I bought a second hand Amiga 600!

Today I will look to cover a new project I have decided to undertake, to create an upgraded Amiga 600.

I have just purchased this Amiga 600 above, second hand from Ebay. I haven't received it yet, but it has been shipped and I am looking forward to getting it soon. I have included some photos of the Amiga 600 that were originally on the Ebay listing to keep me going until it arrives!

These days I generally focus more on Next Generation Amiga systems like AmigaOS4 and MorphOS. I particularly spend a lot of time playing around with the currently available AmigaOne X1000 system running the latest AmigaOS4.1.6 on this very blog.


Classic Amigas are Amiga's made and sold by Commodore from 1985 to 1994, and the short period from 1995-1997 when Classic Amiga 1200 and A4000 equipment was made again and sold by Escom and QuickPak.

About me - I have been a Classic Amiga user since 1988. I set up and participated as a musician and demo designer for Australian demoscene group "The Experience", releasing a number of AGA demos in the late 1990's for the Amiga 1200 with 030 accelerator.

I have owned (at one stage or another) most of the Classic Amigas released by Commodore, including:

Amiga 500, 600, 1200, CD32
Amiga 1000, 2000HD, 3000D, 4000D, 4000T

I never did get an Amiga CDTV, Amiga 3000UX or Amiga 3000T though.

On the Classic Amiga front, I currently own an Amiga CD32, Amiga 2000HD (bought new in 1991), Amiga A4000D and my favourite is my rare Amiga A4000T.

I also have a Minimig  FPGA computer running Amiga core firmware, which provides a modern hardware reimplementation of the Amiga 500. (not software emulated)

Anyway, back to the Amiga 600!

The Amiga 600 was probably the most unpopular Amiga released by Commodore in the early 1990's, to replace the very popular Amiga 500 for home users. Primarily this unpopular status was because it was no faster than the computer it replaced, it was more expensive, and used a cut down keyboard which was an issue for some keys that needed the keypad. It even used a different expansion slot that was incompatible with Amiga 500 expansions. Some more information about the Amiga 600 is on Wikipedia here if you want to read up some more about it.

It was quickly replaced in 1993 by the significantly upgraded and much faster Amiga 1200, which was much more popular. Unfortunately not popular enough to save Commodore from bankruptcy...

However, I still quite like the Amiga 600, over 20 years later! It is much lighter and smaller than an Amiga 500 or Amiga 1200, uses Surface Mounted technology on the motherboard to keep the system and failure rate as small as possible (for the time). It has a PCMCIA slot on the left side, supports 2.5" IDE hard disks internally, 3.5" floppy drive on the right side, and has AV and RF out to connect to a TV.

From the photo above it clearly has some yellowing on the keys that will need Retr0bright to fix. Never used the stuff before, but once I get things the way I want them to be, I may well use it!

I should say that I have upgraded Amiga 600's before, and I have a number of parts ready to install on it - Indivision A630 Accelerator, Indivision A604n Memory expansion with clockports, Indivision ECS Scan doubler, Subway USB controller, HxC Floppy SD Floppy drive emulator, CF Card with adapter , Kickstart 1.3/3.1 switcher, AmigaOS3.1/3.9 (haven't decided which OS yet) and more.

My original inspiration for this project is the work done by Michael Gibs upgrading his Amiga 600, including using a HxC floppy emulator on YouTube:

I was also inspired by the work done by Christian Krenner on his amiga 600 upgrade here.

I hope you will enjoy following the work I do via this blog as I hopefully get this computer successfully upgraded!

The Ebay seller did mention the drive casing on the right needs some attention. The picture the seller took below shows this reasonably well.

Having a bit of experience playing with Amiga 600 cases, I believe that the case clip on that side has been snapped off internally. It is very easy to do when removing the case, which says to me that someone has already done some work inside this Amiga in the past. You can see the floppy drive, mouse port and joystick port in the shot above.

The Amiga 600 rear view above shows the Serial, Parallel, Disk drive ports from the left hand side, than the RCA Audio ports, RGB video port, AV out port, RF out port and Power connector port.

The Amiga 600 normally uses a very small external power supply which will not be enough to power the upgrades I will put into inside it during this project. I have previously bought a beefier power supply from AmigaKit to support the expected additional power requirements.

Overall it looks in fair condition - I expect to have to clean out the inside of the case and scrub everything when I get it.

The last Amiga 600 I had purchased second hand was full of cat hairs inside! I was amazed it worked at all! It took me a very long time to clean that out, and I did upgrade the Amiga 600 successfully, but ultimately that Amiga 600 failed - most likely the capacitors which I cannot repair or replace (I lack the skills needed to de-solder and re-solder).

So I then removed all the useful parts, threw it in the bin (I wish now I kept the keyboard which was perfect white) and waited for another Amiga 600 to come along - and that day of arrival should be very soon! Exciting times!

Amazing Voxel Bird Saga BETA on X1000

Today I want to take a look at the recently released Amazing Voxel Bird Saga BETA for AmigaOS4 on the AmigaOne X1000.

You can download Amazing Voxel Bird Saga BETA from Cherry Darling's website here. It is free to download.

The Cherry Darling developers were also responsible for the 2014 game release Ace of Hearts, which I took a look at here.

I should stress that this game only works if you have the dual graphic card setup installed on your AmigaOne X1000 using a Radeon 9250. You cannot use the Wazp3D software emulation to run it. If you do not have this Dual card setup which enables Warp3D, you cannot run this game.  I covered how to set this dual graphics card setup in my previous blog entry here.

Amazing Voxel Bird Saga is an enhanced Flappy Bird clone (the famous iPhone game if you don't know what Flappy Bird is).

The game uses an interesting concept of a Voxel 3D landscape and some gameplay tweaks to extend the original Flappy Bird game concept and make the game quite fun and playable.

Once downloaded and extracted where you want it, you get a folder like this:

The Readme.txt explains this game is a BETA and runs a bit slowly on AmigaOS4 due to the graphics drivers.

Also note that we need to turn on a fix for 16 bit screen mode as I run a 16bit screen mode on the Radeon 9250 screen for better performance. This fix is applied via an option on the AmigaOS4 icon to launch the game - just remove the brackets around the options as shown below and click on Save:

Once the game launches, it launches in a window, which can be changed to full screen in the Options area on the Main game title screen:

Here is the Options menu where you can adjust Full screen/window mode, music/sound volume, difficulty level and sign into Cherry Darlings online highscore table to post your high scores online!

The music is a wonderful retro Amiga style tune, which I quite enjoyed listening to and works well with the game.

Upon starting the game itself, you are reminded of any achievements you have earned (and there are many achievements to unlock), and a hand reminding you to click on your mouse to start. And just keep clicking and clicking...

Basically you click periodically to keep the bird in flight, otherwise the bird will fall and crash into the ground. Unlike Flappy Bird you have a health bar, which means you sustain damage when you hit the ground or other objects, and it is game over when your health bar disappears.

You fly through coins for more score...you need to fly through the centre of the coins to collect the coin.

Game over in this game comes quickly, and often. The frustration of keeping the bird going for longer to get a better score is what keeps you coming back for another go:

Here is the high score table - you can switch between local and online high score, and use click and hold with scrolling to scroll through the list:

Here is some more in game screenshots:

   

If you fly through the flowers in the landscape you get some health back, and hitting bombs destroys a section of terrain and provides points for the coins distorted in the blast:

Here are the achievements you can unlock during the game - I still have a few to go!

I have uploaded a YouTube video to show the gameplay a bit better, showing both window mode and full screen. I did my best ever score in the full screen mode part of the video! Sorry but the camera angle is a bit crooked and I didn't realise until after I did it - I have very little chance of repeating that good run again so it remains like this. You may also need to turn the volume up a bit as I recorded the video on an iPhone:

I have to say that Amazing Voxel Bird Saga is a great game. Very addictive, graphics and sound are great (although there are some drawing errors at the bottom of the screen occasionally), and the game play can't be faulted. The online high score facility is also welcome.

The extra parts of the gameplay above the standard Flappy Bird clone fare makes this game a lot more engaging and fun to play.

This is a highly recommended game (even in BETA form) for X1000 owners, especially considering it is free! But please ensure you have the dual graphics set up with Radeon 9250 first, in order to be able to play it.

Odyssey 1.23 on X1000

Today I want to take a look at the recently released Odyssey 1.23 web browser for AmigaOS4.1.6 on the X1000.

For the past few weeks I have been dealing with some family illness issues in Japan, and also handling a large Exchange Server 2010 migration which I am pleased to say both have gone well. Unfortunately it has not left any time for using my X1000, but I have had some time on it this week to try out some new stuff!

Odyssey 1.23 is the latest version of the popular web browser for AmigaOS4, originally written for MorphOS and ported by Kas1e to AmigaOS4. It is available for download as usual on os4depot.net 

I have been a heavy user of the previous MUI-OWB web browser on the X1000 and have been looking forward to this latest release.

Once you download the 30MB+ archive and extract it to the folder of your choice (SYS:Internet in my case), you get the folder below:

Make sure to run the Download_Fonts program to download the correct fonts for good web site page rendering in Odyssey. The Odyssey.readme covers all the new features in detail and tips on setting up the web browser as below:

An important system requirement for this version of Odyssey is that you must have AmigaOS4.1 Update 6 and the latest version of MUI4 installed. You can download MUI4 via AmiUpdate as well if you haven't already done it.

The readme also discusses YouTube support, and how things work in the web browser itself, including some limitations, like not being able to use the fullscreen mode of YouTube video playback on AmigaOS4 at this time.

The implementation of HTML5 support, ability to playback YouTube and Vimeo videos within the web browser are very welcome new features, for AmigaOS4 users like myself.

The improved HTML5 support now even means I can create this very blog entry using Odyssey on my X1000:

I am really glad to be doing this blog posting on the X1000 again. As the Timberwolf last Release Candidate release doesn't work for me on the X1000, I had been forced to use my Macbook Pro to compose these blog entries for a while, but now I can use the X1000 again. :-)

When first launching the Odyssey web browser it needs to initialise the fonts, which takes a few minutes, but after that launches very quickly indeed on the X1000:

 

Here is the initial Odyssey web browser on first launch:

 



Google search bar is on the right hand side, the URL field on the left. Bookmark support and URL autocompletion is also present.

Eager to try it out, I tried out a few Amiga related websites to start with, which reminds me that we still have a dedicated Amiga community in 2014:

AmigaWorld.net: (Click to expand)

Amigans.net: (Click to expand)

Amiga-news.de: (Click to expand)

Obligement.free.fr: (Click to expand)

PPA.pl: (click to expand)



Amigax1000.blogspot.com.au: (click to expand)



Adelaidenow.com.au: (click to expand)

As Odyssey supports tabbed browsing, you can open a new tab to browse to another website, similar to most modern web browsers.

A new feature is the recently used website preview (called Top Sites) when opening a new tab. This allows a preview of  and quick connection to commonly visited websites. You can also modify it's behaviour within this view as shown below (click to expand). Very nice feature:



So now we move on to the elephant in the room - YouTube and video playback within the web browser. As people who follow my blog will know, AmigaOS4 has long had issues with playback of YouTube and other video content on the web that uses Adobe flash to playback. This is because Adobe Flash has not been released on AmigaOS4.

Indeed, I spent quite a bit of time back in 2012 looking at how to fix YouTube playback under AmigaOS4 here, using the older MUI-OWB web browser. So, have things improved? Yes, I am pleased to say!

A big part of the improvement comes from the more widespread adoption of HTML5 in common websites, predominantly to support popular iphone and ipads which also can't playback flash video content. This requirement has allowed AmigaOS4 to catch up through the adoption of HTML5 standards in it's web browsers.

With this latest version of Odyssey, the previous YouTube fix scripts are now included with the web browser (rather than a separate download), and the HTML5 support (together with spoofing functionality) allows us to finally playback YouTube and other website video content within the Odyssey web browser web page, as the original website developer intended it to be seen.

For YouTube, by default the view uses flash content as below:

To fix this, you also need to first visit youtube.com/html5 to enable HTML5 support in Odyssey as below - click on Request the HTML5 player:

 

The website then updates as below:

You will note that WebM and a few other media formats are shown as not supported in the browser.

You can adjust the Settings in Odyssey (available in th Top Menu) to enable some of these formats to be supported as below in the Media section of Settings. By default it appears as below:

 

 

I ticked the all the media support options as below (it is a good idea to set your Downloads folder location under Downloads section while in here), and then click on Save:

 

 

If I now revisit the YouTube.com/html5 website it now shows the WebM support is enabled in Odyssey:

 

 

From the screenshot above it may look like you are missing some things you need. Not so - I have also shown the same screenshots below from Youtube.com/html5 with Internet Explorer 9 and the latest FireFox 28.0 on Windows 7 PC for comparison - they support the same formats as Odyssey does excepting that Internet Explorer doesn't support WebM:

 

FireFox 28.0: (click to expand)

 

Internet Explorer 9: (click to expand)



Having done these configuration steps for Odyssey, it is recommended (but not necessary) to go to the top menu in Odyssey and select to Spoof as iPad for YouTube and Vimeo for the best website video support as it forces these websites to render in a way most compatible with AmigaOS4 for playback of media content.

 

This setting can be changed at any time, so you can use the default setting when not using video based websites.

 





I have included some example screenshots of this video use in action from YouTube, Vimeo and AdelaideNow news websites in Odyssey.


Adelaidenow.com.au: (video playback - click to expand)

Vimeo.com: (Using 720p and 360p with Spoof as iPad - click to expand)

Note that using 720p HD playback on Vimeo is not recommended and results in choppy video playback for me. I turned it off and playback was okay after that:

YouTube.com: (Using 360p and spoof as iPad - click to expand)

Special note here for Mike Brantley: Love your various Amiga's set up in this video mate - much respect and looks great! :-)

Video Playback can be choppy at times, but audio stays in sync and is on the whole, acceptable.

Note that for videos not available in HTML5 in YouTube (there are a few like this), you can click on the view Option 18 below the video in YouTube (as covered in detail in my original blog entry here) to stream the video externally in mplayer.

It is fantastic to have video support working well in a web browser on AmigaOS4. My sincere gratitude goes to Kas1e and the original MorphOS development work to make this happen for NG Amiga users!

I look forward to even more features and improvements in future Odyssey versions (Full screen Youtube playback, plugin support, etc)

Odyssey is a great web browser under AmigaOS4.1.6 and is highly recommended to use for all X1000 owners. It is now my main web browser on the X1000!