news board for vAmigaWeb. Amiga emulator for iPad iPhone.

News

15.11.2024 runAhead, vSync, slow motion and vAmigaCore v3.0

supports run ahead, which is an effective technique to reduce input lag.
run ahead is an emulation technique that essentially pre-computes the emulation a few frames ahead. When the user makes an input, the emulation can immediately respond by adjusting the pre-computed frames accordingly, thus reducing the perceived input delay.
For a smoother video output, consider enabling the new vSync option. vSync synchronizes the emulation with your display’s refresh rate, resulting in smoother visuals by adjusting the Amiga's emulation speed to match the monitor’s refresh rate. When selected a new speed icon appears next to the fast forward symbol, functioning as both a speed indicator and a button to go back to the original refresh rate of an Amiga.
Slow motion gaming. The new speed setting also offers speeds below 100%. They are ideal to kick in a slow motion effect on fast paced games. From now on no AI enemy can beat your hero when playing at 50% the speed ;-). matrix effect.
for wider screens the activity monitor switch has been added to the top icon bar
vAmigaWeb is now based on the latest vAmigaCore v3.0
a new css grid based navbar has been implemented. It offers a much better responsive behaviour compared to the old one.

05.10.2024 warp indicator and fast forward icon

a fast-forward icon has been added next to the play/pause symbol, functioning as both a warp indicator and a button to accelerate the emulation.

18.08.2024 EmuTOS and action button management

support for .ST disks
EmuTOS as another free kickstart replacement option in kickstart dialog
option to create and select groups of action buttons only manually by the user which turns off the current automatic which was optimized for single game floppy disks.

31.05.2024 activity monitors and DMA bus visualisation

when 'activity monitors' setting is enabled, it will show the Amiga chipset activity (e.g. workload of copper or blitter coprocessors)
tap on a specific monitor adds more detailed DMA bus activity visualisation for a specific Amiga chip (aka dma debugger)
tap again and dma channel visualisation on that particular DMA channel is turned off
coming soon: splitted read / write CPU workload monitors for various memory types
added pencil support: the app is now usable with a pencil (e.g. Apple Pencil)

13.05.2024 iOS / iPadOS - reconnect audio device after longer suspension

after reviving from longer app background suspension AudioContext got stuck on resuming and reported "Failed to start the audio device"
when this happens we now close the broken AudioContext and create a new one, which brings audio back :-)

12.02.2024 vAmigaWeb v2.6, improved file usage

imports previously unmountable files on a disk (DD/HD 880KB/1.76MB), e.g. single files such as demo.lha (watch), todos.txt, space_ship.iff, blitter_force.asm
extended ADF files are recognized by header bytes regardless of its file extension
select files from folders inside a zip file, improved zip file support
upgraded to most recent vAmigaCore v2.6 for increased machine compatibility

18.01.2024 key stroke sounds, vibration and transparency for the new keyboard

adjustable key stroke feedback sounds (different sounds for different types of keys)
optional key stroke vibration feedback (on devices that support vibration API)
adjustable transparency of the keyboard when using the host device in landscape, so that you can see the whole Amiga screen even if the virtual keyboard is on top of it

03.01.2024 reworked virtual keyboard, improved xbox controller analogue sticks

the virtual keyboard has been restyled and technically reworked. It is now css grid based which allows for automatic scaling on different screen sizes. Besides a scaling factor the user can now add a margin to the bottom. This is especially useful to not let the keyboard interfere with the home indicator (this is is the thin bar that sits at the bottom of the iPhone screen).

all analogue sticks on a external controller should be recognized and work properly now. Tested with wireless xbox controller on iPad.

12.09.2023 covers iPhone notch and dynamic island, redesigned virtual joystick and keyboard mappings

the screen space around the notch and the dynamic island on modern iPhones is perfectly usable now.

redesigned the virtual touch joystick with various different selectable types and a configurable deadzone.

define your own custom key board mappings even for non Amiga keys
e.g. Meta+S => save snapshot, Meta+R => restore snapshot, Alt+J => swap joystick ports

31.07.2023 wake lock and fullscreen feature

added a setting to prevent dimming or auto off on supported browsers... very useful for viewing demos

added a fullscreen button to the menu bar on supported browsers

09.07.2023 increased .adf compatibility, borderless bug fix

more ADF files are recognized now

when going borderless one vertical pixel was missing when it was an odd number of pixel lines. We fixed that.

12.03.2023 support for real BT / USB mouse on iPadOS

despite the built in basic mouse support in iPadOS, Apple decided not to implement the pointerlock API which provides raw movements of the mouse.

A fallback detection has been built into vAmigaWeb to nevertheless please the user experience.

When you select mouse … it will now detect the abscence of the pointerlock API and therefore it will activate the fallback implementation… which works quite satisfying for us

05.03.2023 support for iPadPro ProMotion display and iOS16 bugfixes

iPadPro ProMotion displays with variable refresh rates were capped to 30fps (this was due to a bug in safaris webgl API), completely removed sdl2 API for this bug and implemented native webgl2 rendering code which lets these displays now run PAL at 50Hz or NTSC at 60Hz
iPadOS/iOS 16 specific bugfixes for audio demuting and port1/2 selection listbox ...
fixed sound leaking when running in a hidden firefox tab

07.01.2023 vAmigaWeb v2.3

fixed a bug when system muted the audio while app was being longer suspended in background, now resuming audio context on any user action

upgraded to the release version of vAmigaCore 2.3 which

fixed a bug that causes the GPU pipeline to occasionally update the wrong texture in interlace mode
fixed a bug that caused the CPU to crash on address error double-faults
improves emulation of mechanical floppy drive delays

27.12.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.3 b1

can operate 4 floppy drives and 4 hard disks simultaneously i.e. df0-df3, dh0-dh3 for a classic professional amiga workstation environment

supports extended ADF file format (thanks to mras0)

upgraded to latest vAmigaCore (including all bugfixes thanks to dirkwhoffmann)

12.11.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.2 b1

support for Amiga three button game controller can be selected in the settings. All usual input methods do support this. (including external game pads, touch joystick and keyboard joystick emulation)

20% to 40% more efficiency, minimum browser requirements are now Chrome95, FF100, Safari15.2 (linktime optimization, using webassembly native exceptions and non trapping fptoint, these are new wasm features made for efficiency which require recent browsers)

support for 68030 CPU has been removed because the MMU project has been put on hold
(use 68020 instead, v3.0b1 has been canceled and major version is reverted back to 2)

24.09.2022 vAmigaWeb v3.0 beta1

supports 68000, 68010, 68020 and 68030 CPUs.
(with this kickstart roms which need at least a 68020 are working now e.g. kickstart 3.1 for A1200)

runs now also in a private / incognito browser window
(be aware that browser does not permit any saving in this case)

various performance tweaks
(reduced logging and separation of big computational blocks into smaller execution units on the main thread to get better "cooperative" multitasking escpecially when amiga overclocking is in use)

04.08.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.1 beta5

supports parallel installation of different versions of vAmigaCore
from now on old snapshots can be run by switching back to an older installed version of vAmigaCore

updated to latest vAmigaCore version v2.1.beta5

supports ECS denise (SuperHires modes)

improved memory managment ... support for hdfs with a size of 256Mb (e.g. classic_wb project)

introduced df0/dh0 eject buttons

fixed a severe bug where vAmigaWeb stopped accepting any adf or hdf file

09.06.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.1 beta2

CPU overclocking up to 100Mhz (great for legendary titles like frontier/elite2 or fa-18 interceptor)

PAL/NTSC hot switching (pixel ratio and 50/60 Hz chipset system speed)

floppy drive and hard drive sounds and track display in the HUD

completely reworked display sizes for overscan games like "the settlers"

various bugfixes e.g. memory leaks, pixel precision and more

and last but not least all improvments of vAmigaCore version v2.1.beta2

12.05.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.0

vAmigaCore has been updated to final version v2.0

various reported issues (via github thanks for reporting) have been resolved in this version, most notably these are:

the virtual keyboard forwards now the exact duration of a key press to the Amiga (before duration was a fixed value of 100ms) ... thanks to this games which rely on long keyboard presses like flight simulation "F/A18 Interceptor" do work now using solely the virtual keyboard ... the duration of the key press is animated with a nice background white LED glow effect

technically spoken the virtual keyboard has been freed from default gestures which were often conflicting (e.g. text selection, drag and drop, context menu popup gesture)

on touch screens the virtual keyboard has got the following three different touch implementations which can be selected in the settings dialog.

exact timing autorepeat and simultaneous keycap presses (disables default scroll gestures on keycaps, scroll gesture possible only on gaps around the keys)
smartphone like native scroll gestures on keycaps (press starts after finger is lifted from keycap for a duration of 100ms)
mix of both tries to mix both worlds... i.e. exact timing and simultaneous presses but also scrolls keyboard when swiping the finger on keycaps. disadvantage: also does a keypress when only scrolling was intended

25.04.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.0 Beta 4

vAmigaCore has been updated to latest beta4

regarding the automatic detection of the display area there is now a new borderless strategy available:

the already existing auto strategy was renamed to viewport tracking: in fact what it does is to set the visible area to exactly the viewport coordinates which the amiga hardware was set to by the current running amiga software or game. Often amiga game designers opened a very large viewport but only were drawing to a much smaller area which resulted despite the enabled automatic viewport tracking into a screen with lot space wasted for borders. E.g. Monkey Island series, and others…

to get also rid of these „inner viewport“ borders the new borderless strategy has been implemented:
it examines the screen buffer every 500ms and tries to detect borders by analysing the pixels of the current amiga screen from the edges onwards... it consequently cuts off all same color pixels … when it detects some bigger larger screens (during the calibration process) then it will retain these larger screen sizes ... until the game or software sets other viewport sizes in amiga hardware ... in other words it always looks for the largest drawn picture on the screen and will stick to this largest display area size ... resulting after a couple of seconds in an optimal screen size for devices with smaller screens (e.g. phones or small tablets)

a bug concerning diskswap delay which prevented some games from detecting diskschange has been fixed

on android devices the top status bar and the bottom navbar are hidden now by setting display to fullscreen in the PWAs manifest file, which is parsed at installation time. (hope that this was a good decision, if not open a github issue)

08.04.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.0 Beta 2

updated to latest vAmigaCore
various small bugfixes

27.03.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.0 Beta 1 Update3

support for .hdf files Amiga HardDriveFiles (works also when compressed in a zip file)
fixed bugs in ActionButtons

20.03.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.0 Beta 1 Update2

updated to latest vAmigaCore
color scheme settings
layer stencil settings for sprites and playfields
sprite infos available in javascript for use in action buttons
working aimbot for Freefalls Archon which uses these sprite infos

16.03.2022 vAmigaWeb v2.0 Beta 1

updated to latest vAmigaCore
new gpu shader renderer more speed on slow devices like iPadAir2 and nicer display of interlace resolution
setting for automatic mapping of used amiga screen space to host display