadrive FPGA, C64, Plus/4 and PC Engine (not yet installed in the photo below) to the screen:

Unfortunately I only have one video cable for the C64 so I have to swap it with the Plus/4 when I want to use it. I will try to find another video cable for the Plus 4 later on:

Next up is the AmigaOne X1000. I also started the setup of the IBM Pentium 200MMX PC - as it uses PS/2 my plan to is to use the PS/2 KVM switchbox I was using in the old place to switch between the Minimig, Chameleon64 and IBM PC on it's screen to save some space and also because all of them need PS/2 keyboard and mice to operate and I only have one set of those!

It is great to have the AmigaOne X1000 up and running.

This X1000 setup (like the old place) is using a 5 port HDMI switchbox and audio switcher so I can connect HDMI devices with audio out (like SNES Mini, NES Mini and Switch) to one audio switch and screen, and use the other position for the X1000 and other NG Amigas.

Here is the setup with the SNES Mini and NES Mini installed. I also connected the X1000 via a small network switch to the ethernet over power that goes to the modern room. I added the Nintendo Switch to this as well later on (not shown in photo).

There is plenty of work still to be done but I wanted to get a blog post out in January so you could see what I have been up to - I have been so busy!

Hopefully things will start to settle down in February as I finish the rooms and can actually do some new stuff with my Amiga systems! Thanks for your patience!