Review: A500 Mini, F710 game controller, PETSCII Robots

▼ The A500 Mini, the Logitech F710 and Attack of the PETSCII Robots: an excellent combination. So let me cover all three in a single review.

The A500 Mini

Shortly after its release, I wrote a first take on the A500 Mini, a shrunken down, modernized reincarnation of the Amiga 500 for playing games.

A big limitation of the original firmware was that it didn't support disk emulation with ADF disk images. The only (official) way to get other software than the included 25 games on the device was WHDLoad. WHDLoad is a great system for running older games, especially floppy-based ones, but as a regular user you depend on others to make WHDLoad "slaves" that make it possible to load various software.

But with the latest firmware, the A500 Mini will let you boot off of an ADF disk image, and switch between different preselected ADF images afterwards. So this way, it's possible to run any floppy-based Amiga software. Writing to the disk images works, so you can even save your work.

Logitech F710 wireless game controller

When I learned that the A500 Mini works with the Logitech F710 wireless game controller, I immediately got one to replace the wired controller that comes with the A500 Mini. Before this, I never played games using a controller like this, so I have nothing to compare it to apart from the one that comes with the A500 Mini. Compared to that one, the F710 is a lot heavier and feels good to hold. It has a few extra buttons in the middle and two analog sticks. It can also "rumble". Strangely, the A/B/X/Y buttons are in the same place, but have different colors.

Initially, the F710 didn't work with the THEC64 Mini or Maxi, or with my Mac. But it turns out that you can trick the F710 to start up in a more compatible mode. For this, the switch on the back must be in the "a" position and the USB receiver dongle must be unplugged. Then remove the batteries and put them back in and plug the USB receiver into the computer. Then, the F710 shows up on my Mac as a "Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2" and it's much more compatible. If you don't go through this steps and/or after reactivating the F710 after it goes into sleep mode, it shows up as a "Wireless Gamepad F710" in the list of USB devices.

It looks like the A500 Mini is not picky about mice, I was able to use my Logitech mouse using the unifying receiver without issue. (Of course it would have been too easy if the F710 and the mouse had been able to share the same receiver dongle...)

Attack of the PETSCII Robots

As a subscriber to David Murray's "The 8-Bit Guy" Youtube channel, I had already seen him talk about his game "Attack of the PETSCII Robots", probably the most ambitious game ever made for the Commodore PET computer from 1977. He then proceeded to make versions for other Commodore 8-bit computers and people started offering to port the game to other platforms. Right now the list of computers the game runs on is:

• Sega Genesis
• Commodore Amiga
• Sony PlayStation Portable
• Commodore 128
• Commodore Plus/4
• Commodore 64
• Apple II
• Atari 800
• Commodore PET
• Commodore VIC-20
• Sinclair ZX-Spectrum
• Commander X16

So I bought the download-only Amiga version for $10. (The shipping on other purchase options was too steep for me.) For that, you get an ADF image that you can write to a floppy and the game will boot from that floppy. You also get a WHDLoad installable version and the floppy includes the green monochrome PETSCII version of the game.

Attack of the PETSCII Robots was originally created to work with a keyboard, as it's hard to make the "move in some direction" and "shoot in some other direction" actions both work well with just a joystick. However, the Amiga version also supports the CD32 controller... which is not unlike the A500 Mini controller or the F710!

So when you start the game, just select "CD32" as the controller, and you can do everything you need without needing a (virtual) keyboard. And go into the game settings on the A500 Mini and tell it the second joystick port has a CD32 controller connected to it.

This makes playing the game better on the A500 Mini than on a real Amiga. Well, you get the same benefit on a real Amiga if you have a CD32 controller, and a compatible one comes with some purchase options of the Amiga version of the PETSCII Robots game.

I was stuck on the first map (level) for a while, trying to figure out the gameplay. David's Petscii Robots Gameplay Tutorial came when I had already figured out some stuff on my own, but it was still helpful.

After getting past the first map, the rest was a lot of fun trying to figure out creative ways to lead the robots to their demise. Just one or two maps gave me problems, as I needed to go through lots of steps before I got to the part where I couldn't figure out what to do. So in those cases, I used the "save game" feature of the A500 Mini so I could restart without having to go through the same five minute run to collect weapons and keycards each time.

I think the game could benefit if it would be a bit easier to get through that first map. Maybe give the player hints after some time has passed?

Recently, some "shareware" versions (i.e., free demos limited to two maps/levels) were released for a number of platforms, so you can try out the game without shelling out your hard earned money immediately.

Conclusions

The A500 Mini is a really nice little device for playing Amiga games, especially if you want to do so on your living room TV. With ADF support, you can now boot into the Workbench or floppy-based applications for some nostalgia (did anyone say "DPaint"?), but it won't replace a real Amiga for non-game use.

I have no idea if other game controllers are better, and having to do the unplug USB / remove batteries dance when I want the F710 to work on my Mac or the THEC64 is pretty annoying, but the Logitech F710 is a lot nicer than the A500 Mini's game controller, and the A500 Mini supports the F710 without any issues.

Attack of the PETSCII Robots is a very nice game, even for those of us who are not really into gaming, as it's about trying to figure out how to deal with situations rather than having quick reflexes. Can we have some more maps/levels, please?

Permalink - posted 2022-06-05

PETSCII typer: type your favorite C64 characters

▼ A few months ago, I ordered the Drop + Matt3O MT3 retro keycap set:

These keycaps have the cool/retro "PETSCII" characters printed on the front. But how do you actually type those PETSCII characters?

The first part of the solution is the C64 Pro Mono font by style64.org. This font replicates all the characters from a Commodore 64.

My web-based PETSCII typer tool connects everything together by producing the correct characters as you type as if your keyboard is a C64 keyboard, or using the layout of the MT3 keycap set. You can even load PETSCII text files or C64 BASIC programs which will show up more or less correctly. Or convert to current fonts to the degree possible.

When using the C64 Pro Mono font, if you copy some PETSCII text and then paste that text, it will use the C64 Pro Mono font if that font is installed on your system. This way, the PETSCII looks as intended in a word processing document.

There are still a few minor issues to be figured out, but I wanted to get this out sooner rather than later. Send me an email or a Twitter message if you have any comments or questions.

Permalink - posted 2022-03-23

Making multilingual typing easier with just one new key

▼ Although in the 1980s and 1990s computer were capable of displaying text in many languages, they were limited to one set of characters at a time. So either Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Greek or Cyrillic, but not several of those at the same time. Unicode solved that, and modern computers can (in principle) display all characters found in all languages.

However, when it comes to typing those characters, we're still in 1990, with different keyboard layouts for different languages. Now obviously it would't be workable to make a keyboard that lets you type all Unicode characters. But it should be doable to come up with a system that provides access to all characters and diacritics that are used in latin script languages.

All it takes is one new key. I call it the globe key: 🌐

We'll have to repurpose one existing key to make room for the globe key. On US keyboards, I think the ` key (in the top left corner, left of 1) is a good candidate, as the ` character doesn't occur in normal text, and even in programming it's not used very often. (But don't worry, you can still get ` by typing 🌐 twice.)

The idea is that the globe key gives you access to a new keyboard "level", similar to how the shift or alt / AltGr keys provide access to additional characters, or different forms (uppercase) of the regular characters. When you type 🌐, the next key that you press will give you the following:

Just like the globe key itself, the keys for diacritics (accents) are "dead" keys. So if you type one of those, nothing happens just yet, until you type the letter you want the accent to appear on (or under). So if you want to type "café", that would go as follows:

c a f 🌐 ◌́ e

Now obviously, if you regularly type French, where the acute accent is very common, you wouldn't want to type it like this every time. You'd keep your existing AZERTY layout (or other keyboard that you're using right now) which has a dedicated é key. But what if you need to type an Eastern European name, such as Michał, Enikő or Věra? The globe key comes to the rescue:

🌐 ◌̷ l = ł
🌐 ◌̋ o = ő
🌐 ◌̌ e = ě

How this is different from other approaches

When computers started to become common, various countries were already using different keyboard layouts on typewriters. And that makes sense, as in addition to regular letters and digits, there's only a dozen keys available for punctuation and accented or special characters. So each of those really needs to earn its keep to deserve to get a key of its own, and languages vary wildly in which characters and accents are common.

Since the 1990s, ISO/IEC 9995 has been working on standards in this area. But you're forgiven for not noticing. It looks like so far, only the multilingual Canadian CSA layout based on ISO/IEC 9995 has gained any traction. EurKEY is a more informal effort, but seems to have stalled.

And of course very many people have made their own keyboard layouts that work for them. Others switch between different layouts to be able to type characters from different languages. And of course simply ignoring the issue and letting a spell checker take up the slack is also a widely used strategy.

Unless I'm mistaken, the US keyboard layout is the only one that doesn't use alt (AltGr / right alt on Windows) for typing certain characters. Both ISO/IEC 9995-3 and EurKEY specify a specific alt / shift+alt "level" for typing additional characters. However, the issue with that is that users need to learn the new positions of these characters if they adopt those layouts.

And although spending a bit of time learning something new that is more efficient is usually time well spent, people simply don't like change. And in the real world, often the new and the old exist side-by-side, so that means having to work with different keyboard layouts on different computers. Not great.

Now, I'm all for replacing the more or less random alt / shift+alt levels that are part of existing keyboard layouts with the new one shown above. If you want to do that, make your alt keys or AltGR key the globe key. In that case, you'll have to press the alt / AltGr = globe key along with the next key.

But if you're used to a layout that lets you type certain special characters or accents easily with alt / AltGr, you may not want to be forced to learn a new way to do that. So in those cases, it makes more sense to just sacrifice one existing key to get the globe key so you can type characters not supported by your existing layout, but otherwise keep typing the way you're used to. If you put the globe key somewhere else than under alt / AltGr, you need to press and release it before you press the next key.

Why this layout makes sense

The globe key layout is designed to work well for characters and diacritics that you don't type very often. So the ease of typing takes second place relative to the ease of remembering. As such, the layout is as straightforward as possible.

People used to the US and similar layouts will find ` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) - _ = + [ { ] } | ; : ' " < > / ? where they expect them to be after pressing 🌐. The cedilla, grave, hook and ring accents and (inverted) question mark are found under the keys matching their first letter. Acute, diaeresis/umlaut, tilde and (arguably) vertical stroke are found under the letters that most frequently bear that accent: é, ü, ñ, ł. Circumflex, comma below, dot below are under the keys that look the same. Accents below are all on the bottom row. Similar looking accents are next to each other or above/below each other.

The above applies when using a QWERTY layout. So æ is between caps lock and S, as that is obvious on a QWERTY layout where that key is A. On an AZERTY layout, that same key is Q, but after pressing 🌐, that same key still produces æ. This makes learning the globe layout a bit harder to learn for AZERTY typists, but the advantage is that once learned, it applies the same everywhere.

Whenever possible, the 🌐 key should be blue to make it easy to find.

Permalink - posted 2022-03-06

Review: MouSTer: making my favorite wireless mouse work with my Amiga

▼ Original Amiga mice were never that great, and a few decades of use and storage didn't help. So if there's one part of the Amiga I have no problem replacing with something new, it's the mouse. (Don't feel bad, I swore of Apple mice, too.) So a while ago I got a USB-to-DB9 mouse adapter. That one worked fine with wired mice, which was a big improvement.

An Amiga 3000 "tank mouse", an Amiga 1200 mouse and a 2000-era Logitech Mini Wheel Mouse

However, a few years ago I discovered the Logitech Anywhere MX 2 wireless mouse. I liked it so much I got one for at home and one for at work. The MX 2 is a bluetooth mouse that can pair with three computers. You can simply switch to another computer with a small button at the bottom. Now obviously the Amiga doesn't do bluetooth, but the MX 2 comes with a Logitech unifying receiver, which you can plug in any USB port and then the computer thinks it's talking to a wired USB mouse.

Problem solved, right? Not really. The MX 2 didn't work with that adapter, nor with another one. Eventually I went as far as to get a RapidRoad USB adapter for my Amiga 1200. This does work very well most of the time, but the complex USB software is not compatible with most games and is not 100% reliable.

The MouSTer connected to a DB9 extension cable, with the Logitech unifying receiver and the MX Anywhere 2

So when I read about the MouSTer, I thought four times might be a charm. After waiting for the little device to make its way from Poland to Holland over the course of very many days, it arrived today. So I plugged it in and... not much. The mouse pointer did move a pixel or two, but nothing close to working correctly. Then I noticed:

So I plugged a USB thumb drive into the MouSTer, which produced furiously blinking LEDs. Afterwards, there was a new directory on the flash drive, with in it a file named MOUSTER.INI. This is a text file with settings and clear explanations what they do. Out of the box, the MouSTer was set up for the Atari ST (hm, maybe the capitalized ST in the name should have been a clue?). I quickly changed that to "amiga". For good measure, I downloaded the latest firmware and put that next to the MOUSTER.INI file and put the thumb drive back into the MouSTer. After that, different mice worked as expected, with just some tweaks to the DPI divider and LED heartbeat settings needed.

A modern optical mouse like the MX Anywhere 2 sends way more "hey, the mouse has moved" pulses than the Amiga expects. As a result, when you move the mouse quickly, the mouse pointer jumps around because the computer can't keep up. Using a DPI divider ("microstep") value of 2 - 5 on the MouSTer didn't completely solve that for me, but using the Mac Logitech Options program to tell the mouse to use the minimum pointer speed, along with a microstep value of 2 made everything work satisfactorily.

Amiga mice normally have two buttons. The DB9 port has just one unused wire, so the Amiga can recognize a third button, but that's it. No scroll wheels—without using different hardware. However, the MouSTer will helpfully map any additional mouse buttons to the three the Amiga can recognize, with or without autofire. A program like FreeWheel will let you do something useful with the extra mouse button.

You can tell the MouSTer is starting up after turning on the computer because its yellow-orange light flashes furiously. (It'll tell you any error messages in morse code.) This is fast enough that if you press both mouse buttons as you turn on the computer, you're greeted by the boot menu as intended.

Conclusions: after only a few hours of use, I'm already a fan of the MouSTer. The hardware is nice and small, so it doesn't stick out far enough to get in the way. The electronics are visible, but covered with plastic so no chance of accidental shorts. The configuration method is unorthodox, but works well. I tested it with both a wired and a wireless mouse, as well as a couple of joysticks. Everything worked. (It also supports gamepads.) Using the Amiga mouse port is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's a limitation: only the one extra middle button and no scroll wheel support. On the other hand, it works with everything. In my case, I simply use two Logitech receivers: one on the MouSTer and one on the RapidRoad. So I just flip the mouse and push a button to switch between features and compatibility. 😎

Permalink - posted 2021-07-24