Category Archives: Software

It’s a software project

vamos runs Amiga CLI programs on my Mac

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I did some classic m68k Amiga code development that uses the SAS C compiler recently (see plip2slip). Everything was set up in a P-UAE-based AmigaOS 3.9 environment and worked fairly confortable. While switching between TextMate on my Mac I used for editing the code and the CLI window in P-UAE I had a thought: “It would be fairly cool to have something like Wine for AmigaOS… Then I’d simply run the SAS C compiler Amiga binary on my Mac directly…”

That was the beginning of my newes project: vamos – The Virtual AMiga OS emulator.

Read on to learn more about the birth of vamos and its first major milestone: run the SAS C compiler in my new “Developer’s Diary” series 😉

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SilverSurfer patched for Amiga 500

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I just purchased a new HW goodie for my classic Amiga 500. A clockport adapter and a SilverSurfer serial card that allows high baudrates (e.g. 115200 baud) on this machine without generating too much CPU load.

HW installation was fairly easy, but with the software the trouble began… The supplied drivers does not run on an Amiga 500 but only on an A1200 🙁 Being a real retro hacker I had a look at the driver binary, disassembled it and found out that the code could be easily patched to run on an A500, too.

Now it works like a charm even on the 680000 machines. Here try yourself: silversurfer104-a500.zip

If you want to know how this was done… then read on… Be warned: technical details ahead 😉

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vbcc 0.9b: An Amiga Cross Compiler for Mac OS X

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On my neverending quest to have a powerful cross compiler for m68k Classic Amiga (i.e. OS <= 3.x) for my Mac I had a closer look on the fresh new release of Volker Barthelmann’s C Compiler.

In this post I’ll describe how to install this nice piece of code on your machine in a few easy steps!
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Updated OpenCBM and Nibtools Portfiles

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If you are using OpenCBM or Nibtools with the MacPort Portfiles I offer here on my site then you can now find an update of both Portfiles on the following pages:

What has changed? Until now I had Portfiles that pick the source from a Snapshot tarball I have stored on my site. This was the release version that made it to the public in January 2011. Now I added Portfiles that directly build the HEAD revision of the associated Source Repositories. With these ports you are always up to date,but they are development snapshots that might not work sometimes…You have been warned ;)

DICE 3.15 revisited on Mac

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DICE (Matt Dillon’s C Compiler Environment) was one of the first C compiler I came in touch with back in the days on my A500. Recently,while scanning the Net for a m68k Amiga Cross Compiler solution for my Mac I stumbled across the source code release of DICE by Matt himself…

Here is the story of getting this old pearl running on my Mac…
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What I’ve done lately…

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So many month passed by and no update here… I wasn’t lazy (at least not all the time 😉 and so I’ll give you a short summary what retro projects I’ve been involved with lately:

  • DiskFreeezerX – My pet project that aims to build a standalone disk capture device… Should come very handy for partys or meeting people that don’t want to leave their precious disks… Take the device with you, slip in a disk, press a button and some time later you have a shiny exact clone of the disk on your SD card… That’s the goal!
    The current state here is: The device is built and functional as a prototype and as a first Rev A PCB… See my shiny new dfx hardware page for all the glory details and lots of photos…
  • MacVICE – Not much own contribs done here lately. But always following the flow of new features and busy building current snapshots. And before I forget it: With MagerValp’s help I finally fixed the dreaded “black-screen” display problem when the fine blended display is enabled… So enjoy temporal filtering with no more black outs!
  • PUAE – I am really happy that GnoStiC is now bringing together the current WinUAE and the already dated E-UAE code base to create finally a greate Amiga emualator for all *nix, Linux and Mac users… I really appreciate that and help by submitting small patches. I’ve created my own little fork/clone of the repository at GitHub: You can check this out if you want to have a look what I am patching lately: PUAE/cnvogelg
  • amitools – Another little crazy project started by me. Its a python library that allows you to read and parse Amiga’s Hunk-based binary format. With all the memory on the good ol’ times fading away and with UAE refreshing my old desire for the Amiga I wrote this lib to refresh and to store the old knowledge in readable python code. Currently, there is not much docs there. But a real hacker will find his/her way… I wrote a small sample that scans your harddrive for amiga files (even in adf, lha containers) and tries to parse the exe with the lib… The lib got a new push with the introduction of the AROS m68k Port (yay!!).. This port uses a decent gcc compiler to generate m68k-elf binaries. So I added ELF parsing to amitools. The only thing still missing is now the converter elf to hunk and back again in python (similar to elf2hunk)…

That’s it! See you soon with more updates…

Nibtools on Mac added and OpenCBM on Mac updated

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Now with ZoomFloppy device hitting the streets and a growing number of Mac users that own this device its about time to give them decent software packages to work with. I already started the OpenCBM on Mac page quite some time ago when I started to help porting the code for Macs. I reworked the full page and simplified a lot of things. Here it is the shiny new OpenCBM on Mac page with special attention for easy setup of ZoomFloppy users!

The OpenCBM tools are really useful for day-to-day normal disk transfers. But when it comes to copy-protected disks the only tool there is Nibtools from C64Preservation. These tools use the OpenCBM libraries and I soon got them to compile on my machine. The only thing missing there was writing a Portfile and setting up a page similar to the OpenCBM on Mac one. Here we go: I added a shiny new Portfile for Nibtools and described its installation on the Nibtools on Mac page.

Enjoy installing all the nice tools on your Mac and have lots of fun capturing your old treasures to disk images…

dtv2ser 0.4 released!

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LTNS! Yes, indeed… it took quite a while to finish this new version, but its really worth the wait!

dtv2ser 0.4 now supports all new features of dtvtrans 1.0 including init after reset, BASIC loading, saving and RUN. Furthermore, full flash support was added!

If you are impatient then just head over to the dtv2ser homepage and download your copy.

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dtv2ser 0.3 released

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Finally dtv2ser 0.3 is ready for prime time!

Grab your copy here: dtv2ser Homepage

The new version introduces a fully automatic bootstrap command that brings an unmodified DTV (with only a DB9 joystick connector attached) into dtvtrans mode in a few minutes without manual intervention. A normal mode types in TLR’s boot.txt basic booter on the virtual keyboard and fetches mlboot.prg and dtvtrans.prg afterwards. A new improved fast bootstrap method does some pre POKEs to speed up typing and boots in half the time. Additionally, a screen code compiler allows to type in mlboot.prg directly to screen space and run it there without the need to execute boot.txt first.

Additionally, the JoyStream is introduced to describe and execute sequences of joystick input via a special string language syntax. AutoType allows to type in arbitrary files or strings via the virtual keyboard of DTV’s basic prompt. A Screen Code compiler encodes an assembler program and directly types in the corresponding character codes on the screen to run it there.

Have fun!