Hollywood 7: Eternity Released

In the year of Hollywood's 15th anniversary, Airsoft Softwair, the hardest working men in code business, are back on your screen with Hollywood 7: Eternity. Hollywood 7.0 is a massive update with many new features and bug fixes. The most important new feature is full support for Unicode and native support for 64-bit CPUs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. This is especially useful on Linux because using 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit Linux is quite a hassle. On top of that, there are lots of other new features.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of new features in Hollywood 7.0:

Unicode is now fully supported!

Lots of new functions for dealing with Unicode text

Hollywood is now available in native 64-bit versions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and iOS

Mac OS and iOS backends have been completely rewritten, they are a lot faster now!

High resolution ("Retina") displays now fully supported on Windows, Mac OS, and iOS; Hollywood is ultra-crisp in 4K modes now

New hardware-accelerated full screen scale mode

Faster drawing on Windows and Mac OS

Lots of new features in the iOS backend

Support for conditional compiling at preprocessor level

Switch-Case statement supports fall through now

Text can now be laid out in justified lines

Lots of improvements in the IDE on Windows (e.g. direct help and syntax highlighting for functionality provided by plugins)

Multi-coloured vector paths are now supported

Live resizing on Windows and Mac OS

Time-stamped events

New example scripts

70 new pages of PDF documentation, now 924 altogether!

Lots of other changes, optimizations and bug fixes

Hollywood 7.0 is the ultimate Multimedia experience and a must-have for all creative people. Hollywood is available on CD and as a download version. Both versions include Hollywood for all supported platforms (except the Android and iOS versions). It is no longer necessary to buy separate licenses for the different platforms. Buying Hollywood gives you a single-user license for all 15 platforms supported by Hollywood. If you already own Hollywood, you can buy a discounted upgrade version. People who bought Hollywood 6.1 in 2017 can request a free upgrade.

Hollywood is the ultimate bridge between all the different AmigaOS compatible platforms and the other three modern desktop systems, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux! Additionally, Hollywood also supports the Android and iOS platforms. A truly unique feature is the ability to cross-compile native executables for many different platforms including: AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, WarpOS, MorphOS, AROS (x86), Windows (x86, x64), Mac OS X (x86, x64, PPC), and Linux (x86, x64, PPC, arm). You don't even have to own these platforms in order to compile executables for them. It's enough to run Hollywood on one of the supported platforms and then compile programs for all the others! Only Hollywood makes it possible. If you want to learn more about Hollywood, please visit the official Hollywood portal which also has a forum for all questions concerning Hollywood.

All this makes Hollywood The Cross-Platform Multimedia Application Layer. Join the Multimedia revolution and get your personal copy of Hollywood 7: Eternity now!

This release was brought to you by Airsoft Softwair - the hardest working men in code business.

Michael Holmes

A look into the Commodore Cave!

Hello everyone. :-)

Well it's about time I got a post out for myself. And for the one I'm publishing here I will be blogging about a particular computer museum I visited recently. But what's so special about this particular computer museum you may ask? Commodore computers of course! :-D

The Commodore Cave as it has been neatly named is a purpose built shed to house an electronic workshop and a Commodore computer collection. As well as other electronic items. Perhaps not a cave in the usual meaning of the word, but certainly one in the sense of being a mancave, as we call them now. The building is divided into an upstairs and downstairs section. With downstairs committed to the computer collection as well as a workshop. So I will concentrate on that. It is a private collection and not open to the public. My privilege to see it first hand courtesy of being in the same Amiga user group. ;-)

That's enough of the introduction so let's see what it contains. So I will move from left to right on our tour. I seem to like things in order. :-)

Here is a picture of the corner beside the door where you walk in. Is that the world's first fully 32-bit CD games console? Why yes I believe it is. An Amiga CD32!

Here's a view of the workshop. Lots of useful electronic instruments. That Amiga keyboard is looking good. While an Amiga motherboard is under diagnosis on the right.

Here's is a stack of rack mounts. Now that may not look very Commodore like but see that second one from the top? Not to deceive anyone but that hides an A1200 motherboard. Next to the blue light button is a mini CRT screen pulled from a camera. It's an Amiga test pattern generator.

Here's a collection of Commodore and Amiga software, books, boxes, peripherals, parts and even computers.

Enough of all that. Time to get to the collection. So here's the Commodore Corner as I will call it. First we have a wild card there, a Canon 1614P punched card calculator from 1969. Then starting the Commodore collection is a PET 2001-8 from 1977, displaying a demo. And beside a PET 4016 from 1981, showing the MC (machine code) monitor. I think I froze that one when I visited, me and my typing. ;-)

Following on we have a VIC-20. And next to it is a C64C, concluding the original Commodores currently in the collection. Bringing us to the Commodore-Amiga era and aptly so, the original Amiga A1000 with OCS. Including a PC sidecar expansion. And external floppy drive. Progressing to an A2000. Which is complimented by an A500 with side HD. Going up the ranks to an A3000 and the ECS era. Soon reaching the era of AGA. But not before the couch has eyes. ;-)

And here we are at the AGA generation. My favourite, the Amiga A1200. Now an A4000D is on the desk but OS4 is on screen? Aha, under the desk is an A4000T, pimped up with a PPC CPU card. Next to that is My First Amiga, the A600; almost too small to fit in a few pixels. I don't mean it was my first, which was an A500; but the A600 had the line "My First Amiga" printed on the box. One of the last Amigas Commodore produced. And speaking of being the first and the last, finally we have on display an AmigaOne machine in a standard tower case. Perhaps not a computer in the Commodore line nor an Amiga in the usual sense, but we'll let it share desk space with the other Commodores.

That concludes our tour of the Commodore Cave. As short as it might seem. I hoped you enjoyed the tour. And can look forward to future blogs of Commodore and Amiga computer content. See you next time. Damien :-)

InTune Recap

InTune Music Player

I started programming my InTune music player some time ago and was pleased with the way it was heading and with the introduction of MUIRoyale found I was able to incorporate a playlist.

Intune as it appeared on the 10th March 2013

I also struggled getting coverart to display but eventually overcame that issue as well and the software seemed to be coming along nicely.

For whatever reason, I can't remember why I just stopped working on it, today though I thought I'd get back to it, I recently set my Sam440ep up again after not using it for some time and thought this is the time to resume programming.

My problem was then where on earth are the files I need? Since stopping I have had a few new laptops, where I'd saved and possibly lost files.

Thankfully I've been able to find some of the artwork and I have an older version of my software but I'm hopeful that some files are saved on a MorphOS Powerbook I have hidden under the bed, unused for some time.

I'll be happy if within the next couple of days I can get to the position I was in on the 10th March 2013.

Everyone wish me luck at tracking down the files and getting back to the state it was over 4 years ago.

Michael Holmes