2012 | The Amstrad CPC news portal

SAMDisk v3.4

Aug 202012

SAMdisk is a tool to convert floppy disks into various disk images which can be used in emulators. It works with almost all PC floppy controllers and supports also some copy-protected formats. It requires that you have fdrawcmd.sys, a low-level floppy disk driver, installed on your system.

You can download the latest version from the SAMdisk website.

Changes:

Added create command for blank HDD and floppy images
Added basic IDEDOS partition listing
Added checking of good sectors to track repairing
Added support for Velesoft DSK/DS2 transfer images
Added –chrn to trust ID header over physical location
Added –no-1m to skip 1Mbps data rate scanning
Restored –byte-swap for Atom/AtomLite conversion
Improved ATA identify data handling
Improved scan output to report warnings above affected track
Fixed recognition of DSC/HDR, CFI, LIF disk images
Fixed floppy image conversion to .raw dump
Fixed repaired sectors retaining original track offset
Fixed detection of oversized tracks with just 1 sector
Fixed HDD firmware string missing final character
Fixed log file including empty status messages
Fixed AL+ boot sector being mistaken for MBR
Reverted to Visual Studio 2005 for old CPU compatibility

10th annual scene.org awards: 3 prices for Batman Group

Amstrad CPC, Demo No Responses »

Aug 042012

The 10th annual Scene.org awards results were published and the Batman Group won 3 prices with their great demo “Batman Forever“. It won in the categories “Best demo on an oldschool platform”, “best technical achievement” and “public choice”. But that’s not all, they also ranked 3rd in “best graphics” and “breakthrough performance”. So a big congratulation to the Batman Group, thanks for showing what is possible to do with an Amstrad CPC and for the entertaining demo.

Here is the video of the demo again (but of course, it looks better if you watch it on the real hardware):

CPC generation video by Tau Ceti Productions

Amstrad CPC, Common 4 Responses »

Jul 282012

Tau Ceti Productions released their newested video called “CPC generation“. Maybe you have a similar story to tell :-)… Enjoy:

Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) 3.2.0

Amstrad CPC, Development No Responses »

Jul 122012

A new version of the SDCC C compiler is available. You can use SDCC to develop for the Amstrad CPC, e.g. with using the SDCC Code::Blocks template or the programming tutorials by Mochilote. In the new version, there are a lot of optimisations for the Z80 backend, so be sure to update if you already use the old version. You can download it from http://sdcc.sourceforge.net.

Changes:

Named address spaces with optimal placement of bank selection calls.
_Noreturn.
–std-c11 command line option for ISO C11.
ucsim support for the LR35902 (gameboy CPU).
The gbz80 port is alive again, there were many bug fixes and the generated code is much better now.
Pic 14 enhanced core libraries are included in sdcc builds by default
Added pic 14 enhanced core devices: 16f1503, 16f1508, 16f1509, 16f1516, 16f1517, 16f1518, 16f1519, 16f1526, 16f1527, 16f1946, 16f1947
PIC14/PIC16: Implemented __critical; PIC14 __critical function cannot have arguments for now, though
inclusion of some tests from the gcc test suite into the sdcc regression test suite led to many bugs being found and fixed.
Many macros with previously non-standard-compliant names have been renamed (SDCC_REVISION to __SDCC_REVISION, etc).
setjmp() / longjmp() for the z180 and r2k ports.
Added sdar archive managing utility. sdar and sdranlib are derived from GNU binutils package
Added support for pic 14 core devices: 16f720, 16f721, 16f882, 16f883, 16f884, 16f747, 16f946
sdcpp synchronized with GNU cpp 4.6.3
Added support for pic 18f1230/18f1330 device family
Implemented #pragma config for pic16 target
sdcc now works on Debian GNU/Hurd.
New register allocator for the hc08 port, resulting in better code being generated.
New s08 port.
New r3ka port.
Many small improvements in the z80, hc08 and r2k code generation, reducing code size.
Shift, multiplication, division and returning of long long are now supported (modulo for long long is still missing, integer literals of type long long are broken).

ReSeT #8 meeting report

Amstrad CPC, Meeting No Responses »

Jul 042012

You already saw the news about the releases from the ReSeT #8 which took place in Coutances / France and was organised by Eliot. Now Voxfreax took the time to write a meeting report, which you can read on the Push’n’Pop homepage.

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