David's Computer Blog

My recent success with finding a computer (an old Compaq S6100NX) on which to run Amithlon provided some motivation in connecting and powering up my old A1200 to do some file transfers. I haven't used the A1200 much as it is aging and the hard disk isn't doing well. A hard disk replacement has been on my "To Do" list for quite some time whenever I got around to it. Well, I've now got around to it. My old Commodore 1084 monitor has been MIA until this past Saturday. After finding my 1084 and after finding a dedicated computer that can run my copy of Amithlon, I brought my A1200 and 1084 out of storage. I wasn't sure any of it would still work because it has been several years since it was all powered on and used. I cleared a spot in my office where my MacBook laptops typically sit. While I was reconnecting the A1200 and 1084 I remembered that the small computer desk that it was on was the same desk that I had used the A1200 and 1084 on previously back in 1994...

Aside from the legal issues of the release of Amithlon in the previous Decade, last week I was going through some old CD-ROMs that I had in my collection. I stumbled across my copy of Amithlon. Two weeks ago I was doing some technical reading on the Internet in regard to Amithlon. When I first acquired Amithlon, I wasn't too aware of the differences between it and other emulated Amiga software such as WinUAE and E-UAE. After learning of many of the technical differences, I wanted to give it a try. I had two desktop computers on which I tried to boot Amithlon. An i3 Intel machine and an AMD machine. Amithlon wouldn't boot on either of them. After pondering an hour or two, I remembered that I had an old Pentium 4 Celeron computer (a Compaq S6100NX) that my mother-in-law had given me when they moved houses two years ago. It wasn't running anything anyways, so I decided to plug it in and try to boot Amithlon on it. The result? It booted with no problem! The only problem encoun...

It has been a while since I did some OpenGL testing with AmigaOS. A while meaning two to three years. I had tested OpenGL in WinUAE running AmigaOS 3.X and it worked fairly well in emulation. Since it had been a while that I last experimented with OpenGL, I decided to give it another go. Four months ago I downloaded an OpenGL lesson (the Linux version of lessons 5 and 6) from the NeHe OpenGL Tutorials website. I compiled them on Linux Mint and on Haiku. While it compiled on both Linux and Haiku, it wouldn't display the GL_QUAD object on the version of Haiku that I was running. I worked with the Haiku problem and found that the issue was related to a difference in Haiku versions. Eventually it was AmigaOS' turn. I copied the code for lesson5 to AmiKit 8.5 running AmigaOS 3.X. I downloaded the GCC based Amiga Development Environment (ADE-repack.lha) from Aminet and got it working and compiling. Once GCC was configured and successfully tested, I compiled NeHe's lesson5 code...

Early in 2017 I started having issues with my ASUS laptop. About three months after an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, the touchpad stopped working. I reported the issue to Microsoft in one of their feedback options, all the while not expecting any resolution. I worked on the laptop with a wireless mouse, but that was annoying having to have an external pointer device. Eventually I stopped using the laptop and switched to using my wife's old MacOS X 10.6 laptop. About two weeks ago I had decided to downgrade from Windows 10 back to Windows 8.1 on the ASUS laptop. I was hoping that the touchpad would still work under Windows 8.1 like it did before the upgrade to Windows 10. The reason for deciding on the downgrade was that I was wanting to try out AmiKit 8 on my laptop. I had installed AmigaOS 4.1 PPC on the ASUS laptop early last year, but OS4 ran slower than what I was wanting, so I installed OS4.1 onto my desktop workstation instead. The laptop has an i3 processor and it...