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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jun 15, 2021 10:50 am

HippoPlayer is multiformat module music player created originally for Amiga OS in the late 90s. Designed to run well on Amiga OS 1.3, HippoPlayer can be used with all original AmigaOSes and any model Amiga with minimal resources.

Kari-Pekka Koljonen, the inventor of the legendary Amiga MOD player HippoPlayer, has pushed his first update for the Amiga version of the program in 21 years to Github today.

hippoPlayer.png
HippoPlayer v2.45 from Jan 2000, as viewed in the Workbench 2.0+ four color palette.


The previous version of HippoPlayer was v2.45, published in January of 2000. This new release is v2.46b (beta) published today just 4 hours ago as of this writing.

Many of the fixes involve removing original memory limits as many of today's machines have the capability to do more than in 1987 when the A500 was first released. Koljonen also repaired Hippo's multitasking approach, which could occasionally crash due to timing issues.

Koljonen decided to also take a closer look at the User Interface:
The main window buttons are quite cryptic with both left and right mouse button actions, which I have conveniently forgot about. I implemented a modern feeling tooltip which will pop up a helpful text for each button. Maybe this is a first tooltip on kick1.3?

Right clicks on the buttons don't really work like left clicks. I don't know why the past-me left them like that, they're ugly and non-user friendly that way. I changed the buttons to have a proper visualization for right clicks as well.

I also added a few wait pointers to places with long running operations.
The fixes in v2.46b include:
  • Extraneous requester pop up removed when loading TFMX modules.
  • Fixed a case where unpacked modules were not identified as modules, or a non-module file was identified as a valid module (due to badly initialized memory).
  • A memory leak removed from the file requester.
  • Memory usage is lowered in several situations:
    • Random play bookkeeping now uses a dynamically allocated table.
    • Each module list entry is now about 30 bytes smaller, for 1000 modules that means memory savings of about 30 kB! :-)
    • Unnecessary library loading removed from startup. This also speeds up starting on slow machines.
  • Improved stability
    • Starting and stopping playback and loading modules like a crazy person is now not so prone to crashing. This is achieved by adding exclusive access checks to module data and module list in several places (see above).
  • Other general bad behaviour removed from many places, not directly visible to user.
  • May survive low memory situations better when loading module programs or adding files.
  • A bunch of smaller fixes, such as enforcer hit removals at a few places.
  • Code refactoring! It's still quite a mess in many places.
HippoPlayer is also actively supported and available for modern OSes including Linux, macOS and Windows as a "modern music player for your oldsk00l needs."

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Amiten

Posted Tue Jun 15, 2021 12:46 pm

This is Insane!!! thank you for the News!! :boing:

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invent
Australia

Posted Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:43 pm

Brilliant news!

Hope this encourages other developers to update other Classic software for our Amigas :)

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jun 15, 2021 8:45 pm

I installed the new build. Check out the handy mouse-over tool-tips. Thanks to this I'm discovering features in here I never even realized existed before!
hippo-tooltips.jpg

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Jun 16, 2021 10:09 am

This is Cool! Will add this to the list to check out.

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nullsleep

Posted Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:29 pm

This is player I favored back at the time, when I used my A500 actively.

I would be working on highschool homework with prowrite in one screen, and have hippoplayer playing mods on the screen behind. All with just 1MB, one floppy drive and 1.3.

These days, I tend to keep an Amiga on at all times, but alongside other systems, and I do rotate them (a500/+/a600/a1200).

I'm happy to learn it's still getting updates today, after the open sourcing.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Nov 03, 2021 5:26 pm

By the way, HippoPlayer v2.48 became available on aminet just a couple of days ago.

It adds tons of fixes and new features. Be sure to read the notes on Aminet for all of the info.

User avatar
MattX
Stargard, Poland

Posted Fri Nov 05, 2021 11:53 am

I remember my uncle using Hippoplayer to play modules. I used Delitracker more often played mods in DirectoryOpus 4 and Protracker. My DOpus was heavily customized by me with lots of additional options for playing .wav files, showing .jpg, .gif and writing .adf and .dms to floppies. I rarely used any external GUI based apps if I could integrate their functionality into DOpus. This reminds me how powerful this program really was when combined with some cli programs.





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