MichelS Posted February 12, 2021 Share Posted February 12, 2021 Hello Lynx Community! Please don't flame me for asking this... Inspired by Carl Forhan's excellent series of articles about his Quadromania rom hacking and a post on twitter (asking who else is still using the original amiga tools), i wanted to try the old devkit tools. However, no matter where i search, i cannot find much. There's the encryption toolset which comes with a version of HandyASM (v1.08 i think - not the latest version, but anyway...). Next, there are some posts here about the redeye sources - so there are some redeye related include and macro files also. But that's about it. Lots of missing includes, macros, demo sources and amiga tools... To do anything at all, i figured i'd need at least Handyrom to make the link from the assembler generated bin-files to a rom image which can be finalised by the encryption tool. Not to mention lots of missing include and macro files. So - my question: Are the original tools and sources available somewhere or is anybody willing to share them (or parts) with me? Maybe PM in case... If copyright of 30 year old software is an issue here, i'd also consider buying the physical disks if anyone is willing to sell at a reasonable price (although the developer documentation is copyrighted material as well, yet readily available...?). Full devkits are not available and even if - the hardware is certainly priced way beyond what i can afford. But why is the original software part kept (seemingly) strictly private after all these years still? I don't think the amiga tools and devkit sources are useless without the Howard/Howdy or Pinky/Mandy-hardware. Sure - CC65, bll, etc. are way more capable and convenient to use on today's hardware. But that's not the point here. I wanted to play with the "old school" tools - just for the added retro fun... Best regards and thanks for reading Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MichelS Posted February 16, 2021 Author Share Posted February 16, 2021 Oh well... still haven't found any devkit files but something else instead... an amiga disk from a friend containing a .rom and a .bin file. Checking the .bin file in a hexeditor it was indeed a file generated by handyasm. So i loaded it in my version of Handy and saw something familiar: the into of "Shadow of the beast" with the zooming owl logo. Familiar yet with a subtle difference from the retail version. If there's some interest here, i can post the sources to open the .bin-files directly in Handy. My personal version of the emulator is so heavily modified and has several loose ends, it crashes quite often. Must be a memory leak or out-of-bounds access... But the file loading part is straight forward and shouldn't have too many bugs. In the meantime i can share my bin-loader that can be put on a flashcart. It waits for handyasm .bin-files transmitted via comlynx (62500,8,E,1). Similar to what the bll-loader does but not as advanced. Blank screen, no safety checks, no comlynx configuration, horrible self-modifying asm code. But it works (tested on Lynx I and II). The zip-file also contains the .bin for trying out. The .rom file was a surprise. Using a WinUAE setup i had to add an encrypted bootloader first - worked like a charm with the encryption tools. Copy-paste a lnx-header and... Here's what i found - a pre-release version of "Shadow of the Beast" (left side vs. retail version righthand side): Funny - they had to change the text on the loading screen... I guess Atari didn't want the word "Amiga" to appear anywhere. ? bin_loader.zip 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oakcitycomics Posted February 16, 2021 Share Posted February 16, 2021 57 minutes ago, MichelS said: Oh well... still haven't found any devkit files but something else instead... an amiga disk from a friend containing a .rom and a .bin file. Checking the .bin file in a hexeditor it was indeed a file generated by handyasm. So i loaded it in my version of Handy and saw something familiar: the into of "Shadow of the beast" with the zooming owl logo. Familiar yet with a subtle difference from the retail version. If there's some interest here, i can post the sources to open the .bin-files directly in Handy. My personal version of the emulator is so heavily modified and has several loose ends, it crashes quite often. Must be a memory leak or out-of-bounds access... But the file loading part is straight forward and shouldn't have too many bugs. In the meantime i can share my bin-loader that can be put on a flashcart. It waits for handyasm .bin-files transmitted via comlynx (62500,8,E,1). Similar to what the bll-loader does but not as advanced. Blank screen, no safety checks, no comlynx configuration, horrible self-modifying asm code. But it works (tested on Lynx I and II). The zip-file also contains the .bin for trying out. The .rom file was a surprise. Using a WinUAE setup i had to add an encrypted bootloader first - worked like a charm with the encryption tools. Copy-paste a lnx-header and... Here's what i found - a pre-release version of "Shadow of the Beast" (left side vs. retail version righthand side): Funny - they had to change the text on the loading screen... I guess Atari didn't want the word "Amiga" to appear anywhere. ? bin_loader.zip 11.82 kB · 1 download Awesome little find. I owned the old howard dev system years ago minus the handheld. Traded it off evnetually as I was never able to get the complete setup. I might still have the software will look around Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turbo Laser Lynx Posted February 17, 2021 Share Posted February 17, 2021 I agree that it'd be interresting to know more about the original dev kit. I seem to remember though that it's been discussed "somewhat much" years ago on this forum, but I can't remember much about what I read anymore. Might be sprinkled over threads and hard to find the info at this point though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MichelS Posted February 17, 2021 Author Share Posted February 17, 2021 Quote I might still have the software will look around That would be nice! Quote I agree that it'd be interresting to know more about the original dev kit. I seem to remember though that it's been discussed "somewhat much" years ago on this forum, but I can't remember much about what I read anymore. Might be sprinkled over threads and hard to find the info at this point though. LX.NET has a good writeup about the Mandebug and Pinky/Mandy workings on his page: https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/series/epyx-development-kit/ Will have to check the threads here again... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fadest Posted February 17, 2021 Share Posted February 17, 2021 I know @rygar has an Amiga dev setup, but I don't know if it is operative,and if he has disk images. Maybe @Songbird can help you also. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turbo Laser Lynx Posted February 17, 2021 Share Posted February 17, 2021 10 hours ago, MichelS said: LX.NET has a good writeup about the Mandebug and Pinky/Mandy workings on his page: https://atarilynxdeveloper.wordpress.com/series/epyx-development-kit/ Will have to check the threads here again... Ah nice! Thanks! I had completely forgotten about these articles. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Songbird Posted April 7 Share Posted April 7 Sorry @MichelS and everyone, looks like I am 3 years late to the party. I still run a subset of the Handy toolset as it's the easiest way for me to get asm code from former Lynx devs to build. Working on Microvaders this weekend, in fact, as you can see from the micro_patch.src referenced below... Looks like I have HandyAsm 1.12 even though I've seen references to newer versions. I would certainly like to have a newer toolset if anyone finds one. There are some minor issues I've run into with listings generated by HandyAsm, but the code output itself is fine. I didn't realize anyone cared about the tools, as no one has ever really asked me about them before. HandyAsm is by far the tool I use the most, and only once every few years do I run HandyROM or other tools. I used to own an Amiga and Howard board which I bought from Beyond Games. That's when I acquired the rights to CyberVirus, Ultra Vortek, and Mechtiles. But once I got the code moved over from the Amiga to a Windows PC (what a pain that was ~20 years ago!), I sold the HW. Now I use WinUAE to run it. I'm not an expert on all of the Handy tools, but feel free to ask questions. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Songbird Posted April 10 Share Posted April 10 My son and I did some research over the past few days, and discovered there is a Python tool called vamos which allows you to execute Amiga programs from a Windows command line / PowerShell. I finally installed it tonight, and it works! Very cool to not have to boot WinUAE if I don't want to. You can find vamos as part of the amitools distribution, which can be installed using pip3. Just follow the README. I noticed that I have a zip file containing all the Handy Amiga tools dating back from 2001. asm is the most common tool I run, but I did just notice asmstrip would have come in handy (no pun intended) to remove the 6 leading and 4 trailing bytes on every asm output file. So here it is. Enjoy! HANDYUTL.ZIP 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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