My new years resolution. Amiga only for as long as I can

[Cammy]

gizmo, before you go hacking away at a perfectly good A1200, try and see if you can avoid or fix the problem in software. A palette with 0,0,0 black and 255,255,255 white will cause an A1200 to have all sorts of graphical corruption and glitches in some modes, like DBLPAL and HighGFX. If you experience the same corruption in PAL or NTSC modes it may be a hardware problem though. Also, do you have AmiCDFS installed? If you don't have a CD Filesystem, Poseidon won't be able to access a CD/DVD drive that's connected even if it detects it.

Try these:

http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/BitmapShades
http://aminet.net/package/disk/cdrom/amicdfs240

runequester, I use my A1200 online every single day so if you need any advice join one of the Amiga IRC channels and have a look for me. For those websites that IBrowse can't view, there's always iCab under ShapeShifter. I'm going to try getting this all set up nicely today and see if it's a viable option for web browsing on a 030/AGA machine.

[Cammy]

I've got iCab running on my A1200/030 but having trouble connecting to the net through vlink. I get a network error any time I try connecting to a website, but I haven't got or tried any extra internet software yet, so if I can't work this out soon I'll try Nutscrape or something.

[Cammy]

I love learning how to set up new things, and then share my findings with others wanting to do the same thing. I plan on writing a bunch of tutorials using what I've learned, and ultimately put them into a PDF that can be downloaded and printed out as a guidebuook, as well as hosting the pages online in HTML format on a website for anyone to browse through. Some day, huh!

For now, I have just got a fresh, fully updated install of MacOS 7.6.1 on my A1200, ready to start again going online (previously I tried some butchered 7.5.5 install from someone but couldn't connect to anything). Since all these files are available from Apple's website, but it takes hours to install it all and update it and then update it again and then update it once more, as well as sorting through and disabling the extension that was causing it to crash on booting (AppleShare) and updating that too, I'll provide the fully installed, but unaltered (apart from disabling some unnecessary extensions that can be enabled any time later) ShapeShifter hardfile to anyone else wanting to try running Mac software and games on their Amiga without having to go through all the trouble of setting it up. It's legal since Apple provides all this software freely, you only have to provide your own Macintosh ROM file and download ShapeShifter from Aminet and you're ready to go.

This is just one little project I'm working on, all the other things are much more AmigaOS-based. But yeah, I think the fact that you can run MacOS just as well as it runs on a real Mac, but the Mac can't run AmigaOS the same way shows which was the better computer.

[Cammy]

I don't think it's a good idea to start on something new when we could just contribute to what already exists here - http://wiki.abime.net/

[Cammy]

Netsurf requires a Retargetable Graphics Card, only in 16bit mode, which means it won't run in AGA.

I have been using iCab to browse some CSS sites on my 030 A1200, and with CSS enabled it's certainly slow at transforming the pages after they have loaded, CSS seems to be a very bulky addition to HTML designed for a world with much faster CPUs.

Still, it's pretty good that Mac OS and games run so well on the A1200 through ShapeShifter. I have talked to a few people about my experiences, and many people seem to only remember trying ShapeShifter with either the built-in video drivers (extremely slow) or other older ones from Aminet which aren't much faster. When I first installed it, I saw how slow it was... moving the mouse pointer around on screen was like a slideshow! But then I installed a replacement for PrepareEmul and a much newer video driver (both written by Thomas) and WOW! I have what feels like a full speed 030 Mac. Sure it won't play games as smooth as it would if you had a real Chunky mode (like with a RTG card or Grafitti) but it's actually usable!

Does anyone remember the game Links on the Amiga? It's a golf game that runs in 4,096 colours on classic Amigas. Well Links Pro is a newer and nicer looking version of the game, but it never came out for Amigas. But it plays like a dream on my 030 A1200 in 640x480 in 256 colours!

Sorry for rambling, but I don't think I'll EVER run out of stuff to play and muck around with on my Amigas. If anyone else wants to try, I'm very willing to help out since I've just gone through all of the setting up myself.

[Cammy]

Yeah, that's right it's MMU-based, just like the new experimental video driver for Basilisk in the news item. I tried the SavageAGA demo driver, which is limited to 512x384 (which is actually quite a nice mode if you have an Indivision), but it still wasn't as fast as this new driver.

I have been playing Warcraft II all day on my AGA 030/28 with 32MB RAM (16 for MacOS, the rest for AmigaOS) and it's perfectly playable! Scrolling around the map isn't super smooth, but you wouldn't expect it to be. Playing the game and watching the little dudes move around the map is just as fast as it should be.