If you don’t know what MegaAGS is, it’s a carefully curated and tuned Amiga games and demo scene collection for the Amiga core on MiSTer. It takes advantage of many of MiSTer’s quality-of-life capabilities around shared drives, high-resolution RTG support, and integer zoom/scale options, in addition to also working on the original Amiga hardware.
It aims to be the de-facto Amiga setup for the MiSTer, and lets you explore the massive Amiga game and demo scene library with a user friendly launcher and lots of different categories to help you navigate the vast game library of the Amiga, as well as providing an introduction to the Amiga demo scene for people unfamiliar with it — which, interestingly, is nominated as a UNESCO cultural heritage.
What’s new in this version?
This is just a quick release to get some fixes out, so if you already have 2022.02.02 or 2022.03.03, it may not be worth the effort to replace your existing setup — but if you’re new to the Amiga, this is obviously the latest update as of this writing, and a great starting point.
Although if you don’t usually have a mouse connected to your MiSTer, this update is probably a must-have, see below. 😄
Experimental MiST & CD32 hardware compatibility
We have included some conditional checks that aim to support using the MegaAGS setup with both MiST and the CD32 original hardware. As we are not in possession of these devices, please help test if you do, and let us know if anything is broken.
Joystick/gamepad support for selecting game options
The system that allows hard disk installation of Amiga games, WHDLoad, has added joystick and gamepad support for selecting options on boot. These are usually options like cheats (infinite lives, invincibility, level skips, etc) or alternative versions of a given game.
These can now be navigated with whatever controller you are using. Up & down directions select options, left & right toggles the values. Fire button continues to the game.
You no longer need a mouse plugged in to select game options!
Eurochart #1-48 disk magazines added
Fans of the Amiga demo scene will know that an important part of the “scene” were diskmags (disk magazines), where 14-18 year old (mostly) boys would start drama with each other and compete (mostly in friendly ways) over who could top the charts of best demo, best music, best graphics, etc. This also evolved into electronic publications that would publish submitted articles.
Diskmags are an incredible time capsule of Europe and European computer culture in the 1990s, written by people that were teenagers at the time.
More (and fixed) 5×PAL settings, WHDLoad game updates
As people report improvements, we keep updating the settings for the 1200+ hand-tuned 5× scaling settings. And as usual, the setup contains the very latest fixes from the WHDLoad project.
Likely candidates for the next MegaAGS release
- Native support for MiSTer Super Attract Mode (Amiga demos are the best attract modes!)
- Chronological ordering of disk magazines, so you can watch the demo scene drama unfold in the correct order 😄
- Things that you want fixed or improved!
If you find any bugs or want to suggest improvements, file a ticket on GitHub.
Enjoy!
As always, remember — friends don’t let friends watch Amiga demos and games on modern displays without scanlines! 😄
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), but I wouldn’t count on every “MegaAGS installation” to have followed the readme.