Announcing FS-UAE Amiga 1200Synth theme

When I first designed the Amiga 1200Synth overlay I deeply investigated GoTek add-on being fashinated by the possibility to have gigabytes of simulated data on real Amiga hardware without the need of old magnetic floppies.

So I imagined putting this addon into a somewhat futuristic, dark retroconsole with a synthwave flavour, hence Amiga 1200Synth was born.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge on Amiga 1200Synth (first revision)

But what if we could have realtime LED indicators and multifloppy simulation, full with Read Access indicators and cylinder tracking?

This is not yet possible to achieve in RetroArch, but I hope that one day, sooner or later, we will have this feature worked out. Do designers dream of electric sheep?

FS-UAE to the rescue!

It required some revision of the A1200Synth to adapt the original Mega Bezel assets to FS-UAE theme features: the new screen positioning logic is pure black magic to me, I had to go brute forcing by ol' trial and error. In the end I was able to hammer-in some cool tricks while looking at actual real-life GoTek adaptor operations.

Multi-floppy emulator on the left got a major overhaul: the dot matrix screen is now unified with four rows to host DF0, DF1, DF2 and DF3 operations, full with real-time track/cylinder data and 'Read Access' and 'Write Access' indicator.

Dreamweb (AGA) on Amiga 1200Synth (third revision)

The four switches on the bottom indicate the media presence: if you insert an ADF in the emulator the switch will go to the ON position and if you eject it will go to OFF.

You can see this in action in the following capture:

Next I added two additional LED indicators: the 'headphones' one is positioned near to the audio jack on the top of the Multi-floppy emulator and keeps track of the audio signal, while the 'Optical Disk Drive' was added to the LED indicators on the right.

Here's a sneak peek of working LED indicators for Hard Disk Drive, Optical Disk Drive and Power:

I hope to get the theme published on FS-UAE official emulator site... Let’s hope the developer shares our enthusiasm toward the little synthwave Amiga!