Introduction The last public release of The Digital Universe was v1.03 for 68k based classic Amigas. The original feature summary of this older version can be found at http://www.digitaluniverse.org.uk/68kfeatures.html Though the old classic version does work on AmigaOS4 it had several problems so it was decided to recompile it for OS4, fix any bugs and also to upgrade the application in the process. This document describes the changes made to The Digital Universe since version 1.03. Note. There is also a Digital Universe v2.4 that exists for the Apple Mac range of computers. It is intended to eventually produce Digital Universe version 2.5 for Amiga OS4 which will have all the additional databases and features that exist in the current Mac version. Conversion to PPC Amiga OS4 The first task was to recompile Digital Universe for Amiga OS4 and address problems that the original code had when running in the more strict OS4 environment. Screen colours were incorrect due to problems with the OS4 implementation of MUI. Instead of trying to share GUI and application pens DU now uses separate areas for MUI windows and its own backdrop class. The workbench attributes are cloned to ensure MUI inherits a correct colour scheme. Base memory hits caused crashes when finding a star by name and another occurred when plotting stars with a low magnitude setting. Likewise displaying or printing a report with empty columns would crash. OS3 [incorrectly] ignored these errors but OS4 [correctly] will not. The FPU version of DU 1.03 did not work under emulation, simply re-compiling to OS4 fixed this problem. All the above problems associated with using Digital Universe on OS4 have been fixed. Bugs in version 1.03 There were some bugs that affected Digital Universe 1.03 when running on either OS4 or classic Amigas. After Searching the Hypertext encyclopedia all further use of the Guide system was blocked. This has been fixed. Several operations did not register with the Undo system, now all operations should update the Undo record. When using screen sizes of different aspect to the usual Workbench aspect, Digital Universe 1.03 would plot with stretched aspects. This has been fixed so DU will always plot in a correct manner. When clicking on a planet in mid draw, the planet would continue to plot but with corrupted graphics. Now the planet continues to plot as it should. When a planet had a morning elongation a central dot was drawn in the middle. This has been fixed. An occasional bug when centred on objects of high declination sometimes led to a section of the display with no stars plotted. This has been fixed in v1.5. It was previously possible to lock on to a "miscellaneous object" even when the modelling of "misc objects" was disabled. This oversight has been corrected. Twilight could only be modelled if the display of Solar System objects was enabled. As the positions of these objects are always calculated, twilight can be enabled now regardless of the SS objects display setting. Fixed a bug where for locations at a high latitude, a Circumpolar rise/set attribute was returned for moving objects (e.g. moon) when it is clearly not circumpolar. Features Dropped in Version 1.5 Before getting to the good news about the new features and additions to the functionality of the Digital Universe mention must be made of two features no longer available. It is no longer possible to generate animations. Even on a classic Amiga this did not work when using a graphics card as DU hit the classic Amiga hardware. As this feature did not work on modern graphics outputs anyway it was decided to drop it. More advanced and modern animation support will be added in version 2.x of Digital Universe. Similarly the ability to save the screen as an IFF file has been removed. As there are now standard screen grabbing applications such as SGrab, there is no need for an application to try to do the same task itself. Finally, though not a removal of a feature, the number of preset Fields of View has been reduced from 20 to 10. Having 20 was overkill and not necessary. This will also free the shifted number keys for a much better FOV feature that will be introduced later. New Features and Enhancements for version 1.5 Digital Universe is no longer limited to a 32 colour palette. In fact Digital Universe will now only operate with high colour or true colour screenmodes. Planet feature mapping now can use colour maps or a higher resolution greyscale map. Both are higher resolution than the greyscale maps used in v1.03. The maximum number of objects that can be displayed on screen at any one time increased from 10,000 to 150,000 objects. The maximum number of miscellaneous objects that can be modelled has been increased from 100 to 7500 objects. Objects are labelled in different colours depending upon the type of object. Planetary satellite labelling has been modified to avoid clutter. The Menu structure has been modified, to conform more to the Amiga Style Guides. The Menu Shortcuts have been updated. A Redo View function has been added to complement the Undo View system. It is now possible to manually add or edit earth orbiting satellite data. The mouse pointer will centre after finding an object or zooming in on an area. The mouse pointer changes shape for different functions, zooming, clicking, shift clicking or control dragging. A zoom can now be cancelled without being interpreted as a click and displaying unwanted data. A "Sticky Window" option has been added. This will allow windows to remain open rather than close after finding objects or pressing Use when trying out Settings options. This option can be toggled from the menu and the default behaviour can be set via a tooltype or CLI argument. Bubble Help has been added to many of the GUI gadgets. A rudimentary Arexx interface is now included with a few basic Arexx commands. The Ecliptic is now included, this was omitted in v1.03. The Display Window has been modified to include the option to display the Ecliptic or not. Clipboard support has been added for Reports and Object Information. The GUI has been improved with many more keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop support etc. NList classes are used now rather than the original MUI List classes. Interaction between GUI elements has been improved particularly in the multiple tabbed Search Star and Search DSO windows. Printing support has been updated. All printing is now done in one pass rather than the banded approach of v1.03. Full Screen printing now prints as landscape. Databases and Help Files The databases used are essentially the same as those used in v1.03. Additional star catalogues and deep sky object catalogues will be added for v2.x. The NGC/IC database has been updated to the latest 2012 revision. Satellite data is newer than that provided for v1.03 but by definition data for earth orbiting objects becomes out of date very quickly. The TLE2UOF shell utility is updated to support the newer satellite data format used by DU1.5 and DU2.40 (Mac). A much larger database of 9700 Satellites, 150,000 Asteroids and 2600 Comets is provided in version 1.5. The duhelp.guide has been updated to cover all the changes made from v1.03 to v1.5. Many of the old images used in v1.03 which used non-square aspect pixels have been updated to be better viewed in modern screenmodes. Otherwise the encyclopedia for v1.5 is much the same as that for v1.03. Under the Bonnet Stuff A lot of work has been done on the Digital Universe code that will not be readily seen by the end user. The code has been tightened, optimised and will hopefully be much easier to maintain for future development.