The fonts in the directory and debugger window are now scalable, to accomodate high-res screens, where 9-point Monaco is simply to hard to read.
Sound Output is broken on some Macs. This used to cause extremly fast emulation in Power20. While the root cause of this bug is still not understood, Power20 now detects the problem and safely falls back to mute emulation.
Power20 sometime had trouble mounting disks via Drag&Drop. This bug has been fixed.
Power20 no longer crashes when saving/loading RAM Images even if disk/tape images are attached.
Added Support for Gamepads
Power20 no longer crashes when drawing screens in black/white mode.
Minor Bugfix for Joystick Support in MacOS 10.4.9
Lots of links in the documentation have been updated/fixed.
Version 4.9.3: (Bugfix Release - March 2006)
Power20 had some trouble unmounting previously the mounted disks, when a new disk image was dragged and dropped onto the emulator window. This has been fixed.
The 'COPY' command of the fast 1541 emulation failed to copy the first 2 bytes of each file. This has been fixed.
Lots of links in the documentation have been updated/fixed.
Version 4.9.2: (Bugfix Release - January 2006)
Improved Timing when Power20 is used with Sound Emulation on Classic MacOS
Fixed a bug that caused menus to become disabled without good cause.
Fixed a bug that caused the Finder to become upset when dragging files from a disk image to the desktop.
The Directory window are now properly updated after a drag.
The decoder for TAP-files was fitted with tighter restrictions on the amount of tape speed adjustment, so that it will no longer get carried away when a tape has long streams of extremly fast pulses (Supremacy.tap).
Power20 no longer crashes when saving files with wildcards to a floppy disk.
When selecting an item from a menu in Full Screen mode, with an automatically hidden menu bar/dock, it could happen, that the menu bar was hidden while the user was still picking an item. Hiding is now delayed until the user is done making his choice.
Most Internet-links in the Help Menu were broken. This has been fixed.
Version 4.9.1: (Bugfix Release - December 2005)
A bug that caused keys to become stuck in rare cases has been fixed.
Disk/Tape Images, that are loaded from CD-ROMs or other write-protected drives, are write-protected by default.
The keyboard is no longer listed as available device in the USB-joystick configuration dialog.
Version 4.9: (October 2005)
When loading RAM-Images, the keyboard and joystick positions are started up in correct position (avoids unwanted movement at loading)
Loading Disk or Tape Images from read-only disk drives (e.g CD-ROMs) now works properly.
A 'Bring all to Front' feature has been added to the Window Menu for MacOS X
When a VIC-20 file, whose name contains 'dangerous characters' (':', '/' or '\'), if copied to the Mac desktop, the dangerous characters are replaced by '-' to avoid confusion of the Mac.
Some minor bugfixes
Version 4.8: (December 2004)
Buttons on USB Joysticks can now be used to emulate keypresses on the VIC-20. This makes gameplay easier for games that use the joystick for general movement and use the keyboard for special features.
The Monitor/Debugger now features a Find-Poke command, that makes it easier to obtain infinite energy and eternal life.
It is now possible to completly disable the joystick emulation on the Mac keyboard. This is particulary useful on PowerBooks that have fewer 'spare' keys on their keyboards.
Files on the VIC-20 floppy now maintain their correct file type when being overwritten.
Write protected files are now properly skipped when erasing files from disk.
The timing of the Illegal Opcodes of the M6502 has been improved.
The timing of the VIAs in the VIC-20 and the floppy disk drive has been improved.
The BAM (Block Allocation Map) of a floppy is only read to floppy memory automatically when full floppy emulation is not enabled.
The MacOSX edition now has a Window menu, listing all open windows and subwindows as well as a Help menu.
The title of VIC-20 windows does no longer become garbled.
A bug has been fixed that caused Power20 to crash when selecting cartridges and tapes.
Some minor bugfixes
Version 4.6: (March 2004)
The right shift key of the VIC-20 keyboard is now available as F12 or End on the Mac Keyboard. This makes it possible to play games that use the left and right VIC-20 shift key for different purposes on Mac keyboards that do not distinguish between left and right shift keys. The pound and up-arrow keys of the VIC-20 keyboard are now available as F10/F11 to make these symbols accessible too.
Fixed a bug in the floppy emulation that caused trouble when writing to SEQ files.
When changing disks while Full Floppy Emulation is enabled Power20 now simulates a time without a disk in the drive, so that demos that check for read errors to detect empty drives work without trouble.
Bilinear filtering in OpenGL is now again optional.
Accessing the Floppy VIAs using regular M-R commands now works. There is no good reason to do this, but some programs seem to like it (Comal 0.14)
Fixed a bug that caused Power20 to crash when special 'joysticks' (such as an UPS) where connected to the USB.
Files that are dragged & dropped onto a directory window, are now (again) copied onto that drive, instead of switching to a different directory.
Drag&Dropping files from a directory to the VIC-20 now loads the file.
Fixed a terrible bug, that crashed Power20 Classic on some systems (and nobody noticed and told me for 3 month...)
Some minor bugfixes
Version 4.5: (September 2003)
The inner guts of Power20 have been totally rebuilt. While previous Carbon versions of Power20 where just slightly tweeked sideproducts of the Classic version, there is now a Carbon only design. The link format has been changed to Mach-O so that there is now a clear distinction between Classic and OS X (and noone trys to run the Carbon version on OS 9 and is surprised by the absence of Input Sprocket joystick support). Preferences are now stored in (OS X standard) XML files. Please note, that while the main emphasis in the developement of Power20 has been shifted to OS X, the classic MacOS is still supported and has its own version of Power20.
The OS X version of Power20 now uses neat icons with 128x128 pixel.
USB Joysticks are now directly supported in Power20 OS X. USB/ADB joysticks have been supported in Power20 Classic since Power20 1.5, but the OS X lacks Input Sprocket (Apple's Standard for joystick support in Classic MacOS), so this feature was not available in OS X.
Joysticks now have seperate Single-Fire and Auto-Fire Buttons. That way you can easily to produce a single button-press (to switch to the next level) and still fry lots of meanies without hurting your trigger-finger or having to reconfigure the joystick.
OpenGL support is now much faster.
Power20 now remembers ten recently used disk/tape images. Changing the disk in a multi-disk game is now just a single mouse click.
All dialogs have been redesigned to comply with Apple's Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. Several old useless options have been discarded.
A problem with the floppy emulation has been fixed (Trouble using direct mode files)
All Menus and Dialogs have Help Tags (Balloon Help is not supported in OS X). Also Help Tags are supposed to be short (according to Apple), I have chosen to suppy long, informative texts.
If the Mac is equipped with a 2(-3) button mouse, the second button of the Mac mouse is used to directly emulate the second button of the C64 mouse. Users of a 1-button mouse can now choose the control-key that they have to press to obtain the second C64 mouse button.
All scroll bars (directory window, debugger) can be controlled using the mouse scroll wheel (assuming your Mac mouse has one).
The Shareware Info window is now resizeable.
Version 4.1.2: (September 2002)
A minor problem with the floppy emulation has been fixed (Trouble in the fast emulation of TalkSec/ListenSec when using unusal secondary adresses).
Version 4.1.1: (August 2002)
A minor bug, that caused Power20 to crash in the joystick configuration dialog when Appearance Manager 1.02 was installed has been fixed.
Version 4.1: (August 2002)
Fixed a bug that caused Power20 to crash when loading faulty (too big) compressed disk images.
Under special circumstances Power20 used the wrong palette when using Copy&Paste to transfer screenshots to the Clipboard. This has been fixed.
A bug that caused Power20 to become unplayably fast under MacOS X when the sound was muted (and MaxRunCnt == 1) has been fixed.
A bug that caused Power20 to crash when displaying some error messages under MacOS X has been fixed.
Version 4.0.2: (April 2002)
The fast floppy emulation is now more flexible when accepting commands. File names and commands may now have a newline character at the end (that is automatically truncated). When opening files, it is now permitted to give the file mode/type in full text rather than abbreviated (e.g. SEQ,WRITE instead of S,W) and in any order (e.g. S,W or W,S)
Power20 now permits draging non-Power20 files from a mounted harddisk to a floppy or tape (used to filter for Power20 files only).
Directory window titles are now properly adjusted when switching the type of medium in a drive or swapping two drives that contained media of different type.
Clicking on the ADB/USB Joystick configuration button now summons up the corresponding dialog. This feature was broken in Power20 4.0.
Calling up the Device Option Dialog does no longer crash Power20.
The Macintosh mouse cursor now maintains its arrow shape when over a directory window, and does no longer change to a drag cursor at certain moments.
Dialogs are now properly dimmed when another (sub-) dialog is opened.
Version 4.0.1: (March 2002)
Power20 4.0 unfortunatly contained a bug that caused the Mac to hang, when a folder was selected to be mounted as a hard disk. This bug is now fixed.
Power20 now no longer uses the keyboard shortcuts Cmd-H and Cmd-M when run under MacOS X. In MacOS X these keyboard equivalents are reserved by Apple for Hiding and Minimizing windows.
Version 4.0: (March 2002)
Power20 now supports OpenGL. This makes it possible to scale the emulation window to any desired size (not just single/double/tripple etc) and actually use the full screen in Full Screen mode without any black frame around. Using bilinear filtering OpenGL produces an excellent, soft image.
For those Macs, that do not have OpenGL hardware support, drawing to the screen has been drastically improved for screens with thousands and millions of colors. Drawing of scaled images is now much faster.
It is now possible to have Power20 draw directly into the VideoRAM. While this is definitly not good MacOS practise, it is slightly faster than the legal way with CopyBits() that Power20 used up to now. This trick is even possible under MacOS X.
Documentation is now also available in HTML format. Since DocMaker is not Carbonized, reading the Power20 Docs under MacOS X used to require a start of the classic environment. Now they can be read in any webbrowser.
Power20 can now be used as a screensaver. Let Power20 play VIC-20 demos (loaded from RAM Snapshots) while you are away from work, or let it show slideshows of old game cover images or Commodore ads.
Power20 used to forget the default locations for disk-/tape-images and RAM snapshots when Navigation Services were used. This bug has been fixed.
Directory titles now reflect the type of device that they serve, rather than just the device number (e.g. Hard Disk #8 instead of just Drive #8).
If a D64 disk image has inconsistent information on the number of free blocks (because it is broken or has been artistically 'improved'), both numbers are displayed.
Fixed a bug that caused files to appear twice in a directory window in certain situations.
Version number has been jumped to 4.0 to indicate that Power20 is at the same level of developement as Power64.
Several minor bug fixes and enhancements.
Version 2.2.1: (September 2001)
Power20's file type detection now relies more on the file contents and filename, than on a previously determined file type/creator. Thus dragging e.g. a disk image, that is erroneously labeled as tape image, will load the disk image (rather than evoking a 'This is not a valid tape image' message).
Double-Clicking in the directory of a T64 tape now 'winds' it to the position directly before that program. This avoids the 'Found XYZ' messages for all the other files on the tape.
The messages of the monitor/debugger are now displayed in the chosen user-interface language, instead of always in English.
The code for writing disk images in ZIP (4/5 part) format was badly broken. Power20 continually asked for a new filename, and never saved anything. This has been fixed.
Power20 now uses the right shift key only (instead of both left and right shift key) when the cursor up or cursor left key of the Mac keyboard is pressed. Some software gets confused when both shift keys are pressed at once.
When dragging files onto a write protected of full disk, Power20 used to emit a beep only. Now there are useful error messages.
The 'Broken Directory' detection introduced in Power20 2.2 was removed again. Too many 'artists' played around with directory structures causing Power20 to detect errors where there was indeed a readable (also not 100% valid) directory present.
Swapping drives #8/#9 used to switch the window titles of the directory windows to English instead of the selected interface language. This has been fixed.
The documentation of the emulator file formats now also shows the associated icons.
Version 2.2: (August 2001)
Power20 now supports raw tape images in *.TAP format
The CPU timing has been improved. In previous versions Power20 the CPU sometimes 'lost' several cycles when accessing I/O circuits. This has been fixed.
Disk and tape images can now be mounted by dragging & dropping their files onto the emulator window.
A bug that caused Power20 to destroy disk files that where stored with the replace option (@:filename) was fixed.
Power20 now remembers the chosen language on every system. This did not work on systems with Italian or Spanish MacOS.
For keyboard that distinguish between left and right Modifier keys, Power20 now emulates the left and the right VIC-20 Shift Key seperatly. Note: Most modern keyboard do NOT distinguish these two keys. For these keyboards Power20 will continue to 'press' both VIC-20 Shift Keys, whenever any Mac Shift key is pressed.
If a disk image does not contain a valid directory, Power20 now displays a message saying so, rather than displaying the broken data.
After loading a file from a tape image, the virtual 'Play' button of the tape drive is now automatically released. Some software checks to see that the user releases the button (for whatever reason, it can always turn off the tape motor), and was unusable before.
Directory messages are now localized according to Power20's selected language. (This does NOT apply to the floppy drive error messages. For compatibility reasons they remain as they are in the 1541 ROM (i.e. English)).
The keyboard shortcuts for mounting/unmounting devices now follow the Default Device preferences.
When a game required full floppy emulation, and showed the corresponding dialog the emulator was not properly stopped, but only placed in the background. Thus, when Power20 was set up to continue emulation in the background, it would stumble into the same call the the 1541 over and over again and redisplay the window over and over again. This was fixed.
When a tape could not be properly mounted, the directory window of the previously mounted tape sometimes remained visible, even so neither the old, nor the new tape was mounted. Power20 now closes the directory window properly if there is no device.
The Device Dialog was split into a Device and a Directory Option Dialog. This became necessary, since the old Device Dialog has grown too big to be fully visible on a 640x480 screen.
The Default Device Popup-Menu was not usable in its full width. This was fixed in a way that should avoid similar trouble with too small Controls for all future.
It used to be possible to drag the VIC-20 'into' the menubar by two pixels. While many programs allow dragging it even further, this behaviour seem ugly and was stopped.
Version 2.1: (July 2001)
A bug that caused Power20 Carbon to crash at starttime has been fixed.
A bug that caused Power20 to crash when exchanging drives #8 and #9 has been fixed.
It is now possible to quickly navigate through the folders of an attached hard disk. Just click on a subfolder to mount it, or on '..' to go back up one level.
Power20 can now hog the Mac CPU, giving only minimal processing time to other applications
The Directory windows now have a Zoom button for automatic adjustment to optimal size.
Several minor bugfixes.
Version 2.0: (April 2501)
All System calls in Power20 have been checked for their Carbon friendliness and (where necessary) been adjusted. It should therefore be easy to create a MacOS X version of Power20 once MacOS X is released (and stable).
It is now possible to mount ZIP archives containing *.PRG/*.P00 files as hard disks (read access only).
The error messages for broken disk/tape/program images have been improved. In particular they now give clear descriptions when a binary file has been downloaded (or compressed) as text file (and been destroyed by linefeed conversion in the process).
The contents of a ZIP archive is now clearly denoted by its icon. There are now separate icons for zipped disk images, zipped tape images, zipped cartridge etc. (rather than just a general ZIP archive icon, and separate icons for GZIP files only).
The disk command LOAD"$:",8 now behaves correctly.
The VIC-20 keys '^' and '£' that were not mapped to the Mac keyboard in previous versions of Power20 are now available as PageUp/Down.
The Power20 Debugger/Monitor now keeps a list of recent commands, that can be browsed using Ctrl-Up/Down.
Power20 now offers both supported user interface languages in one single file. The proper language is chosen at runtime (rather than download-time).
Power20 now automatically adjust the sizes of all dialog elements to match different system fonts without accidental clipping. This is particularly useful when running Kaleidoscope and picking a fontsize larger that 12 point (even so Kaleidoscope has a lot of trouble here itself...)
Fixed a bug that caused strange colors on 24-bit screens under MacOS 9.1.
If unexpected event occur in the main event loop (e.g. right click on a two button mouse), no error message is produced any more.
Fixed a bug that caused Power20 to remember the registration code only on the second try.
Clear Navigation buttons have been added to the documentation. Too many people failed to find the Table of Contents in the menu bar, or the pop-up menu at the bottom of the window or the horizontal scrollbar.
Version 1.6: (Sept. 2000)
When a ZIP archive contains several suitable files, Power20 now asks which one to use, rather than always using the first file.
It is now possible to search for character strings in the debugger (rather than sequences of hex-bytes only).
A bug that caused Power20 to crash in a part of the screen was printed twice has been fixed.
Documentation on the M6502 Assembler has been added
Documentation on the VIC-20 Custom Chips (VIC/VIA) has been added
Version 1.4: (June 2000)
Power20 is now also available in German.
Power20 now uses Navigation Services (is available in the used version of MacOS). This makes the process of file selection easier as it features a list of recently selected files and folder and offers a more Finder like user-interface.
A bug that caused Power20 to become extremely slow if run on a battery powered PowerBook without user interaction has been fixed.
Power20 is now able to write GZ compressed Disk and Tape files. Thus there is no reason to use non compressed files any more.
The icons for GZ-compressed files do now reflect the type of the contents, rather than just the fact that it is a GZ-compressed file.
Power20 can now show a window with the current keyboard layout. This makes it easier to find the graphic characters on the VIC-20 keyboard.
A harddisk can now be automatically be mounted on drive #8 or #9 (instead of #8 only) for each new VIC-20.
In Turbo-Boost mode the keyboard repeat rate is adjusted to normal speed level. Thus it is possible to type text (including spaces and cursor movement) comfortably without characters being accidently duplicated.
Power20 can now query the USB-joystick movement as four separate buttons. While this is obviously against the central idea of Input Sprocket it seems to be a necessary work-around for a bug that appears in MacOS 9 together with certain joystick drivers.
The default setting for the joystick keys is now dependent on the Mac keyboard type. Users without numeric keypad (e.g. PowerBooks) use Cursor keys + Control, all others use 4568-0 on the numeric keypad.
Fixed a bug in the sound handler that caused Power20 to crash in high load situations taking the entire MacOS along.
Version 1.2.1: (September 1999 - Not released)
Totally reworked Sound Options Dialog.
Added Sound Sample Rate is now selectable (44, 22 or 11kHz).
Comments in AIFF-Files have been extended. They now denote the Sound Quality, Duration, Creator etc.
Added support for a 1351 Mouse.
Added Turbo Boost Mode to speed up Power20 during long LOADs (or if the chess program is thinking too long), without sacrificing compatibility.
Support for USB joysticks is now documented. While it has been implemented for many releases, many people wondered if the term 'ADB joysticks' excludes USB.
The secure mode of Power20 can now be activated by holding the Control key when starting Power20 (used to be Option - Conflict: Holding down Option while starting a program is used by the Finder to close the window after starting the program!)
Version 1.2: (August 1999)
Added Drag & Drop support. Files can now be copied between D64-disk images, T64-tape images and the harddisk by simply dragging and dropping. Also files can be renamed by clicking on their name, and just typing the new name. To delete a file, just drag it to the garbage. Handling VIC20 files is just as easy as handling MacOS files with the Finder.
Added Text Drag & Drop. To copy information from/into an emulator window, just use drag & drop.
Shift-, Control-, Option- and Command- Keys are now available for joystick emulation. This is useful for PowerBook users, that don't have a numeric keypad.
Error information in D64 disk images, is now evaluated in true 1541 mode. This makes many games, that still have their copy protection (at least partially) in place usable with Power20.
Added support for LHA-archives
Fixed a bug that caused Power20 to crash after the M6502 of a floppy drive ran into an illegal instruction.
Added new commands to the built in Monitor: tl = Trace until a scanline has been reached; tq = Trace Quick for a certain number of statement; View VIC and VIAs in easy-to-read format.
Added new keywords for the evaluation of expressions in the Monitor: Mem[] gets the contents of memory, Scanline evaluates to the current video scanline
Fixed a bug that caused a serious crash when a bad, or sometimes even valid Lynx file was mounted.
Improved keyboard navigation in directory windows. Typing the first few characters of a filename move the cursor to that file. Up to now only the first character was evaluated.
Printing the contents of the VIC-20 screen now works correctly with selection even if the screen has been scaled.
Version 1.1.1: (December 1998)
File type recognition is now much smarter for GZ/ZIP files, and now looks at the headers of the files inside a archive rather than just at its filenames (which are still evaluated first for performance reasons).
Some people were confused about that the numbers above the regular keyboard do not work for the joysticks when numbers from the keypad were selected for joystick keys. The keys from the keypad are now prefixed 'Kpd.' in the joystick dialog to avoid this confusion.
Fixed a bug in the Joystick selection dialog, that caused total failure to remember any changes when no VIC-20 window was open.
Version 1.1: (December 1998)
Added support for GZ and ZIP files. This saves lots of space on the harddisks and makes CD-ROMs with ZIPed files much easier to use.
Fixed a bug, that caused the Mac to crash when a key was pressed in a Power20 dialog (usually Emulator Speed Joysticks)
Fixed a bug, that caused the Directory Window position to be forgotten after closing the window.
FileType detection for files that come without a suitable Type/Creator is now much smarter. It looks not only on the file name extension (as before), but also for magic headers and filesizes.
Tape (T64/Lynx) files on read-only Macintosh disks are now properly write protected.
Tape files can now also be mounted using the disk mounting dialog. This is useful, if you do not know what kind of file hides within a GZ/ZIP archive. The only distinction between 'Insert Floppy Disk' and 'Mount Tape/Lynx' now is that 'Insert Floppy Disk' will start the file selection dialog in the folder that the last disk image was selected from, while 'Mount Tape/Lynx' will start the selection from the previous tape image folder.
Fixed a bug that caused some tapes not to load properly when mounted on a disk drive.
Added basic Appearance Manager awareness.
Added function key F9 as a mapping of Clr/Home (necessary on PowerBooks that don't have a Home key).
Insert now works as Insert/Delete key also in Macintosh keyboard mode.
Change the Power20 program icons for nicer looks.
Version 1.0: (September 1998)
First public release - Derived from the sources of Power64 2.1.2.
