I’ve been working on my personal 4000 for some time and sadly had to sell it off to cover some unexpected bills shortly after finished it. It’s with a new owner that loves it as much as I did making it.
So what do I do now? Well I’m making myself a new one. I’ve nearly got the new board completed and just need to solder a few more parts. The one missing thing was a case. I had most of one but it’s missing the front face and other plastic parts. What’s a guy to do? Well, if you know me you know I don’t give up easily. I had access to a large format commercial resin 3D printer. Below are the results from having the replacement parts professionally printed. I can’t wait to show all of you the completed project when I’m done now. Stay tuned!
It’s not ever easy saying goodbye to a fellow member in our community and especially one like Taylor. Please take the time to celebrate and remember him through this great replay Amiga Bill did on Twitch. Taylor was part of the Pintz & Amiga show and will be greatly missed.
It’s been a long wait but the first of the two sets of key caps I ordered many years ago from the kickstarter campaign have arrived. As reported other places I can confirm my set of US layout keys is missing the period. I’m told a replacement key will be sent out eventually, but no timeline on that has been announced. They otherwise look pretty great and I’m pleased with them.
Another major new release of the gold standard in Amiga emulation is now available for download. Go grab it from here: https://www.winuae.net/
Major update
68000 based unexpanded (with optional Slow or Fast RAM expansion) configurations are now 100% cycle-accurate.
Big thanks to ross for writing test programs that required perfect cycle accuracy. Lots of expected and unexpected hardware features found and implemented.
Featute updates that got delayed but will be implemented in 5.0
OCS and ECS Denise mid screen resolution changes are not pixel perfect, correct chip model specific bit pattern is not emulated yet. AGA is pixel perfect.
Not all blitter line draw width != 2 (invalid line draw configuration, normally not used) conditions are 100% accurate.
Disk status/interrupt timing is not fully confirmed yet.
New hardware emulation features and update
68000 emulation is finally fully cycle accurate, last missing part, interrupt level change detection timing, is now cycle accurate.
Custom chipset interrupt timing is now cycle accurate.
CIA emulation is now fully cycle accurate. Timers were accurate previously but now also interrupt timing, TOD counting, CPU/E-clock sync, and more, including undocumented side-effects are cycle accurate.
Serial port internal timing, interrupt timing, including SERDATR status bits are now cycle accurate (I used serial port interrupts as a timer in my cputester real 68000 interrupt timing tests)
Audio interrupt timing is now cycle accurate (Was almost fully accurate previously).
Blitter timing is now cycle accurate (previously startup behavior and interrupt timing was not fully accurate).
Blitter line mode with invalid settings (for example width not 2, octant and line direction mismatch etc) is now almost accurately emulated. Some conditions are not fully correct.
Copper is now cycle accurate, previously some special cases were not handled correctly.
More undocumented chipset features implemented.
A1000 Denise bug emulated: sprites end horizontally 1 lores pixel later than bitplane horizontal window end. Currently enabled when A1000 Agnus is selected.
OCS/ECS vs AGA EHB on/off mid screen change different behavior emulated.
Emulated chipset mode display is blanked if programmed mode is active but has invalid configuration (for example too short or too long sync pulses or missing syncs, genlock sync enabled without genlock, etc).
Optional display mode change resync black screen delay.
Programmed custom chipset modes again use also blanking timing to position the display in addition to vsync and hsync (Most real world SVGA monitors do the same).
Max allowed programmed mode non-interlaced vertical line count is now 800 (increased from 592), special 700+ line programmed modes are possible and compatible with real SVGA monitors.
Refresh cycles conflicting with bitplane DMA is now accurately emulated, including all display and audio related glitches it can cause.
Optional Chip RAM and Slow RAM power up pattern emulation, enabled by default.
Color palette is now filled with pseudo-random contents at power up (was all black previously).
Monitor type selection. Composite sync or H/V sync. ECS Agnus/AGA programmed display modes can generate different C-Sync and H/V sync signals.
New other features and updates
RTG (uaegfx) Picasso96 v3.0+ mixed mode screen draggging is enabled by default.
RTG (uaegfx) blitter emulation now supports previously unsupported less common blitter operations.
RTG (uaegfx and emulated boards) automatic integer scaling support.
On the fly FloppyBridge drive change to normal or back now triggers automatic disk change condition.
Harddrive panel Full drive/RDB mode is now normal checbox. Hopefully it is less confusing than button that didn’t look like a button.
Larger default GUI size and slightly larger font if Windows desktop is large enough (at least 1600*1024).
CD audio is now always mixed with Paula audio. Separate CD audio output support removed.
Some American Laser Games didn’t have ROM descrambling support, also added missing ROM variants.
Added American Laser Games Quickstart support.
Added NVRAM path to Paths panel. Arcade/CD32/CDTV hardware NVRAM files default to this path.
Keyboard reset change, reset state is kept until at least one key is released.
CTRL+C in console log/debug window does not anymore close WinUAE. CTRL+C in newer Windows versions can be used as a Copy operation.
Changed CTRL+F12 fullscreen/windowed switch: If already switched from full-window to window. Next CTRL+F12 will return back to full-window, not fullscreen.
Optional interlace mode filter profile added.
DirectDraw mode was replaced with GDI mode. GDI mode does not support exclusive fullscreen but supports basic scaling modes and uaegfx hardware cursor that DirectDraw mode did not support.
Palette mode screenshot support. If enabled and screen has <= 256 colors, palette mode screenshot is created. It also attempts to preserve first 32 color entries if possible. RTC is automatically enabled if chipset extra= and system has fast ram, slow ram or chip ram expansion.
Save MSM6242B RTC model control registers to RTC file if they are modified. Previously only RF5C01A (Used in big box Amigas) control registers (and NVRAM) was saved.
If Quickstart ROM based Arcade hardware config (Arcadia or ALG) is selected, NVRAM file name is automatically set to ROM name. Genlock video file path is also set if ALG ROM is selected. Config files are not affected.
ROM file list sorting changed, added grouping, sort by group priority first (KS ROMs, extended KS ROMs, freezer ROMs etc..), then alphabetically.
Sometimes old graphics was temporarily visible in RTG modes if RTG had visible black borders (depends on scaling mode) and screen was switched and new screen had larger size/resolution.
Added “Slow” flag to RAM panel. If set, selected memory bank has Chip RAM timing but is not Chip RAM capable. Advanced chipset panel “C00000 is Fast RAM” removed, it is not needed anymore.
4.9.x bugs fixed
Sprite to playfield and playfield to playfield collisions were unreliable.
RTG (uaegfx) overlay was not drawn. 32-bit Windows only.
Magic mouse mode without virtual mouse driver installed: mouse position was incorrect in RTG modes and it also ignored scaling modes.
If hardware emulated RTG board VRAM was immediately (no gap in address space) after any RAM/ROM region and JIT direct was enabled: first 4096 bytes (host CPU page size) of VRAM was not fully JIT direct compatible and any direct read or write to first 4096 bytes would not access VRAM correctly, causing unexpected graphics glitches.
Quickstart panel floppy bootblock check used current track of drive (not track 0). Broken when FloppyBridge support was added.
Hires resolution and hires BPLCON1 bit set (or shres and shres BPLCON1 bit): single pixel horizontal offset may have appeared in right side of screen. AGA and non-subpixel mode only.
CD32/CDTV Quickstart mode “remembered” previous DF0: setting and didn’t disable it by default (even if Quickstart panel showed it as disabled).
CD32/CDTV Quickstart panel DF0: was not possible to select/enable.
Z2 RAM configuration was unreliable.
Older bugs fixed
CHD CD image CD audio timing fix.
Direct3D11 with custom shaders leaked memory.
Directory filesystem softlinks fixed.
68060 without FPU or disabled FPU and executing FPU instruction that uses -(An) or (An)+ addressing mode: D7 was modified when exception stack frame was created.
Reading from non-existing custom register always returned 0xFFFF instead of data that previous cycle’s possible DMA access transferred.
Higher 68000/010 integer clock multipliers (4x+) in CE mode: chipset access timing was not accurate.
Second 1M extended ROM bank is now internally split to two 512k banks. Non-aligned bank start and size caused problems in some configs.
Hardware emulated RTG boards that have physically swapped red and blue output (Spectrum, Piccolo, Piccolo SD64) had wrong colors in 24/32-bit modes.
Piccolo Z3 and Piccolo SD64 Z3 had wrong autoconfig board logical size (which crashed the driver).
CD audio was not resumed if WinUAE was unminimized and minimize was configured to pause emulation.
Debugging related updates and fixes
Ultra extreme overscan mode. Shows complete full raster including blanking regions. Horizontal and vertical blanking disabled. COLOR0 changes are always visible.
DMA debugger shows CIA accesses (including cycles lost due to E-Clock sync) and Chip RAM RAS/CAS addressing values.
DMA debugger shows CPU memory access type (instruction fetch or data access). Interrupt level and interrupt level change detection are included.
DMA debugger shows CPU opcodes in basic form (“NOP”, “MOVE” etc), vertically. Which can look a bit weird…
Added CPU STOP state information to DMA debugger (| = STOP idle cycle, + = STOP idle cycle and higher IPL detected = STOP ending soon)
Visual DMA debugger shows conflicting cycles as blinking red pixels.
Horizontal and vertical position are now included in debugger history output (H/HH)
Added OR, AND and XOR operators to debugger calculator (|, &, ^).
sp command parsed attached sprites incorrectly.
It was not possible to enter debugger anymore if CPU was stuck in stopped state after entering and exiting the debugger once.
Tracing STOP instruction now works differently, each single step executes one internal STOP “round”.
Memwatch break point that crossed 64k “bank” didn’t map last 64k “bank” if it was only partially needed.
Self modifying code (smc) debugger feature now clears detected modifications if 68020+ instruction cache is flushed.
DMA debugger (both console and visual) better support for variable/toggling horizontal and vertical line counts.
Sorry for a longer break since the last update. I’m happy to let you know that everything is going very well. I’ve been busy with organizational stuff, like signing shipping contracts. Unfortunately the shipment will not start before Christmas and I apologize for the delay.
Tank Mouse is now being manufactured and will be ready mid January. The delay was caused by technical problems regarding color of the beige version. The color was not exactly as I wanted and it couldn’t be achieved using the selected production method, so we had to do more tests to nail the color. But it’s been solved and this is the last phase of mouse production.
I’m also very happy to let you know that the USB-to-DB9 adapter is in production as well. Lotharek informed me that the firmware already supports touch scrolling on Amiga, and the adapter will also work with Atari and Commodore 64. He is still working on the firmware, adding mode selection for example, but hardware is being manufactured in the meantime.
Last but not least, AmigaBill was presenting Tank Mouse in his live-stream and he’s preparing a YouTube video about it. So if you can’t wait for your Tank Mouse you might get a sneak peek at: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1670688820
I will be gone again and expect to return on the 18th of November. This trip I wont have the ability to reply to any emails for messages. Thanks for the continued support. All boards that have been completed recently are going out Monday the 31st. Everyone with work in should have been updated with information on your packages if they are going out in this shipment.
Hello and welcome to another long over due update! One day I will get better and start keeping things more up to date. So much has been happening in my full time job I can hardly take the time to catch a breath though!
So I just got called out on a no notice assignment for a couple weeks. I will be in Japan and out of contact for most of it. I will return on or about October 12th though. I hope to get all caught up and get the couple things I have here done and back to you all then. Thanks for understanding and we will see you all soon!!
Hello everyone and thanks for being here! Its time again I felt to post an update as to what’s been going on. Its been a difficult year and things are not where I would like them to be.
Things in my personal life have been a challenge. While I love the Amiga and love helping as many of you as I can, life just tends to get in the way more times than not it seems. With my family life being strained, full time job stress, health and the parts shortages from the pandemic I just cant keep up with it all. As a result I have decided to drastically cut back on services being offered. Things here will be completed as best as they can and if a repair looks like it is something I cant complete it will be returned, at my expense. I dont like to charge for things I take in and cant resolve as many of you know.
Fear not though! I am not going anywhere and we have plenty of people here in the US now that have stepped up and offer some great services! Many of them are members of the Discord Server we host, and its become a valuable place to get things resolved, have some gun and learn a lot! If you havent visited the server, I recommend you check it out! Here is the most current invite as of this post: https://discord.gg/xBrgrFneqt
Thanks for being understanding and please feel free to reach out any time! I will continue to post updates as things become more clear and as they change.
I have contacted the original manufacturer of the case screws for the A3000 and arranged an order of 50 sets. There will be custom made to order and are brand new sets of 4 screws and the matching washers. If you are interested in a set please email me using the contact form here on the site and let me know your name, location and number of sets you would like. I expect them to be here in a few weeks.
1 set of 4 screws will be $8 plus shipping.
UPDATE: The sets are sold out! I will arrange for a larger order after these come in next time. I had to raise the price to $8 a set due to the higher quote then expected when shipping to me is added.
UPDATE #2: The screw sets have been paid for by myself and shipped to me on May 31st. Once they arrive and I sort them into sets I will contact those who reserved them for payment and shipping information.
UPDATE #3: Screws are in!!! Sorting when I can and will be in touch soon.
The final assembly of the Dreamcast is complete! Check out part 2 of my video below! Be sure to like and subscribe! Thanks to all who help me get this done and out.
Acill Classics 