Software Library: Amiga | Hacker News Reader

Software Library: Amiga

archive.org

243 pointsohjeez65 comments

Greetings, Hackernews. Jason Scott, guy adding these to the collection right now. Great work by the team (they'll all get credited in the Internet Archive announcement when it goes up).

All together now:

* Still adding items (we're at 10,380) * AWS instances are screenshotting these to find issues * A notable amount of issues * Yes, we're using AROS kickstarter ROMs. * The emulator (Scripted Amiga Emulator) is excellent and will be improved over time * Enjoy what works * Have fun * Viva Amiga

You guys & gals do such good work over there @ archive.org and don't get nearly enough credit. Thank you to the entire team, I have to imagine that it's one hell of an effort to do all the stuff that goes on at The Internet Archive. Please, please keep on doing what you do!

Thanks Jason. Amiga Emulation is still a PITA, and hopefully this makes it a little bit easier to play the many classic games that the Amiga played host to. Or just use Ultimate SoundTracker :-D.

Jason: you and your crew are under-appreciated heroes of our age.

Thanks for all the work and hopefully this will help with improving AROS to become a full replacement for the original kickstart ROMs.

I'm so thankful, you're awesome. Just one question, how could this be legal? This is undoubtedly copyrighted software.

I too would like to see the question asked by unicornporn answered: how could this be legal?

Why isn't the FBI raiding them like it did with Megaupload?

Even if it's technically a non-profit, it's still profiting from this piracy in terms of advertising, which in turn is meant to attract funding, which pays for the officers and other employees and their extravagant office buildings, right? There seems to be a lot of money involved!

The Internet Archive benefits from an exemption concerning the circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, i.e. section 1201(a)(1). But how can it be covered by the immunity granted under the Safe Harbor provision of section 512(g) of the DMCA, when this is not content submitted by an unrelated user, nor isn't the Internet Archive unaware of the fact that it doesn't own the copyrights on these materials?

The Internet Archive seems to be out of control in the hands of narcissistic egomaniacs like Jason Scott, who doesn't miss an opportunity to boast about his antisocial behavior. Just look at his Twitter feed of the past few days: snaps a photo while driving by a bloody car accident, returns from a wedding overseas and takes a photo of the no-photography sign at the customs office...

This is piracy plain and simple, on both the copyright and the trademark front, on a massive scale. Shame on the Internet Archive for doing what any script kiddie could do from their bedroom (i.e. put an existing TOSEC dump online). With their resources, they should have found a legal way of doing it! We need changes to the law to protect and make accessible true abandonware, not irresponsible actions like these, which are hurting future chances of the Internet Archive and others to foster such changes, and benefit from them.

Shame on you!

This is very cool.

The first thing I did was to click on Frontier: Elite II, seeing as how I grew up with it on the Amiga and now I play Elite: Dangerous.

To be emulating the Amiga in a browser is rather impressive, although it naturally does have a few drawbacks. Some comments/observations...

The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you).

The actual emulation within the browser was slow on my machine at least (An ageing AMD Phenom II X4, and using Google Chrome) - the frame rate is noticeably slower than the Real Deal running on original metal [again, it's an emulation therefore understandable]).

The sound is very very close - although if you scroll up and down the page a bit you notice the sound slows down (again understandable - you're probably stealing execution cycles from the emulator when doing this).

The full screen icon did nothing.

The sound icon did nothing except bring up a message window telling me it only did something if the emulator was running - even when the emulator is running.

Verdict: An impressive feat to be running old Amiga games in a browser, but at least on my system speed improvements, feedback on what is happening whilst it sets up the emulation environment and game, and having the full-screen and sound icons work properly, is desirable.

Try to play Frontier: Elite II on http://www.jor1k.com. When it finished booting just open the menu by typing "help" and then choose Elite in the graphic games menu. Change to 30 frames per second.

This way it runs smooth on my system. The version in jor1k ran through several transformation steps. It uses the Atari version of Frontier written in Assembler. Then Tom Morton wrote a 68k to C converter for this game (https://tom.noflag.org.uk/glfrontier.html). This was compiled to OpenRISC machine code which is then emulated by jor1k.

The fact that this runs faster then the Amiga emulator shows, that they have still have a lot of work to do.

I just tried it.

The frame rate was still sub-optimal.

It may be time to upgrade my motherboard and CPU - the Phenom II X4 is really starting to show its age these days :)

The games needs about 130 MIPS in the emulation. If it runs at that speed you have to adjust the frame rate in the dropdown menu. But the main problem is the keyboard emulation. Frontier needs the shift key to slowdown the spaceship. And there is no way in JavaScript to get the keydown and keyup events for this key.

Hmm, looks like I am wrong. The shift key is recognized by JavaScript.

> The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you).

This would be an interesting area of research. Once we fire up the emulator, it starts drawing to its screen buffer (which is an HTML5 canvas). What you see is presumably exactly what you would see on the original machine (sadly, I never had an Amiga myself). You see the workbench, possibly some messages in it from the software, then the software takes over the screen and starts drawing pretty pictures. In between, a lot of these things seem to blank the screen, turning it black or grey, or filling it with noise.

Providing meaningful and accurate feedback on top of that would be a fun application of computer vision, but it could turn out to be a difficult problem in the general case.

Thanks for mentioning the fullscreen button, I hadn't noticed that it was broken; I'll see if I can fix it. Muting is a horror show, because MAME and DosBox don't yet support it. SAE does though, so we'll work on it next.

One option for better feedback is to add indicators for floppy and hard drive activity, like the leds on the original Amigas.

Some emulators even emulate the sound of the physical fdd :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc

Indeed, a disk activity indicator is actually an option now with SAE. It'll probably take a bit longer to do correctly, as it will touch more of the page than just the canvas.

If you can get the current instruction pointer of the emulated CPU and compare it to a system memory map (or just previous runs of the same ROM and software), you could probably create a progress bar. No computer vision required ;).

Hmm. Such a progress bar would be really cool, but it would jump back and forth a lot.

Also, I have secret plans to use the progress-bar metaphor as an interface for accessing past game states. Imagine if you started playing Pacman, and the progress bar started filling up. Then you click in the middle of the filled-in bar to jump back to that place in time...

I imagine building a table of, say, 100 IP values that are only ever visited in order. That is, IP table 5 will never be seen after IP table 6 has been seen. But even that isn't necessary. You could just say, "the first time I see this IP value, increment to 37%", so that the progress bar never moves backward.

The progress-bar-as-rewind idea is very cool, too.

Nah, you are overthinking it.

You can record how many frames or cycles it takes for the first thing to appear on the screen.

Since the emulator is deterministic and you are always starting from the same state, it will always take the exact same amount of emulated time (for each version of the emulator). So your progress bar is simply a measure of emulated time.

Or take it a step further, and store a savestate from the moment the first thing appears on the screen, and the user's emulation will start from there instead.

Save states would solve a lot of problems :)

I wonder what happens when it asks you to type in a word from the manual.

Many games are wrongly configured and do not seem to run. Games usually run best with KS1.3 on an expanded A500 (1MB), while later games with AGA, need to run on KS3.0 and an A1200 with 2MB+. it seems that many are configured to run on a KS2.04 A500.

BTW, they use the Scripted Amiga Emulator: http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/

Note: reach out to me... would really like to help with improving this.

This might be because they're using the AROS Kickstart (because it's free) and not the original Commodore Kickstart. (because you can still buy it and so it cannot be distributed)

LOL, I saw this news last night and thought I read "AMOS" instead of "AROS"... so I thought the game I checked was running a crackintro (written in AMOS?!?). Anyways, you are right; this is actually a great usecase and opportunity to improve AROS as kickstart.

#jsmess on EFnet IRC if you'd like to talk with the developers

+ all the screenshots appear to be captured in an automated fashion. I browsed ~20 tiutles and havent found one correct screenshot, everything shows emulator window starting a game instead of actual game.

The script captures multiple screenshots over a few minutes, discards duplicates, then sets the one that has the largest filesize as the default.

This doesn't always result in the nicest screenshot being the default :) Some manual intervention is generally required, and that hasn't happened yet.

We have a small handful of alternate configurations, such as an A1200, ready to hand. However, we still have to go through and find out which items need to use them; it's hard to automate that. Screenshotting is the first step in that process, since it's then pretty easy to see which ones have problems.

I would recommend looking at the emulator platforms, specifically RetroPie and CoinOPs - if you find the right Distro, those seem to come with a lot of pre-built UAE configs you could adapt.

Amazing to see "No Man's Land" on there! That really made my day, such a classic! Two-player action/shooter, with player-vs-player on a single screen. Great detailed graphics and funky music.

Too bad it doesn't seem to run, it's stuck in what seems like an infinite loop of crashing and rebooting.

That's kind of embarassing, as I did in fact write the code for this game, back in 1990. Bad bad 15-year old me who couldn't stay compatible with an emulator written in a scripting language running in a web browser (none of which existed, basically, and certainly not to me, back then) and using a new non-Commodore ROM implementation. Heh. My mind is blown.

So I'm trying to play music from "Turrican" because the Chris Huelsbeck sound is awesome:

https://archive.org/details/Turrican_Musicdisk_19xx_Andromed...

How does that work? I don't get any sound. I don't know what to do. I can select items in the upper menu by click, but I can't get anything else done.

Clicking on the audio button (which shows disabled audio) shows a popup "This button only works once the emulation is running" - well, it is running.

"Fullscreen view" does not do anything either by the way.

Same - seems to be a bug.

The same disk image crashes after the first logo on http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/ although this might be because of the config I used.

Does anyone want to recommend more things to include in the Showcase? See https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga_showcase. We're looking for items with good screenshots and which are fairly straight-forward to use once they load up.

Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior can't go wrong with that one.

Also, International Karate+

And finally, Dungeon Master, just because. :)

Is there any plan related to an Atari ST/TT/Falcon section on archive.org? I know the Atari is probably considered sort of a "second class citizen" compared to the Amiga, but it had a very important role in the development of modern music software.

I think Jason plans on having _every_ system up there (all the things!) but they're just working through them one at a time...

Cubase in an Atari ST emulator works great with MIDI devices. I wonder if in the future there could be integration in these web emulators with the Web MIDI API.

One of the real achievements here is that the IA is streamlining the process from going from a new MAME/MESS release to in-browser emulation very quickly. Along the way they're helping provide input to improve browser audio, transpilation, and archiving and making available the efforts of millions of man-years of creative work.

IA?

Internet Archive.

This is amazing...

It shows how far PCs have come that we can emulate a machine that I once lusted after in a browser.

On a personal note, can anyone remember what the name is of an Amiga game that I once saw at a store?

I just remember that there were objects arranged I think in a grid, and there were laser beams, and you could rotate small mirrors on the grid to reflect the beams onto objects, I guess to destroy them. I only played it for a couple of minutes but I'd like to see it again.

I remember being amazed at the Amiga's graphics (I had a C64), and I'd love to see how dated they are now.

Deflektor?

Oh my god, that's it! Thank you!

"No results matched your criteria."

aaaand its gone

One of my all-time favourite games: Mind Walker. Haven't really played anything else like it since:

https://archive.org/details/Mind_Walker_1986_Commodore

I have just learnt that the Amiga version of Chuckie Egg was woeful.

However - amazing library - thanks!

Nice, but almost all the ones we used to play don't seem to be there.

Oh, hah, "Maze Man"... What a great time software was back then!

Ahh... The sweet taste of the Amiga without the hell of UAE4All. Yes, it really is that bad. No, really.

Now, if we could get saves (prob. not happening), I could run Ultimate SoundTracker in the browser...

Very cool, but the selection is pretty arbitrary with not really any of the classics in there. Probably licensing issues?

The selection is basically all the Amiga software that IA already happens to have, and that we know about, and that we've gotten around to adding to the Amiga category. Most of them come ultimately from TOSEC.

Also cool that you have demoscene releases in the selection, but as far as I can tell it's mostly very early demopacks.

Some of the most popular releases that people will remember can be found here if you want to add them:

http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?order=thumbup&platform%5B%...

These are the OCS/ECS chipset demos listed on Pouet sorted by popularity. Most of them have ADF files for the download link so should be easy to add.

No Cosmic Bouncer :/ That was by far my favorite Amiga game.

Good to see Hardball, Kikstart II, and Zany Golf on there though.

I believe they're still adding new things to the archive all weekend. It's just taking time to package up the images, get a thumbnail and put it into the archive.

Would love to see this for the C64.

Like this? http://vice.janicek.co/c64/

Or this? https://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64

Or this? http://www.vizzed.com/play-c64

There's dozens of them.

No, an archive.org version. With decent emulator + software library + nice interface.

Soon. Or soonish, at any rate. Join us in #jsmess on EFNet if you'd like to talk about it.

no newtek video toaster?

That wouldn't make sense without the hardware (where hardware includes the Amiga itself; a modern PC doesn't have composite video output suitable for combining with other composite sources).

Maybe an HTML5 video element could be used as the emulated other source

well duh.. emulate the software.. i just want to push buttons and drag the fader..

Video Toaster was a hardware expansion card. The Specific software likely wouldn't work without it, since it went through the video input/output. It doesn't have lightwave3d either, but does seem to have some model packs for it.

That would be an amazing thing to emulate. We still have to work on printer support for DosBox though.

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