Open Collective
Open Collective
Loading
Amiberry 4.2 updates
Published on January 6, 2022 by Dimitris Panokostas

Hi everyone,
I hope you had a great time during the holidays, even under these conditions with the pandemic causing trouble everywhere...

Here's what's been happening with Amiberry, since the previous update:
  • Custom Controls in the GUI will now show the default mapping, if no custom mapping is being used. This should help reduce the confusion and make it easier to see what button is assigned to which function, by default.
  • Changed default Sound method to Pull, Sound Buffer size to 8192 (which is setting 6 on the slider), default width to 720 and default height to 568. This should help reduce problems with sound latency and lag that some people have been experiencing with the previous defaults.
  • All GUI dropdowns containing paths (Floppy, CD images, WHDLoad) will now display the filename first, followed by the full path contained in "{" and "}". This makes it easier to read long paths that might be otherwise cut-off to the right of the screen.
  • Added a new option in amiberry.conf: "disable_shutdown_button" allows you to optionally disable that button in the GUI, so you don't press it by mistake and shut down your device. The default is to leave it enabled, as before.
  • Detect small floppy disk like images as HDFs, if the extension is a known HDF one.
  • Added scsi.device disable option, from WinUAE latest updates. This can only be controlled in the config file, for now (as is the case with WinUAE).
  • Added support for Kickstart ROM 3.2.1. The ROMs would already work before, if you selected them manually, but with this change Amiberry will auto-detect and show those ROMs in the dropdowns of the GUI.
  • Added new GUI button and dialog, for attaching Amiga-formatted Hard Drives. Note: you will need to have permissions to read/write to the device from the Linux side, so make sure you have that first.
  • Implemented CHD support for CD images and Hardfiles. The CHD library used is newer than that which WinUAE uses, and comes directly from the MAME project.
  • Updated the 7-zip library used to open related archives, from v9.22 beta to v16.04 (this also is newer than what WinUAE uses).
  • Updated FloppyDriveBridge submodule to the latest version. More updates are expected in this area soon, as Rob is working on some large improvements.
Additionally, the "dev" branch version got a few extra custom chipset improvements from WinUAE.

For now, the only remaining milestone I'm hoping to improve is the Floppy Drive Bridge support, which has shown problems when using the faster modes. It does work with Compatible and Accurate modes, but faster modes throw errors while trying to read/write from floppies. After that, I think we're ready for the v4.2.0 release, assuming that we don't discover any bugs during testing, of course!

Best regards, and have fun!
Dimitris