Amiga Addict magazine - Cut, Copy, Paint! - Issue 06 June 2021

BRITAIN'S BEST-SELLING (ACTIVE!) MAGAZINE FOR AMIGA USERS

ISSUE No. 6 JUNE 2021 £4.99 / $6.50 / €5.50

- Interviews - Readers' Letters - Hardware - Tutorials - User Groups

CUT, COPY, PAINT! Deluxe Paint - the history, pioneers & Amiga masterpieces...

PRE-INSTALLED:

Big Box Amigas, AmiKit XE, new game Inviyya reviewed & Amiga game movie licences

YOUR MONTHLY SOURCE OF AMIGA NEWS, INTERVIEWS & SOFTWARE FUN FOR 68K | PPC | OS4 | MORPHOS & MORE!

June 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

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AMIGA ADDICT

June 2021

MEET THE ADDICTS We give the acronym "AA" a whole new addictive meaning...

Greetings fellow Amigans, and welcome to our art special!

The team temporarily grew this month at AA Towers, as we welcomed Neave into our gang of Amiga misfits. Neave is new to the Amiga and a trainee graphic designer! She offered to help out with our main feature and a couple of other articles, so we'd like to give her a big thank you. Neave, we hope you stick with the Amiga and wish you all the very best with your future design career.

The Amiga certainly helped to give me an advantage over those dull and grey PC users when I was younger! Even back in high school, most of my homework was completed on an Amiga 1200. I would proudly print my work and take it into school; just because I could. It didn't matter if the project was supposed to be handwritten, or even oil painted... out came the Amiga! The teachers must have thought I was cheating - or worse - trying to show off! But actually, I just wanted to use my Amiga to create. It was just so damn versatile. After university, my first "proper" job was working for a professional magazine - and guess what got me that job?! At my interview, I pulled out my own DIY Amiga-made fanzine. I'd made the front cover in Deluxe Paint, I'd written the text in Wordworth - I'd even laid out all the pages on the Amiga too, before finally printing it all on my new Amiga-compatible laser printer. PostScript anyone?

Now I realise that times have changed - the office PC has become unavoidable, and those moving into the creative industries mostly end up using Macs (I'm not sure who I feel the most sorry for?). To an extent, creativity has become standardised. Everybody has the same tools, the same methods and this can sometimes lead to similar creative results. The era of clip art on the PC is an example of this! But before the standards were set, the Amiga reigned supreme. There was a lot of digital innovation. The Amiga not only helped to shape many creatives' jobs and careers, but also helped to build the legacy of what would come next. Would we even have Photoshop at all without groundbreaking Amiga programs such as Deluxe Paint?

Jonah

(his bathroom smells) editor@amiga-addict.com

Ravi

(enjoys the good life) ravi@amiga-addict.com

Neave

(ready to try all 4096) neave@amiga-addict.com

Paul

(takes on the consoles) paul@amiga-addict.com

Best Amiga driving game?

"Micro Machines was really quite unique. I played it a lot with my friends as a kid. We all loved the actual toys too, which I've heard are now being re-manufactured and are due for a comeback!"

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"Everything from Darkmere. I can't wait for AA to cover the game. The artwork is rich and gritty!"

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"I used to love photography. I would black out the toilet to set up my own darkroom. Guests used to wonder why the bathroom smelt of chemicals!"

Best Amiga driving game?

"Buggy Boy - simple and fun. A classic! The Amiga port is amazingly playable and runs well. The basic arcade sounds take me right back in time."

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"I love demos, but game-wise Marvin's Marvellous Adventure is stunning. On par with the consoles.

Colourful sprites, it is really bright and exciting."

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"I consider gardening a creative pursuit. Getting away from screens, and turning an empty space into a food or flowers hotspot. Very satisfying!"

DPaint is one of the most iconic artistic tools to grace our platform - so let's commemorate it! Our main feature looks at its history and competing art applications. We also have interviews with some very special guests. (See Cut, Copy, Paint! page 23.) Thanks to Rama and the Musée Bolo for your help with our A1000 cover image too.

For readers who aren't into all this artsy stuff - don't put us in the recycling just yet! You may not realise it, but you are holding a gem of a magazine, rammed full of non-art related articles too!

- Jonah Naylor (Editor)

Ian

(as fast as Nijel Mainsail?) ian@amiga-addict.com

Best Amiga driving game?

"There's so many to choose from - Lotus, Micro Machines, Skidmarks. I have a lot of good memories of perfecting my corners and playing through seasons on Microprose F1GP though!"

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"I love the games with the 'small people' graphics, so The Settlers is probably up there. Although the style of Another World is great too."

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"I have too many creative pursuits, but luckily, my favourite one is writing. Back to the mag!"

Best Amiga driving game?

"At the moment I'd choose Super Cars II due to our AA tournament, it's got me hooked!"

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"Orland Petermann has got to be my favourite. I particularly like his Donald piece because of the bright colours and cartoon style."

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"I love creating digital illustrations, especially for children. I am hoping to learn more about illustrating on the Amiga and produce my own Amiga artwork in the future too."

Best Amiga driving game?

"Probably the driving games I have spent most time on were Skidmarks and its sequel - so much fun with friends."

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"Not sure if this counts but I must have watched the intro to Liberation on the CD32 hundreds of times, it looked so good and was very cinematic."

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"I love just messing around in Photoshop and (Photoshop... what's that!?) have been really grateful for the excuse to use it james@amiga-addict.com more than ever now doing bits for Amiga Addict."

Best Amiga driving game?

"Lotus 2 - it's brilliant! A step up from the original.

More of an arcade racer, it looked great and Barry Leitch's music had that hidden message."

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"I think Ruff 'N' Tumble looks amazing! Bright colours, beautiful backgrounds, detailed and nicely sized sprites. Easily as good as a console game..."

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"Looking through old games mags for research before doing interviews and features. It's nice and relaxing! They take me back to the 80s/90s."

Best Amiga driving game?

"Nigel Mansell's World Championship of course a classic nostalgic Amiga racer!"

Your favourite Amiga artwork/graphics?

"Any Amiga work by Jim Sachs, he is a brilliant digital artist. Check out some examples of his work on page 25 within our main feature."

Most enjoyable creative pastime?

"Baking is my creative outlet - we were recently emailed a photograph of an amazing Amiga birthday cake from a reader, hopefully we'll have (wants an Amiga recipe) space for a picture of it in next month's issue." hannah@amiga-addict.com

James

Hannah

June 2021

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REGULARS

Now speaking of careers, I have a question. Has being an Amiga owner helped to shape your own career, or influenced some other creative endeavour? I bet many readers now have jobs thanks to Amiga computers, and we would be interested to hear your stories.

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AMIGA ADDICT

June 2021

BIG BOX AM IGAS! AA un ISSUE 6 - JUNE 2021

PAGE 19

CUT, COPY, PAINT!

PAGE 23

Editorial & Meet The Addicts............................3 Amiga News.........................................................6 Keyboard Warriors & Back In The Day...........11 Back Issues & Subscriptions.............................41 Amiga Addict Merch..........................................43 Amiga Addict Crossword Puzzle.....................45 What?! Amiga Pie!..............................................53 Next Month in Amiga Addict...........................54

AMIGA FOCUS Revision 2021 Show Report..............................8 Perth Amiga User Group..................................10 Amiga's Got You Covered (Part 2)..................12 The Creative Revolution: Cinema 4D.............15 Thinking Inside The Box...................................19

AMIKIT XE The latest vers ion is here - does A miKit really save yo u time?

James finds ou t...

me? Let's a film tie-in ga Ever enjoyed miga's some of the A take a look at yya is vi In st. New game best and wor assic cl e th t we revisi st. reviewed, and ue oQ er H on nversi o! to board game co d re r games cove Plus many othe

TESTBENCH StarShip Next Generation.................................9 AmiKit XE............................................................46 GOEX Drive.........................................................47 Ultimate Floppy Emulator................................49 Pimp Your Amiga 600.......................................50 Amiga Scraptop.................................................52

AMIGA UPGRADES & MODS Pull your Amiga to bit s and put it back together again. The pu rists will hate us!

PAGE 47 - 52

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly........................30 Inviyya..................................................................34 Gold Standard: Crazy Cars III...........................38 HeroQuest..........................................................40 Six Of The Best...................................................42 CD32 Corner: Benefactor.................................44

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ON SCREEN

ONSCREEN

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We are joined by two legends, Trip Hawkins (Electronic Arts) and Jim Sachs (Cinemaware), for an Amiga art special.

The talented pixel artist Victoria Lamburn also pops in to discuss all things DPaint!

AMIGA INSIGHT John Hertell Interview......................................21 Cut, Copy, Paint!................................................23 Gary Bracey Interview......................................33 Michael Borrman Interview.............................36

CONTENTS

REGULARS

leashes that hi ghend power in an overview , of the classic big box Amiga ra nge featuring our special guest John H ertell!

*Amigas were used, but not harmed, in the creation of this magazine.

WWW.AMIGA-ADDICT.COM • TWITTER.COM/AMIGAMAGAZINE • FACEBOOK.COM/AMIGAMAGAZINE • Editor & Graphic Designer Jonah Naylor • Deputy Editor Ravi Abbott • Games Editor & Art Assistant James Walker • Community Editor, Staff Writer & Proof Reader Ian Griffiths • Features Editor & Staff Writer Paul Monaghan • Advertising Manager & Staff Writer Hannah Clark Amiga Addict is an independent publication. The publishing company - Simulant Systems Ltd - has no connection with Commodore, or any subsequent trademark/ branding rights holders such as Cloanto/Amiga Corporation. The views expressed in this magazine are those of the individual writers' opinions only, and are not the opinions held by Amiga Addict magazine publication or its publishers.

We take great care to ensure that what we publish is accurate, but cannot be liable for any mistakes or misprints. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without our explicit permission.

June 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

PUBLISHED BY

© 2021.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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REGULARS

Email your news & press releases to magazine@amiga-addict.com

A Legal Mess With This OS! The latest version of AmigaOS has been released by Hyperion Entertainment. The release isn't without drama, as Amiga Corporation own the trademarks and rights to the Amiga brand name, as well as parts of the software supplied (including the Kickstart ROMS). Hyperion did not acquire the correct rights to sell a digital download of OS3.2 and have since been forced to remove it from their website. The CD-ROM product is currently still being allowed for sale. OS3.2 offers hundreds of updates and bugfixes, making it the most stable and fully featured 3.x branch release thus far. We have a full in-depth review coming in Amiga Addict next issue, but this may be the last version available for profit by Hyperion. More info at: www.hyperion-entertainment.com

Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer project.

The latest incarnation uses a slimline USB PC floppy drive to create an Amiga compatible disk drive which can read and write via any PC. It can even be used in conjunction with WinUAE directly! We can't emphasize enough how important this is, Rob's latest breakthroughs will aid Amiga software preservation and home user disk archival efforts. Register your interest: https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk Checkmate 1500 Accessories Stephen Jones is extending the Checkmate parts range. His website now also stocks MiSTer and Raspberry Pi mounting brackets, Checkmate power supplies, keyboard keycaps and more. Check out: www.checkmate1500plus.com

Amiga Art Contest 2021 This year's Amiga Art, hosted by 10MARC and Pixel Vixen, has recently been announced. Send in your art or music (IFF/ MOD) files by 11th October 2021 in order to enter - with prizes up for grabs! For more on Amiga art and the amazing Pixel Vixen see our Cut, Copy, Paint! feature, page 23. Competition art can be submitted at: www.amigaartwork.com

The World Re-Opens For Play Expo?

We love a good shindig! Zoom is great, but it is nice to finally hear of an event planned and taking place without the use of webcams! The UK's biggest retro games show, Play Expo is scheduled for 23rd and 24th of October at Norbreck Castle Hotel, Blackpool. Some of the AA team are hoping to attend - please say hi if you see us! Tickets are on-sale now: www.playexpoblackpool.com

Silk Dust We've witnessed lots of new Amiga game releases this month. First up we have Silk Dusk by Davide Bucci. This is a wonderful text adventure which includes a unique save game feature. It can be downloaded here: https://darwinne.itch.io/silk-dust Dark Angel Fans of classic Amiga rotoscope games

Unofficial MorphOS Web Shop A new online store dedicated to MorphOS hardware has launched. Not affiliated with the OS team, the shop is maintained by IT company Siren of France. We hope they do well and help to further promote MorphOS. So, if you fancy a new battery for your MorphOS PowerBook visit: www.morphos-store.com

AMIGA ADDICT

Super Cars Or Hyper Cars?

Those who did miss our recent Super Cars II tournament can pick up a new Beta version of Super Cars AGA, which uses graphics adapted from the PC version of Super Cars International. jotd is working on this improved version which harnesses glorious AGA power. Find out more here: www.amiga-addict.com/SupercarsAGA

Another Great Show Good news! The 24th AmiWest event will take place on 16th and 17th October 2021 at the Holiday Inn Express Cal Expo in Sacramento, California, USA. Secure your place now at: www.amiwest.net Mega Warhol Wonga Five Andy Warhol artworks, recovered from original 1985 Amiga launch floppy disks, have now sold for $3.38million at a New York Christie's auction - setting a record for the most valuable Amiga artwork ever!

Amiga Addict Super Cars II Tournament Our first AA gaming tournament on Antstream Arcade will have come to an end as you read this. The competition has been a great success with over 250 participants, and we would like to thank everyone who played, what impressive scores! Ed could only manage 17th position, with AA's James up in 10th. AA readers are currently 1-2-3 on the podium at the time of writing - with EmuChicken, Trapshot and litwarski taking the top places. Our next Antstream gaming event is announced on page 28. We can't wait!

Do Copy That Floppy!

Our old pal Rob Smith (featured in AA issue 1) has further improved his Arduino

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such as Flashback and Another World are in for a treat! Dark Angel was written in 1995 using AMOS, it comes on three floppy disks, or via a HDF hard drive file.

It was previously published by Archoas Software, yet no full version of the game has been available online until now! Get the floppy files here: www.amigaaddict.com/DarkAngelADFs or the premade hard drive installed version: www.amiga-addict.com/DarkAngelHDF

June 2021

June 2021

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Revision 2021 Show Report

AMIGA FOCUS

- Ian quickly whips out his press pass; it's demo time!

Online demoparties have become an unfortunate necessity over the past 12 months. Unfortunate for all the people who want to socialise and can’t... but fortunate for those of us who have never been to a party before! We now get to enjoy part of that experience streamed directly into our eyeballs using the power of the Internet...

Revision is a demoparty that has been held over the Easter weekend at the EWERK event hall in Saarbrücken, Germany since 2011. Since then, it has rapidly grown to become the biggest “pure” demoscene party in the world, with an attendance of over 1000 sceners piling into the darkness of the hall to get their creative kicks.

Last year, Revision unfortunately got caught up in the start of the pandemic lockdown, but not willing to accept a cancellation, the organising team quickly put together an online event. It ran smoothly and was well attended over on Twitch - perhaps getting a bigger attendance than they could have hoped for at an in-person event - and while I enjoyed it, I got the feeling the demo community maybe wasn’t prepared. There were some good submissions for sure, but a big part of a demoparty is creation with people in-person. With a longer lead time this year, I expected bigger things.

Revision is not a purely Amiga event - in fact it covers a lot of systems, from the earliest to the most recent. But it’s still a demoparty, so you better believe your favourite platform is in full attendance!

We’ll focus on the Amiga content here this is an Amiga magazine after all!

As with last year, the event was ably compèred by event hosts D.Fox and dojoe, who kept things rolling and brought a degree of comedy to proceedings. They were supported by a huge cast of characters from the Revision community (such as the inimitable Scene Santa, Truck!), presenting various segments throughout the weekend and keeping the banter rolling.

So what were the Amiga highlights?

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AMIGA ADDICT

The Meteoriks The event started up with regular demoscene awards, the Meteoriks. Each year, a selected jury picks the best demos from the past year in multiple categories.

There’s a lot of great work to see.

happy. And damn, that’s a funky bassline!

My special pick goes to the rather hilarious OCS intro Bears by Void, with its stunning reveal of the shocking truth behind the identity of all sceners. And Bill Gates. Not technically amazing (although the VHS effects were nice), but the comedy woven into the visuals and song just made it for me.

'Bears' by Void

The biggest news for the Amiga scene this year was for the stunning Hologon

by The Electronic Knights, which won Best Low-End Production, as well as an honourable mention in the Outstanding Technical Achievement category, for producing visuals befitting an AGA demo on stock OCS. Really stunning to see with a big reflective torus and industrial soundtrack.

'Hologon' by The Electronic Knights

Amiga Intro The Amiga Intro competition is always hotly contested and this year was no different. Taking place on the Saturday night, there were 11 entries to pick from.

In third place, On Fire by Nah-Kolor is just a really solid OCS demo, with all the essential elements - impressive effects, excellent static art and a pumping tune.

Second place Dual Panoply by Software Failure is an 060 64KB demo that is a flatshaded polygonal tour de force, with a throbbing industrial soundtrack to boot.

This is what demos should look like.

'Dual Panoply' by Software Failure

It’s always nice to see an OCS demo come in first - to me, pushing stock hardware to its limits is what demomaking is all about.

Planet Disco Balls by Planet Jazz is a great example, with a variety of effects and 3D shapes impressively recreated. I think most people will remember the little dancing dude near the end of the demo, plus there’s even some bouncing copper bars in there to keep everyone

June 2021

Amiga Demo Of course, the highlight of any demoparty worth its salt is the Amiga demo content, and this is doubly true of Revision. With no less than eight stellar entries, there wasn’t a shortage of quality content to enjoy.

Third place entry was the Last Goat Standing by Noice, an 060 demo pushing pixels all over the shop with a requisite pumping soundtrack. My favourite parts were the cool “smashing glass” transition and a pseudo-3D twisty scroller that made my brain hurt.

Second place saw the triumphant return of titans Melon Dezign with OCS demo Fisherhawk Dr., putting out some impressive visuals. The highlight was undoubtedly the wireframe dancers cutting a mean Thriller dance!

The Martini Effect by Flex unsurprisingly took first place as it bent the 060 to its will, with Giger-esque visuals I struggled to interpret, let alone understand.

Meanwhile, Paula was put to work generating a soundtrack that was half EDM, half Massive Attack-style trip hop.

A work of art for sure.

While demos like the three winners are clearly technically impressive, I want to give a mention to Abstractica by NahKolor for just being so damn vibrant. Some modern demos stick with muted palettes and shades of grey and brown in favour of speed and smooth frames, whereas 'Last Goat Standing' by Noice

STARSHIP

These are the voyages of the starship Amiga. Its mission to boldly go… oh damn who broke the warp engines! That's how it goes right?

Next

GENERATION

Data being a new user has come across a big issue - deciding how to set up your NG system. Many of the hardcore will do it manually and the classic Amiga users have a choice of pre-installed environments.

One of the biggest struggles in the NG world is fully unlocking the system's capabilities. Often, new users try out OS4.1 with a barebones installation and/ or the MorphOS demo CD. Once they have fired it up, they suddenly are hit with the thought... ”Now what?”.

Keeping your systems up-to-date can ensure you get the full benefit and ease

Abstractica looks like something straight out of the 90s with its bright colours set to a thick groove that makes you want to move (and rhyme?)... all using the simple power of OCS.

While this is all very slick, it still leaves you with fairly light sprinkling of software. The Chrysalis Pack is an essential tool for MorphOS users, rampacked with all the latest software, emulators, applications and media players. It really takes your MorphOS installation to the next level. Having just received an update to version 3.15, if you're not sure what to do with MorphOS, this will definitely push you in the right direction. The package keeps growing and now totals 1017MB of software... and this is where it becomes a bit of an issue for new users. Unregistered MorphOS slows down after 20 minutes of use, and extracting this data takes a lot longer than that. I would love to see it

OS4 is not left out either with its Enhancer Software Plus Edition, adding essential programs, classes, gadgets and commodities. This package comes from A-Eon at a price of around £60. OS4 also has the AMIStore application, which allows you to browse and buy software from a storefront, very much in the Apple App Store style. I would love to see a Chrysalis Pack that allowed OS4 users to get more freeware and/or community content onto their systems. Maybe there is something amazing already available, and I am missing a trick? Send us a letter if you know better!

After installing these packs, we are having a lot of fun and Data is running with more features than ever. We have just hit some bad space weather and the Starship has entered a galaxy known as “PiStorm”. Lighting, thunder and heavy rain is causing issues with the ship. Data has just announced on the comms: "Captain, we are being hailed.”

'4kASM' by Lemon

Special mention goes to Open Your Mind Let Us Inside by Void, purely because it’s the first time Amiga Addict has ever been shouted out in a demo!

'Abstractica' by Nah-Kolor

somehow split up - or a lite version produced - to help new users experience the software, as opposed to only registered users who have already been convinced of the joys of the platform.

Best of the Rest Of course, the Amiga refuses to be contained, and it turned up in other places too. The most notable landed third place in the Oldskool Intro competition, with the demo “4kASM” from veterans Lemon. With both a kaleidoscope of swirling colour and an absolutely blasting soundtrack throughout - all in just 4KB of space - it was a joy to behold.

'Open Your Mind Let Us Inside' by Void

So there we go. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the event, which had some truly spectacular creations across many systems. If you want to get a true feel of Revision, then grab any of the demos from the party over at www.amigaaddict.com/revision2021. If you’d like to just watch some of the event, much of it has been uploaded to the Revision YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/ RevisionParty. Roll on next year!

June 2021

The elephant in the room For the 2021 event, Revision started off the party streaming on Twitch quite happily, as they did last year.

Unfortunately, this all changed around 8pm BST on the second day, when the stream suddenly cut out part way through the PC 64k compo. Apparently, due to some nudey bits in the preceding Photo and Animation/Video compos (which is against the Twitch terms of service), the channel got summarily banned for 3 days - the whole of the remaining event!

That could have easily been a sad end to it, if it weren’t for the Chaos Computer Club (one of Revision’s many sponsors).

They stepped up to provide streaming services from their own site, meaning, all in all, the party was down for no more than 40 minutes. Cue shouts of “You’ll never shut us down!”, before a speedy resumption of proceedings. The stream quality was arguably better than Twitch in the end too. It’s not clear how this will affect any plans for Revision 2022.

AMIGA ADDICT

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TESTBENCH

After weeks of gaming via his head, Data has now installed OS4 and is running well with the latest update from Hyperion. Wesley has been overthrown, and came to his senses after Data tempted him with a Sam460cr.

Worf managed to bundle him back into the Starship and we’re on the road again.

of use of your NG OS, and there are some fancy tools that can really help you keep your software on the latest versions.

AmiUpdate is a great built-in tool for OS4. It works by having a database of the versions you have installed - if any updates are available to be downloaded, it will fetch them to keep you current.

Grunch is the MorphOS equivalent, and can be set to automatically scan to update your libs, software and games on startup.

Perth Amiga User Group

AMIGA FOCUS

- It's not just trapdoor RAM you'll find down under, y'know?! by David Fowler In a little over three years, the Perth Amiga User Group (Perth, Western Australia) has grown from a small Facebook group founded by local Amiga enthusiast, Shane Haines, to a vibrant community of over 200 local and international members. Since the first “unofficial” meetup, held in 2018 at the Palace Arcade (a retro arcade games bar in Perth), the group admins have organised quarterly meetups, where people can talk about all things Amiga and general retro, as well as display their wares.

Historically, the meetup events were held at the Loftus Community Centre, located in Leederville. However, with an increasing attendee count and tons of retro wares people wanted to bring, we’ve quickly outgrown the only room that could be hired. Frustratingly, there was another larger room in the Centre, but an unrelated organisation would regularly hire the room on the same night, but never turn up!

gills. It was an awesome sight and the room was full of life, with the sounds of excited and curious retro enthusiasts chatting away, and the very distinct sound of retro devices spanning three decades. Almost every table at the Centre was out, and were full with various retro items – some powered up with people gazing at, playing on, or discussing them, and some simply as display items for people to become familiar with or simply to reminisce.

Some more modern devices also made an appearance, with two Pentium 4s to play Quake 3 Arena, a Commodore 64 full size, and a Raspberry Pi400 hooked up to the projector playing Amiga demos!

At 7pm, it was time for the surprise guest - none other than David Pleasance himself! We managed a full 45 minutes with this legend of Commodore, where attendees had the opportunity to present any burning questions.

Visit Perth Amiga U.G. at www .amiga-addict.com/PAUG

So, for our first meetup event of the year, Meetup #5, our event organiser, Matt Webb, found a room at the Mt Claremont Community Centre. We wanted to do something special for this event to mark the occasion of having a bigger and better venue.

Traditionally, we would only hold a raffle, with a big-ticket retro item as first prize.

So for this event, another group admin, Al Smith, organised more large raffle prizes, but also co-ordinated with a number of international Amiga folks to send us various goodies, and posters to put up (such as Amiga Addict itself!). He also organised a head-to-head link up racing competition for Stunt Car Racer and Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, run on two Amiga 500s.

"I've got one too!"

LEFT: We're famous! RIGHT:

Everything was ready to go. However, at the very last minute, when ordering goods for my company, RetroKit.com.au, I was able to secure a special guest Is that the GamesMaster or Bill Gates at Macworld? speaker. So, scheduled for Saturday 17th April and with invites sent out to all members, we were on!

Come the afternoon of the event, and as everyone turned up, the difference created by the new location was sheer night and day - leaps and bounds over the previous venue. Fully carpeted, high ceilings, power sockets around the room, a kitchen, loads of parking, and - best of all - a full AV system with a projector and wall-mounted speakers. Despite the extra space, the room was packed to the

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Traditionally, our group has a main focus on all things Amiga. However, we had quite a few other devices on display, such as an Atari 800XL, a Commodore 8032-8K, and an Apple IIc clone that was up for sale.

AMIGA ADDICT

David spent time reminiscing about his time at Commodore and some of the incredible achievements and successes they had, such as David’s personal two million unit sales of the A500, and the creation of the bundle packs like the original Batman Pack. David also regaled us with some of the ideas that never came to fruition, such as Amiga Infinity which would have brought some incredible new products. In addition, he took the opportunity to promote his current book, Commodore: The Inside Story, and his next two-part book, From Vultures to Vampires.

The raffle was next, with some great prizes won by lucky winners. First prize was an almost mint-condition Amiga 500, second prize an iMac G4, and third prize a retro Casio digital watch.

Next was the quiz, which everyone looks forward to at each event, as it’s a fiendishly intense test of past and present Amiga knowledge. Typically, there are first, second, and third goodie prizes for lucky contestants to win.

However, this time it was decided to mix it up by awarding the prizes to the people with the lowest scores!

Finally, rounding up the evening was the standard feast of takeaway pizzas - a mainstay of the events. On the evening, we tried to mix it up with a variety of finger food instead. However, this turned out to be frivolous, as the oven wasn’t up to scratch and took two hours to cook food that should only take 20-30 minutes!

Needless to say, the sight of steaming hot pizza was a relief and a delight for everyone, and a Y MUNIT M O great conclusion to C .

E le feuds and old rivalries the evening!

A nice harmless way to sett ARTICL

SSION SUBMI

June 2021

Send your reader comments & letters via email or Discord: magazine@amiga-addict.com www.amiga-addict.com/discord

Keyboard Warriors (Basically just send anything in - we'll probably print it!)

colour laser printer. One can fit a lot of decals on an Sta Let r A4 sheet! I made sure to fill the page with ter Commodore logos, boing balls and other cool emblems I could also find a use for later.

The result can be seen below, along with the process of applying the decals. I am very happy with the outcome. Now I have a decent stock prepared for future AA cover disks! I can only hope it will be a recurring thing.

- Peter "RetroPete" Lundberg (via Facebook)

The world went barmy for football in 1990. You were actually in the minority if you didn't watch the World Cup - Italia 90 had a TV audience of approximately 27 billion non-unique viewers during its various stages. It's hard to imagine... that's more than three times the world's current population!

Britain was experiencing a very hot summer (for a change!), with temperature highs of over 37C - the good weather meant that everybody who wasn't watching the footie, was out playing it. England also had one of their best teams since winning the title in 1966, which encouraged the nation to get behind Lineker, Beardsley, Shilton, Barnes and rest of the squad. Many of the world's most iconic footballers participated too - Klinsmann, Milla, Baggio, Maradona. Yet the most memorable moment for England fans was "Gazza" crying when penalised for a foul, followed by the devastation of losing to West Germany on penalties in the semi-finals!

West Germany went on to win the cup. No wonder so many outstanding Amiga football games were released in subsequent years...

BACK iN THE DAY '9 0

Amiga Computers

Amiga Software & Games

At The Box Office

In The News

Commodore UK respond to the success of Checkmate Digital's A1500 offering, releasing their own official Amiga 1500. This is effectively a 1MB A2000, in a workstation case, with two floppy disk drives. A tad more exciting for consumers however, is the new Amiga 3000! Boasting a full redesign, it includes improvements over previous models such as extra RAM, a faster processor and Zorro III expansion slots.

In 1990, we witness an uptake of new Amiga programmers, as AMOS is launched. Software titles this year also include Aegis Audiomaster III, Disney Animation Studio and ProWrite v3. What a varied mix of games too, with Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Kick Off 2, Pang, Turrican, Pirates!, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, PowerMonger, Loom, Player Manager, Railroad Tycoon, Wings, Captive, Tower of Babel to name just a few!

Patrick Swayze stars in another hit movie; Ghost (Ed. - "Hannah will be happy - my favourite is Road House!"). Other classics out at the cinema this year include Home Alone, Kindergarten Cop, Back to the Future Part III, Total Recall, Die Hard 2, Dances with Wolves, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rocky V (Paul - "Classic..?

Really!?"), Quick Change, Pretty Woman, Tremors, Gremlins 2, RoboCop 2, Flatliners, Goodfellas and Nuns on the Run. Phew!

Tim Berners-Lee publishes his World Wide Web proposal.

Microsoft Windows 3.0 is released, yet is no match for Workbench! NASA's STS-31 mission deploys the Hubble Space Telescope. British and French workers on the Channel Tunnel meet 40 metres below the English Channel sea bed, creating a ground connection between the UK and mainland Europe (Ed. - "So Britain is now part of Europe... or not!?").

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AMIGA ADDICT

11

REGULARS

Creative Coverdisk Conception I have been an Amiga fan since 1990, when I got my first A500. Today, I have quite the collection of both hardware, peripherals and games, which should keep me busy forever! I also do recaps, repairs and refurbish all types of Amigas. I'm a happy subscriber of Amiga Addict and look forward to every new issue with excitement.

So, a while back, I had an idea to use printable water slide paper to print decals on things for Amiga computers to have them look more genuine. These are similar to the type of stickers included in most plastic model kits.

I recently read that AA magazine would be including a floppy label and downloadable ADF to write your own coverdisk in Issue 5. I suggested this idea when I first heard about this magazine, so I was thrilled!

Naturally, I had to try and find some good floppies to put these ADFs on - that's when an idea came to me. I could use decals to brand the floppies! This would give them a nice final touch - now they would really have a special place in my collection and stand out from every other disk.

The paper was £2 per sheet on eBay, and compatible with my

Jump On it!

I asked my 5-year-old if she wanted an Amiga magazine... and she jumped on it! She's now showing me pictures of games in the mag she wants to play, so well done all of you!

- Patrick Offord (via email) Everyday Users Perhaps include a "Readers Guest" section, where everyday Amiga fans tell a story about how they got into the Amiga?

- Daniel Lynch (via email) Thank you Daniel, a good suggestion. AA readers, our postbox is always here to receive your articles or tales for consideration.

AMIGA FOCUS

AMIGA'S GOT YOU...

...COVERED (DISK 2)!

- Ian Griffiths loads up the second instalment of our magazine coverdisk retrospective Back in the heyday of the Amiga, most people’s only contact with the wider world of the format was via magazines.

Save for the odd rumour from your mates, there was no other source for the latest information about your favourite platform, unless you were one of the lucky few with a modem or access to a user group.

In the UK, at one point in time, we had seven concurrent magazines of varying quality, giving everyone - from the casual fan to the most hardened enthusiast plenty to read on every subject from games to applications to hardware. We all had our favourite publications, of course, and we read them cover to cover, regardless of our interest in any particular subject. But I think few people can disagree that what often drew us to pick up a particular magazine over another was frequently the small squares of plastic on the front - the coverdisks.

Soundtracker Pro II on an AF coverdisk really started me on my way to working with samples and sequences. - Paulee Alex Bow Last month, we looked at some of the greatest game coverdisks ever produced. That’s all well and good. Magazines helped us enjoy the Amiga that little bit more, and enabled us to discover amazing games we just wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. But there’s another aspect to coverdisks, the importance of which often gets overlooked. The free applications.

Games weren’t necessarily cheap in the 80s and 90s - full price games could run you £20+, which was a lot for a teenager

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AMIGA ADDICT

without a steady income. But that pales into insignificance when you look at applications. These could easily run into the hundreds of pounds, and would be completely inaccessible for most users.

Amiga E was on a coverdisk, and, along with PCQ Pascal, taught me ‘proper’ talking-to-the-OS programming. I’ve been a professional coder for (Jesus Christ, where does it go?) - 18 years now?

Working in simulation of graphics HW mostly. Pretty low level, so all the bit fiddling on the C64 and ‘proper’ languages on the Amiga were very useful. - Two Owls With many of those users just getting their start in computing, access to a quality piece of productivity software could quite literally have life-changing consequences for the average Amiga user, and perhaps set the course of a future hobby or even career. I think I bought maybe one or two applications in my whole Amiga-owning life. But, as the kind of person that likes to dip their toe into many creative pools, this wouldn’t have been enough for me, and would have severely curtailed my experience with everybody’s favourite 16bit system.

Magazines to the rescue! Pretty much every kind of application you can conceive of was given away free of charge on an Amiga magazine at one point or another. Some were obviously demos, but many were either fully featured products, or had just a few features turned off. In most cases, the publishers gave old versions of products to magazines on the proviso that they

June 2021

would get a feature or short article about the latest version - the version people could pay cold hard cash for, to get that hot new feature. For us users, the covermount application was like getting a second-hand car - it wasn’t quite the shiny new model, but it could definitely get you from A to B...

So let’s take a look back at just what applications turned up on UK magazines back in the day. I’ve dug into some of the biggest magazines - Amiga Format, CU Amiga, Amiga Computing - and tried to pull out some of the applications that were a real steal. And if you look around the article, you’ll also see some testimonials of how these applications went on to change people’s lives. Let’s get started.

Art The Amiga is well known as a creative machine - graphics and art are one of its fortés. While a full version of Deluxe Paint never made its way onto a coverdisk (although there were demos), there was no shortage of artistic software packages made available - for free - to lucky readers.

Those looking to get to grips with pixel art had the more-than-capable Personal Paint to get to grips with, with v4 being given away in full with Issue 89 of Amiga Computing. Budding pixel artists could also get v6.4 and v7.0 with Issues 96 and 110 of Amiga Format, although this was maybe too late in the Amiga’s lifecycle for most.

The Amiga isn’t just good at creating art

from scratch - it also features a bunch of advanced image processing packages to tweak your images to perfection. One of the most famous is The Art Department (and its “professional” follow-up), which was given away on the cover of CU Amiga May 93, with the magazine offering a discount on a full manual and an upgrade to ADPro. The June 95 edition of CU offered more image processing goodness with Image FX 1.5, while AF69 and AC106 both gave away copies of the powerful image manipulation tool Photogenics. You can still do great work on images with these packages, even today.

To round things off - literally in this case Amiga Format had a covermount of ProVector 2.1 on Issue 58. This is a structured drawing package, so unlike DPaint, you’re working with vectors, lines and curves to create a mathematically described image that can be scaled.

Certainly a cool piece of software to have in your toolkit if you wanted to get into, say, publishing your own magazine...

OctaMED on a coverdisk got me into music production. I think I did have MED first too.

- ASNiVOR

3D Modelling A step up from pixel art and photo manipulation, the third dimension offers something completely new to the artist.

In an era when most games were 2D, 3D modelling was something shiny and new to pretty much everyone who encountered it. Of course, most Amigas struggled for the raw power required to render their creations, but those with enough patience could be richly rewarded.

Most of these application coverdisks were supported by short tutorials in the magazine, and some even came with a small custom printed book taped to the magazine cover. Such was the case with Real 3D, free with AF77 (a previous version came with AC40).

After a short bit of reading in the magazine, you would soon be well on your way to modelling your first blue teapot, or, if you were me, a sphere with no lighting, so you just got a plain black screen after hours of wasted rendering!

To complete this trio of revered renderers, AF92 gave away Cinema 4D 2, a notable package whose latest revision was released just last year, and whose 30-year pedigree extends to use in films like Tron: Legacy, Pacific Rim and Avengers: Endgame.

Music You can’t talk about the Amiga without talking about its music making abilities. A giant in the world of composing, the Amiga had a vast swath of products for producing music in just about any way you wanted.

In the last issue, we talked to the creator of OctaMED, a package that owes a lot to its presence on the covers of printed media. Probably the most featured product on Amiga coverdisks full stop, OctaMED was many people’s first introduction to digital music creation, and many artists continue to use it today for its excellent splicing of tracker music with MIDI input. All three of the magazines I’ve been looking at here had MED or OctaMED on the cover at some point, from the very first version through to the final Amiga release, OctaMED Soundstudio. My personal favourite is OctaMED Pro v5 (AF62), which I fiddled around with for many a long evening in my childhood, much to the pain of my parents’ eardrums...

Trackers rely heavily on samples for their instruments of course, and while you can grab these from sample disks and from other mods, it was more common for people to rip those samples from records or through a microphone.

Technosound Turbo 2 (AF73) was a popular sampler given away on a cover.

The problem being, of course, that a sampler is more than just the software... so you were really just limited to sample

June 2021

editing with your new package. Luckily, developers had a special offer to allow readers to get the hardware sampler for just 20 quid. That’s how they get ya!

Maybe your musical education was a little more traditional? What you need is Bars & Pipes Professional, a MIDI sequencer given away on AF71. Now obviously, you can’t sequence MIDI particularly easily without some kind of MIDI device to play, and a MIDI interface to access it from your Amiga - so there’s some overhead here. But you’re still getting the software for free! The same was true of fellow sequencer Music-X (AF58) - both were serious pieces of software, and since MIDI remains a standard to this day, you can even use these pieces of software with modern music hardware too.

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AMIGA FOCUS

Maybe moving pictures are more your scene? CU Amiga had you covered - in September 1992, they offered Gold Disk Inc.’s MovieSetter package to create animated movies on... and then in December 1993, they offered the fully featured Aegis Animator on their front cover.

Many different 3D package developers hawked their wares through the medium of the magazine floppy. You can’t go far wrong with Imagine, of course, and version 2.0 of the 3D software with the golden interface was on the cover of AF53, with versions 3.0 and 4.0 turning up on CU Jan 96 and Jan 97.

AMIGA FOCUS

Programming As someone who would later go on to study coding and work in development for many years, this topic is pretty close to my heart. I’d already meddled with BASIC on my ZX Spectrum, so getting into programming on my Amiga and developing my skills there was pretty much a given. And magazines helped out hugely here.

Whenever anyone mentions programming on the Amiga, you can be sure to hear one name whispered in hushed tones, and that’s François Lionet’s BASIC language, AMOS. While I am now the proud owner of a boxed copy of AMOS, I wasn’t back in the day my copies of the package were all included on magazine covers. From the

Further Learning The Amiga could do so much, more than I could possibly cover here. Some things were incredibly specialist, but because of coverdisks, we got to have a go at all sorts - making fonts, playing with computer-generated music, making menus. Let’s look at a few things that might pique your interest.

Firstly, I want to give a mention to fractal generator Fractal Pro (AF56). It’s pretty simple, but it holds a special place in my heart for being the coverdisk for my very first copy of Amiga Format. And come on, who doesn’t love infinitely zooming in on the Mandelbrot Set? While we’re in the visual space, I should definitely give a mention to landscape generator Vista (and Vista Pro), from AF33 and CU September 97 respectively.

Building a mountain or two is always fun, as Gareth Qually found out last month in his Creative Revolution article!

Scala (AF97, CU Feb 94/Feb 98) is quite a special piece of software - not only does it do video titling and interactive slide show presentations, you can also use Genlock hardware to overlay content over live video input. And this is another product that survives to this day - many digital signs

cut-down version for beginners, Easy AMOS (AC81), to the standard edition and compiler (AF42/CU April 93), through to fully fledged AMOS Professional (AF67) - there’s no excuse for not having the language, if only to tinker around with. I still have disks full of half-finished projects based on my ill-developed teenage coding skills!

may want to use one of the various versions of Devpac 2 (AF39/AC76) to do your coding with.

If your 90s coding skills were a little more evolved than mine were, then a BASIC interpreted language probably isn’t going to cut it for you. In that case you’re probably going to need something a bit “closer to the metal”, and if the MOVs, PUSHs and POPs of Assembly language are more your speed, then you have a choice of environments to work with ArgAsm (AF7) is perfectly capable, or you

and displays you see around the country and the world use Scala technology.

We like to think you enjoy our little magazine, but how do you think we got here? By learning how to do desktop publishing on the Amiga of course! And there’s no shortage of DTP packages to choose from: Gold Disk Inc.’s PageSetter is a really solid package that I used to do my homework back in the day - all thanks to AF63. Maybe you want to go more upmarket than that? Well, why not use PageStream? We did - to create this very page, albeit using a later version! CU Oct 95 had a copy of v2.2. And if all that isn’t enough, CU June 97 gave away a copy of ProPage 4.1. There’s some pretty good headlines in there, and that’s for sure!

We’ve spent a lot of time at Amiga Addict talking about the demoscene (and we’ll continue to do so!), but what if you’re not a real coder, but still want to have a crack at making some scrollers and spinning shapes? Lucky for you then that magazines can provide - RSI DemoMaker (CU Oct 91) and Demo Maniac (AF60) are both user-friendly pieces of software to build basic demos. You’re not going to win Revision, but you might have a bit of fun into the bargain!

But if you only ever get one application coverdisk, there can really only be one choice. The ultimate application for Amiga users. The only file manager you’ll ever need... for free! You know it. I know it. Grab your copy of CU Amiga February 95 - it’s Directory Opus 4.

Well, I used Devpac and ArgAsm from cover discs and eventually bought DevPac. I think Devpac came with the Davy Jones' Locker tutorial stuff (was it called that? How to make Blood Money basically)?

Many, many, years later, I ended up a games programmer, eventually even working at Argonaut Games (who made ArgAsm in the first place) on PS1 games. The cover discs were super important to me because it took me ages to afford Devpac and the coding tutorials really helped me out. - ExUnit

Devpac 2 and AMOS on Amiga Format coverdisks gave me a 20-year career in software development... including porting some games to Amiga late in its life, the most notable being Simon the Sorcerer 2.

- Peter Mulholland

This article only scratches the surface of what magazine coverdisks truly enabled, whether it was just sparking Amiga users’ creativity, or exposing them to interests they never knew they had, at a budget price. And while it was really just in support of selling a few more magazines... if you have a hobby, or even a career, because of one of those little blue squares of plastic, maybe you want to say a silent “Thank you” to the disk editors and developers who made it possible. I know I will.

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June 2021

by Gareth Qually

- Lights, Camera, Action, Amiga!

This month, I thought we should jump into the first of the big hitters on the Amiga, something in the 3D space. It might not be one you think of first, but it has proved to be one of the biggest successes - if not the biggest - in the 3D world. I am, of course, talking about Cinema 4D. This is going to be one of many investigations into this 3D package, as there is just too much to cover in one single issue. But first of all, a history lesson...

Cinema 4D started as a project between brothers Christian and Philip Losch.

Initially a ray tracer, they entered it into Kickstart Magazine’s monthly programming contest, and won. A year later, they released their first product under the name FastRay. It took a couple of years before the first version of Cinema 4D came out. I can’t attest to its popularity, as I was an Imagine zealot at the time, but looking back you can already see that it was part of a new wave of 3D programs, showing a marked step up in many areas, when compared with packages like Imagine, Sculpt 4D and others.

As we headed towards the mid-nineties, we got more versions, with 1.5 and 2 in 1994, and 2.1 and 3.0 in 1995. However, we knew the tide was turning for our platform, and so did the C4D team. So they started preparing to port the software to the PC platform.

likes of Maya, Softimage, Lightwave and 3D Studio Max all dominated in different industries, but Cinema 4D, along with a lot of other packages, still managed to benefit from a healthy market with many faithful supporters.

It would have been around 2001 that I finally joined the Cinema 4D world with release 7. I was jumping ship from Hash’s Animation Master, and it was a choice between C4D and Lightwave.

Some of you may be wondering why the hell I went with C4D! Lightwave was riding high at that point, especially in the television industry, where I worked. Well, this may sound strange, but... I had a feeling - a strong feeling - that C4D was going places. Lightwave was feeling a little stuck in the mud at that point - it needed to move with the industry in key areas, such as a unified environment for modelling and animation for example.

Indeed, it was in 2001 when key development staff left Newtek to start development on Modo, so I think they felt the same way.

But it was in 2006 when Cinema 4D really took off. It was with a plugin module called MoGraph that the industry finally stood up and took notice, that and the fact that it was still being developed for the Mac. So few other 3D programs were, and it had a very smooth learning curve which allowed many graphic designers to jump into 3D with a little effort.

Finally in 1997, the last version for the Amiga released, release 4.2.

Now, in 2021, Cinema 4D is on version 23, dominating the motion graphics market.

It has been an unmitigated success.

Maxon has bought Red Giant, a high end plugin developer for the Adobe range of products and Redshift, a third party renderer making waves in the industry.

They also have a very close relationship with Adobe, which sees a lite version of C4D included with digital effects and motion graphics giant After Effects.

As it left the Amiga behind, Cinema 4D continued on - but it was definitely not one of the big packages out there. The

I can’t think of any product other than Newtek’s Toaster that has had a bigger impact on the industry. It took longer

1996 was a big year, as V4 was released not only for the Amiga, but Alpha NT, Windows and Macintosh. And it’s that last platform that was one of the key reasons why the software became so successful.

than others to get there, but that slower growth has actually helped them with stability and to weather the storms of the industry.

June 2021 2021 June

And now for something completely different!

As mentioned above, the last Amiga version of C4D was 4.2, and I got this from the very last issue of CU Amiga: October 1998. I was already on the PC at this point in the 90s, and missed out on all these insane giveaways, but considering the new millennium was around the corner, I am impressed the Amiga lasted this long. I doubt even Mac addicts would have hung on this long to their beloved platform.

AMIGA AMIGAADDICT ADDICT

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The Creative Revolution

AMIGA FOCUS

The very first thing that was different for me, apart from running a CD-ROM on an Amiga, was installing the floating point version of a package, rather than the integer versions I used originally. For those of you who can’t remember your mathematics, integers are whole numbers with no decimal points, and floating point numbers have loads of very important numbers after the decimal point. In a 3D program, the latter gives us so much more precision and accuracy.

On initially starting the software, I am greeted with the user interface and an empty 3D plane. The first screen is from my Amiga 1200. I really like the clean and subdued greyscale look. We should actually have a discussion about interfaces at some point, but this is an example of a well thought out system that keeps everything out of your way while you work.

LEFT: PC version... Pah! Who needs it?! RIGHT: Back to the Amiga with some basic shape renders.

So, the software is fired up, I am fired up, and... immediately I hit a wall. No manual!

Searching the internet yielded no English manuals, and our extensive FTP resource only had two copies in German. This isn’t a unique problem either - as I write these articles, I am finding that not only are there no scans of documentation for much serious Amiga software, but the quality of the scans that do exist leaves a lot to be desired. I hope to rectify this with the software I have, and I think that we, as a community can solve this fairly easily.

So, with no guide on how to use the software, I relied on my experience with later versions of C4D, hovering over icons, menu hunting and randomly pressing keys on the keyboard to see what happened. There were similarities of course, but it took time to get the essentials down.

Additionally, this program will use any screen mode available to it. I like bashing on my 1200, but running it via emulation on an A4000 with P96 drivers really shows the flexibility of the interface. If you look to the left edge, you can see some extra items I have added. Below is the material editor, the right has an information window, and I have split the viewport into four smaller viewports.

I've included them in the box below to help anyone else get into creating quickly (see Essential keyboard shortcuts).

There was one big “GOTCHA!” that does not exist with modern versions, and that is the right-click interactions. If you need to get to the settings for an icon or menu item (for example Render Settings), you need to right-click, not left-click. You can see this as an option when there is a little plus symbol next to the menu item or icon.

I was very chuffed to get something on the screen, even if it was a bit crap. I battled initially with “screen mode” errors - a sub menu in the render settings basically tells C4D what screen buffer you want to render to, including resolution and colour settings. The nice thing is that the program renders to 24-bit colour internally anyway, so saving out a highest quality render is pure simplicity.

It’s just letters...

After having messed around with the program for a while and got myself familiar enough with the tools, it was time to attempt a real scene. I wanted to try something with text, as that’s a key component of motion graphics. One of the tools I found was Cinema Font, which allows you to use a PostScript Type 1 font to generate some text. This is amazing. PS fonts were a standard in the design industry, and having that support in C4D demonstrates the level of integration with other design tools they were looking for. Cinema 4D has always had top notch typography tools. No other 3D program comes close, and it is one of the many reasons it became a leader in the motion graphics world.

So, diving into the tool... you choose your font, type the text you want, set the resolution of the final mesh and then choose how you want it built/if you want it sent to the main C4D program or saved

Right, with the basic navigation controls sorted, I was able to start making something. Nothing fancy, just some objects on screen with some lights and a camera. Some exploring of the possibilities in the “Object” menu was in order, as this menu still exists to this day, albeit with more complexity. You can see the grand result above (top right).

With great resolution comes great versatility.

Although this software is very old, it really felt familiar. They have done well to evolve the program over the years and yet still retain its essence, and the interface is at the core of this. At the top centre of this page is a screenshot from the last version of C4D I have, release 10.5. You can see the similarities immediately. The row of icons to the left, the materials manager, the information dialog - it is all there across versions.

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Essential keyboard shortcuts A wise person once boldy stated: "There are no shortcuts to success." Obviously they were not an Amiga user...

W..............Select object dialog V...............Object manager dialog C...............Camera settings dialog D...............Light settings dialog ENTER......Refresh the viewports!

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X...............Enable/disable X axis Y...............Enable/disable Y axis Z................Enable/disable Z axis

1................Edit points mode 2................Object mode 3................Edit object axis mode 4................Edit texture mode 5................Edit texture axis mode 0................Edit work area mode

COMMU NI ARTICL TY E SUBMI SSION

out to a separate file. Considering the age of the program, this was incredible.

nineties. It might be worth discussing rendering tech in a later article, as this only scratches the surface!

After all these tweaks, shall we look at the results? (See bottom of page.)

After moving the camera and text to get a good frame, I moved onto the lights. All of this is pretty much the same as current day 3D packages. There are more options and settings these days, but the essentials are the same.

Let’s see what we have so far.

We now get to the texturing of the objects. Using the material dialog, with a simple right-click, you can add a new material. This was another area that has not changed much over the years, so I was able to get something up and

running fairly quickly. Although, I have to say, I have been spoiled by modern PBR materials, so the old tricks to get certain looks had to be employed once again!

It is worth mentioning rendering technology here briefly. During the Amiga's lifetime, we had scanline and raytrace rendering for all our 3D programs. Radiosity was around, but was so expensive in rendering time, it was reserved for high SGI machines in practical terms.

In the late nineties, we started to see these incredible animations using global illumination coming out of research projects and universities. This was the beginning of a wave of rendering, material and lighting techniques that massively improved the realism of renderers. You might have heard of terms such as Sub Surface Scattering (SSS), Ambient Occlusion (AO) and the current trend of Physically Based Rendering (PBR). There is also the world of Non-Photo Realistic Rendering (NPR), which does the complete opposite to the above, but uses some of the same technology to achieve its results. We can’t hope for the Amiga to match these present day results, but we can use our experience and knowledge of these past two decades to achieve better renders than we could have done back in the

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My view on the brilliance of Cinema 4D has only strengthened after doing this article. That the core thinking and design was in the application so early on in its life shows it is clearly more modern in its thinking, like Lightwave, when compared to the earlier 3D packages on the Amiga.

However, it is those earlier packages that built the foundation for applications like these to stand on. And judging by the fact that Cinema 4D and Lightwave are still around to this day, that foundation was very strong indeed.

Are you enjoying the series?

We really appreciate Gareth's Creative Revolution guides thus far - what a series, eh? The team here at AA have always wanted to learn how to render using our Amigas. But wait! Gareth has gone above and beyond - he's packaged up a downloadable archive for AA readers, containing all the files he's created, so you can follow along at home! If you'd like to download his Vista Pro landscapes from Issue 5, or these Cinema 4D renders, simply follow this link: www.amiga-addict.com/creative01

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This was an enjoyable first look at Cinema 4D. Definitely not as dated as Vista Pro, that’s for certain - I could use this for work today if I wanted to. There is a lot more to look at in the coming months. For example, I haven’t explored importing and exporting objects or even animation. I have been thinking of a way to demonstrate animation in these static pages. How about some URL links? What do you think?

Right, let’s get a familiar name into the scene.

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June 2021

The A1000, compared to those that followed, wasn’t super powerful or particularly targeted at the high-end even if it was best in class at the time. It just had a well-designed case. But it was the Amiga of the day, and where this form factor of these Amigas got started.

- by Ian Griffiths pitched more at the home user, primarily with games and creative applications in mind. But the Amiga had a whole other range of machines that were mostly designed with productivity in mind...

The Amiga range can be split into two halves (I’m going to conveniently forget the CD32 and CDTV here) - the “budget” range and the “big box” range. The “budget” label is a little misleading, as anyone who forked over half a grand for an A500 in 1987 will attest - but generally it refers to those machines that were

I might be stretching the definition of “big box” a tad here - the A1000’s sleek and slimline looks were one of its key selling points, after all - but it really belongs in this list as one of the larger desktop systems. Just like its 1987 cousin, the A500, it runs on the Original ChipSet (OCS) with the mighty 7MHz

A1000 The Amiga 1000 is where it all started, way back in 1985. On release, it was simply referred to as “the Amiga”, and didn’t even have Commodore on the machine - it’s the only machine that uses the Amiga Tick as its logo. The A1000 was trying to be all things to all people, supporting creativity (complete with Andy Warhol at launch), games and business/productivity angles.

A2000 Two years into the Amiga story, it was decided that a machine targeting the high-end was needed, and so the Amiga 2000 was developed... the first true big box Amiga. And big it was! Being much bulkier than the A1000, this was one system that was hard to miss. While the A2000 still used the 68000 processor, it came with a much more substantial (and required) 1MB of RAM as standard (512KB Chip and 512KB Fast RAM in early revisions, and 1MB Chip in later ones), and, for the first time, the Kickstart ROM was on a chip. It was also the first system in the line that allowed internal expansion, which was part of the reason for the larger case - to support expansion cards installed in the five included Zorro II slots. Users had the choice to expand their system in many areas including graphics, networking, PC bridgeboards and SCSI host adapters.

Unfortunately, the A2000 just didn’t have the sex appeal of its predecessor, looking

Image courtesy of Bill Winters.

Image courtesy of Bill Winters.

For a certain section of Amiga owners (and I include myself in this category), the first thing that comes to mind when they think about their favourite platform is a compact, wedge-shaped machine with an integrated keyboard. In the UK and Europe, the Amiga 500, 600 and 1200 reigned supreme, and whilst the other machines in the Amiga range were certainly no slouch, especially in the productivity-focussed US - we may sometimes be a little guilty of not giving them the love they deserve. So much so that newer users, and those outside the community, are sometimes not even aware of the existence of the A500’s bigger brethren.

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AMIGA FOCUS

Motorola 68000 processor, but it’s a bit lighter on RAM, coming with only 256KB as standard (the upgrade to 512KB is pretty much required to do anything useful). It also has a side expansion slot - the same one that would later feature in the A500.

But one of the most interesting technical quirks of the A1000 is that there is no onboard Kickstart ROM - you need to load your Kickstart from disk before you can do anything. Visually, but the most famous feature of the machine is the keyboard “garage”... fold down the legs of your keyboard and you can slide it away out of sight under the A1000’s chassis, ready to go to sleep, or maybe just to give you more room to flail around on your joystick!

Perhaps because of its flexibility, there were a number of variants of the A2000 on the market. The A1500 (not to be confused with the Checkmate A1500) was basically just a rebadged A2000 with a couple of floppy drives. But the A2500 was a more significant change to the base spec, with an 020 or 030-based accelerator included. The A2000/20 and A2000/30 offered a similar setup with CPU expansion cards for 020/030. The A2000HD was just an A2000 with a SCSI hard drive included as standard. There were even some - the A2500UX models - that came with an Amiga port of UNIX, something the later A3000UX would also replicate.

A3000 By the time the Amiga 3000 was released in 1990, big boxes had cemented their place as the premium high-end workstations of the Amiga line. While some of the A2000 variants shipped with upgraded processor expansions, the A3000 was the first mainline machine to come with a CPU other than the 68000 on the mainboard, equipped, as it was, with the meaty 32-bit 68030 processor (running at 16MHz or 25MHz). This CPU, along with the Enhanced ChipSet (ECS), 1MB Chip/ 1MB Fast RAM, plus a SCSI hard drive as standard, all meant the machine ran faster than its predecessor. It also came with a built-in scan-doubler/flicker fixer, so that standard PC monitors could be used, and the new Workbench 2.04. It wasn’t for the light of wallet though,

costing in the region of £2500 on release.

This new high-end workstation took a lot of what made the A2000 a step above other models, and ran with it. Now using the enhanced Zorro III slots to make expansion cards even faster, and being the first Amiga to feature a built-in hard drive controller (and a quick one at that), the 3000 is highly favoured as one of the fastest and most expandable machines in the Amiga lineup. The A3000 had a much better look than the prior machine too.

The moulded curves of its front panel and the top-heavy aspect with vents underneath really made it stand out.

The Amiga 3000 was also the first to have an official towerised version - the A3000T had a completely redesigned motherboard with increased expandability.

A4000 The Amiga 4000 was the end of an era, the last family of big box machines to be released, and one of the last machines to be designed and released by Commodore.

Coming out alongside its little brother, the Amiga 1200, the A4000 got a mixed reception - it clearly had the fastest processor with a 25MHz 68040 at its core, it had a full 2MB Chip RAM (and more could be added in the form of industry-standard SIMMs), and the new Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) chipset was a step up in terms of graphics capability. But the speedy SCSI interface for hard drives had been replaced with a cheaper (and slower) IDE interface. And again, the A4000 wasn’t much to look at, with the only really interesting feature of the PC-esque box being the recessed Amiga logo. That said, the system was still popular (but niche as always).

A new version of the video production behemoth, the Newtek Video Toaster, was released for the Amiga 4000, and many of the systems sold would go on to be used in that industry, especially in the US. You’ll often see the vibrant Toaster flash across the front of A4000s that shipped with the video card, or were later expanded with it.

The A4000T was a towerised version of the A4000, but it is incredibly rare, as it was released mere months before Commodore went bankrupt. Escom went on to restart production of the A4000T, but the Commodore originals are still hard to find.

So if you ever find one in your parents’ attic, be careful - it’s worth some cash!

Image courtesy of Dan Wood.

AMIGA FOCUS

pretty much like an anonymous PC desktop case, and losing the cute keyboard garage of the A1000. I guess, as a productivity machine, it didn’t need to look too flashy when sitting on office desks, but still, this was one occasion that function outstripped form.

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Which is your favourite big box Amiga?

Back in the day, it was the Amiga 3000 - it simply was the best Amiga. SCSI and scan-doubler (and more!). Now it’s the Amiga 4000, as I can run AGA demos on it, and as it’s not my daily machine anymore, this is a good tradeoff (although to be honest, my main Amiga is my AA3000+ now!).

The A3000 impressed you then?

It was simply a better machine than Windows PCs - I could easily have software in different languages, powerful scripting etc. It was just more of a joy to use.

Were Amigas popular in the USA? The possibility of video editing was, for sure, an important part of the Amiga over here. This was down to how easy it was to connect Amigas to TVs - it was a much cheaper way to connect displays.

What would be your dream Amiga build?

Well... an AA3000+, ZZ9000 graphics card and a decent 060 accelerator. What more can you ask for?

Why do you think the A500/600/1200 Amigas won out in the rest of the world?

Price. The big box machines were simply too expensive, and Commodore management did not know how to handle the demands of the people wanting to buy big box machines. They could have definitely competed with PC and Mac, if there had been more professional software. Maybe if Commodore would have given out dev machines to people developing more "productivity software", instead of just the games market, it might have made a difference.

15KHz). Small changes like a reset button, IRQ7 switch (so you can get Action Replay functionality with the correct software loaded), and also a PCMCIA reset fix. Small fixes like that.

The ReAmiga 3000 has the INT2 connection done on the board as well, so boards like Cyberstorm PPC work.

In terms of things that break, the Alice chip can die when you hotplug monitors, and this is the hardest chip on the A4000 to get. Otherwise, it is the CIA chips, as they are connected to parallel port, game ports and so on.

Why do you feel it is important to maintain classic Amigas?

It’s simply the "real feeling" - it is nicer to use the real stuff. Even if FPGA is the only solution to keep the Amiga alive for longer, sadly today there are no exact mappings of the chips, and there might still be undiscovered "features" and bugs of the chips that the FPGAs haven't replicated yet.

Have you had many age-related Amiga hardware problems yourself?

I get them all the time, those pesky leaking capacitors still haunt me!

Can you tell us about the ReAmiga?

It all started when I worked in Gothenburg, staying in a hotel for a week every month. Once I asked the community what I should reverse engineer and got the hint of doing the Amiga 1200. So I asked if someone had a scan of a A1200 PCB... and it all started there.

The name "ReAmiga" is from my friend tbtorro - I liked the name and used it. The goal of the project is simply to have a replacement PCB for broken boards, which is why there’s not that many design changes on the boards.

How do you source the schematics?

AmigaWiki.org (www.amiga-addict.com/ schematics), and sometimes you get some schematics and data mailed to you.

What PCB design software do you use?

I use a program called Sprint Layout. It’s actually really bad for new design! But, it has a feature that lets you have a picture as a background, so doing a reverse engineer is very easy with that, as it allows me to draw the traces straight over the picture. I will do a YouTube video about how I do it someday.

What features does the ReAmiga offer?

On the 1200, I changed the composite and RF output, and put in a better, more modern, solution for composite and SVideo, giving much better quality. I also added a VGA connector (although it still requires a monitor that can handle

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When did you first hear about Paul Rezendes' A4000 Replica project?

Before the crowdfunding project started.

I had discussions with Paul before that.

What attracted you to the project?

Well, it was in a discussion with Paul about what "it would be great to have", as we needed replacement boards ourselves.

Is preservation or upgrade your aim?

I must say both really, but preservation is the most important. The Amiga would simply not be the "main machine" otherwise. But upgrades like networking, that make life easier, are always great too.

Do you ever get out to any shows?

I’ve been at Amiga 32 and 34, and I usually visit many demoparties in Sweden, Norway and even Finland and Germany at times.

What are you working on currently?

Right now, I am just doing a lot of PCB transfers for people - we will see what more I can do in the future!

Anything else you'd like to add?

Just that people must understand that designing and reversing engineering hardware is a time-consuming project, and costly too. Some people at present don’t understand this - they need to stop this nagging about price and demanding things. As with most hobby projects, users can’t say "You must do xxx", or even demand the release of all data. You can hope people do, but you can never demand it. There are a lot of good projects being cancelled due to this.

We all need to remember: this is all a HOBBY project for many of us, with no warranty or the like. We all need to enjoy it or there’s no point.

For more information about John’s projects, see his site at www.hertell.nu.

For the ReAmiga visit www.reamiga.info or the DiagROM see www.diagrom.com.

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AMIGA INSIGHT

John “Chucky” Hertell is one of the giants of the Amiga hardware world he’s the man behind the popular ReAmiga mainboard replacement project for A1200s and A3000s, he put together the popular DiagROM tool for diagnosing defective machines, and he’s also just a general font of hardware knowledge and tips. John agreed to talk to us about big box Amigas, and his past and current projects...

What tends to fail or need replacing the most with big box Amigas?

To nobody’s surprise, first of all the battery needs to be handled. No question really just remove it. You only need a battery if you want to keep the date (and if you do, you maybe are a more serious user and have a network card - so better to sync with a NTP server instead). The battery is, by far, the biggest threat to any machine.

The leaking capacitors on the A4000 are next. Other than that, the big box machines are built like tanks - if they’re taken care of, they will usually work pretty well, it is mostly leakage issues that are the main cause of problems on those machines.

Oh, and people hotplugging hardware.

The Amiga is not designed for that!

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AMIGA INSIGHT

Trip Hawkins: You'd be happy too if you founded EA.

“Amiga, the first personal computer that gives you a creative edge”... never was this phrase more apt than when applied to the true breakthrough piece of Amiga creativity software that is Deluxe Paint. Every system needs its killer app - a program that justifies buying the computer, turning it into a tool with a singular purpose. From the commercial perspective, the foundation of a strong system is good development tools, enabling the developers to work quickly and productively, being accessible to both the new user and the amateur developer. Deluxe Paint did all these things and more from the very start, and had industry-wide appeal far beyond Commodore’s progeny. Quite simply, Deluxe Paint was everything.

took advantage of the Amiga’s power, arguably more than any other packages at the time. Dan had been working on graphics packages since his time at Xerox, and he brought that knowledge and passion to EA in 1982. His features and tricks fully exploited the Amiga’s chipset with techniques like colour cycling to create simple, efficient animations, and palette swapping to increase the variety of colours available. At the time, features like these were innovative, so it was no surprise that the package quickly became an industry standard.

"An entire generation of creative talent grew up on DPaint, and many went on to careers in the industry."

This premier digital arts package started out as an internal development tool for a young and fresh-faced Electronic Arts.

Now-famous worldwide CEO Trip Hawkins was fascinated with the Amiga at the time, and EA stated their dedication to the platform from the very start. Engineer Dan Silva, who had prior stints at Xerox and Lucasfilm, created a tool called Prism to enable EA to quickly create high quality graphics, menus and stunning screens for their own products.

With help from the marketing department, Prism was rebadged as Deluxe Paint and turned into a full blown product. The stunning programming of Dan Silva really

level, but the pure functionality of Deluxe Paint and the simplicity of its usage helped create a whole generation of pixel artists and bedroom animators.

The UI and program structure helped set the standard for today’s world of homogenised paint programs, with products such as Adobe Photoshop. The cutting, the copying, the zooming and filling, the brush sizes and overall clarity of the design has been adopted by creative tools worldwide.

Studios around the world have used Deluxe Paint to create games for Atari, Sega and Nintendo - even to the point that PlayStation developers would sometimes have to whip it out for a bit of a touch up on their early titles. While it was ported to other systems (such as Apple and MS-DOS), the Amiga version - the first and the best - always reigned supreme.

Deluxe Paint is a truly inspiring piece of software which cannot be matched, even to this day. We spoke to CEO and founder of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins, about the birth of this creative colossus.

When did you first hear about the Amiga and what got you really excited about it?

Daniel Silva, photo from Deluxe Paint manual.

Dan had a lifelong fascination with animation, working on a video editor for Lucasfilm, and so future versions of DPaint opened up that world of animation, adding the ability to paint individual frames and introducing the mind-blowing Anim Brush. The ability to create a quick-and-easy pastable brush that moved forward frame by frame every time you stamped it down - this was unheard of at the time. Not only did the animation effects take it to the next

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I think it was in late 1983 when Dave Morse reached out to me. Of course I was very excited, it was exactly what we wanted from a home computer. Namely, real life in a box with graphics like television! The PC had turned towards the office desktop and PC makers stopped caring about games, sound, music, video and graphics processing. Steve Jobs and I had worked together on Apple's selection of the Motorola MC68000 as their 16-bit CPU, and it was a great processor that EA was already using in development kits.

Amiga then built a wonderful system

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architecture around custom ASICs for graphics and sound and allowed gamers to plug in multiple joysticks.

AMIGA INSIGHT

DPaint started as an internal piece of EA software for developing titles. How did it evolve into a full product?

Tim Mott hired Dan Silva to make an art creation tool for our developers. We cared a great deal about supporting our artists with a complete "studio" of tools that gave all of us a competitive advantage. DPaint was such a powerful and well-designed tool that Tim realized we could sell it as a product for a much wider audience.

Without Dan, do you think it would have been successful?

Dan Silva is an extraordinary human.

Brilliant and ingenious, yet always calm and warm. Who knows what would have happened without him; he was very critical to our success.

Dan always had a vision and plenty of ideas, but we also had hundreds of developers giving us feedback and asking for new features. There was always a wishlist and key priorities for new versions.

Do you feel many of the modern paint packages such as Photoshop have taken a lot of influence from DPaint?

They certainly did, there's no doubt. An entire generation of creative talent grew up on DPaint, and many went on to careers in the industry.

How important was the Deluxe suite of creativity tools in keeping EA alive in those early days?

The game industry was very tough in the 1980s. Atari had imploded... which was a big turnoff for the media, consumers and retailers. Rebuilding the industry from scratch was very slow and painful. PCs were very costly - often more than $3,000 in today's money - so they had to have many uses. It helped us to offer a wider variety of products. The Deluxe Series was a crucial part of EA in the 1980s. It could have remained important, but in the 1990s, EA's success with sports games and consoles caused the company to shift away from creativity tools.

DPaint had amazing animation features and early hacked functions like colour cycles. Did EA have a development path?

Why do you think DPaint PC did not perform in sales as well as the Amiga until DPaint II Enhanced 2.0?

We definitely had a plan that was guided by our desire to make games with much higher fidelity, that would enable games to become mainstream entertainment.

PC retailers would often clinch the sale of a new PC with a copy of Flight Simulator. For the Amiga, it was Deluxe Paint that closed the deal.

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Ian's big box copy of DPaint III, still in good nick.

Have you heard from many developers about their use of DPaint and its legacy?

As I have gotten older, it has been a delightful surprise to see the huge nostalgia factor and fanbase that keeps alive all the precious memories of what happened in the early days at EA, with products like DPaint, and platforms like Amiga and 3DO. I love it.

Which artworks created in DPaint stood out to you?

For me, the King Tut mask always dominates any other image. The lovely rendering of “The Birth of Venus” by Botticelli is a solid #2. Tut is so vibrant and just pops off the screen, announcing a quantum leap in graphics and realism.

The Botticelli adds a sophisticated emotional feeling and artistic delicacy.

Just those two images created a clear vision of the future - that we're not just going to be playing Pong anymore.

Some of the most stunning works and system-selling images were created by the early Amiga artist Jim Sachs. Jim’s career is a story of grinding and creating stunning work with focus, time and dedication to the art and subject. In those early days post-C64, he was lumbered with tools lacking the speed, quality and stability he needed, until Deluxe Paint arrived on the scene and took his work to a truly masterpiece level. We spoke with him to find out about the story behind one of DPaint’s most talented users.

Graphicraft. It was written by RJ Mical, mostly as a tool for the Amiga in-house artists, Jack Hager and Sheryl Knowles.

Aegis Development took it over and rebranded it Aegis Images.

Defender of the Crown was a stunning game. Which techniques did you use and how long did a single scene take to draw on average?

When I started doing the graphics for Defender of the Crown, Aegis Images was the only paint program available. It was a painstaking pixel-by-pixel process, and the first scene (the Saxon castle) took about two weeks. During production, Deluxe Paint came out, which greatly sped up my work.

What was your favourite Amiga art package and why?

The various versions of Deluxe were my favourite for years. Dan Silva was the first person to really put a lot of thought

When did you first see Deluxe Paint and what did you think of it on release?

It came out about halfway through the production of Defender of the Crown, so 86?

At first I found it very complex, and was worried that the user interface was very different from what I was used to. That’s when I discovered a truth that I have taught a lot in my seminars since. Never try to actually do anything useful with a new software package. Spend at least a couple of days just going through the manual and experimenting with each feature. You’ll be glad you did.

There’s the famous story where RJ cautioned Andy Warhol not to use it during his demo at the Amiga launch, but he did anyway. All the Commodore and Amiga staff nearly had a heart attack, but the flood held and didn’t bleed all over the screen. Clipping out objects was also very primitive at first. You could only do a rectangle, and your object had to be lifted off of absolute black. If you wanted black in the object, you needed to use very dark grey, otherwise those pixels would become transparent. You saw mistakes of this kind in lots of Amiga graphics. In later packages, the artist could set any colour as an alpha channel, and that was a great leap forward.

You created the gorgeous CDTV boot screen and GUI for Commodore. How come you didn’t do the CD32?

What essential tools were needed back then for a pixel artist, that are now standardised in modern programs?

When I did the graphics for CDTV, my friends Carl Sassenrath and Reichart Von Wolfsheild acted as a “buffer” between myself and Commodore management.

These two guys understood that the graphics would be the machine’s vitally important “face to the world”. On the CD32, I had to deal with Commodore executives directly, and found it impossible. They ended up keeping my opening fanfare music (which was too long), and the “spacewaves” effect I had created for the background. They cobbled together a user interface from my original CDTV graphics. But the downfall was the lo-res logo, which made the whole machine seem like a step backward from CDTV, even though it was actually more powerful.

Ha, ha – flood fill was extremely temperamental in the first paint programs.

What is the favourite artwork you have created on the Amiga and why?

One of your most stunning images was used to advertise Brilliance. How did this product improve on DPaint?

Brilliance was the first to utilise the expanded resolution and palette of the Amiga 4000. Digital Creations gave me one of the machines in exchange for my doing the Amiga Lagoon pic. Deluxe Paint soon caught up, but by then it was becoming apparent that Commodore was failing, and I started the long and unpleasant process of switching to the PC.

Jim Sachs Amiga artwork. LEFT: Amiga Lagoon, created in Brilliance. TOP RIGHT: From Aegis Animator. BOTTOM RIGHT: Used in the Amiga dealer demo.

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AMIGA INSIGHT

What was the first paint package you used on the Amiga?

into the ergonomics of a computer paint program, and I found it easy to use. The shortcuts became second nature to me left hand on the keyboard, right hand on the mouse, and eyes on the screen.

The earliest pieces for Defender of the Crown come to mind. It was just such a heady time, waking up each morning knowing that you would create effects that no one had ever seen on a computer screen before. The first time I got colour cycling under control with the shiny gold of the Defender title screen - I knew I was really on to something.

Victoria Lamburn, aka Pixel Vixen, is still flying the DPaint flag high. As a founding member and judge of the Amiga Art Contest - now bigger than ever in its third year - Pixel Vixen explains why there is still nothing like it.

Using an Amiga and Deluxe Paint in 2021

AMIGA INSIGHT

Do you explore any modern painting mediums, like using the iPad? Nope, never got past the mouse.

You're good Jim but don't blow your own trumpet!

Do you still create pixel artwork today?

What do you think of the modern revival of pixel 16/32-bit artwork?

to 28 rooms (only three of which are bedrooms). Full-scale construction started in 2006, but the 2008 recession wiped out the screensaver market, so I had to fire the crew and work alone ever since. We were finally able to move in last month, though there is still a huge amount of work to do.

I have a blog (which is sorely in need of an update) at www.castleonthecheap.blogspot.com

I haven’t done any pixel artwork in decades.

I’m somewhat amazed at its resurgence, since at the time, all I could dream about was more colours and resolution.

You’re currently building a castle like Defender of the Crown in real life! Tell us about this project and how can our readers find out about it?

I was looking to move out of Southern California around 2002, and was making some money from my Marine Aquarium screensaver, so my wife and I bought some acreage in Oregon, and I started designing my dream home. It had to incorporate everything I’ve ever wanted in a house since childhood, so the design soon ballooned

Deluxe Paint has a strong legacy, but one can argue that it’s still relevant today. Art created in DPaint has a certain look which is hard to recreate in modern programs, and using the original program is much simpler than trying to replicate in a new tool not designed for pixel art. In a world where pixel art is no longer seen as niche, but rather as a legitimate artform, it still has a chance to shine. Its users are still creating some stunning artworks with it.

I'm going to be a bit bold here, by stating that using an Amiga doesn’t have to be just for games and running SysInfo. Most importantly, it doesn’t have to be something only for nostalgia. When I dug my simple-but-reliable Amiga 600 out of my loft in early 2018, it was hard to imagine that I would end up having so much fun with it using Deluxe Paint. Sadly though, I couldn’t bring my Amiga to live with me in Japan, although I am still enjoying the platform through emulation.

Just the mention of the program’s name is enough to cause a halcyon reflection, of days scribbling with a tank mouse and using the flood fill with rich primary colours. However, DPaint has far more uses than simply looking back or loading the iconic King Tut image.

Once you accept your Amiga’s limited resolutions and, in some cases, colour palette, you will soon find a huge amount of versatility. Certainly, I am not for one second suggesting replacing Photoshop with DPaint; but by leveraging some modern tools and equipment, if you’re looking to create an aesthetic informed by lower palettes, lower resolutions and maybe a few HAM mode artefacts, you could find a hugely entertaining and artistically-valid use for DPaint and your Amiga in 2021.

I want to take you through some of the things I have more recently been using DPaint for artistically, aside from 100%drawn-on-Amiga pixel art . I want to talk about digital artwork, HAM mode and animation. I hope these reflections inspire you to take another look at how you could be using DPaint today.

Digital artwork Digital artwork in DPaint doesn’t have to be started or worked on 100% in DPaint.

I have been creating hand-drawn images and scanning them using the modern multifunction device in Lawson (a chain of Japanese convenience stores which provide copy/scanning machines). I’ve then reduced the size and retouched the scan in Photoshop on my similarly-vintage 10year-old MacBook Air, before saving directly out as an Amiga IFF image, which Photoshop still supports.

TOP: Also from the Amiga dealer demo. BOTTOM LEFT: CDTV boot screen. BOTTOM RIGHT: Bike portrait.

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The resulting line artwork is very pleasing,

Vicky is an advocate for Amiga art living in Japan.

and leads to some wonderful uses of DPaint’s basic tools like flood filling, and those which are slightly more advanced, like stencils. It’s like good old-fashioned cel shading.

So, in combination with my preference of hand drawing, and using modern reliable tools to bring them over to Amiga to use DPaint as a finishing medium - you can start creating artwork that is not trying to be a modern high resolution 300dpi image, but one that you deliberately want to be pixelated and have a lower colour count.

An example of this leveraging of old hardware is shown bottom right, with my character Saki Endo from my manga, Future Saviors.

HAM mode HAM mode has some very desirable effects, with almost chromatically distorted colour ramping at times, and allowing “high colour” (i.e. thousands of colours, not necessarily 15/16-bit images) images to be brought over to the Amiga.

Recently, I experimented with another image of my character Saki for a little side project I am quietly working on. This was a hand drawn image that was shaded by hand using Copic markers. The image was then scanned in and went through the Photoshop process to reduce the size and colour count. I actually reduced it to 256 colours, but with the intention of using the original 4096 colour HAM mode (known latterly as HAM6).

DPaint provides a surprising amount of image processing functionality that seems to have been forgotten. Again, not exactly Photoshop replacement material, but if you want to

Because of the low resolution of the original HAM mode, it can actually look very much like a paused VHS tape. By using the technical limits of HAM mode on the Amiga, and employing them as part of the effect, it again becomes just part of my artistic expression in 2021.

Animation To finish, DPaint’s animation features are still a good deal of fun with such a low bar accessibility-wise. This year, I am aiming to push my own boundaries by animating traditionally, after being inspired by fellow Amiga user and animator Chris Forrester at a South West Amiga Group meeting in 2019. We will see how that goes.

However, in the here and now, I took the Saki VHS glitch effect image a step further with animation. By using all of the features previously described and the very powerful stencil tools DPaint has in HAM mode, creating a full fledged VHS rewind animation was relatively easily achieved.

The result exceeded even my expectations (you can see it here: www.amigaaddict.com/hammode). And playback is swift and smooth. In fact, I know it would run fine on a 68000 Amiga, as previous experiments with HAM mode have proven as long as the whole screen isn’t changing, you can run many HAM animations at 12fps on a basic Amiga, especially if you use the ClariSSA animation format.

Again, using DPaint more as an image processor for externally created assets, and tying that with the animation

functionality has, for me, breathed new artistic life into my Amiga in 2021; creating a fresh aesthetic that I haven’t seen much recently, at least when it comes to DPaint animation, although many recent Amiga demos have shown considerable artistic value and style. The great thing is it's easy to capture Amiga output these days and use it on a modern video production. As I use emulation for my Amiga environment here in Japan, I can use QuickTime Player’s screen capture to record the playback easily for incorporation in Final Cut videos.

In time, I hope this brings a slightly wider audience to DPaint-created artwork than just the Amiga community.

Wrap Up It is my ambition to create a number of animations and images in DPaint in this style, for characters such as Saki that are part of my manga Future Saviors. It’s just another part of the artistic expression for the story, a complement.

In a way, it’s living up to the multimedia nature of the Amiga; just because my main focus is a print-based manga, it can be a multimedia expression, combining artwork and animation surrounding it, that has been created in DPaint on the Amiga. The Amiga and DPaint doesn’t have to be the beginning and end, but part of the expression as a whole.

DPaint isn’t just nostalgia, or for placing on a shelf to collect dust - with an idea, you’ll be surprised what you can do with it in 2021. The past has happened... what you do today makes the future, so let’s start adding to the Amiga’s and DPaint’s legacy by not just looking back. And the best bit - you can start today with a basic Amiga 500 or emulation - no expensive hardware required! Happy DPainting!

Pixel Vixen is a manga artist, and if you like what you see here, you can read the first volume of her new manga, Future Saviors, for free at www.amigaaddict.com/manga. For more information on the Amiga Artwork Contest, head to www.amigaartwork.com.

LEFT: Pixel Vixen used the quirks of HAM for some cool effects! RIGHT: Saki Endo from Pixel Vixen's manga.

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AMIGA INSIGHT

actually make a thing of HAM mode’s colour “bleeds” and “artefacts”, they really can heighten an image.

For this image, I wanted to create a VHS glitch effect. I was able to create the colour-phased versions of Saki using just DPaint to alter the hue of the scanned image on a variety of stencils. I used the warping tools to mess with the false shadow, and simple tracking corruption was created with brushed line patterns stamped down with translucency effects applied. This was entirely done in DPaint.

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Games based on film licences have been around almost since the dawn of computer and video games. Licensed toys, stickers and lunch boxes are a surefire way to help bring more money in for film companies. Back in the day, even cereal companies got in on the act when it came to free gifts. I wish they still did.

Who can forget opening up a box of cereal and finding cardboard characters from Willow, or some coloured plastic tat based on The Black Cauldron?

Whilst researching this feature, I came across over 70 film licensed tie-ins of various quality for the Amiga. Ocean Software had a reputation for licensed film tie-ins and put out some very strong releases during the Amiga years. A few other companies did a fantastic job with their titles too (and saved my sanity for this article!).

Whilst I have always known about the likes of Aladdin, Jurassic Park and Batman: The Movie, some of the games released really surprised me. How many of us played Fright Night, based on the excellent vampire film from 1985? Or Surf Ninjas in 1994, based on the Leslie Nielsen "classic"? With so many titles to choose from, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on five games that I judged to be The Good, five The Bad, and finally, five The Ugly (see what I did there?).

Back in Issue 4 of AA, I wrote about Amiga gaming heroes, and we talked about the likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Both of these action A-Listers have appeared on the Amiga. Arnie's Amiga career really is a mixed bag, but controlling one of the biggest action movie stars was tempting for so many gamers at the time that it almost doesn’t matter. I recently replayed Predator (a game that

came with my ST back in 1989), and despite being one of the greatest action films - the game is just awful. A turgid run-and-gun affair with awful graphics and dull gameplay. Even the skinnedalive bodies (well... splodgy mess in the trees, anyway) and being hunted by the Predator's laser sight doesn't add any wow factor. When I played this as a 10year-old, I felt like I was doing something naughty - playing a game based on a violent 18-rated film - however, I should have been more guilty for playing such a bad game!

Other late 80s releases that turned up on the Amiga - Red Heat and The Running Man - again not great. Amazingly, there was no game release for comedy vehicle Twins from 1989. The Amiga output continued when the 90s hit. By this point, Ocean were the kings of film licensed games, and they were involved in the next few of Arnie's. Although Total Recall from 1990 didn't excite me as a ten year old, the next game certainly did! In 1991, Terminator 2 was released to massive fanfare - the film was a huge hit, and even Guns N' Roses (the biggest band at that time) featured their excellent “You Could Be Mine” on the soundtrack, with the music video featuring scenes taken from the movie as well.

The Terminator 2 game (well, games) gave players two totally different experiences. T2: The Arcade Game was a decent light gun game (you could use the mouse on Amiga, which is actually quite easy to play with), having you blast through several levels of Terminators and various other Skynet enemies. Gunning through several settings seen in the film, it is up to you to protect John Connor - and therefore the future of mankind - as well as destroying Cyberdyne Systems. The other version of Terminator 2 isn't as strong as The Arcade Game sadly.

I have two main memories from playing Terminator 2. One of them was getting the game as a present in the big box original release.

It came with a

- by Paul Monaghan

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promotional t-shirt, which had a silver T2 logo on the front in the top corner. As an 11-year-old, the XL size of the t-shirt drowned me, but I felt so cool wearing film-related merchandise! The game itself wasn't one of Ocean's best.

Following the same setup as many other Ocean titles, there was a mixture of fighting, racing, and puzzles. Despite the film being an action masterpiece, the game was nowhere near such acclaim.

With sluggish one-on-one fighting levels against the T-1000, and some fairly boring puzzle levels - I only enjoyed the motorbike chase as a child. Hardly high praise for a full price game, and even the budget price is a stretch!

Now would be a good time to mention Last Action Hero - which was released around the same time as the game of Cliffhanger (starring another big action star, Sylvester Stallone). Neither of these games received positive reviews (Bram Stoker's Dracula would complete this "trilogy of terror"). Amiga games based on Stallone's movie career were more limited, with only Rambo 3 having a tie-in.

I find it quite surprising that Demolition Man or Judge Dredd didn't have Amiga versions, as the machine was still popular around their release.

Ocean had a lot of success working with Commodore throughout the Amiga's lifespan. The Batman Pack helped sell so many machines, and other bundles included the likes of Dennis, Nightbreed and more as this relationship flourished. I speak to Ocean's Gary Bracey about some of his memories at the end of this article.

These have been a few basic thoughts and memories of Amiga film tie-ins, but I wanted to list five good, bad and ugly games. Remember, this is only my opinion!

THE GOOD

The Oscar winners of game licences Batman: The Movie An obvious choice. But when this title helped sell so many A500s, how could I ignore it?

Following the popular Ocean Software template of platforming, puzzles and racing, Batman nailed them all. The game provided a good challenge to gamers

and captured the film perfectly. Also, the music by Matthew Cannon still sticks in my memory all these years later. The whole package is just amazing and easily one of my favourite Amiga games.

The graphics, sound and design of the game all still hold up almost 30 years since it was released. There is a good challenge here, but the game doesn't seem unfair as there are a decent amount of health hearts as you avoid traps and various enemies. On top of this, Gomez can find a rather nifty fez complete with propeller to help him through the levels. I don't have to say much more about the game because if you own an Amiga you should already know how great it is.

Aladdin Although there had previously been Disney games on the Amiga, Aladdin was one of the best. Based on the Sega Megadrive version, the Amiga release is an equal. Fantastic music, colourful graphics and it follows the plot of the film really well. The Amiga has so many platformers each trying to stand side by side with the SNES and Megadrive - Aladdin shows the Amiga can hold its own.

Fate Of Atlantis was released as a separate adventure, one not based on a film. That's a game I need to play properly - it has to be better than the fourth Indy film...

Jurassic Park The game of one of the biggest movies of all time was originally released on the A1200 in 1993, with A500/600 versions appearing in 1994. This is one big game.

Playing Alan Grant, the game follows the plot of the film - saving Doctor Hammond's grandchildren and, most importantly, getting off that dino-infested island!

The main part of the game uses an overhead view point similar to The Chaos Engine, with the sprites all looking distinctive as you shoot various dinosaurs, poisonous plants and more. Of course, having a large playing field can be an issue, as you look for keycards and survivors and try to move to the next section of the park. The stand out moments of the game are when you enter buildings though. The game switches to a 3D viewpoint as you navigate through the building, shooting the many raptors in your way in first person. This section, for the time, was really impressive - especially on the Amiga. A good game and another hit for Ocean Software.

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THE BAD

Maybe not box office flops, but awful games nonetheless

Fright Night I love this horror film, yet had no idea there was an Amiga game based on it.

The gameplay experience is very different, however. Playing as the vampire Jerry Dandrige, your role is to survive until dawn in your house. Each night becomes more difficult as more rooms and floors are added, with various intruders in random places. Killing victims keeps your health up and when all intruders are killed you can return to your crypt. Sound good? The game is awful! Repetitive gameplay and a steep difficulty curve make this no fun at all. It almost made me want to stake myself to end the misery!

Batman Returns Wow! This is the total opposite of Batman: The Movie. Developed by Denton Designs, the game follows the same storyline as the film, but it looks awful!

This side scrolling beat 'em up has you fighting various clowns, Catwoman and the Penguin. I honestly don't know what to say about it though, as it is just so tedious, with really poor graphics! The console versions of Batman Returns were both good games, but this Amiga version is one of the worst film tie-ins I have ever played. There is nothing that stands out here - if this had been the game bundled with Amigas, then I could see a lot being returned!

Moonwalker Based on the 1988 Michael Jackson film of the same name, it is easy to forget how big Jackson was at the time. The home computer games are nowhere near as good as the Sega arcade and Megadrive releases.

The game features four levels, with two of them being overhead collect-a-thons.

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The Addams Family This is seen as one of the best platformers for the system with most reviews being in the 80-95% range.

Playing as Gomez, you must search the Addams Mansion for your family members who have been kidnapped. Unlike many games around this time, you can tackle the majority of the levels in any way you choose. For a pretty bad gamer such as myself, this is a godsend as I got to see more of the game!

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure A Lucasarts point-and-click adventure featuring one of the greatest action heroes of all time? Yes please! Although there was also The Action Game available, it was nowhere near as good as this.

Following the script of the movie fairly closely, this was the closest I felt to actually being Indy. Even watching the film left me stuck on some puzzles as a kid though, but that was always part of the fun.

A few years later, Indiana Jones and The

The maze-like levels - collecting various items for Michael to escape crazed fans soon get boring, and even the shootingbased levels based in the Smooth Criminal video (and then becoming the robot) don't add much excitement. Still, to look for a positive, it is nice to hear the snippets of Jackson's music.

levels, nothing in the game stands out. The game follows the storyline well enough I suppose, but to have two levels on the hoverboard that drag on, an overhead level trying to avoid people, a rough beat 'em up and finally a sliding puzzle... it is slim pickings to look for positives! I suppose the theme tune sounds OK!

THE UGLY ONSCREEN

They may be good games, but the art department failed here

Cliffhanger I always knew this game was supposed to be bad! Every review I saw as a kid ripped into it. For this feature I finally wanted to give it a try - and instantly wished I hadn't.

Playing as Stallone's character Gabe, you must take down the terrorist group that has crashed in the mountains you patrol.

Back To The Future 2 Maybe not one everyone will agree, but this isn't a game I have ever enjoyed.

Coming as part of the Screen Gems A500 bundle, I expected big things playing it at a friend's house. I mean, the film was great, and I wanted to experience those futuristic settings in a game too. Set over five

Darkman This was another film I loved as a kid (even though I was underage). A superhero film from director Sam Raimi (way before Spider-Man) which starred Liam Neeson.

Hudson Hawk Although the film starring Bruce Willis was deemed a flop, the game from Ocean isn't that bad. You play Hudson Hawk, a thief who has to get through some pretty long platforming levels and obstacles in order to steal various art.

The graphical style features unattractive little squashed down cartoon-like sprites.

Although they don't actually do anything for me personally, the gameplay has stayed in my memory since it was released.

The game is mainly a scrolling beat 'em up, with a couple of vertical climbing sections thrown in to break up the gameplay. There is nothing that makes this game stand out, but your character is slow and requires pixel perfect jumps from the very beginning. And there is a part when you use a corpse to ride down a mountain slope(?!).

Detective Harrigan, your job is to blast your way through non-stop drug dealers as the screen scrolls along the streets, a hotel and even onboard the Predator's ship. The game may be seen as "one ugly motherf**ker", but for a quick blast, it isn't that bad.

There are plenty of levels to get through, including the Vatican and Da Vinci Castle.

Luckily you have a boxing glove and baseball to attack enemies with - the baseball comes in handy to flick switches to open doors and progress. Hopefully I'm not the only fan of this action platformer.

Predator 2 Luckily, this was very different to the game of the first film. No longer running left to right shooting the odd enemy, this sequel used an Operation Wolf-style viewpoint.

The game has some decent-sized sprites, but they don't have much detail, and there’s mostly the same enemy throughout each level. The game is quite simple to play as you punch and kick your way through streets, warehouses and building sites looking to kill the people that disfigured and left you for dead.

Before each level, you have a chance to take some photographs of one enemy to try and make a disguise with their likeness, which gives you a few moments of extra energy when you start the level. I always thought this was a nice idea. I may be on my own thinking this game is OK though.

Dune 2 I’m probably cheating a little with this choice.

The game uses the film (and novel) as source material, leading to what became a key real time strategy game.

It is on this section of the list as the graphics are fairly basic for the main part of the game, but that doesn't matter too much when so many other RTS games owe Dune 2 so much.

I'm not saying this game is amazing - far from it - but I don't think it is worthy of being in the bad batch. Playing as

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With three houses to take control of, and various missions to play, there is plenty to get stuck into here. The fact that

developers Westwood Studios went on to make the Command & Conquer series shows how important this game is to the Amiga.

So, there’s our brief look at film tie-ins.

There are a lot I haven't discussed, again a mixture of quality, but games such as Alien 3, The Lion King and the Robocop trilogy are all worth a play. However the likes of Home Alone, Total Recall, Days Of Thunder... aren't. No doubt my list and how I have grouped these together would be different for some, but it has mostly been fun checking some games out for the first time. Who knows - in a future issue some more film tie-ins may get a mention...

Gary Bracey Over the last few pages, I have discussed a mixture of Amiga film tieins. Whilst researching the topic, I found out there were around 75 film-related games for the Amiga - some obviously better than others - and a good number of those were made by Ocean.

Ocean Software had a reputation for some excellent (and some average) film licensed games. I was lucky enough to speak with ex-Ocean VP of Development Gary Bracey.

Employed there for almost a decade, Gary had some great experiences during his time with the company, and was kind enough to share some with us.

Ocean had what seemed like a fantastic relationship with Commodore. Going back

"Our sales team worked up a great relationship with the executive management team at Commodore UK people like Paul Patterson (Ocean) and David Pleasance (Commodore) were instrumental in that relationship. They knew that big titles could help sell the hardware, and so we collaborated with them for the bundle packs. Batman: The Movie was probably the biggest of all."

That one was a master stroke. The driving level really showed off what the Amiga could do. Can you remember seeing it running compared to the 8-bit versions? It felt like this was the start of the proper leap to the next generation.

"Yeah, we were really proud of that. I recall seeing some rough footage of the movie at Pinewood Studios, and there was a short sequence showing the Batmobile screeching around a corner using a Batarang and wire shot at a lamppost to spin the vehicle around the corner without slowing. I thought that could be a great game mechanic, and so I suggested it to the team. They did an amazing job with that, but sadly it couldn't be done on the 8-bit computers - for obvious reasons."

In the 90s, there were many games based on major films. Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Addams Family, Lethal Weapon. Several of these not only had home computer releases, but also came out on consoles such as the Super Nintendo. How did your day-to-day role at Ocean change around this time? There seemed to be more releases than ever before, taking the various formats into consideration.

"I started having to spend more time on the licensing, and at one point, I even considered a permanent move to San Jose where Ocean of America was based.

I was lucky to have a great team of producers in-house by then, like Lorraine Starr, and so they began overseeing more of the day-to-day development, while I messed around with the licensing and spent more time at Ocean of America."

the Nintendo Party at CES; meetings with the likes of Spielberg (fantastic!) and Steve Jobs (awful!), Hollywood premiere parties for the movies we licensed, inviting Alec Baldwin (The Shadow) and his then-wife Kim Basinger to my house in Manchester for dinner (they never came!), frequent dining in the commissary at the big studios like Universal, Warner Bros and Paramount and so eating lunch opposite Kevin Costner and Joel Silver... and so much more! How's that for name-dropping?"

One thing I remember from a news article in a games magazine is that you had a small part in Clive Barker's Nightbreed. How did this happen? It must be a great memory.

"Yeah, fellow scouser Clive Barker was directing the movie. I regularly visited the set and we became chummy. One day, he just asked if I'd like to be in the movie as a background creature. I mean, what would you say?!"

Ocean had plenty of film licensed games, are there any films you regret not making into a game?

"None that come to mind. It wasn't just about how “big” the film was, but more about whether the scenario lent itself to a decent game narrative."

You left Ocean in 1994 after almost a decade. What were some of your favourite games and memories from your time there?

"So very many. It's like asking which is your favourite child! However, I do remember The Addams Family being a game I absolutely loved and spent many hours playing. The design was as close to perfect as you could get back then. We did have some of the best developers in the world in my opinion (but I might be biased)!"

A massive thank you to Gary for giving up some of his time to chat to us.

What were some key moments from trips to games events or film events that you experienced during your time with Ocean?

"I refuse to answer that, on the grounds I might incriminate myself!" [laughs] "There were so many amazing events, such as watching Meat Loaf perform at

June 2021

This portrait of Gary was drawn by Stephen Thompson (ex-Ocean) on a Samsung Galaxy Note.

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AMIGA INSIGHT

Lethal Weapon Up until recently, I had never played this game before. Although the sprites are quite simplistic, the gameplay works well.

Throughout five missions, you get to play as Riggs or Murtaugh attempting to gather evidence and kill the end boss. Each level is a decent size, and doesn't drag on - plus the settings do change, for example, the subway mission includes fighting in the tunnels and later on the train itself. Some quick reflexes are needed in places, but luckily there is a decent amount of ammo to help you out. Finally the amazing Barry Leitch was the game's composer and that is always a good thing! Well worth checking out!

to the Commodore 64 days, their hardware bundles often featured Ocean titles. Titles such as Batman, Nightbreed, Dennis and The Simpsons showed consumers that this platform was where you found the biggest stars, so to speak. How did the relationship between Ocean and Commodore work back then? Did they come to you?

- We're all "inviyyous" of James this month...

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“First there was nothing. But now, poly.play presents, Tigerskunk designed game, Inviyya!” This is the epic but ambitious declaration on loading Inviyya.

Now, I’m no qualified historian, but I am sceptical. One thing that did exist before Inviyya was, of course, R-Type - and that’s a game that’s clearly been an inspiration here. The look of the ship is the most obvious homage, and there are some clear nods in some of the level design, enemies and explosions too. But there’s major differences to be found in the weapons and speed upgrades - appearing on the levels at predetermined points, rather than from destroyed enemy ships, for example. All this aside, Inviyya is a simple and predictable shmup, but don’t go underestimating it - this game really delivers.

Considering this is all the work of just one man, it’s a remarkable feat. With the glossy feel of a commercial release, the environments and enemies in Inviyya look great for a 16-colour game, and of course it features multiple eye-watering layers of parallax scrolling. It’s also worth mentioning the sound track, which is superb, featuring some great tunes.

Level 2 and 6 are the real highlights in the score for me, but each one is excellent. Turn down the lights, wrap some glow sticks round your neck and pump up the volume!

They mostly come at night...mostly.

easy enough to master after a few runs, and as in similar games, it helps to memorise the patterns and layouts.

However, small mistakes will be punished mercilessly, with the loss of fire power and speed meaning you're even more likely to die again after the respawn! It turns out that staying alive is the key to success (who’d have thought it?) and this is one of those games where you make a stupid mistake, restart the game and then start making even more stupid mistakes in places you’d never screwed up before, in your rush to best that original death. It may behove you to warn your neighbours that the strangled howls they’re hearing through the walls aren’t anything to worry about - it’s just you starting again for the 10th time!

Don’t despair though, you are awarded extra lives throughout to extend the single credit. Phew!

Don’t be fooled into viewing this six level game as a quick romp. The player is eased into the challenge, certainly, with difficulty ramping up with each level, but there are no handy continues. Once you’ve lost your lives, it’s back to the title screen you go!

In terms of gameplay, Inviyya is simple but great fun - as with most of the best shmups. It’s well thought-out with a few surprises. Foes include mini xenomorphinspired alien creatures, robots, various types of ships and a veritable biomechanical menagerie of monsterbosses. They fire at you. You fire back.

You know the drill.

For newcomers, the first few levels are

Pleasingly, the speed upgrades (blue

AMIGA ADDICT

spheres you pick up) are fairly subtle in their effect and you’ll quickly reach maximum speed, avoiding the pitfall of some other shooters, where collecting too many speed ups ends up working against you (Hellfire in the arcade - I am looking at you!). The orange weapon upgrades can boost your power by an additional five levels, increasing the damage output and height of your lasers (or would they be phasers or particle beams? I’m not a scientist!). You won’t see more sophisticated options such as homing missiles, bombs or a companion craft in the style of R-Type’s Force however - Inviyya is all about keeping things simple.

One interesting surprise is that the incoming barrage of bullets actually slows down the closer you are to the enemy when they fire. Advantage or disadvantage? It could be either really, but it certainly forces you to carefully consider your onscreen positioning - an interesting peek into the game’s tactics.

Level 4 has a fascinating twist. Your weapons are useless against the boss!

Instead, you must avoid death while its attempts to kill you bring down the roof of the cavern on its own head. Silly dragon. There was me thinking they were wise! It’s definitely a novel idea though, although it is a little let down by being a bit too easy once you realise you simply need to sit safely above the dragon’s limited reach and avoid the falling debris. D’oh!

The final stage is appropriately the toughest - you can expect the final boss (again maintaining a funky R-Type style) to claim a frustrating chunk of your beleaguered pilot’s lives in the initial barrage. The rest of the fight is a tough

Game over man!

They're comin' outta the walls!

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• Developer: Tigerskunk • Available from www.polyplay.xyz • Amiga platforms: OCS / ECS • Release year: 2021

June 2021

That's Not A Gun... That's a Gun! Level 5 Default

Level 3 Level 4

Level 6 (full power)

Level 2

One thing conspicuously absent - in these days of endless cut-scenes and complicated plots - is a storyline. I was

Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.

hankering for a bit of back story! What’s my motivation? How can I get in character? The maker, however, has pretty accurately predicted the type of gamer he’s designing for - we all know what we have to do: get to the end and try not to die! Once you complete the game, however, you are treated to a bit of context: the final screen congratulates you for defeating the alien Inviyya Empire and bringing peace to the galaxy. So we’re definitely not the baddies! Thank goodness for that. Of course, the people of the Inviyya Empire might see it differently, but they are all dead now and history is written by the victors! Ho hum!

Inviyya will work on all Amigas with 512KB Chip RAM and 512KB of any other form of extra RAM (that includes the CD32, using the included .iso image). So if you have even a passing interest in shooters, grab a copy! The fate of the galaxy is in your hands...

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GRAPHICS 84% It’s a lovely looking game and is well drawn, however it is a little let down by the low number of colours (especially on level 4). It’s just crying out for some AGA goodness!

SOUND 95% The music is excellent across the board, plus it also features good sound effects!

GRAB FACTOR 85% The difficulty builds well, definitely possible for the average gamer to beat, but it will take practise.

PLAYABILITY 80% Controls very well, it’s a horizontal shooter so you know what to expect! It’s not trying to reinvent the genre, but it plays well.

86%

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challenge if you don’t have fully powered weapons, and chances are that you won’t by the end! All of the levels are such fun though - I think my favourite boss is the monster found at the end of the fifth stage. A fabulous challenge in being both nimble enough and quick enough to pick off four turrets before you succumb to a hail of bullets.

Michael Borrmann

- Paul delves into the interesting backstory of Inviyya in a chat with the game's creator

AMIGA INSIGHT

Hi Michael, thanks for your time today and for agreeing to answer a few questions. Can you tell us a bit about your early experiences with the Amiga? Was it a machine you owned during the 80s/90s?

I read about the Amiga 1000 in a German computer magazine called Happy Computer when I was a little boy, and it was immediately my dream computer. I was the happiest boy alive to get an Amiga 500 on Christmas Day 1987.

How did you become interested in games programming?

Like every boy back then, I was most interested in games. Unlike many others though, I was interested in not only playing them I always wanted to create my own game too. I just didn't know how to code ASM (assembly language) back then, and had nobody to teach me. So I tried to create something in AmigaBASIC [he laughs], which didn't turn out well, as you might guess!

What was it about the Amiga that made you want to make a game for it?

As I said previously, I always wanted to create a game, especially for the Amiga. Back when I started coding on Inviyya in 2016, there wasn't really much around, except Reshoot, when it came to new Amiga homebrew games. Just some not-sofancy-looking Backbone games and the like.

The Amiga has several fantastic shoot 'em ups with the likes of Project-X, Banshee, Xenon 2 and more. With Inviyya, you have released a brand new shooter. What were your original ideas and aims for the game?

I saw Reshoot, and was kind of amazed that the game runs basically with seven colours in the foreground. Seeing that, I tried to create my own little mock-up of a shmup that used only seven colours. After that I thought "Hey, maybe let's try to create a little demo showing this". After that, it just went on from there.

Whilst developing Inviyya, did the design of the game evolve at all from what you originally had in mind?

Yes, heavily actually. The first two versions of the game used only seven colours, for instance. At one point, I noticed that while this was okay for one level, it wasn't really practical for me to create more levels within those limitations, and still have the variety that I longed for in my game. So I switched over to 16 colours later on. That was around two years ago. I never looked back, to be honest.

Was there anything you wanted in the game that didn't quite make it?

I had an idea for a two-player mode, where the second player had control over a little satellite. But time constraints were a problem and the amount of blitter power needed for that was just not there. poly.play are the publisher of Inviyya. They have been involved with and released a great mixture of genres. How did you end up working with them?

I met Seba Bach of poly.play at the Amiga34 convention in Neuss. Some people there told me they really like what he does for the games he releases on his label. So I went over to his

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booth and showed him my little game. I think he was immediately hooked on it, and after that we started working on what we thought should be in the box.

The game itself runs so smoothly and has some really nice graphics. I love the dance soundtrack too. Seeing all this hard work come together must be an amazing feeling! Do you have any ideas for your next project?

It's really an amazing feeling to have produced what probably would have been seen as a professional level game back in the day. Also I feel it's great to show what the good old OCS Amigas are capable of. I have the idea of creating a horizontal scrolling fighting game with barbarians. A bit like Yie Ar KungFu. I am heavily influenced by NeoGeo graphics styles currently, and hence I’m trying to incorporate this into my new game a bit.

The graphics you see in the screenshot (above) will probably be very different in the end product, though...

Thanks again for speaking with us. To finish up - what are some of your favourite games for the Amiga?

F-18 Interceptor, Warhead, Turrican, R-Type, Corruption and Monkey Island. Thanks for the nice questions, Paul.

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gold

standard

Matthew Smith, producer of Amiga Power: The Album With Attitude, rummages through the game drawers of time to pluck out the finest Amiga titles in different genres. This month: the sprite-based racer that's streets ahead of the competition.

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Game Crazy Cars 3

Released 1992

Authors Publisher Richard Hooper and Jean-Michel Masson (programming); Bob Belaïdouni, Didier Titus Carrère, Françis Fournier and Florent Moreau (graphics); Richard Hooper (music)

In Amiga circles, when conversation turns to sprite-based racing games, there’s one word which will likely spring to everybody’s lips: Lotus. And with good reason - Gremlin’s 1990 smash hit Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was the first such game to fully utilise the Amiga’s capabilities, delivering a super-speedy, silky-smooth sprite-scaling sensation that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an arcade, and launching a top-notch trilogy of zoom-fests bearing the name of the famous car manufacturer.

Opinions vary as to which of the Lotus games is the best. Some players prefer the tightly-focused lap-based racing of the original; others favour the full-screen Out Run-esque checkpoint system employed by Lotus Turbo Challenge 2.

And Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge certainly has its fans, with its course designer and quirky futuristic tracks. But one fact is unquestionable - the original Lotus put the great majority of earlier Amiga sprite-based racers to absolute shame (especially the coin-op conversions - just look at the horribly sluggish, hideously juddering likes of Out Run and Chase HQ, or rather, don’t if you value your eyesight). It became the yardstick by which all subsequent similar releases would be measured.

There was only one Amiga game in the same genre that ever truly surpassed it.

And it came from the unlikeliest of sources.

graphics easily the equal of the Lotus trio; spiffing sonics and a game engine that left its rivals in the dust. A peek at the CC3 credits reveals that it was made by an entirely different creative team from the first two, and “Hurrah!” for that, because they took the trouble to apply an extra coat of polish to every single aspect of it.

Boy (and girl) racers So, what is it that makes Crazy Cars 3 so gosh-darned impressive? Well, for a start, it has a sort-of plot. Such a thing might strike you as irrelevant for a racing title, but in this case, it adds a surprising amount of personality and depth to the proceedings.

Y’see, in CC3, you’re not just any old racing driver, vying to claim some trophy or other. Instead you play as one of many nefarious ne’er-do-wells taking part in a high-stakes and hugely illegal road race tournament across the USA, for no reason other than to become a millionaire.

You’re a greedy, reckless adrenaline junkie, and you don’t care who knows it.

This backstory is pretty fun in itself, and it’s the sturdy peg on which the game hangs a multitude of funky features. The race structure, for example. Each race takes place in a different US city, and to join in, you need to put up a fairly hefty entrance fee - and thus add to the prize pot that everyone’s after. You arrive in

the States with just a few thousand dollars to your name, so you have to start out competing in the cheaper, easier races in the tournament’s lowly fourth division, building up your winnings until you can afford to enter the more lucrative (and more difficult) advanced stages of the contest.

You’re up against a veritable rogues gallery of rival speed demons, and you can further add to your funds (or, if you do badly, go broke in a very “Game Over” sort of way) by betting on the outcome of races. You get to decide exactly how much you want to wager on your victory, and when you’re on the road, the racers you’ve bet against have little “Rival” markers hovering above their cars, so you know precisely who you need to beat in order to claim a major cash bonus.

Money is also required for such tasks as repairing your car and buying equipment from the shop to enhance its performance. If you want to advance to the next division, you’ll have to complete a special division challenge race, which can only be entered once you’ve saved up a tidy sum to pay for a set of three entry passes. Thus the plotline beefs up the gameplay, by allowing numerous strategic elements to be layered on top of it, and we haven’t even talked about the actual racing yet.

The actual racing is ace.

Titus Non-Chronicus When Crazy Cars 3 turned up in 1992, courtesy of Titus, anybody with experience of the publisher’s prior output would quite reasonably have expected it to be dreadful. Crazy Cars and Crazy Cars 2 must surely rank as two of the most appallingly useless games ever to be inflicted on an innocent home computer, so the chances of the third entry in the series turning out to be decent were slimmer than a supermodel trapped in a trouser press. And yet, Crazy Cars 3 was and indeed, still is - a total stunner.

Gone were the slow, jerky visuals, tinny sound and wonky controls of its predecessors... replaced instead with

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Your law-breaking racing antics take you all over the USA in search of ever-bigger prize purses.

June 2021

The police are alarmingly tenacious once they have you in their sights...

“Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double-good, double-screened, Lamborghini American Challenge.”

I can see somebody’s house from here As mentioned, CC3 is no slouch in the presentation department, with pseudo3D graphics that come barrelling at you in a thrillingly smooth and speedy style.

Your car handles excellently, and at its fastest (once you’ve purchased every upgrade), it’s blisteringly quick, with not a hint of jerkiness in the sprites or scenery. Lengthy draw distances mean you can see miles down the road in front of you, so you get fair warning of tricky bends approaching, and there are weather effects such as snow and rain and even night-time racing - all of which require you to adjust your driving tactics.

Most impressive of all, however, is the sheer diversity of the racing environments. Each division features 15 tracks to complete, which can be tackled in pretty much any order. They all look and feel unique; varying colour palettes are used to gloriously atmospheric effect, and the road layouts are invigoratingly imaginative, with much use of hills, valleys and tunnels, carriageways of differing widths and assorted bits of debris at the roadside (or sometimes in the road itself, like traffic cones or animal skulls) that you can send flying if you hit them. In total, you get to race on 60 different courses, plus the four division challenges, in which you have to dodge convoys of terrifyingly gigantic trucks, and you’re constantly kept on your toes

...can’t we just talk about this, officers?

by all the other road users you encounter.

Alongside your fellow competitors, there are numerous civilian vehicles driving around, and you can end up being pursued by the police if they spot you breaking the speed limit. The AI on the computer-controlled cars is remarkably convincing - rival racers will attempt to hinder each other as well as you, the cops are dogged in their attempts to ram you off the road (but can be fooled if you slow right down while passing them), and you’ll sometimes see them chasing other lawbreakers. The sound effects enhance the action splendidly, with suitably beefy engine noises, squealing tyres and genuinely useful audio cues; such as the beeping from your radar scanner (if you have one), which warns you when a speed trap or roadside police camera is nearby; and the wailing of sirens, which gets louder as the law closes in on you.

Fully comprehensive It’s the enormous variety of Crazy Cars 3 that makes it ultraspecial, and keeps it endlessly fresh and replayable. Just as the

You don’t half meet some funny characters on your travels. That bloke on the left’s a blimmin’ cyborg.

creators of Shadow Fighter took note of all the best bits from previous one-onone fighters and crammed them into their game, so the makers of CC3 clearly endeavoured to include all the best features from previous racing games, along with a wealth of neat innovations of their own. There’s a range of upgrades you can buy in the shop, including such fun gadgets as night vision goggles to make driving in the dark easier, a radar jammer which stops speed traps and police cameras from working on your car, and turbo boosts that give you 10 seconds of hyper speed. Then there’s the breadth of user-friendly options, with a customisable training mode, different control methods and the ability to save your game after each division challenge.

No part of this game hasn’t been carefully thought through and executed with tremendous precision and flair.

Heck, you can even choose between three different characters to play as, and keep tabs on how your opponents are doing via a division ranking screen, so you know who’ll be the hardest to beat.

Just don’t be tempted to try either of the first two Crazy Cars games after playing this one, or the police may come after you for real. To find out what all the vociferous swearing is about.

creators Head-on, full-tilt collisions with ruddy massive lorries are best avoided. In real life, too.

Cresting hills at top speed can lead to your car becoming briefly airborne, which is terrific fun, if not that great for your suspension.

June 2021

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Formula Two Crazy Cars 3’s only real failing is its lack of a two-player mode. However!

This was put right in the game’s 1994 re-release as Lamborghini American Challenge, which introduced not only an official car manufacturer licence, but also a split-screen option allowing a pair of human players to compete at the same time. Beyond that the game is largely the same as ever, just with a new title screen and some tweaks to heighten the difficulty level. Hurrah!

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• Published by Gremlin Graphics • Amiga platforms: OCS / ECS • Release year: 1991

A nice cosy warm by the fire... or battling with orcs in close combat. Who drew the short straw?

It was the last day of term at primary school in 1990 - toy day. All around me, other kids were enjoying their favourite playthings. Action figures, Game Boys... even an Atari Lynx was being passed around. I didn’t care. What I had brought in was so much better than everything else, because in front of me sat HeroQuest, the new fantasy board game.

Just a glance at the box art, with its muscular barbarian swinging his sword as all manner of dark forces fight in the background, filled you with anticipation.

Back then, the world of fantasy had enchanted many of us. The likes of Knightmare on TV, the Fighting Fantasy series of game books that dominated bookshelves and a number of popular fantasy-based films on the big and small screens - all these were enough to whip up curiosity in these faraway lands.

Unfortunately, the practicalities of taking a board game like HeroQuest into school to play with others and also trying to explain the rules to them quickly enough to get a decent game going became rapidly obvious to young Paul. Handheld consoles soon had people walking away from the dungeon game board and waiting for a turn on those instead...

The following year, software giant Gremlin released HeroQuest on a number of home computers. Being a fan of the board game, this was a "must buy" for me. Surely the computer version couldn’t match the magic of the original?

First off, let’s look at the main characters.

All your favourites from the board game are present. You get to choose from four heroes, each with different strengths and weaknesses. The Barbarian is all about brute strength and has the most hit points; the Dwarf is skilled in disarming traps; the Wizard and Elf are weaker characters, but have the benefit of being able to use magic. With a choice of Fire, Wind, Earth and Water spells, there is a lot to choose from to help you complete the quest at hand. And don’t

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AMIGA ADDICT

forget - these four characters will be all you have when you enter the dungeons of the evil wizard Morcar and take on his legions of monsters.

The game options themselves are fairly basic. You can rename any of the main characters, renew/reload any fighters lost in battle, or load up the add-on datadisk (Return Of The Witch Lord, which was released a little later). The most important icon (if you want to

- by Paul Monaghan succeed anyway) is the shop. I remember playing the game for the first time, thinking, "Great, time to get armed to the teeth and kill some creatures!" Sadly, with the grand total of ZERO gold pieces to spend at the start... the shop has to wait.

There are 14 different quests to choose from, of varying difficulty, from simple fetch quests to finding hidden treasure, with several needing you to also escape the dungeon by the stairs in order to complete the mission. Whichever character escapes first earns 100 gold pieces (although that’s not too impressive looking at those shop prices!)

The layout of the dungeons is similar to those you would expect to find outlined in the Quest Book for the board game.

Each room has a sealed door, and many are decorated with fireplaces and furniture. Various rooms and corridors contain chests, bookcases and piles of rubble to block your way, forcing you to rethink your route.

Each player takes their turn to click on a spinning coin to decide how many steps they will move that turn, which is a little odd. I suppose they could have still rolled dice on screen to move, but that’s just a small niggle of mine. As you move around the dungeon map, it is slowly revealed to the player, and at any point during your turn, you can view the parts of the map that have been uncovered already and decide which way to head next. This map also shows enemy characters, fallen rocks and other hazards.

Just like the board game, there's a mixture of rooms and corridors to search during your quest. However, this is where some strategy and risk/reward elements come into play. Each turn you have various options to choose from - you can move, attack (if close to an enemy), use an item or magic, and search for treasure or any secrets in the room. Searching a room is the best way to build up much needed funds for the aforementioned shop, as if you do find any gold, it varies from 10-50 pieces usually - allowing you to save up fairly quickly for a new weapon or other item. Any gold found, though, is only allocated to that character at the mission's end. You can also find various potions to improve health or other skills again, these really come in handy for any

Ian and James are lucky enough to still own the HeroQuest board game - resulting in the wildest AA staff after hours parties! The only problem is our vacillation before deciding on Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf or Wizard.

June 2021

these offer shortcuts around the dungeon, or just a way forward. I found myself checking the map anytime I became lost, in case I was missing something.

non-magic characters who don't have healing spells.

It isn't all sunshine and rainbows though... not that it could be in a dungeon! Whilst searching a room, you may come up empty-handed, but more importantly, you may be attacked by a monster, ending your turn. If your health is already low, this can be extremely dangerous, as if you get killed whilst awaiting your next turn, you lose anything you found.

Sometimes, during your search, you will also be hit by a trap that reduces your hit points - is it really worth taking the risk?

The other search option mentioned is looking for secret doorways. Some of

The in-game music was created by the fantastic Barry Leitch, known for his work on several Amiga classics we all know and love (see Issue 5 for our interview with him). In this soundtrack, he has captured a fantastic medieval/classical sound that you find yourself humming

As discussed (and teased about) on Maximum Power Up podcast, my history of buying games based on board games has been quite dodgy.

However - unlike Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit - HeroQuest is well worth your time for some turn-based fantasy fun!

GRAPHICS 88% Characters are well drawn, and the player can easily make out what they all are. The look of the board game is captured well.

SOUND 91% Great atmosphere from Amiga legend Barry Leitch.

GRAB FACTOR 90% 14 quests to choose from, played alone or with friends. And a computer game MAY appeal more to some people than a board game.

PLAYABILITY 88% Easy enough to pick up and play - luckily this isn't so in-depth as to put non fantasy fans off.

89%

VERDICT

Your Mother Wouldn't Like It!

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ONSCREEN

The first dance is always nerve-racking.

There are several enemies to fight in this game, with mummies, orcs, and goblins just for starters. The combat is one of the weakest areas of the game, unfortunately. Most characters will need to start their turn next to the enemy and choose the attack command to even begin a fight. One character rolls attack dice (the number is based on his character class) and the other rolls defence dice - if you have more dice in your favour than your foe, you win! Get the same, and the fight is declared a draw. Whenever it is the enemy's turn, the roles are reversed. The combat does a job, but just seems a bit boring in the transition to a digital format.

Luckily, any magic users can often use attack magic from a distance and therefore save precious hit points.

along to involuntarily. The sound effects are fairly basic, but do the job, and add much-needed atmosphere to the game.

Six of the Best - Tony Aksnes (www.amigaguru.com) Each month we catch up with a notable figure in the world of Amiga and retro gaming, and ask them to whittle down their list of favourite games to a shortlist of just six.

instead of just unboxing on forums and social media, I did it all on my blog. The results have been rather overwhelming to be honest!

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That’s great! Okay, let’s get onto the list...

This month we’re talking to exdeveloper and Amiga demo-scener Tony Aksnes, now editor of the popular Amigaguru.com gaming blog.

This is a really tough task, only six games? I want to mention hundreds!

by Stufm enough of this one.

Agony I knew this was a game for me as soon as I saw (and heard) the loading screen for the first time. The graphics, the action, and the over-the-top music made it very difficult for me not to like this game.

Hi Tony, can you tell us a bit about your history with the Amiga?

Hi. I got my first Amiga way back in 1985, on the 3rd October to be precise! It

Jim Power In Mutant Planet This was an instant hit from the very first second for me - the brilliant music by Chris Huelsbeck, bundled together with sublime graphics, code and playability,

Slam Tilt This is my most played Amiga title ever, for sure - we must have played it for 1000s of hours by now. By “we”, I mean me and my fiancée. The game is pixel perfect, the music is untouchable and the

Jim Power maintains his cool even on a hot day.

If anyone bothers Brian, he just gives them the claw.

Superman or pirate? You decide.

"I can do anything Sonic or Mario can do!"

I only came out tonight to catch a mouse... now this!

Who would have guessed the final frontier has eyes?

makes it hard to ignore, even today.

whole nextgen feel to the tables makes it the best digital pinball game across all platforms ever for me.

wasn’t long before I was writing my own games, and then I got into the demo scene where I was active for 20-odd years. In the mid-90s, I started helping out other developers with game mechanics, design etc. I’ve worked on quite a lot of Amiga and PlayStation stuff over the years.

Fantastic. And how did you get started in blogging?

I started the blog for one reason - to talk about Amiga games and games on other systems that have a connection to the Amiga, whether by their developer or IP. It didn’t take long before I realised it would be a good way to channel out news about new Amiga releases, so

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Mr Nutz: Hoppin Mad This game is one that not many people talk about, but to me, it is not only a technical marvel, but also scores high in just about every category. The map screen can drag on a bit, but the rest is just dazzlingly good and, best of all, it is rather unique too.

Brian The Lion This is the one game that never ceases to amaze me. There are so many cool tricks in this Amiga exclusive - the bitmap scaling, the boss fight twists and the crazy amounts of hidden stuff are just a few of the reasons why I just can't get

June 2021

RESHOOT-R I just had to include this rather-new shooter. It did so many things perfectly, and it more or less has rescued the Amiga market. The game is technically good, but also a proper looker and it sounds perfect.

Thanks for your choices this month Tony!

Check out the Amigaguru: https://blog.amigaguru.com for lots of interesting NITY Amiga gaming blog COMMU LE content.

ARTIC

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• Gives team AA a nice home on your shelf!

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32 M ad C sK O ris R te N ns en E R

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by

CD

Year....................................................1994 Publisher...................................Psygnosis Developer..........................Digital Illusions

LEFT: Time to get started. MIDDLE: Ben could get on Gladiators with those arm muscles. RIGHT: Inverse zip line? This ain't The Krypton Factor!

Welcome along to the CD32 Corner. Last month, we took a look at a fantastic puzzle-platformer, and this month we will be looking at... another puzzleplatformer! Yes, I do love puzzleplatformers; yes, I promise to cover something different next month; and no, there are no Vikings in this one.

Minniat. Off you go - to the rescue!

Benefactor is, in many ways, a typical puzzle-platformer - you pick up keys to unlock doors, as well as various other objects that you can use along the way to traverse each level. In pure puzzleplatformer style, the amount of things to pick up and interact with steadily grows as you progress through the game.

The game we are taking a look at this month is Benefactor - a wonderful little puzzle-platformer by Swedish developer Digital Illusions, published by Psygnosis in 1994. Digital Illusions are probably best known these days for games such as the Battlefield franchise, Mirror’s Edge, and Star Wars: Battlefront, but for those of us who grew up with the Amiga, they are better known for developing some brilliant pinball games: Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, and Pinball Illusions (Ed. - "See AA issue 3 for more on those!").

Pinball games are not all they did back in the day though, which this game is proof of. Benefactor is every bit as brilliant.

In Benefactor, you play as Ben E. Factor, intergalactic hero extraordinaire, who has set course for planet Lullyat to help the Merry Men recover their lost rainbow machine. The rainbow machine, along with the guards protecting it, was stolen by the evil inhabitants of their neighbouring planet Minniat. This simply won't do, as that rainbow machine was what kept the Merry Men merry - without it, they are losing their colour and turning evil. In order to get it back, Mr. Factor has to rescue the Lullyatian guards, who have been imprisoned on the six moons of

You're not only interacting with objects and various switches though, you'll also be interacting with the little Merry Men that you rescue along the way. If you guide them properly, they will help you out by pushing switches and operating different machinery - all vital to successfully completing the level. In order to finish a level, you need to guide all Merry Men into the exit - but beware of the black and white merry men! These guys are destructive and may foil your attempt at rescuing them - they need to be recolourised using a colouring machine and some ink before they’ll be

your allies once again.

The Merry Men in each level are scripted to do the right thing, so once you free them, they will move along on their merry way to wherever they are needed next... be that pushing down some button, pulling a lever, or operating a crank to elevate Mr. Factor to another platform. Sometimes though, they need a bit of guidance from you, the player. In those cases you can simply pick them up and, for example, throw them up onto a higher platform that they could not otherwise reach. Don't worry about traps and creatures though - while they are very dangerous to Mr. Factor, the little Merry Men seem completely impervious to rough treatment.

The platforming is sufficiently tight that you’ll quickly learn to guide Ben through the many jumps, climbs, and falls of the various levels. There are numerous moves to get the hang of, but using all the buttons of the CD32 control pad, you will soon master the controls. Ben can climb ladders, swing hand to hand on pipes to cross deep chasms, jump, roll, climb between platforms and more. All of these actions are beautifully animated, leading to some reviewers comparing it to Flashback with its rotoscoped graphics. The red button picks up items or Merry Men and, if used while running, makes Ben jump while doing a somersault. The yellow button makes Ben do a short controlled jump, and if you hold down the green button before you press left or right on the Dpad, you can do a longer controlled jump.

The blue button makes Ben do a roll in the direction he is facing, which may be handy when avoiding creatures and traps from above. While climbing a pipe, Ben can pull up his legs by pressing up on the D-pad, again handy to avoid moving traps, and so on and so forth.

There is an impressive set of moves in Benefactor and you will need every single one to get through the levels. By pressing one of the shoulder buttons, you enter a

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June 2021

AMIGA ADDICT CROSSWORD PUZZLE - by Paul Harrington

mode where you can have a look at the entire level, without moving Ben at all, so that you can plan how to approach it, similar to the approach an experienced Lemmings player would take.

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Ben nearly lost his feet to Pacman's angrier cousin!

While we’re on the subject of the greenhaired cliff plungers, the graphical style is somewhat reminiscent of Psygnosis’ classic puzzler, in that our protagonist and everything else for that matter - is quite small, meaning that you can see a large part of the level at any given moment. But even with the limited sprite size, they have created some really attractive animations, and the whole thing looks excellent if you ask me. The music is also alright, even though its monotony may get on your nerves after a while.

Mail order store you shouldn't eat Let's go!

Factor 5's finest Kitten chasing head-banger Jack Marshall's the chief tactician Tyrannical scripting Musical 8th Vorlon renderer Blue and orange All about the spice A hard days knight Metal penguin collector Perfect jumps Checkpoint!

Not Tam

Turn this page upside down to check your answers! renderer WORKBENCH - Blue and orange DUNE - All about the spice MOONSTONE - A hard days knight ROBOCOD - Metal penguin collector PIXEL - Perfect jumps LOTUS - Checkpoint!

RIT - Not Tam

NITY COMMU LE ARTIC ION SS SUBMI

June 2021

ANSWERS (NO CHEATING!)

14.

15.

17.

20.

22.

24.

25.

Amiga CD32 Gamer.......85% CU Amiga........................88% The One..........................85% Amiga Action.................91%

1.

2.

5.

6.

8.

9.

11.

13.

14.

15.

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Down 1. SILICA - Mail order

store you shouldn't

eat 2. LEMMINGS - Let's go!

5. TURRICAN - Factor 5's

finest 6. WIZKID - Kitten

chasing head-banger 8. THUNDERHAWK Jack Marshall's the

chief tactician 9. AREXX - Tyrannical

scripting 11. OCTAMED - Musical

8th 13. LIGHTWAVE - Vorlon

1. Blitz Basic's best 3. They're state of the art 4. Went from disk to chip 7. Convincing in the Atlantic 10. Space adventures with Jameson 12. His desert rocks 14. Prize emulator 16. Dweezil's nemesis 18. 1 has 86, 2 has 100 19. Not just for bread 21. Disseminating essential information 23. Pogo's ascent 26. Mostly useless unless

you're a squirrel 27. Manic chip designer

PUTTY - Dweezil's nemesis ZORRO - 1 has 86, 2 has 100 TOASTER - Not just for bread AMIGAPOWER disseminating essential information NEBULUS - Pogo's ascent PCMCIA - Mostly useless unless you're a squirrel MINER - Manic chip designer

Critical Reception

Down

16.

18.

19.

21.

23.

26.

27.

The reviewers back in the day loved Benefactor as much as I do it seems, as it scored really well all around. This is most definitely a game I recommend you check out today, as its brilliant puzzle design still makes this a worthwhile title these 27 years later. It is a game that is perfectly suited to playing on your couch with a controller in hand, and the puzzles are rewarding and fun enough that it warrants playing it with some friends or family members, so that you can enjoy some coop puzzle solving. I personally have had a lot of fun playing this with my kids.

Across

Across 1. SKIDMARKS Blitz Basic's best 3. SPACEBALLS - They're

state of the art 4. KICKSTART - Went

from disk to chip 7. PERSUADERTRON Convincing in the

Atlantic 10. FRONTIER - Space

adventures with

Jameson 12. HUELSBECK - His

desert rocks 14. WINUAE - Prize

emulator

The single most important thing about a puzzle-platformer is its level design, and in that regard Benefactor is up there with the best of them. I have spent many happy hours playing Benefactor with my youngest daughter, trying to figure out how to get through the levels together.

We will get stuck, try again, take a different approach, and slowly but surely work our way through the levels, feeling really clever whenever we beat a level.

This is exactly what a puzzle-platformer should be.

AMIGA ADDICT

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AmiKit

TESTBENCH

- James gets his Pi kitted out Amiga-style I have long had a pipe dream of being able to call myself a coder... a skill that nowadays lends itself to the image of cool young folk with skinny jeans and a dizzying intellect (not quite the same image as it used to have back when it was just called programming!). Alas, I am creeping up on middle age, having merely dabbled at a very basic level (literally - I used the BASIC language as a kid), so the moment I detected a whiff of interest in coding from my eldest son, I thought it was time to begin living vicariously through him, and bought myself presented him with a Raspberry Pi 400 (RPi400) for Christmas.

When the RPi400 was announced, like a waft of Lynx deodorant and sweaty plimsolls, I was transported back to the 80s. A time when I grew up with micro computers - those chunky little all-in-one systems you could plug into your TV, and moments later be either programming or gaming. I loved the idea of my son excitedly ripping open the wrapping paper and marvelling at this modern day micro. To my delight (and slight surprise), he’s really enjoying coding - especially when combined with physical computing using the GPIO pins. Something that again echoed my past with early micros, watching my dad connecting devices using homemade cables and wires to the user port of the Commodore 64. So when I heard about AmiKit XE, and the chance to review a version specifically for the RPi400, I jumped at the chance to bring the old and new worlds together.

Available to buy from www.amikit.amiga.sk/ raspberry at a cost of either €19.95 (for the current version of the software), €29.95 (for an additional year of updates and live chat support) or €49.95 (as

• Price from €19.95 • Available from www.amikit.amiga.sk • Developer: Ján Zahurančík

previous, but with three years of updates).

It’s also recommended that you have Amiga Forever, as legally, AmigaOS3.x and the relevant Amiga ROM files cannot be distributed with AmiKit.

change the boot mode so that it automatically starts up into AmiKit - it’s as easy as double-clicking the “boot mode” icon on the desktop, and it’s much nicer to boot into an Amiga environment.

So how do you get started? Simply download the software, write it to your removable media of choice - SD card in my case, but SSDs are also supported and pop it into your Pi. It will boot up into a Linux desktop environment (Manjaro). The installation instructions (available as both a PDF and as a video) are conveniently stored on the desktop in a ”START HERE” folder, which (guess what?) is where you need to start the installation process. It includes step-bystep directions on how to quickly expand your main partition, connect to WiFi, copy over your Amiga Forever ISO file to the Pi (which you should create beforehand from the “Tools -> Build Image” menu within the Amiga Forever application), and then launch AmiKit (with the ISO file mounted in the virtual CD drive). A series of screens talk you through the installation and any interaction you need to perform, such as confirming if you wish to automatically download Picasso96, a device driver library set for enhanced visuals - standard on OS4, and an optional extra for AmigaOS3.x.

From within Amikit’s Amiberry environment, you are running AmigaOS3.x with a whole host of software at your fingertips, such as Directory Opus 5 Magellan II, AmiSSL, DOSBox, HippoPlayer, WHDLoad and Wazp3D Beta - over 400 AmigaOS3.x applications and games. The selection of games and demos bundled includes the full version of Another World (with an extra level not found in the original) with permission from Eric Chahi, and ports of games such as Doom and Metal Slug.

These steps might sound a bit complex, but it's really very simple (assuming you own Amiga Forever) - the install guides hold your hand throughout the whole process.

To access applications on the Linux host environment - such as the Chromium browser I am using to access my Google Drive for this document, or an application such as LibreOffice or VLC you simply switch to the Manjaro desktop with a click of the Pi symbol at the bottom of the screen. Amiberry keeps running in the background, another click of the Pi symbol and you’re plunged right back in. Alternatively, it’s easy to launch a selection of apps without leaving/minimising Amiberry, using the Rabbit Hole desktop drawer (or Rabbit Hole icon at the bottom of the screen). It’s a pretty great experience to be able to have an up to date browser, or another non-native application such as VLC, opening up seemingly within the AmigaOS environment.

Once rebooted, you’re up and running in the (now fully set up) Manjaro Linux host environment. AmiKit is ready to go using the Amiberry emulator, a fork of a version of UAE specifically aimed at ARM systems.

One of the first things I recommend is to

Wow, look at that gorgeous website! What's that?! It looks like an Amiga magazine... I can't resist!

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June 2021

When it comes to computers, my inclination naturally leans towards gaming. But in my opinion, the capability that raised the Amiga (and other micros that came before it) above its console contemporaries was that users could do so much more with their machine. With AmiKit allowing a full Amiga desktop solution with access to modern Linux applications, I decided a great initial test would be writing this review using it. So that’s what I am doing - this whole review will be (or as you’re reading this... was) written using my son’s RPi400.

Browsing sites such as Google Drive is pretty seamless too, but of course bear in mind you’re using a computer that costs less than £100 - adjust your expectations accordingly. Applications can take a little time to open, and tasks running in the background can lag slightly (HippoPlayer just did, when I opened a new browser tab and loaded up the PiHut site to check the current price). The installation instructions

and it’s also where (assuming you have access to updates with the version you purchased) you can access the Live Update section to download the latest version of AmiKit (and therefore Amiberry).

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So, if you have a RPi400 and are looking to bring some Amiga flavour to it - whilst still being able to have access to a modern Linux environment - I can certainly recommend AmiKit. And to top it off, it’s also under constant development, so will only continue to improve. By the time you read this, the version I was testing (11.6.0), should be released, adding much requested AHI audio support, amongst other things. Get it now!

TESTBENCH

The overall experience is smooth, userfriendly and The Doom test - a standard way to check performance these days... remarkably easy, provide the details on how to overclock although, as with any system based on your Pi, if you so wish, but AmiKit is also Linux, expect to get stuck in with a bit of available to higher specification tinkering at times, especially with machines (PC, Mac or Linux), if you want unusual hardware. In my case, I had to get the slickest experience possible. trouble with my Monster Joysticks Amiga Having said that, even with the joystick to USB adapter - the Linux host limitations of the hardware, it all looks system certainly recognised it, but I could really great. As a user of Classic not get Amiberry to allow it as a Workbench most of the time, it’s great to controller. I’m sure I will be able to make see the modern (to me at least) high-res it work at some point, but it’s going to looks of AmigaOS3.x, and the underlying take some playing around and messing Linux desktop. with config files I expect, and I have a deadline to meet! The good news is my The easiest method of customising Xbox 360 USB controller worked straight AmiKit is with the included MorpheuZ away with no more messing around than application. Here, you can change all simply selecting it from the dropdown in manner of visual and system settings, the input menu when starting Amikit (or

just by accessing the UAE config with F12).

For gaming, I had some issues with ADFs, but once I’d copied over the same WHDLoad directories I have mounted as hard drives in WinUAE on my PC, they worked great for all the games I tested albeit with occasional slight delay in the game starting). Once started, the games ran fabulously and at full speed.

THE GOOD AmiKit removes hours of painstaking configuration. Comes complete with lots of legally bundled software and games.

THE BAD Not bad per se, but nothing completely new is offered, other than total convenience.

90%

VERDICT

GOEX Drive

- Can the GOEX go like the clappers?

Thinking about the Amiga range in today’s world (or I guess what would have been Tomorrow’s World back in the day?!?), whilst we are lucky enough to still have fully functioning Amiga computers to use, I am conscious that the original floppy disks of the day are now 30+ years old. They were never intended to still be working after all this time, and sadly, many disks just don’t work anymore. However, in addition to having digital preservation societies looking to catalogue and archive almost every disk ever created for the platform, there is

also a healthy library of existing floppy disk "images” (Amiga Disk Files or ADFs).

These are exact replicas of the original disk - so much so, that with a bit of software on your Amiga, you can write the image back to a physical disk and recreate that time spent waiting for a disk to load. We all remember and loved that... didn't we?

In recent times, we have had alternatives.

After all those years of using floppy disks, how awesome was it to finally have something to use that would remove our reliance on those failing storage media? I

The GOEX package.

June 2021

am, of course, referring to the Gotek drive. The Gotek provides an exact emulation of a physical floppy disk drive, not only for the Amiga, but also for sewing machines, music synthesizers, Atari STs and everything in-between. If you are not familiar with the Gotek - it’s a physical device, about the size of a floppy drive, that you can use in replacement of, or in addition to, your real Amiga disk drive. It enables your Amiga to use ADF images copied to a USB stick in place of your ancient floppy disks. Handy, eh?

Early Gotek drives would have little three-digit seven-segment LED screens, showing you which disk number was inserted from a list of disks chosen at startup. Later, the screen was replaced with OLED variants, which allowed you to see the actual name of the disk which was loaded. Firmware changed over time to adopt the more popular FlashFloppy standard, and further iterations added a rotary dial to make it easier to scroll through the disks on the inserted USB stick. You can even get a piezo speaker to

AMIGA ADDICT

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TESTBENCH

Between 1987 and 1991, when the Amiga was at its most popular, the main way to consume content was via floppy disk. The young computer enthusiast in me would have dearly loved a hard drive during those years, and although I would finally obtain a reconditioned 20MB A590 in the early 90s (from the Computer Depot in Glasgow), I still felt rather privileged to own an Amiga 500 with no less than two Cumana slimline external floppy disk drives, before finally achieving that particular panacea.

by John McDermott

TESTBENCH

emulate the sound of the disk being accessed (which I love!).

As wonderful as the Gotek is, however, the bulky enclosure it is supplied in means that if you want it to be housed inside your Amiga (and for info, the Gotek drive will work with any Amiga), some people have had to resort to cutting their cases to fit, and others have been mounting it outside the case via a trailing cable. Some talented people have even gone as far as creating 3D printed brackets to house the Gotek more snugly inside the Amiga, and these are good... but it still isn’t an elegant solution for our beloved Amigas, especially the A500, A600 and A1200 machines.

My own Micro Gotek (a smaller version of the normal Gotek that can be situated more cleanly inside an Amiga) was still not great, so it was with pleasant surprise that I came across the GOEX drive from Centurion Tech (centuriontech.eu).

Designed for the three “wedge” Amigas listed above, the GOEX takes all that made the Gotek a wonderful, useful piece of hardware and takes it to the next level. Using the same FlashFloppy firmware by Keir Fraser that is popular on Gotek drives, the GOEX is a slimline, carefully crafted piece of kit. Once installed, it lines up perfectly and unobtrusively with the Amiga’s disk slot, without any modification required at all.

The version I bought was the GOEX “On Pills” edition, which comes in a sleek allblack design, including the mounting bracket. I also opted for the external OLED module, which provides the user with bright, clear text while they use the device. The screen is larger than I expected, and simply pokes through the venting of the Amiga, plugging straight into the board with ease.

The “On Pills” version of GOEX also has an on-board add-on hardware module that allows you to see the selection menus on your main monitor (via an onscreen display), as well as letting you navigate through it using your keyboard. The GOEX uses an onboard SD card interface for loading disk images (which I find to be much more elegant and unobtrusive than a USB stick) and a scroll/jog wheel for navigating through disk images.

My version didn’t come with any installation instructions (which is a shame really), but once you realise that you need to remove the existing floppy mounting bracket in order to screw one end of the GOEX (using a 3D printed clip) into the screw-hole vacated by the bracket, it all falls into place neatly. I will admit to that taking me longer than it should have to realise. I blame age!

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The GOEX installed into my A1200. Note the little clip (bottom left of the unit) which is installed where the floppy disk mounting bracket used to be (once I figured that out of course!). There is enough clearance to have my extra-long IDE cable to sit under it (as I have my Compact Flash HD mounted on the back plane).

Using the GOEX is a breeze. I simply copied over the contents of my Gotek USB stick to a 1GB SD card (I knew I would find a use for that old card eventually!) and popped it into the GOEX. There is a nice “press to insert/eject” feel to inserting or removing the card and, once in place, scrolling through the disk images to my usual save game ADF was simple.

I have yet to attempt the included modification to the board to allow the onscreen display on my main monitor, as there is soldering involved. And I’m not that bothered to be honest. It would certainly be a great feature to use though, especially if you didn’t opt for the external OLED module.

A smaller overall footprint than the Gotek/ OpenFlops, meaning more space for cables.

Of course, the final “nice to have” is the piezo speaker emulating floppy disk access. There’s just some extra nostalgia to hearing your Amiga clicking and whirring away, even if it is only an emulation.

All in all, this is a really elegant solution for the wedge Amigas. I’m lucky enough to have the limited edition CD32 case and keys, and the GOEX matches up wonderfully with the aesthetic of the rest of my system. This is definitely the peak of floppy drive emulation - it has made my system a joy to use. Highly recommended.

You can pick up the GOEX “On Pills” edition from centuriontech.eu for as little as €59, although this can go up to as much as €71.50 depending on the options and extras selected. Stock is currently limited due to worldwide chip shortages.

June 2021

Installed neatly where you can see the discrete jog wheel and the slot for the SD Card.

The OLED module sits in the vent strips with feet which fit perfectly and keep the module secure.

Ultimate Floppy Emulator - Does Edu's USB floppy drive solution cut the mustard?

The current model is a revised version which saw the addition of a rotary dial for much faster and easier ADF selection.

At the time of writing, this device can be yours for €43.

As with the popular Gotek and OpenFlops solutions, you have the option of replacing DF0: entirely with the UFE, or adding it as an external drive, leaving your physical floppy unaffected. The simplest method to quickly get up and running, of course, is to go with the external option, connecting the hardware to any Amiga’s external drive port. If you choose to go the replacement route, an alternative header port is present on the board to allow you to connect directly to the existing internal drive cable. You will, however, also need to supply +5V and GND connections.

The tiny switch on board specifies how the drive has been connected, so ensure it set correctly and you’re good to go... almost.

The UFE uses the FlashFloppy floppy drive emulator firmware, as used by Gotek drives. To complete the setup, you are required to download two files (HFE and TY

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CFG) and drop them onto the root of the USB or microSD storage, along with your ADF images. You can use sub folders or just dump everything on the root, your choice.

You may have a number of ADF images on the drive, but before you can use them, you need to assign them to numbered slots. Connect the UFE with your Amiga switched off, and boot into Workbench. A new floppy disk should be mounted which contains the FFManager program. This allows you to assign your ADF images - press F10 to save and the Amiga will reboot. Once back at Workbench, you can use the dial to select your images which will then appear on the desktop. There is even a small speaker that clicks away, just to reassure you that things are working.

If you want to play games, your best bet is to use the UFE as DF0:, as many games only work from the primary drive. Even if you go down the external route, you’ll be able to get some titles to boot by holding both mouse buttons after a reboot to bring up the Startup Menu (Kickstart version dependant). This will give you time to select your image but you can also select which drive to boot from. I had very little luck gaming with the UFE set as DF2:. Pairing the UFE with a DF0:/ DF1: switcher is an ideal way to have a flexible system, allowing you to boot from disk or ADF, switching which device is treated as DF0: as needed.

The biggest issue with the UFE is that unless you are able to easily access the rear of your Amiga, switching images could be a mild pain. If you replace the internal drive, then you could hang the

TESTBENCH

From the creator of the UnAmiga, Edu Arana brings us the Amiga Ultimate Floppy Emulator (UFE). This handy little device allows you to store your collection of ADF images on a USB stick or microSD card (but not both at the same time, mind) and have the Amiga access them as though they are true floppy disks.

by Duncan Styles

For Duncan, it was love at first sight.

device out of the side of the computer’s case, which would be ugly but functional.

Amiga owners are a resourceful lot, so I imagine that putting the screen and selector dial on extension cables would open up all sorts of custom installs.

Alternatively, plugging the UFE into the back of an external floppy drive with a passthrough connector can be very convenient.

The Amiga Ultimate Floppy Emulator is perhaps at its most useful as a method of preserving your own data disks, and transporting files between Amigas or an emulated system on a PC. It’s worth noting though, that using a USB stick is much less fiddly than the microSD option. Previously, I had been removing the internal Compact Flash card I am using as a hard drive to transfer files back and forth, but after a bent pin incident on the PC’s CF port, I am glad of the robust USB option the UFE provides.

A great device, recommended.

THE GOOD Very easy to use and in a nice compact form factor for external use. Has both external and internal connectors.

Flexible, especially with a drive switcher. Great for data preservation.

THE BAD More expensive than other solutions.

Would look better in a case when used externally.

88%

VERDICT June 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

49

Pimp Your Amiga 600

by Andrew Siddall

TESTBENCH

- Modern parts for your retro computer

The Commodore Amiga 600 was always an oddball. The original intention was for it to slot into the Amiga range as a lowcost entry-level machine, to fill the gap the Commodore 64 left. At a maximum price of £249, the vision was to enable those who could not afford an A500 to get a basic machine and upgrade it later.

Originally named the Amiga 300 to emphasise the entry-level status, the machine was released in March 1992 rebadged with the A600 designation. The addition of certain specs, however, meant that it actually ended up costing more than the A500, and for this reason, Commodore marketing decided it should be seen as a successor instead. The name

was changed appropriately.

Amiga Format first reviewed the A600 in Issue 36 in July 1992. Editor Damian Noonan concluded that the Amiga 600 was exactly what was wanted in the UK, and pointed out that A500 owners in general never expanded their machines beyond what the 600 was limited to. He also said that gamers wanting a compact gaming machine, that could also be used for their homework, would be happy with the new offering. AF even speculated that someone might add an LCD screen to turn the 600 into a portable Amiga (not beyond the realms of possibility see Ravi’s Scraptop on page 52)!

Internally at least, the Amiga 600 was mostly a smaller Amiga 500+. Nicknamed “Junebug”, surface mount technology was used to lower manufacturing costs, enhance reliability and shrink the main board.

Three main changes were made from the Amiga 500 series: an internal IDE port was added, allowing the optional addition of an industry-standard internal 2.5” hard drive, and a PCMCIA Type II interface replaced the versatile DMA side expansion port of the 500. Finally, the numeric keypad was removed. This helped reduce the size of the machine... but some games that needed it, such as flight simulators, suffered from the loss, as did some serious packages like Deluxe Paint.

The Furia accelerator card simply drops in right on top of the A600's CPU.

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The A600 cost £399 when it was launched at the Amiga Shopper Show, at Wembley Exhibition Centre in May 1992. The A600HD followed shortly after, sporting a built-in 20MB hard drive as part of the Epic/Language Lab pack for £499.

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The PCMCIA slot was a new addition to the Amiga range. Commodore’s original vision was to take advantage of the PCMCIA standard prevalent on a number of non-Amiga machines, such as PC laptops. Hard-disks-on-a-card and games on ROM cards were amongst the peripherals in Commodore’s crosshairs.

Plans for an A670 CD-ROM drive (equivalent to the A500 CD expansion) were made, but never materialised. The hardware gap would be bridged by third party peripherals such as the excellent “Squirrel” SCSI interface, allowing use of any standard SCSI CD-ROM drive with the Amiga 600 and 1200.

An article in Amiga Format 35 suggested that the PCMCIA card could be used to assist in the fight against piracy - and to allow the production of larger games - by releasing games on ROM cards instead of floppy disk. Unfortunately, developers never took advantage, and this vision didn’t materialise. The slot was instead used mostly for memory expansion using expensive RAM cards.

The IDE port was a different story, however. It allowed the use of standard 2.5” drives, instead of the proprietary (and much more expensive) hardware used by the Amiga 500. It became very easy, and comparatively cheap, to add a hard drive to your Amiga and many users took advantage of this function.

The A600 wasn’t quite the flop that anecdotal history suggests, with 65,000 units sold within six months of launch.

Total sales figures are uncertain, but figures are available suggesting 193,000 were sold within Germany alone.

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Pimp my A600 Despite being unloved by some users in the 90s (complaints of “It’s like a C64, it looks cheap” or “It looks too small” were quoted by Amiga Format), the Amiga 600 is now quite a sought-after machine. eBay prices north of £200 are not uncommon, and Amiga enthusiasts have created a number of new expansions that allow you to turn your once-limited little machine into a portable gaming powerhouse.

In this article, I’m going to show you the four additions I have made to my Amiga 600 to make it my own personal little powerhouse.

The expansions I have used are: • The Furia EC020 33MHz accelerator card • IDE Compact Flash adapter • 2MB Chip RAM • PCMCIA Compact Flash transfer kit The Furia The Furia card is a modern board that clips over the Amiga 600’s 68000

processor. Using a 68EC020 processor clocked at either 33 or 40MHz, it gives the diminutive A600 a nice little speed boost of roughly 12 to 15 times that of the base machine.

sale that contain pretty much every Amiga game ever made, all accessible using a WHDLoad application. All running on the standard Amiga Workbench!

2MB Chip RAM

The Furia also adds a very useful 9.5MB Fast RAM. Because this clashes with memory addressing on the PCMCIA port (disabling it), the Furia includes the ability to reduce the onboard memory to 4MB using a softkey reset. Installing a KS3.1.4 ROM solves this problem completely. The Furia is available from various Amiga sellers, such as lotherak.pl (www.amigaaddict.com/pimp), starting from only £100.

In my view, this is one of the best value expansions available for any computer in the Amiga range, and is an absolute nobrainer purchase.

IDE Compact Flash adaptor This device slots into the IDE interface, originally intended for the 2.5” hard drive, and allows a several GB Compact Flash card to be used as a hard drive in your Amiga 600. Card images can be found for

The next expansion I installed was a 1MB memory expansion to take my Amiga 600 up to a full 2MB Chip RAM. While this is not, strictly speaking, necessary, it allows WHDLoad a little more headroom in Chip RAM for full operation of all software.

The card is available from just £18.99 from Amigakit and other sellers. A clockport is also included on most cards, allowing the use of a real time clock module.

PCMCIA Compact Flash adapter So you have an Amiga 600 with a big hard drive, but how do you get files onto it in these modern times? This is where the PCMCIA port, so little used in the 90s, comes into its own now.

A standard FAT32 formatted Compact Flash card can be plugged into the PCMCIA port using the adapter pictured.

The CF card can be plugged into your PC, just like any other card, to copy whatever files you wish. It immediately opens up an entire internet of Amiga files and software to your little Amiga 600.

So why should you choose this setup over a more powerful Amiga 1200?

For the moment at least, the Amiga 600 remains cheaper to buy. The Furia accelerator is much cheaper and more widely available than its 1200 counterparts, and it’s also worth considering that most Amiga games do not require the AGA chipset of the 1200.

The PCMCIA CF adapter is a quick and easy way to move files onto your Amiga.

June 2021

If you want a nice little portable Amiga gaming machine that can be cheaply upgraded, or even one capable of more serious operation, the Amiga 600 should be a genuine consideration. Except, perhaps, if you like flight sims.

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TESTBENCH

The CF to IDE adaptor (left) and a RAM upgrade (right) are relatively cheap, but when combined with WHDLoad mean you can run a massive selection of software.

Amiga Scraptop - Ravi rummages through his tool box to create the ultimate portable Amiga

TESTBENCH

One day, as a young Amigan, I met a hero.

He was an Amiga user with an obsession.

An obsession to build a portable Amiga laptop.

His name was Simon Archer and he successfully built that Amiga 600 laptop, a machine he named “Suzanne: the portable Amiga”. It was compact, had a colour display, CD-ROM and a trackpad, all packed in with an accelerated A600. The main issue was that it had to be plugged into the mains, making the “portable” side of the laptop a little questionable.

But it was very neat, and looked stunning using the original A600 keyboard.

If you want to find out more about Suzanne, check out the October 1997 edition of CU Amiga Magazine. I had seen other Amiga laptop conversion kits on the market too, like The PAWS (Portable Amiga WorkStation) from US-based Silent Paws. That kit housed an Amiga 1200, and being a much bigger machine, it was pretty huge. But it had a battery!

These laptops were way ahead of their time, and an amazing achievement in the days when Amigas, batteries and other components were heavy and unwieldy.

Yet they achieved the impossible.

on your own, and letting it naturally develop - just like Simon did. I enjoy harking back to the old days where Brits could knock something up in a shed and work on a passion project for fun.

This series of articles will show all the plans, what I used and how it works. I’m hugely into recycling and reusing old computers, so I embarked on the quest to build my own Amiga Scraptop!

Initially the most intimidating thing was power. That's one thing I have no understanding of, and I didn’t want to kill myself or burn down the house working it out! Luckily, I found Howard of the Dubious Engineering YouTube channel.

My interest was piqued initially when I found a video of him transforming a mobility scooter he found on the side of the road into a solar and lithium battery powered monster! Straightaway, I thought, “This dude has exactly the shed engineering vibe to make this work!”

With some help from mutual friend Neil from RMC, Howard and I linked up, and have since formed a great friendship whilst working on this project.

All this got me thinking... why not build a modern Amiga 600 laptop? Lithium-ion batteries these days are lighter, more powerful and more stable. LVDS (LowVoltage Differential Signaling) screens are just sitting around in old laptops waiting to be used. And most of all - it would be great fun!

Here’s Howard to tell you more about how we got the power working: Ravi and I embarked on the Amiga laptop project - the brainchild of Ravi who was very keen to have a portable Amiga to use on the street/train/in the library. I'd not spent much time around Amigas the Acorn Electron was what I was brought up on. The Amiga is in a very different league!

Even when starting this project, I found it hard to explain to people that it was just for fun, a hobby project. Often I’ve had questions like “Why don't you turn it into a commercial product?”. The real answer to that question is that I feel that the whole fun of the process is in creating it

I looked at the power requirements, and realised that I could build a battery system that would just about cope with that power hungry Amiga motherboard.

It was important to keep things simple in order to keep costs down, and to focus on getting things working, rather than

It's alive!

making them look pretty. So we made a basic wooden case, and I drew out a quick diagram for a battery system. There was quite a large geographical gap between Ravi and myself, and as such, we were only able to meet a couple of times to get our ideas together and start the build.

The power supply requirements for the Amiga are quite hefty - we needed 12 volts positive at about 3 amps, 12 volts negative at about an amp and 5 volts at about 5 amps!! We also needed 12 volts at an amp for the display. I asked Ravi how long he needed the battery to last, and we negotiated it down to about two hours, otherwise he'd need a rucksack for the battery!

The challenge of creating multiple supplies at different polarities out of a single pack of batteries is a tough one. I realised I had to split the battery into two packs - one to create the negative 12V power source, and the other to create the 5V and 12V positive supplies.

Most of the current would be drawn from the positive battery pack, so I bolstered that with more batteries.

The batteries I used were salvaged 18650 cells from laptops. There's been a lot of bad press on lithium-ion batteries since the exploding Samsung phones, and to be fair, our Amiga laptop didn't look like something airport security would be happy to pass through! I literally bodged a bunch of batteries together in order to test our solution, and fabricated a power plug for the Amiga motherboard out of hot-glue and tape so we could get things tested!

These off-the-shelf battery packs supply both 5v and 12v Amiga motherboard power rail requirements.

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June 2021

We’ll continue to cover the Amiga Scraptop in future issues, including listing the components and costs. If you're interested in watching our series of videos on YouTube, check out this playlist: www.amiga-addict.com/scraptop

What?! Amiga Pie? - Simon Butler dissects a different kind of animal (no, it isn't a werewolf!)

REGULARS

If you found these worms whilst gardening, it'd be best to leave them be!

Just when you think you’ve exhausted your store of Amigarelated anecdotes... things start drifting in from the dark recesses of your cerebellum, making you realise there’s still a few fish left in the barrel after all.

If any of that made any sense to you, then you’re in a worse state than I am. So, without any further preamble, let’s roll back the clock to late 1994, where we find ourselves in darkest Ossett, West Yorkshire - a place not unlike the kind of town where one would find a pub similar to The Slaughtered Lamb in American Werewolf.

Here, on the outskirts of civilisation, was where I found myself working at Team 17. Plonked in front of my shiny Amiga, I had a nice comfortable window seat where I could watch the incessant rainfall or, on more than one occasion, see the car park disappear under six inches of snow in roughly 40 minutes, causing me to scurry to the nearest bus stop in an attempt to return to normality and home and hearth.

It was here also, that I was called upon to make my own small contribution to the original Amiga release of Worms.

These were very strange and exciting times, with Andy Davidson making regular appearances to check his baby was entering the entertainment world intact, and, in doing so, entertaining us by simply being the loveable oddball that he was back then. Worms is one of those titles that is always better remembered than the game that gave it life. So for me, as much as I love Worms, I will always have a soft spot for Scorched Earth, which (unless I’m mistaken) came free as a cover disk on some PC magazine at the time (Ian - "Readers should definitely try Scorched Tanks for the Amiga too.").

Looks like Ian may be in for it. Has he been submitting articles late again?!

Also during this period, I was working on a Zelda-style adventure for Amiga and PC. It was, for the time, a lovelylooking little creation that called for me to write some typical fantasy narrative nonsense, design the levels as well as create the sprites. Everything should have gone swimmingly, but for the small fly in the ointment that the lead coder had never seen Zelda, let alone played it. So coding a top-down RPG was something akin to being asked to build a car without knowing what one was. Needless to say, it didn't have a happy ending.

One more feather in my pixelated cap, if I may be so bold, was being asked at the eleventh hour to create some sprites for Alien Breed 3D. It was the kind of job every artist yearns for where one’s boss approaches and chooses you for this important task. The adrenalin levels rise, and you start running through ideas for creatures and soldiers... but pause when you realise he has just said that they need to be done by lunchtime!

Nevertheless, one does one’s best, and while I doubt very much that my contributions have anything to do with matters, the finished product was well received and is still a favourite, or so I am told, among fans to this very day.

They were good times at Team 17, a great bunch of artists, coders and general lunatics and I am glad I was one of them.

Simon Butler

I can’t be doing with any subsequent Worms-related title, mainly because I think the first was all that was needed. It was flawless - the gameplay was spot on, and the humour dialled just high enough, but not too much as to be excessive.

Lunchtimes, when not spent next door in the pub doing irreparable harm to my wallet - as well as my liver - would find me “testing” the latest build of Worms and getting soundly trounced for my sins. I was rarely a victor, but always enjoyed the challenge. Worms was like that - a game where I personally didn’t care if I won (although some opponents did bring out the worst in me). Worms was enjoyable as it was. A smashing little game that wasn’t as smart as some, but more entertaining than others.

See Amiga Addict Issue 5 for our Gold Standard feature on Alien Breed 3D.

June 2021

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NEXT MONTH

PRESENTS

Psygnosis "The Scouse House" Exploring the iconic studio, we chat with programmers and artists behind the magic.

It's going to be a hoot!

Issue 7 - On sale 8th July 2021 • Vampire coverage • Amiga OS3.2 review • Arabian Nights • Gold Standard: Ruff 'N' Tumble • Public Domain • RGB2HDMI • A1200 Upgrades • Creative Revolution: Brilliance • As well as our regular columns including gaming articles, CD32 Corner, Across The Pond, Simon Butler, Back In The Day '91, Amiga News, Keyboard Warriors & Six of the Best!

PLUS !

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June 2021

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