@mailman
So far, absolutely no spam has made it through the "enter the word" test I cooked up for my site.

@orgin
My site is absolutely hammered by spambots to the point where I had to put a "human test" on every comment form.

I also have a massive .htaccess filtering out referrers containing "casino", "baccarat", "roulette", "insurance", "viagra" and so on and so forth.

The former stopped the spam, and the latter has brought my bandwidth down quite a lot.

It still messes up my referrer stats, though, and I like to browse those to see who is linking to my site. I hate thos spambot bastards.

@mailman
Thats what you have to find out. So far, DPaint 3 and DPaint 5 work better.

@jape
NallePUH won't work alongside blitzen anyway. There may be other parts of the classic amiga added to blitzen in future, but don't expect a copper emulator, or anything like that. I'm thinking maybe CIA timers, that kind of thing.

Blitzen 0.3 is ready!

It now makes all the drawing tools in DPaint 3 work correctly. DPaint 3 isn't exactly completely usable, though; tools which draw crosshairs or zoomboxes leave trails all over your picture. I don't think they're drawn with the blitter, so that is outside of the scope of blitzen. It also freezes up sometimes, which is annoying.

I now consider Blitzen good enough to be useful, though. Other apps that use the blitter directly on intuition screens should work with it.

So, everyone, download 0.3 and try some old apps and see if it makes them work better. Report here if anything does. Remember to turn on "Planar screens on RTG" in GUI prefs, and make sure that fake native modes are enabled.

@R-TEAM

Copper emulation is not really feasible.

OK, 0.2 is up already :)

Changes:

? Fixed small problem in copy/fill mode. DPaint 3 works a lot better. Its round brushes look correct as long as they're not wider than one word (for some reason, when the circles get wider than 16 pixels, the leftmost word of each line is repeated as if the source pointers aren't updated. Don't know why yet). And its smooth-freehand mode looks a lot better (although not perfect because of the same bug).

? Line mode is implimented using the same algorythm as MESS, but i've not tested it yet (if someone wants to make a program to specifically test it, please do. Just remember to make it a 68k exe otherwise WaitBlit() won't wait for your blits :)

I don't think Brilliance will ever work, though, because it uses full on copper magic.

@spotUP

on AW.net, perhaps? :)

@orgin
Well, I hope so to. Whats done so far at least proves that the concept works; DPaint 3 is closer to working with blitzen than without it.

Who knows, maybe it already helps other apps work, but I didn't want to get anyones hopes up, since its far from complete.

In the AW.net thread about OS4's new planar emulation, it was mentioned that a blitter emulator might make a few more old apps work (such as DPaint3 or Brilliance).

Edit: With 0.3, it seems to work quite well.

Anyway, click the link below to download and try it. I take no responsibility for anything bad that happens as a consequence of people trying this out.

Info and download page

It already allocates 16 bytes (8 each side of the allocation), and it already puts the memsize into the longword preceding the returned buffer address for AllocVec().

Here is a patch:

MemPatch

Its a quick and dirty hack I just knocked together in 5 mins. It basically patches the 68k AllocMem(), and AllocVec() functions and causes them to allocate an extra 8 bytes at the start and end of the buffer. It also places the requested allocation size just before the returned buffer in AllocVec() which some badly written software use.

I don't recommend installing this patch as a matter of course, only install it if you find it makes a particular piece of software you need start working.

Its a very ugly hack, and I would hope that someone could take this patch and make a per-application patch instead of a global patch like this one. (in other words, I hope this becomes obsolete very soon :)

Someone told me that it got Final Writer running under OS4 Final, although your mileage may vary.

(Oh, and in case someone was wondering, it wasn't the missing size field from AllocVec that prevents FW from working; it just happily overwrites the ends of its buffers).

Oh yes! If you're putting it in your startup-sequence, DO NOT forget the "Run NIL:" since you can't quit the patch and it'll halt the bootsequence forever.

I have always used, and probably always will use PPMore. Not too fancy, it just does what I need it to do and does it well.

Interesting place you have here...