AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup – July 2025

Greetings,

Welcome to a new post here on the Old School Game Blog!

Today, it is time for another edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup, where we will be looking into what has been happening in the community during July.

Even though it is summer time in the Northern hemisphere, there has been a surprisingly large amount of activity on several fronts.

I don’t want to spoil any news here in the introduction, so let’s get cracking with the roundup!

Software News

July started off with version 5.21 of AmiSSL being released. As mentioned in earlier editions of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup, the AmiSSL project is a collaborative effort to develop a port of OpenSSL in a shared library for Amiga-based systems. The download is available here. If you are interested in the SDK, it can be found here. It is a must-have if you use AmigaOS 4 to browse the web!

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=library/misc/amissl.lha

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=development/misc/amissl-sdk.lha

Those of you enjoying pixel art will probably be thrilled to read that version 2.9 WIP of GrafX2 is available for download from OS4Depot, thanks to the work by Kas1e and smarkusg.

I did write about this version last month, but a new one appeared on the depot some time later, so I believe there have been some changes. Either way, I highly recommend downloading and checking it out; it is a great program.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=graphics/edit/grafx2.lha

AmiUpdate V2.58 has been released! A new full archive is available from the official downloads page.

http://codebench.co.uk/amiupdate_website/index.php?page=downloads

For those interested, the release notes are available here:

http://codebench.co.uk/amiupdate_website/txt/release_notes.txt

An updated version, 3.5, of the YouTube URL Extractor Script by Michael Trebilcock was released on July 4th. YT.rexx is a script for providing direct video and audio links from YouTube URLs. Changes from the previous version include:

3.5 – 4th Jul 2025:

• Compatibility fixes.
• Added TVSIMPLY client.
• Fixed DualPlay to work with captions
• Updated bundled cURL to 8.13.0 (using AmiSSL)

More history within the archive.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/misc/yt.lha

Version 2.5 of Avalanche, a GUI for xadmaster.library using the ReAction gadget set, has been released by Chris Young. An overview of the changes since the last version can be found on OS4Depot. For full history, see documentation inside the archive.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/archive/avalanche.lha

A new version of the lightweight and powerful text editor Lite XL has been released for AmigaOS 4.1. This time it is version 2.1.8r1.

The port is being maintained by George Sokianos, a.k.a Walkero. The program itself was created by Francesco Abbate and the Lite XL team.

George Sokianos writes as follows about the new release on his Ko-fi page:

This new version is the first one that uses SDL3, the latest version of the SDL framework that powers it. Unfortunately, with that, there comes some slowdown in the editor that is visible with an increased CPU usage and having the scrolling and animations being slower. I put great effort the past 3 weeks profiling the code and providing all the necessary information to the original Lite XL team, as well as Capehill who is responsible for the SDL3 port to AmigaOS 4, and BeWorld who does the same for MorphOS.

If you’re interested in getting hold of the new version, it can be freely downloaded from OS4Depot via the link below:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/text/edit/litexl2.lha

Quite some time ago, I published the article OS4Depot Adventure – Part 2, where I looked into random games on OS4Depot. Here I made the discovery of an interesting game… It was part of a small bundle called Crap Games Vol. 8. Spot from Up Rough! has released 21 such compilations of software he has ported to AmigaOS 4. As it turns out, not all games included in the bundles are bad, since there are some gems in between! Hence, PC Maziacs. Due to the game itself being quite good (in my opinion), I felt it needed its own upload to become more visible and accessible. On Amigans.net, I received Spot’s permission to do this, so here it is, repackaged and with a new icon, hehe. 😀

PC Maziacs is a remake created by S. Romero for Windows and Linux in 2002.

Please click on the link below to visit the webpage of the project:

https://www.sromero.org/wiki/spectrum/proyectos/pcmaziacs

Being a remake, the game has an old-school mode where you can play the game like it was back in the day. It also has a modern mode with updated graphics.

The game takes place in a randomly generated maze. Your goal is to find gold and then exit the level. To find the route to the gold, you can lean on specific icons of human prisoners in the maze, and then parts of the route will light up for a limited time. You can also find food that increases health, as well as swords. Beware, though, there are monsters everywhere, and if you lose the fight, you are dead. If you are uncertain where you are (it is a maze after all), you can press M to see a map.

If you want to check it out, please click on the link below.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/action/pcmaziacs.zip

Version 34.7 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machine emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);

• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);

• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);

• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);

• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);

• Signetics TWIN minicomputer (1976);

• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);

• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);

• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);

• Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);

• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);

• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);

• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);

• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples include ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, and windowed and fullscreen modes. Other features are CPU tracing, trainer, and drag and drop support. Additionally, it offers graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, and frame skipping, among many other features!

Here is an overview of the changes since the last release:

Summary:

• BINBUG, CD2650, PHUNSY: added “Settings|Emulator|Frame-based
  emulation?” option.
• Debugger: added INJECT and RENAME commands.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/gamesystem/amiarcadia.lha

Frank Wille has released an updated version of vasm m68k std, vasm PPC std, and vasm 68k mot. vasm is a portable and re-targetable assembler to create linkable objects in various formats and absolute code. Multiple CPU-, syntax, and output-modules can be selected.

A new version of the V.A.M.P. multimedia player has been released by Juan Carlos Herrán Martín a.k.a. Templario.

V.A.M.P. displays the next multimedia formats currently:

Amiga Anim formats: anim, anim5, ham6, ham8, yafa.
MovieSetter movie format.
Web animation formats: gif, apng.
Show pictures: jpg, png, gif, lbm, bmp, svg, jp2(jpeg 2000), tiff, pcx, webp (with Datatypes).
Video formats: cdxl, ogg, avi, mpeg, mpg, wmv, flv, mp4, mov, 3gp, m4v.
Music&Sound files: mp3, mod, med, 8svx, 16sv, iff, aiff, wav, ac3, wave, riff, ogg, flac, m4a, wma, dbm, hvl, aiff, s3m, xm, sid.

Supported languages: Spanish, English, Italian, French, Finnish, Swedish, Polish, and Greek.

Improvements in this version:

• Fixed bug with the configuration file.
• Again fixed some problems with the special video sizes to play the videos downloaded from: Facebook Reels, Tik Tok, CapCut, Instagram Reels, Kwai and Whatsapp videos.

NOTE: The video sizes recommended are 360xNNN pixels, sizes greater than Width of 360 will be play slow depending on CPU speed.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/play/vamp.lha

UHC Tools is a collection of programs and scripts for Amiga computers and their offspring to simplify daily usage and the Amiga more independent. The authors, Patrik Axelsson and David Eriksson released version 2.1 in July.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/misc/uhctools.lha

SQLite is a Self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine. For information about SQLite, see the main README or check the site here: http://www.sqlite.org

This is small update to sqlite-3.34.0-amiga with a fix for obtaining the current date and time. The previous version was off by 8 years which is the difference between AmigaDos function DateStamp and Unix gettimeofday. Now ‘select CURRENT_TIMESRAMP’ returns the correct value.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=development/library/misc/sqlite.lha

On July 25th, DRIDI released version 9.0Final of the Arabic Console Device.

(version 9.0Final) “Version education&legacy” finished (for me) – CTRL_P for Parallel, launch a CLI[ArabicLauncher]. Don’t use RUN command and if changing the priority do that for the CLI process before launching the command. No more use “ArabicLauncher ARABCONX:” with a parameter, because CTRL_P do that. For changing the priority of the editor: “ChangeTaskPri 1 process=8” and in process 8 do: “Stevie/src/stevie” (put it in C: if you prefer).

Furthermore:

Add additional entries (duplicate lines) in L/mountlista i.e ARABCON4: to ARABCON9: are allowed.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=driver/input/arabic_console_devicepro2.lha

Now for some exciting gaming news… Doom 64 has been ported to AmigaOS 4! This is a special version of Doom developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64 back in the 1990s. According to Wikipedia, it is “(…) the second spin-off in id Software’s Doom series after Final Doom (1996), and the fourth game in the series overall.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_64).

Doom 64 EX+ is a community-driven continuation of Samuel “Kaiser” Villarreal’s original Doom 64 EX project. The primary goal of Doom 64 EX+ is to faithfully recreate the classic Nintendo 64 experience while incorporating modern features, extensive modding capabilities, and performance enhancements.

OS4Depot lists the author of the port and game to AOS4 fans from Mars… hehe.. 😀

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/fps/doom64ex.lha

To run the game, you need the original Doom64.WAD file from the GOG or Steam version of Doom64.

GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/doom_64
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1148590/DOOM_64/

Maijestro of the Amiga Retro Channel on YouTube has created a nice video of the gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHx_fv-F4rI

Version 1.11.4 of XORSearch has been released. Search for an XOR encoded string in a file.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/misc/xorsearch.lha

AmigaGPT is a versatile ChatGPT client for AmigaOS 3.x, 4.1, and MorphOS. It is being developed by Cameron Armstrong a.k.a. Nightfox. This powerful tool brings the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT to your Amiga system, enabling text generation, question-answering, and creative exploration. AmigaGPT can also generate stunning images using DALL-E and includes support for speech output, making it easier than ever to interact with AI on your Amiga. Designed to integrate seamlessly with your system, AmigaGPT delivers modern AI technology while embracing the timeless Amiga experience. Version 2.7.0 is now available for download from OS4Depot.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=network/chat/amigagpt.lha

On Amiga.org, the artist JTDigitalDesigns announced the following:

On July 19, 2025, a massive Icon Theme Pack by JTDigitalDesigns (Jari Tuovinen) is released, called Infinite Icons Theme Pack.

It features nearly 6,000 brand-new DualPNG icons, primarily designed for AmigaOS 4,
but also perfect for AmiKit users and other platforms that support this icon format.

See more about what it’s all about and order for yourself here:

https://www.amikit.amiga.sk/infiniteicons

I’ve ordered this one myself and look forward to checking it out. 🙂 The icons look very, very nice!

In earlier monthly roundups, we’ve read a lot about the FlashMandelNG tool. Dino Papararo and Edgar Schwan are once again back with an update. Version 5.4 sees the following changes:

• Fixed AllocAslRequest function call TAGS
• Recompiled with last Walkero SDK update GCC 11.3.0

Steffen Häuser, a.k.a. MagicSN, has made available cores for the soon-to-be-released RetroArch. The archive contains the following cores:

• PicoDrive
• GenesisPlus GX (only OS4)
• SNES9x 2010
• Mame 2003
• Mame 2003 Plus
• Mame 2009

Here is the download link:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/gamesystem/retroarchcores_installer.lha

Now, this is something completely new to the platform. George Sokianos, a.k.a. Walkero, has released a program called AuraFly! According to the author, this tool helps you focus better and feel more relaxed by using the sounds of nature. It lets you mix up to three different sounds to create the perfect escape when you need it. This sounds brilliant to me, and I’m looking forward to checking it out further, since I often listen to ambience while working.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=audio/misc/aurafly.lha

https://ko-fi.com/s/2984266dd5

The website amiga-news.de reports about the further development steps for the clib4 library from Andrea Palmate a.k.a. afxgroup. You can read it about it here.

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2025-07-00013-EN.html

Version 0.60 of the PDF generator Compression has been released. This tool is being developed by Achim Pankalla. The goal is to make a PDF generator that is complete with WYSIWYG. Progress has been made since the last version, and many errors have been fixed. You can download it from OS4Depot, where there’s also information about all of the recent changes to the program.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/misc/compression.lha

Elfpipe has ported several demos of Qt6 for AmigaOS 4.1. These can be downloaded here:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=development/cross/qt6demos.lha

Kyvos, the new QEMU frontend, is released!

Here is the description straight from the author, George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero:

Kyvos is a user-friendly frontend for Qemu, designed to streamline the creation of AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS emulated environments on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Pronounced “kee-vos,” this name is inspired by the Greek word “κύβος,” meaning cube, symbolizing these virtual systems running within the host OS.

Setting up an AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS system is effortless with Kyvos—just a few clicks, and you’re ready to go. A helpful wizard guides users in locating or downloading necessary dependencies, including Qemu and 7zip binaries.

Kyvos comes with a comprehensive 100-page manual, offering step-by-step guidance through the installation process, complete with detailed screenshots. It also explores Qemu incompatibilities, ensuring a smooth experience—don’t forget to check the FAQ section.

For those eager to explore AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS on any system, Kyvos offers an intuitive and efficient solution on Linux, macOS x64, or Windows. Give it a try and unlock new possibilities today!

https://ko-fi.com/s/6476fdadd2

Miscellaneous News

First up is the Norwegian musician Helge Kvalheim, who is back with a brand new song on YouTube! This one has been created in connection with his 50th birthday! Congratulations, Mr. Kvalheim! 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeADAey2cNA

BOING, a 10th Anniversary Issue

Boing Attitude never does things halfway, and this time, it’s going even bigger! You’ll get a 104-page issue, instead of the usual 52… And BOING is not only in French, but also in English! Oh my gosh! No, you’re not dreaming: you’ll have 104 pages all about the Amiga in every possible form to read. Why? Because a tenth anniversary is something to celebrate, but also, and especially, because in 2025, the Amiga turns forty!

In this issue, you’ll find an exclusive interview with Timothy De Groote, the new head of Hyperion Entertainment. This is his first public statement since taking over as head of the publisher of AmigaOS 3.2 and 4.1, and we asked him all the questions—even the tough ones (justice, THE A1200…). There’s also a feature on Mirari, the new PowerPC motherboard designed for AmigaOS 4.1 and MorphOS 3.20. We’ve also tested the A600GS and even compared it to the THEA500 Mini. Hot off the press, we’ve also played the brand-new Krogharr. And of course, the demo scene is not forgotten with an interview with the Batman Group and the legendary Moby… El Mobo!

Of course, there are tons of other articles to read in what is the largest print magazine fully dedicated to the Amiga in at least twenty years. So, what are you waiting for to join us?!

BOING is a magazine dedicated to the Amiga computer, whether original (“classic”) or new generation. It deals with all its variations or rather variants ;): AmigaOS (1.x, 2.x, 3.x), AmigaOS 4.1, MorphOS, AROS, and ApolloOS.

BOING, the Amiga in all its variants!

More details here.

http://glames.online.fr/boing/boing10.html

Amiga Future issue 175 released

Amigans.net reports that a new issue of Amiga Future has been released!

The English and German issue 175 (July/August 2025) of our print magazine Amiga Future has been distributed today, and can also be ordered directly from our editorial office at Amiga Future, and from other Amiga dealers that stock it.

Magazine Content:

Review Aminer
Review Board Game vs. Amiga: Ramses
Review AmigaOS 3.2.3
Review Mechanical Keyboard Amiga 1200
Workshop Knowledge 8: The third dimension: 3D graphics on the Amiga
Workshop Setting Up Samba
Special Beyond the Screen: Cinemaware
Special Amiga HAM-E
40 Years of Amiga – Part 2
Interview Jon Bohmer Part 2
Interview Tim Wright

And so much more … if you haven’t already, right now might be the best time to get your collectable copy ordered, before they’re all sold out!

For a more detailed description of its contents and previews of this issue click-on link of the Amiga Future magazine hompepage.

Information: https://www.amigafuture.de/app.php/kb/index?c=13
Orders: https://www.amigashop.org https://www.amigashop.org

The blogger Epsilon has published a massive blog post about the AmigaOne A1222+. It is crammed with images and information, so I highly recommend checking it out here:

https://www.epsilonsworld.com/2025/07/amigaone-a1222-in-2025.html

Trixie, the author of Rave, but also blogger of Rear Window, has been posting several texts recently. 🙂 You can read them here:

https://ko-fi.com/rearwindow

Amiga-news.de reports that the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) multimedia library is now available for AmigaOS 4 in versions 2.32.8 and 3.2.18. You can read more about it on their website:

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2025-07-00068-EN.html

The American YouTube Ghettofinger Gaming has been very active in July. He has published many videos, some documenting his new AmigaOne X5040 build, others about events he has been visiting. You can find all the videos on his channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions/UC8kkj-qQ-b2r0Cw1-Lmkq9A

His Red Dragon A-EON X5000/40 AmigaOne is now completed:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9DcFr2sXkUA

Maijestro has made a video showing is favorite tools under AmigaOS 4.1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IALnt36oAgQ

Muf@ has released a new video of Medal of Honor Allied Assault. The video is in Polish, but translation is available through YouTube preferences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRzmhzACanA

Bill Borsari will be streaming the Amiga/040th 2025 event. The Friday evening event is scheduled for streaming on August 2nd. Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzfpEDI4_PA

Bernardo and the AmigaOne A1222+ (redux) – PaCommEx 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS0fbucjNtM

TJ Ferreira is back with a new video, with him checking the temperature of his AmigaOne X5000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEDCL-DCvZw

Hans de Ruiter has released a video called Building a Raylib App for AmigaOS4 via cross-compiler. You can check it out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOJ7eZSp9Dw

Until next time

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for reading the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup of July 2025. It has been an active month for sure, and I’m really looking forward to what autumn and the coming months will bring on the platform. 🙂

Thanks as always to all readers and supporters out there!

I wish you all a great August and see you in the next roundup!

Best regards,

Puni

#Amiga #AmigaNews #AmigaPPC #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #AmigaOS41 #PowerPC

AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup – June 2025

Hi,

Thanks for visiting my blog! 🙂

Summer is here and it’s time for a news update covering June 2025. As often happens this time of year, summer is not the most active season. This is especially true when it comes to news about software and hardware. Still, there’s activity on several fronts, which you can read more about below. 😉

Software News

Version 77.1 of libICU became available on OS4Depot on June 2nd. ICU is a mature, widely used set of C/C++ and Java libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support for software applications. ICU is widely portable and gives applications the same results on all platforms and between C/C++ and Java software.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=development/library/misc/libicu.lha

Also, version 1.0.16 of libfribidi arrived a couple of days later. This is the Free Implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. According to the authors, one key issue hindering the penetration of free software in the Middle East is the lack of support for the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. This support is crucial. To have proper Arabic and Hebrew support, the bidi algorithm needs to be implemented.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=development/library/misc/libfribidi.lha

DeepL, a small tool for online translation, has received an update and is now at version 0.93. It is based on the DeepL REST API and supports up to 500,000 characters a month. The author, root, has fixed the version string and changed hURL post mechanic.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/text/deepl.lha

Steffen Häuser, a.k.a. MagicSN, has made available cores for the soon-to-be-released RetroArch. The archive contains the following cores:

• PicoDrive
• GenesisPlus GX (only AmigaOS 4)
• MAME 2003
• MAME 2003 Plus
• MAME 2009

Here is the download link:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/gamesystem/retroarch_cores_installer.lha

Acuario is a portable screensaver featuring exotic fish and mermaids. It was developed by Juan Carlos Herran Martin, a.k.a. Templario. The final version was released in June and became available on OS4Depot on June 10th. Changes include being compiled with Hollywood 10, cleaning up and optimizing the code, guppy fish now available again, new backgrounds, new cover and back cover, new free fonts for texts, and more. For more information, please follow the link below:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=graphics/screenblanker/acuario.lha

He also released version 2.25 of his kit to make your own decks for these games:

• HLE Poker Card
• BlackJuan
• Siete y Media
• Baccarat
• BlackIvan Card

It is available in both Spanish and English.

Improvements include:

• New PNG transparent templates to make three Baphomet decks
• New tester decks to test the Spanish suits

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/utility/cardsmakingkit.lha

On June 28th, DRIDI released version 7.5Final of the Arabic Console Device.

(version 7.5Final) “Version education&legacy” finished (for me) – big regression 2025 estWriteOnly – during writing no read interrupt is permitted [arabcon-handler]

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=driver/input/arabic_console_devicepro2.lha

New versions of SDL 2 and SDL 3 are now available for download over on OS4Depot:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=library/misc/sdl2.lha

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=library/misc/sdl3.lha

Version 2.6.0 of the WHD-Load front-end iGame was released in June. The AmigaOS 4 port is maintained by George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero. This is a front-end application for launching WHDLoad games and demos.

Features

• Multiple WHDLoad slaves repositories on hard disk partitions
• On-demand scanning in repositories for installed WHDLoad slaves (games, demos, etc.)
• Use games tooltypes on the run
• Shows game screenshot (screenshot window can be altered through tooltypes/settings uses datatypes to load foreign formats)
• Categorization of the games and filtering
• Manual addition of non-WHDLoad games, demos, etc.
• Simple statistics
• Find-as-you-type search filter

The download is available here:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/misc/igame.lha

MEncoder version 1.5 is now available on OS4Depot. It has been updated to the latest SVN version and recompiled for the most recent SDK.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/edit/mencoder.lha

In previous reports, I’ve written about Seq, a MIDI sequencer, by Tuomas Hokka. A new update is out with the following changes:

3.2 (19th June 2025):

• FIXED drawing one-time track steps

3.1 (4th June 2025):

• NOTE! Changed how MIDI devices are selected, changes to the project file format
• requires re-saving all projects
• loading project will try to get the correct MIDI device selection automatically
• NOTE! CAMD might put your multiple MIDI devices to different order after each boot/power on, that’s the reason to change how to set the devices! This way one will need to change the devices in one place only.

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=audio/misc/seq.lha

Version 53.10 of SMB2FS has been released. smb2-handler is a filesystem for accessing files remotely using the SMB2/3 protocols. The protocol implementation is based on the latest git version of libsmb2 (https://github.com/sahlberg/libsmb2).

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=network/samba/smb2fs.lha

Version 34.5 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Signetics TWIN minicomputer (1976);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
• Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples include ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, and windowed and fullscreen modes. Other features are CPU tracing, trainer, and drag and drop support. Additionally, it offers graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, and frame skipping, among many other features!

Here is an overview of the changes since the last release:

• Debugger: added DRAW command.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Please visit OS4Depot for the full list.

If you enjoy creating pixel art, you’ll be happy to hear that version 2.9 WIP of GrafX2 has been ported by Kas1e and smarkusg. The program is similar in style to programs like Deluxe Paint and Personal Paint. It works great and has a lot of functions and possibilities. Grab it from OS4Depot here:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=graphics/edit/grafx2.lha

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 125 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 15.5, which provides miscellaneous improvements, as well as save game editors for King’s Quest 2 and 3.

Amiga-news.de reports news concerning a project by Kas1e to create a new text editor. It is called DumbPad and already runs stable. Please head over to amiga-news.de for the full story.

They also report that Snork 0.1, a new tracer/logger for AmigaOS 4 is now available. You can find more information on their website.

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2025-06-00108-EN.html

The developer Andrea Palmate has written a post describing a new chapter for the AmigaOS 4 web experience. The text starts with “After years of silence, a new version of the Odyssey Web Browser is being developed for AmigaOS4, reigniting hope for modern web browsing on our beloved platform.”. You can find it here:

https://ko-fi.com/post/The-Return-of-Odyssey-A-New-Chapter-for-AmigaOS4-W7W71G4B2G

He has also published a video of Odyssey Alpha 1 running on QEMU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddKNJwVl858

Miscellaneous News

Trixie, developer of Rave for AmigaOS 4, has published a new post on his Rear Window blog. The title of the text is The power of being abandoned. It was a great read in my opinion, and I’d like to quote one passage from it (hope you don’t mind, Trixie!):

The OS4 community should start arranging for itself the things it can arrange, and focusing on the things it can influence. We may not be the largest of the Amiga platforms, but the blood, sweat, and tears poured into it make it something worth looking after. 

Well said, Trixie!

Here is the link to the post:

https://ko-fi.com/post/The-power-of-being-abandoned-X8X11H22ZG

The Amiga Retro Channel has published a new video showing OpenLara running on AmigaOS 4.1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbB4Oysc3s

The Norwegian musician Helge Kvalheim is back with a new song. This one is called Rasta Man. You can check it out here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0rFtTTSsts

McFly PPC has released a new video showing footage from the Amiga Ruhrpott Convention V3 (June 21st, 2025).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UB_38Xrei0

Shoe’s Workbench has made a video called AmigaOne X5000 via NanoKVM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkW9h79JrR8

Until next time

That was all for this time. Hope you enjoyed the read!

Thanks as always to all readers and supporters out there. Thanks for visiting my blog and see you in the next roundup! 🙂

I wish you all a great summer and hope you’ll have a good time. 🙂

Best regards,

Puni

#Amiga #AmigaNews #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #AmigaOS41

AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup – April 2025

Hi,

Welcome to a new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! 🙂

The month of May has arrived. Spring is in the air! It is time to look at what has been happening in the community during April.

Thanks for reading and for visiting my blog. Hope you’ll enjoy the news!

Software News

First up is some gaming news! Hold on to your horses!

Warcraft-2-Engine: Stratagus 3.3.3 for AmigaOS 4

Press release from amiga-news.de

Alinea Computer is pleased to be able to offer another port by Steffen Häuser. Steffen has taken care of the porting of the latest version 3.3.3 and the installation routines for easy installation under AmigaOS 4. Stratagus is the port of the engine in version 3.3.3, which makes it possible to play the game Warcraft 2 from Blizzard Entertainment natively on the Amiga under AmigaOS 4.

The archive contains an installer with which it is possible to install the game directly from the PC CD without pre-installing it on the PC. At least for the Warcraft 2 Classic PC CD, for the Battle.Net CD or the Gog version it is necessary to unpack a file with a Windows tool, but with the Classic CD you can install directly on the Amiga.

Warcraft 2 is one of the most famous strategy games of all time, practically the prequel to the famous MMO “World of Warcraft”. In addition to the base game “Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness”, the add-on CD “Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal” (already included in the Battle.Net CD and Gog version) is also supported.

Stratagus is based on the current “latest Git” version of the Stratagus project (version 3.3.3). In contrast to an earlier implementation, 3.3.3 offers the following features:

• Iconic game music and not just sound effects (the music files are only installed with the Warcraft 2 Classic CD and the Battle.net CD, but can be copied manually afterwards when using the Gog version).
• The game’s video sequences (video sequences not available on AmigaOne A1222)
• A functional level editor
• Numerous bug fixes

Of course, the localisation of Warcraft 2 into different languages is also supported.

Stratagus is under GPL licence, the source code of the Amiga version will be integrated into the github of the PC version in the foreseeable future, but is also available as a request by e-mail (see readme for details).

The minimum requirements for Stratagus are:

A computer with AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 2 or higher
Special executables optimised for the respective platforms (x1000, x5000, Sam 440, Sam 460, G3 and A1222) can be selected during installation.

https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-Software/Amiga-Games/Stratagus-3-3-3-for-AmigaOS-4::1412.html

Juan Carlos Herrán Martín is an active software developer for platforms like AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, and AROS. We’ve seen many releases from him in the earlier monthly roundups. Now he is back with a new version of the game Los Malditos. It is a free adaption of the mythical books from Timun Mas from the 1980s and 1990s. These books are related to Dungeons & Dragons. The author is a fan of these works. It is now available for download at OS4Depot.

Improvements since the previous version:

• Improved on-screen text
• Improvement of the game speed, removing the delay refresh in the game window
• Bugs fixed
• Removed the option to exit the game when you are in a fight and you are in places preventing you from running away from the enemy
• New cover
• The game has been made free, but donations are welcome

He also released version Final2 of High-Low-Equal Poker. This is a special version to promote the game Los Malditos del Valle del Cerro and a way to show the possibilities of his games to promote magazines, books, movies, and other games and programs, even hardware.

• The game has the exclusive Baphomet deck with the Heroes from the game “Los Malditos’ del Valle del Cerro”
• Bug fixed with card engine
• Two game modes: A=1 Ace equals 1 and Poker A>K Ace as in poker is the highest card
• Now the game cans open and play with Baphomet decks
• New screen to exit the game instead of the window requester
• Small improvements

If that was not enough, he updated his utility Cards Making Kit to version 2.20. With this program, you can make your decks for the following games:

• HLE Poker Card (High-Low-Equal Poker Card)
• BlackJuan
• Siete y Media
• Baccarat
• BlackIvan Card

You can make your decks using pictures from your family, pets, hobbies, etc.

Here is another one from the same author. Version 2.05 of a game called Baccarat has been released. This is a tribute to the mythical card game, popularized by the James Bond movie Dr. No with Sean Connery. The author has added a new exit cover (more James Bond style), and fixed a bug with the Baphomet decks and the overload in the game screen that slowed down the game.

Blackjuan Poker Card has been updated to version 2.00. This is another card game from the author above. The development of the game started back in 2012. This release includes new graphics and bug fixes. The game now supports Baphomet decks.

Last, but not least, he has updated the game Siete y Media to version 2.00. This is a Spanish Blackjack version with a Spanish deck of 40 cards. The aim of the game is not to get 21 which is common in Blackjack, but the sum of 7.5. You can read more about this in the readme. An SDK is included for those interested in making their decks of cards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J67WwNSgq3A

Amifish is a chess program made to play chess with Amiga-like systems. It exploits the power of one of the most powerful chess engines in the world: Stockfish. This engine was developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, and Gary Linscott. A chess engine is a console program that plays chess, receiving strings as commands and producing strings in output as a result of computation. Stockfish and many other engines are compatible with a standard named UCI (Universal Chess Interface). The name Amifish is obtained by joining the words ‘Amiga’ and ‘Stockfish’. However, the project is open to all engines compliant with the UCI standard. It is a light program for amateurs. It is made to have fun with chess. Only the most important options are implemented. Version 2.1 is out for AmigaOS 4 and can be downloaded from OS4Depot.

Version R19 of iMage, a fast image viewer by Lazi has been released. According to the author, it handles JPG files very fast.

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 122 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 15.31, which provides miscellaneous improvements, as well as an enhanced Goal! Team editor.

Lorence Lombardo released version 1.0 of chklib. It is currently used in the “amiaudcomp” lib project. He also released version 1.0 of flushmem, which in theory flushes all flushable items from memory.

AmiSSL received an update to version 5.20. As mentioned in earlier editions of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup, the AmiSSL project is a collaborative effort to develop a port of OpenSSL in a shared library for Amiga-based systems. The download is available here. If you are interested in the SDK, it can be found here. It is a must-have if you use AmigaOS 4 to browse the web!

An updated version, 3.4, of the YouTube URL Extractor Script by Michael Trebilcock was released on April 16th. YT.rexx is a script for providing direct video and audio links from YouTube URLs. Changes from the previous version include:

3.4 – 16th Apr 2025:

• Compatibility fixes.
• Removed MEDIACONNECT client as it was no longer supported.
• Added ANDROIDVR client. This is the default in a new YT.cfg. Please note that
  YouTube Kids videos are incompatible with this client.
• DualTagVid / DualTagAud settings in the .cfg can now have multiple tag
  numbers in order of priority, for use with the dualplay option.

More history within the archive.

PolarPaint is an experimental paint program made in Hollywood by Anbjørn Myren. Version 1.055 was uploaded to OS4Depot and became available on April 18th. If you are interested in checking it out, please click here. Another version called PolarPaint Small can be downloaded via this link.

Deark is an application that can extract data from a wide range of file formats. Developed by Jason Summers, this tool can help you get data from everything from AMOS ABK files to Doom WADs. You can read more about supported formats, as well as download the utility from OS4Depot. Version 1.7.0 became available on OS4Depot on April 18th.

George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero has released a new version of aiostreams. “All In One streams” (aiostreams) is a pack of scripts, written in Python, that can be used to stream and watch videos from different online networks, like Twitch.tv, YouTube, and Vimeo.com. Please click here to download it or to read the changelog.

Version 3.451 of IMP3, a utility created by Juen a.k.a Pawl Nowak, has been released! The program was originally meant for 68K but does run OK on AmigaOS 4. With IMP3, you can listen to over 168.000 music files through the Internet. These are ProTracker modules, SID tunes, and so forth. Besides this, it has cloud storage and Online gaming with high scores.

The source code for AmiCraftNova has been released to the public domain by Caras Ghant.

Frank Wille has released an updated version of vasm m68k std, vasm PPC std, and vasm 68k mot. vasm is a portable and re-targetable assembler to create linkable objects in various formats and absolute code. Multiple CPU-, syntax, and output-modules can be selected.

AmigaGPT is a versatile ChatGPT client for AmigaOS 3.x, 4.1 and MorphOS. It is being developed by Cameron Armstrong a.k.a. Nightfox. This powerful tool brings the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT to your Amiga system, enabling text generation, question-answering, and creative exploration. AmigaGPT can also generate stunning images using DALL-E and includes support for speech output, making it easier than ever to interact with AI on your Amiga. Designed to integrate seamlessly with your system, AmigaGPT delivers modern AI technology while embracing the timeless Amiga experience. Version 2.5.0 is now available for download from OS4Depot.

Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, modifying web page data, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups, and other obnoxious Internet junk. It is being developed by Mark Mansnerus. Privoxy has a very flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. Privoxy has applications for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks. Version 3.0.6 is now out and available for download.

WormHole allows you to transfer files to another computer within the same LAN without having to make any adjustments. It is being developed by Lazi. The main advantage of using WormHole between Amiga systems is that it can handle icons and all AmigaOS file attributes in one step.

Main features:

• Transfers all Amiga file attributes
• Transfers icons automatically
• Zero configuration
• Transfers files bi-directional at the same time
• Transfer multiple files parallel at the same time
• Multiplatform

Version 0.5 has been released. Please click here to download it.

AStone is a picture viewer created in Hollywood by Sandro Barbagelata. Version 1.0 was released on April 26th. It is heavily inspired by the utility Fastone on Windows.

The AmigaOS 4 port of Open Medal of Honor is now available on OS4Depot. The porting has been done by Ryan Dixon a.k.a. rjd324. The main goal of OpenMoHAA is to ensure the future and continuity of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (including Spearhead and Breakthrough expansions) on all platforms/architectures by providing new patches/features.

The source code for the AmigaOS4 port can be found at:

https://github.com/3246251196/openmohaa

The download is available here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQhvT-h2jk0

An update to Report+, a ReAction-based utility with nine functions, has been released by James Jacobs. It was made available on OS4Depot on April 27th. This tool can help you with generating Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readme files, performing batch processing on icons, and much more. Recent changes since 8.64 include miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. More detailed information can be found on OS4Depot.

Version 34.3 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Signetics TWIN minicomputer (1976);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
• Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples include ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, and windowed and fullscreen modes. Other features are CPU tracing, trainer, and drag and drop support. Additionally, it offers graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, and frame skipping, among many other features!

Here is a summary of the changes since the last version:

• TWIN: added emulation of high-speed papertape reader.
• CD2650, PHUNSY: added “Tools|Sprite/character editor/viewer…”
  command.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Please click here to be taken to the download page.

Xiangqi is a chess program made to play Xiangqi (Chinese chess), by making use of chess engines UCI compatible with the moves played by computers. A chess engine is a console program that play chess, receiving strings as commands and producing strings in output as a result of computation. The program is developed by Domenico Lattanzi. More information is available on OS4Depot.

That was the software news for this time. Now let us move over to hardware! 🙂

Hardware

I first heard about the new PPC hardware on Discord and was very surprised, to say the least! amiga-news.de has an extensive article about the subject. It will explain the project much better than I would be able to do. 🙂 I recommend you pop over to them and have a look at what this new PPC hardware is about.

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2025-04-00129-EN.html

Here are two announcements from ACube Systems about UBoot updates! 🙂

UBoot 2015.d for Sam460EX / Sam460CR / Sam460LE boards available
Bassano del Grappa, Italy – 08 April 2025

ACube Systems is pleased to announce a new release of the UBoot firmware for its Sam460 line of motherboards.

For the first time in Amiga history, it is now possible to boot from an NVMe SSD.

This groundbreaking achievement marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Amiga platform. Thanks to recent advancements, users can now experience dramatically improved boot speeds and data access times by utilizing modern NVMe solid-state drives—bringing the Amiga into a new era of performance and reliability.

This development not only enhances the capabilities of current NG systems but also demonstrates the ongoing innovation and dedication within the Amiga community. Booting from an NVMe SSD was once considered impossible—today, it is a reality.

This update is completely free for all users.

We are excited to announce a new version packed with important features and improvements—available as a free download.

New in this release:

• NVMe SSD driver – For the first time ever, you can boot from an NVMe drive using a standard NVMe-to PCIe adapter.
• PCIe SATA2 support – Added driver for the Silicon Image 3132 controller, allowing booting from both SATA SSDs and DVD drives.
• DDR2 timing adjustments – Fine-tune DDR2 RAM timings for faster memory access.
• Customizable USB stack – Choose between EHCI (faster for mass storage) or OHCI (greater compatibility with keyboards).
• Enhanced “sata” command – Now displays more detailed information about drivers and connected devices.
• Improved serial console navigation – Navigate menu items using W and S keys.
• General bug fixes and improvements.
• Unified source code – Now streamlined for both 460ex and 440ep platforms.
• An updated installation guide is included, covering the standard ISO image method as well as alternative installation methods via TFTP and USB.
• Updater tool can be downloaded from:
  https://acube-systems.biz/download/Sam460_updater_2015d.zip

If you are not comfortable installing UBoot yourself, we also offer fully updated UBoot chips through our online store.

Additional information:
Please note: UBoot and UBoot updater make use of GPL code and thus are both published under GPL.

Sources can be downloaded from:

UBoot & UBoot updater
https://acube-systems.biz/download/u-boot-2015.d_prod.tar.gz

Parthenope
https://acube-systems.biz/download/ub2lb_0.94.tar.gz

UBoot 2015.d for Sam440ep mini-itx and Sam440ep flex boards available
Bassano del Grappa, Italy – 14 April 2025

ACube Systems is pleased to announce a new release of the U-Boot firmware for its Sam440 line of motherboards.

Following the recent update for the Sam460, the Sam440 now also benefits from enhanced support, including compatibility with NVMe SSDs. Additionally, this update introduces support for Radeon RX and Radeon HD graphics cards.

This release represents a significant investment of time and resources. Nevertheless, we have chosen to offer it at the symbolic price of €3.99.

Highlights of this release include:

• Support for Radeon RX graphics cards () Improved support for Radeon HD graphics cards ()
  NVMe SSD driver: boot directly from NVMe devices using a PCIe adapter () Driver for the PCIe SATA2 Silicon Image 3132 controller, with support for booting from SSDs and DVDs ()
• Enhanced RAM access speed on Sam440ep-flex boards
• New graphical interface style
• Revised ‘sata’ command, now displaying more detailed information about drivers and connected devices
• Serial console improvements: menu navigation via the W (up) and S (down) keys
• General bug fixes and overall improvements
• Unified source code for the 460ex and 440ep platforms

Note:

Features marked with an asterisk (*) require a PCI-to-PCIe bridge.
Radeon RX and Radeon HD graphics cards also require a specific driver (to be sold separately by A-EON Technology once available) for use with AmigaOS 4.

Purchase the update:

The update is available through our online store.
For those not comfortable performing the update themselves, we also offer pre-programmed, fully updated U-Boot chips.

Additional Information:

UBoot makes use of GPL-licensed code and is therefore released under the terms of the GPL.

Source code downloads:

U-Boot:
https://acube-systems.biz/download/u-boot-2015.d_prod.tar.gz
Parthenope:
https://acube-systems.biz/download/ub2lb_0.94.tar.gz

YouTube

Marek Glogowski has published a new video showing Super Star Blast running on AmigaOS 4 through QEMU 10 and GPU Passthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd_a9kpbXtQ

HunoPPC shows DOSBox Enhanced running on AmigaOS 4 with 3dfx support and shader effects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSCPkfZ-pVo

Here is a video of Baldur’s Gate running on AmigaOS 4. The video was created by anouk33.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UT8a-33z2o

Here is another video, but this time of WarCraft II:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY5ktfyiK7o

And one of Quake II:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewALudVmDRc

Amiga Wave has made a long video. It lasts for more than 2 hours and covers his experience with AmigaOS 4 on the Sam460LE. The video is in Spanish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nVsxjDwqHM

Mr. Byte shows Stratagus 3.3.3 running on his A1222+:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCJhZh_f_qY

The Lost C is back with a new video. This time he does a test of the A1222 with a Radeon HD7750. The vide is in Italian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLYq27YKxls

He also created a video with the A1222 and AmiCygnix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCDn4hMeabY

TJ Ferreira is back once again. This time, he takes us on a journey through his experience with playing Glubble on his AmigaOne X5000. 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72WX8T2Lsd4

Until next time

You’ve now reached the end of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup for April 2025. I had not expected it to be this extensive. There is a clearly a lot happening in the world of AmigaOS 4 and Amiga in general these days!

Thanks as always to all readers and supporters out there. Thanks for visiting my blog and see you in the next roundup! 🙂

Best regards,

Puni

#A1222 #Amiga #AmigaNews #AmigaOne #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #AmigaOS41

AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup – March 2025

Hi,

Welcome to a new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! 🙂

This time we’ll have a look at what has been happening on the platform in March 2025.

Thanks for reading and for visiting my blog. Hope you’ll enjoy the news!

Software News

Andrea Palmatè has created the Waffle Floppy Disk Reader. This enables you to read floppy disks using an Arduino. It supports various disk formats and provides a simple interface for reading and writing data. Waffle Copy Professional is now available for everyone.

https://ko-fi.com/post/Creating-Waffle-An-Arduino-Floppy-Disk-Reader-for-Z8Z11BLU6M

You can buy it starting from 3,99€ on his Ko-Fi page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR6R0ly8MHw

Steffen Häuser and Alinea Computer are pleased to present the GemRB RPG package in version 0.8.8 for AmigaOS 4.

Steffen Häuser is responsible for porting and making the package easy to install.

GemRB allows you to play the famous PC role-playing games Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2 (often called “the best PC RPG of all time”), Icewind Dale 1, and Planescape: Torment on an Amiga running AmigaOS 4.

More information can be found on Amigans.net.

You can buy the package from Alinea Computer here:

GemRB RPG package (0.8.8) for AmigaOS 4/WOS – Amiga Shop

The price is 19,95 EUR. It is available for AmigaOS 4 and WarpOS.

Lazi has released version 1.03 of MailSender, a program created to reduce the effort needed to send files or images by email. It can convert image files to the JPG format, resize them on the fly, and optionally pack them to a ZIP archive, or even create a PDF document before sending. A download, as well as more information, is available here:

MailSender on OS4Depot

Ryan Dixon a.k.a rjd324 is working on a port of Open Medal of Honor for AmigaOS 4. It is currently in the BETA stage. More information is available in the appropriate thread on Amigans.net.

Open Medal of Honor (BETA) [AmigaOS4] – The Amigans website

Version 2.9 of Prism II, a driver for 11 Mbps wireless network cards, was uploaded to OS4Depot on March 6th. This driver supports PCI cards in all AmigaOS 4 systems (according to the readme). It has WPA and WPA2 encryption, including both TKIP and CCMP/AES modes. There have been a lot of changes since the last version, which you can read via the link below:

Prism II on OS4Depot

SDL 3.2.8 has been released for AmigaOS 4. Changes have been made since the last time:

• Fix issue with window size after SetWindowPosition

• Prefs: add AISS images to menus (#48)

• Ignore destination alpha for target textures (#150)

• Remove constructor / destructor workarounds

• Improve OS4_DebugPrintF

• sdl3benchmark: reset random seed before every test

• Support SDL_PROP_APP_METADATA_NAME_STRING and SDL_HINT_APP_NAME (#115)

• Improve timer resolution from milliseconds to microseconds

• Cleanup code and makefiles

https://github.com/AmigaPorts/SDL/releases/tag/v3.2.8-amigaos4

The source code for Blender 2.48 has been uploaded to OS4Depot. More information can be found on OS4Depot.

In previous reports, I’ve written about Seq, a MIDI sequencer, by Tuomas Hokka. A new update is out with the following changes:

3.0 (1st March 2025):

– FIXED one major bug in saving project: Too many bytes were written so it was filled with zero bytes and that will break reading one integer value in the project file. This will be fixed automatically in loading project. User will be prompted to choose to save the project immediately after.

– Fixed bugs

– New song (long) mode to One time track, added One time banks

– Increased number of song steps to 96, project files version increased to 9

– Added more settings to alt/double note

– Alt notes displayed in steps better

– Some font sizes increased

– Added new tooltype to set large font

– Refactored some parts of the source code for better maintainability and to avoid bugs

Seq on OS4Depot

Apart from the program above, Hokka also released version 2.1 of Viivi, a picture viewer. Changes can be found below:

2.1 (8th February 2025):

– Fixed iconification/uniconification in full screen mode

– Fixed drag&drop with multiple files

– Don’t show popup menu when activating the window if it was inactive

You can download the program on OS4Depot.

Video Vortex is a frontend GUI for YT (.rexx) to search and view YouTube videos. It is developed by Thomas Kölsch and version 1.1 is now available for download from OS4Depot.

Version 1.5 of AmigaTText, which makes it possible to view ARD/ZDF teletext from the Internet, has been released. It is being developed by TearsOfMe. The author has fixed HR3 and WDR sites.

PNG 2 Amiga is a program that converts PNG icons to Amiga icon format. The utility was developed by Kjetil Hvalstrand. Version 1.3 is available for download at OS4Depot.

Version 0.51 of the PDF generator Compression has been released. This tool is being developed by Achim Pankalla. The goal is to make a PDF generator that is complete with WYSIWYG. Progress has been made since the last version and many errors have been fixed. You can download it from OS4Depot, where there’s also information about all of the recent changes to the program.

AmigaGPT is a text generation program that runs on the classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4 by Cameron Armstrong (Nightfox). Utilizing the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 architectures, this program provides state-of-the-art language modeling. Version 2.3.1 became available for download on OS4Depot on March 30th.

Features:

• Generates text based on input prompts

• Generates images based on input prompts

• UI customization

• Full conversation history

• Text-to-speech

Changes:

• Fix broken error requester in MorphOS

• Fix incorrect language name for English-British for OS4

• Running the “Version” command on the AmigaGPT executable will now report the version and build date

• The installer in MorphOS will now properly ask where you want to install the readme

On March 30th, DRIDI released version 6.1 of the Arabic Console Device. The author has been trying to fix a regression – 0xA6 becomes 0xE1 when double input alif suscrit on a letter d (0x4A) before.

Version 34.1 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Signetics TWIN minicomputer (1976);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
• Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples include ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, and windowed and fullscreen modes. Other features are CPU tracing, trainer, and drag and drop support. Additionally, it offers graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, and frame skipping, among many other features!

Changes since V34.02:

• Tape deck subwindow: added waveform display
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes

AmiArcadia is free to download. You can get it from OS4Depot via the link below:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/gamesystem/amiarcadia.lha

Misc

A brand new issue of the Polish magazine AmigaNG has been released.

https://sklep.amiga.org.pl/wp/produkt/magazyn-amiga-ng-nr-12/

You can read about the Sam460LE, the A1222 Plus, THEA500 Mini, and much more. It is in Polish language.

Celebrate 40 Years of Amiga Innovation at the Computer History Museum! On Amigans.net we can read that the AMIGA/040th Silicon Valley organizing team is excited to announce, in partnership with VCF West, an epic event on August 1st and 2nd, 2025, at the renowned Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. More information is available here.

The English and German issue 173 (March/April 2025) of the print magazine Amiga Future has been published. It can be ordered directly from the editorial office of Amiga Future or from various Amiga shops stocking it. In this issue, you’ll find reviews of games such as Super Star Blast and Battle Squadron 2, as well as an interesting article called AmigaOS 4.1: The Troubled Life of a Beta Tester.

George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero has published a review of the Silicon Image Sil3112 PCI SATA card on the IntuitionBase website.

The Norwegian Amiga musician Helge Kvalheim is back with more music for us to listen to. Two new videos were released on his YouTube channel in March. One of these is a recreation of the theme from the film Karate Kid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCy6oSmvE9c

McFly PPC has created a new video about WormHole, a program for easy transfer of data from one system to another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbS0_n5rxic

TJ Ferreira has published a ton of videos lately, some containing AmigaOS 4-related content. Please have a look via this link:

https://www.youtube.com/@MacSociety/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKt9VkTTR54

Maijestro of the Amiga Retro Channel published two videos in March. One about WormHole, another about DosBox-Staging with 3dfx (Voodoo) support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZZnjKB104w

The winner of the gaming competition at Amigans.net for February and March 2025 was 328gts with 8,805 points. Players competed in the game A Frog Game from EntwicklerX.

Until next time

You’ve now reached the end of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup for March.

Many thanks to all readers and supporters out there for visiting my blog and for reading the AmigaOS 4 Monthly roundup. Huge thanks as always for all the feedback, comments and encouragement.

Have a great day everyone! 🙂

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler

#Amiga #AmigaNews #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #AmigaOS41

AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup – November 2024

AmigaOS 4 News – November 2024

Hi,

December 1st is here and it is (finally) time for a new post on this blog.

Thank you for visiting the Old School Game Blog and checking out this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

Some of you have noticed that I haven’t released any roundups for several months. There are many reasons, personal, health, and work-related, but now I’m back and ready to continue where I left off (almost). I’ve got less hardware than before, but I’m looking for a new, affordable setup to remedy the situation.

Now, let us have a look at the news. 🙂

Software News

First up in November was version 0.40 of the PDF generator Compression. This tool is being developed by Achim Pankalla. The goal is to make a PDF generator that is complete with WYSIWYG. Progress has been made since the last version and many errors have been fixed. You can download it here.

TwinVNC is a VNC client, or viewer, allowing control of a computer running a VNC Server. A German catalog has been created for TwinVNC GUI by McFly.

http://twinvnc.free.fr/AuSujetDe.php?menu=2&lang=eng

Andy Broad has released version 1.8 of the driver for UGTABLET base tablets, such as XP-Pen. It has specifically been tested with the XP-Pen Deco01 tablet, and according to the author, other tables with the same ID should work.

SilkRAW is a program developed by Domenico Lattanzi that allows you to work with RAW files generated by digital SLR cameras, acting as an interface to the dcRAW program written by Dave Coffin. Version 3 is out now and can be downloaded from OS4Depot.

Features:

– Thumbnail thumbnail exports, individual RAW files or groups, with metadata extraction and rotation capabilities

– 25 dcRAW options supported

– Batch processing of RAW files, with saving in TIFF, PPM, JPG, PNG, ILBM

– Further postprocessing beyond dcRAW

An update to Report+, a ReAction-based utility with nine functions, has been released by James Jacobs. It was made available on OS4Depot on November 13th. This tool can help you with generating Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readme files, performing batch processing on icons, and much more. Here are the recent changes:

Changes since V8.6:

– Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Details:

– f3: fixed incorrect library base name.

– os3: now linked with small.lib rather than amiga.lib.

– f7: fixed: unwrapping: some spaces were being converted to EOLs when they should not have been.

– f3: added import and export buttons.

– f3: improved error reporting for nonvolatile.library operations.

– f3: now user can deselect items.

– f3: revised gadget layout somewhat.

SDL2 for AmigaOS 4 has received an update. Version 2.30.9 is now available for download at OS4Depot.

For more information about the project, please visit the GitHub page:

https://github.com/AmigaPorts/SDL

mGBA is an emulator for running Game Boy Advance games by Jeffrey Pfau. It aims to be faster and more accurate than many existing Game Boy Advance emulators, as well as adding features that other emulators lack. It also supports Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. The port to AmigaOS 4 was done by Marek Glogowski and version 0.10.3 was released on November 21st. More information, as well as a download, is available at OS4Depot.

UHC Tools is a collection of programs and scripts for Amiga computers and their offspring to simplify daily usage and the Amiga more independent. The authors, Patrik Axelsson and David Eriksson released a new version in November.

Version 33.6 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Signetics TWIN minicomputer (1976);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
• Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples are ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, windowed and fullscreen modes, CPU tracing, trainer, drag and drop support, graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, frame skipping, and much more!

Here is an overview of the changes since the last release:

Changes since V33.5:

• Improved Galaxia emulation.
• Added ASM and DISGAME CLI arguments.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Kevin Taddeucci has released version 1.6 of his script aimed at MediaVault 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 allowing the user to choose the stream player or to download a stream via a requester.

Version 1.6: (Nov. 25, 2024)

• Added “User Settings to choose ffplay display mode.

• 1 – Waveforms.  Used to much CPU on slower systems.

• 2 – Frequency band. Uses much less CPU time.

• Added “User Settings” to set ffplay window size.

• Made corrections to “User Settings” Player variable comments.

Added keyboard shortcuts to player requester.

The developer Kjetil Hvalstrand is back with a new utility. GIF2ABK is a program for converting GIF animations to AMOS ABK or BOBS.

He also released version 1.1 of IFF-Converter, a replica of a program created many years ago by Metallion of Kefrens. Hvalstrand has added major improvements including DataTypes support for filetypes like PNG, GIF, and others, as well as zooming and drag-and-drop support.

On November 26th, the Sacrificio Pagano magic tool from Juan Carlos Herran Martin became available on OS4Depot. This is a special program for people believing in the magic of Wiccan practices providing a virtual altar.

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 121 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 15.23, which provides miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Misc News

Issue 171 of the Amiga Future magazine was released at the beginning of the month. There you can read articles such as A1222 from a Coder’s Perspective, Classic Reflections – Whatever Happened to Macrosystems? – Part 1, interviews, game reviews, news, and much more.

The magazine can be purchased from here:

The Amiga Future Website

Francis G. Loch, the author of PowerReboot for AmigaOS 4.1, has published a report about his experiences with the A1222+ on the website of amiga-news.de.

He presents solutions to problems others might encounter when first setting up and getting to know the computer. Highly worth checking out if you are a new A1222+ owner.

https://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2024-11-00057-EN.html

There is currently a games competition being held on Amigans.net. For November, participants compete to get the highest score in Mini Metal Slug, an action game brought to AmigaOS 4 by HunoPPC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vsYkOlqIEM

Currently in the lead is Mr_byte with a whopping 48,480 points!

Hans de Ruiter of KSD – Amiga Corner has published a new video on YouTube called Quick Guide: Cross-compiling to AmigaOS 4.x+ the easy way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5j6Ycc4-6o

The author writes: “Setting up a cross-compiler for AmigaOS 4 used to be a painful task because you had to build the cross-compiler yourself following complicated instructions. Now, there’s a much easier way: using pre-built Docker containers. This video shows you how it’s done…”

You can visit his website here.

The Amiga Retro Channel, hosted by Maijestro, has published a video looking at 3D gaming on the AmigaOne X5000. Here he shows games like Quake 3 and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy running.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpe4hiM9rPo

Maijestro recently bought an AmigaOne X5000 and informed us that he will be publishing more videos showing this computer in action in the future.

Skateman has written a post on his blog titled “rVNCd 1.38: A New Era of Remote AmigaOS4 Control”. You can read it here:

https://www.skateman.nl/index.php/2024/11/03/rvncd-1-38-a-new-era-of-remote-amigaos4-control/

Robert Bernardo has published many photos from the AmiWest 2024 event on his blog:

http://blog.retro-link.com/2024/11/more-amiwest-show-2024-photos.html

Not only that, you can watch his videos from the same event on his YouTube-channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsvqR_fyXaA

https://www.youtube.com/@BIOSJERBIL/videos

Well worth checking out for sure! 🙂

Until Next Time

You’ve reached the end of this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

The next one is scheduled for January 2025, a new year with new possibilities!

I wish you all a nice December and see you soon in other post here on the Old School Game Blog. 🙂

Take care everyone!

Best regards,

Puni

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#Amiga #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #AmigaOS41 #news

AmigaOS 4 News – March 2024

Hi everyone,

Thanks for visiting my blog. 🙂

It is, like it usually is at the end of a month, time for the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! 

March proved to be a very active month in the community. We got new hardware, a commercial software release, and many updates to everything from applications to games. Thanks to all the developers, users, and enthusiasts who keep the platform alive!

On the personal side, March was also the month I got myself a new AmigaOS 4 system based around the Sam460LE by ACube Systems. Have since then expanded it with an optical drive, as well as added extra storage space.

Without further ado, here is the AmigaOS 4 news from March 2024. 🙂

Software News

Some of you might remember that I did an interview with Steffen Häuser, a.k.a. TheMagicSN, a few months ago about the game he has ported for Hyperion Entertainment to AmigaOS 4, namely Heretic II.

I’m happy to report that the boxed version of the game is now available for purchase from Alinea Computer in Germany! RetroPassion in the United Kingdom had it in stock, but it is currently only available on backorder.

Here is the link to Alinea Computer:

https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-Software/Amiga-Games/Heretic-II-for-AmigaOS-4::1354.html

The price is 44,95 EUR VAT included.

The requirements are as follows:

• AmigaOS ® 4.1 or higher
• PPC (x1000/x5000, Sam, QEmu or older PPC Hardware like Peg2/Classic/A1, no support for A1222 currently)
• 64 MB minimum, more recommended
• 3D acceleration supported through Warp3D/Warp3DNova (OpenGL)
• Soundcards supported through AHI
• 4x CD ROM (only needed for game installation)
• 400 MB free harddrive space

Features:

• Features Quake IITM 3D engine by Id Software ® using OpenGL
• MiniGL(Warp3D), GL4ES (Warp3DNova) and Software Renderer
• Both GL Renderers with Multitexturing
• CD Audio with Game Music (also playable through ISO-mounting, CD does not need to be in Drive while playing)
• Localization (both Text and Audio-Output) to English, German, French, Italian and Spanish
• Improved Quality of Video Intro/Extro
• High Resolutions (1920×1080 and 4K Resolutions) added
• Multiplayer Support (internet or LAN up to 32 players)
• Formidable Enemy AI
• Outstanding player controls (mouse, keyboard, joystick) using AmigaInput
• Expandable with new mission packs like Quake

My original plan was to show you photos of the box, screenshots from the game, and to tell you more about it, but unfortunately, my copy of Heretic II is still in transit. I got a message that it was going to be delivered soon, but suddenly the tracking showed that it was back at customs here in Norway again. Due to Easter, it has gotten further delayed. I’m guessing it will reach me sometime in the middle of April. I will write a review of the game later on when I’ve received it and have had time to play through it. I’m looking forward to that! 🙂

Speaking of Heretic II, Steffen Häuser recently ported THF 3.0 to AmigaOS 4. This is one of the biggest multiplayer mods for the game. You need Heretic II for AmigaOS 4 to run it. This opens the door to some fun multiplayer action for Amigans! You can download it from here.

Unofficial Polish and Russian localization for Heretic II have also been released. 

On March 2nd, DRIDI released version 2.9z5Final of the Arabic Console Device. According to the author, this version contains a lot of fixes. Later in March, on the 31st, another update was published, 2.9z6Final. Please visit OS4Depot to read more about the changes.

René W. Olsen has released version 1.29 of the Amiga VNC Server. Changes from the previous versions are as follows:

– Changed: The Server now only sends GfxTiles that are asked for by the client. This also means the Faster BufferSync=Off is no longer possible.

– Fixed: The Server no longer sends RichCursor if there are UpdateRequest. This fixes the RealVNC logon problem.

– Fixed: The ‘Settings updated, restart required’ message now disappears when you stop the server.

Version 2.9114.523 of the DNetC client was released on March 4th. Distributed.net was the Internet’s first multi-purpose distributed computing project. If you are interested in contributing to the Distributed Amiga team, visit the effort homepage at http://distributed.amiga.org/, it contains all the necessary info along with extensive information on usage, configuration, and troubleshooting. You can download it from OS4Depot here.

Marie Katrine Ekeberg has released version 0.3.0 of AmiEnvMon. This is a utility to call a homemade Pico environment monitor API to fetch information and show this in a GUI based on MUI. Here is the link to the GitHub page.

George Sokianos, a.k.a. Walkero, is back with an update to the Lite XL port for AmigaOS 4. This time it is version 2.1.3r1.

Lite XL is a lightweight text editor written in Lua and SDL2. It is being developed by the Lite XL team. Here is the link to the official page on GitHub.

Here is the changelog:

[2.1.3r1] – 2024-03-09

Added

– Added AmiUpdate support
– Added the Tetris plugin

Updated

– Updated the code to the upstream 2.1.3 release
– Compiled with SDL 2.30.0 that supports editing with ISO encodings, other than English. Now the editor should be able to support any language and in conjuction with the codesets plugin be able to make text encodings conversions.
– Now the codesets plugin supports MorphOS 3.18 and above

Changed

– Changed the way the “Open in system” option executes the WBRun command in AmigaOS 4, with a more secure way
– Did a lot of code cleanup in sync with the upstream, and parts of code that were left over
– Compiled with pcre2 10.42 (MorphOS version only)

Fixed

– I did a lot of changes on path manipulation and usage, fixing scanning the root of a partition or an assign path
– Fixed an error with the codesets plugin, where an empty file could not be opened
– Improved the folder suggestions when opening projects or changing paths. Now even the root folders of a partition are presented
– Fixed ghmarkdown plugin, but now requires a GitHub token to be provided

For more information (and to download the program), please visit OS4Depot.

SDL2 for AmigaOS 4 has received an update. It is now available for download at OS4Depot. Information about the changes for this version can be found on the GitHub page.

FFmpeg is a fast video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high-quality polyphase filter. MickJT has released a new update that brings it to version 6.1.1. More information about the program is available on OS4Depot.

On AmigaOS 4 you can emulate many different computers and consoles. One of the systems you can enjoy is the Sega Mega Drive / Sega Genesis. This platform is especially interesting since it contains a vast amount of high-quality games. Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Earthworm Jim, Ecco the Dolphin, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage 2, and many more, are examples of this. Thanks to work done by Marek “smarkusg” Glogowski (porting) and Javier de las Rivas (GUI), we can enjoy version 1.33 of the DGen emulator on our computers. 🙂

Here is a video created by Rene Engel a.k.a. Maijestro showing DGen running on QEMU (Pegasos II):

Prince of Persia is a classic game first released in 1989 by Broderbund. It was developed by Jordan Mechner, who was the author of another blast from the past, namely Karateka. Prince of Persia came out for many different platforms, including the Amiga. I can remember briefly playing it on an Amiga 500, but nothing more than that. It is a famous game though, well-known in the history of video games.

Let us fast-forward to 2024. An open-source port of Prince of Persia, based on the disassembly of the DOS version, extended with new features, is available to AmigaOS 4 users. The developer behind the original port is NagyD. Responsible for the AmigaOS 4 port is Javier de las Rivas.

On March 18th, version 1.23 of the AmigaOS 4 port was released. You can download it from OS4Depot:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/adventure/sdlpop.lha

The open-source variant has many added features compared to the original, such as recording your game. You can find a complete list via the link below:

https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP/tree/amigaos4

The game ran fine under emulation of AmigaOS 4.1 FE Classic, so it should run on most, if not all AmigaOS 4 setups. 🙂

Hollywood is an excellent language for developing software. There are a wide range of plugins available handling everything from video to music. Pangomonium is a new plugin for Hollywood that features an advanced text rendering engine that makes it possible to draw text in almost every language of the world. It supports complex layouts like the right-to-left or bidirectional ones found in the Arabic and Hebrew languages or vertical layouts in columns like in Japanese. Pangomonium can also handle complex-text languages like Hindi and fonts that contain colored glyphs (emojis) are supported as well. By giving you full access to the Pango API the plugin also enables you to customize all stages of the text rendering process. Please visit OS4Depot to download the plugin and to read more about it.

Letter Worm is a new game by tickBIT. The goal of the game is to collect enough letters to eventually fly away as a butterfly. Please click here to download it or here to visit the page on GitHub.

Several libraries related to SDL2 have been released. These are:

• Libsmpeg2 (SDL2 MPEG Player Library (SMPEG2)
• Libsdl2_net (SDL2_net portable network library)
• Libsdl2_image (SDL2 image file loading library)
• Sdl2_gfx (Drawing and graphical effects extension for SDL2)
• Libsdl2_ttf (A Freetype 2.0 wrapper for SDL2)

A new version of MPlayer has been uploaded to OS4Depot! This program can play most standard video formats straight out of the box, and almost all others with additional external codecs. MPlayer for AmigaOS 4 is based on MPlayer 1.5 (w/ FFmpeg 6.0), merging code from LiveForIt-MPlayer, MickJT-MPlayer and the Andrea Palmatè’s MPlayer ports, with additional changes and improvements.

Here is an overview of the changes since the last release:

MPlayer 1.5 RC2 (MPlayer 1.5) – MickJT, Marek, Javier and Samo79 (26.01.2024)
* Based on MPlayer 1.5 SVN-r38440 (FFmpeg 6.0)
From now on, the AmigaOS4 release will follow the official versioning scheme!
* Compiled with GCC 11.3 + LTO (currently compiled with optimisation -O2)
* Added support for append, now dragging more than one file will append them
* Added support for AmiUpdate (yes again!)
* Added amiga video output (a fresh new P96 video output written by Jörg Strohmayer!)
* Added video’s path in all availible video outputs (show file path in MPlayer window)
* Added more audio/video formats in ASL requester and reorder them alphabetically
* Added gadgets for iconification and fullscreen in all availible video outputs
* Added “Iconify” option menu to iconify MPlayer from menu
* Added “Open subtitles” option menu to load the subtitles from MPlayer
* Added “Unload subtitles” option menu to unload the subtitles from MPlayer
* Added “Subtitles size” option menu to increase/decrease the size of the subtitles
* Added “Properties” option menu to show informations about the video playing
* Added “MPlayer-GUI” option menu to open MPlayer-GUI from MPlayer
* Added catalogs for French, German, Polish, Russian and Spanish (Credits: zzd10h, Maijestro, Marek, Samo79 and Javier)
* Fixed support for AppWindow, now drag and drop of files over AmiDock really works
* Fixed external windows problems when opened on fullscreen
* Fixed crash on AltiVec version if launched on non AltiVec CPUs
* Fixed crash on quit in the GL video outputs
* PIP: Added support for menu
* Disabled some more debug outputs that were printing to shell
* MPlayer can now be controlled with the Exchanger commodity (Show, Hide and Quit)
* Separation of video outputs for SM502 G4 vo_sdl_sm502.c (Useful in QEMU emulation)
* Made screen/window titles standard in all availible video outputs
* Made drag and drop standard in all availible video outputs
* Improved RegisterApplication support
* New banner and iconsets (thx Mason!)
* A lot of bugfixes and code cleanup

Here is the download link:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/play/mplayer.lha

Marek “smarkusg” Glogowski has released Polish catalog files for AmiUpdate, while Marko Raina has uploaded Finnish ones.

It is no secret that many of us played with ProTracker on our Amiga computers back in the day. Countless music modules have been composed since the tracker was first released. Even I (in co-operation with another demoscener) created a tune called TveitaDowntown back in 2000. That song is not very good, but we had fun making it. 😉

PT2 Clone is a ProTracker 2 clone created for Windows, MacOS, and Linux by 8bitbubsy. The goal is to make a highly accurate clone of the classic ProTracker 2.3D. It is, as seen above, available also for AmigaOS 4. This is thanks to Smarkusg who ported it to our platform.

You can read more about it on GitHub:

https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone

Here are the changes since the last version:

– Fullscreen mode code has been refactored, as I apparently had coded it the wrong way. “Stretched” mode always fills the whole screen now too, and other issues may have been fixed as well. The “INTEGERSCALING” option in protracker.ini has been removed as it wouldn’t work with the new code anyway.
– Updated SDL to v2.30.1

You can download it from OS4Depot:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=audio/tracker/pt2_clone.lha

SDL2_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports 8 channels of 16-bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music. It can load FLAC, MP3, Ogg, VOC, and WAV format audio. It can also load MIDI, MOD, and Opus audio, depending on build options. Version 2.8.0 is now available from OS4Depot.

Liba52 is a free library for decoding ATSC A/52 streams. It is released under the terms of the GPL license. The A/52 standard is used in a variety of applications, including digital television and DVD. It is also known as AC-3. Version 0.8.0 is now available for download.

AmigaGPT is a text generation program that runs on the classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4. Utilizing the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 architectures, this program provides state-of-the-art language modeling.

Features:

– Generates text based on input prompts

– UI customization

– Full conversation history

– Text-to-speech

Version 1.4.4 is now available from OS4Depot. 

Changes:

– Fixes a bug in chat mode in AmigaOS 3.X where the send button stays disabled after an error occurs

– Change the stack size in the program .info file to the recommended 32768 bytes

– Fix bug where accents were not loaded properly resulting in the speech to fail. If you get an error when generating speech, go to the menu and set the accent again

Libfreetype 2.13.2 has been uploaded to OS4Depot to fix headers path. According to the readme, FreeType is a software font engine that is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images).

Kjetil Hvalstrand a.k.a. LiveForIt is back with a new release! This time it is a utility called Mem Info. According to the author, it is a small tool to display the memory usage on an AmigaOne. The source code is included if you’re interested in improving or customizing it.

Pankalla has returned with a new add-on for the spreadsheet program Ignition. This tool makes it possible to read and write files with the suffix ods. Well-known programs such as Open Office Calc and Libre Office Calc use this.

Juan Carlos Herrán Martín is a very active developer of games for platforms such as AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, and AROS. We’ve seen plenty of releases from him in the previous monthly roundups. Now he is back again and inviting us to check out a new project he is working on. The game is called Los Malditos, and it is a free adaption of the mythical books from Timun Mas from the 1980s and 1990s related to Dungeons & Dragons, which the author was a fan of. The demo of the game is now available for download at OS4Depot.

Version 32.0 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
•  Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples are ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, windowed and fullscreen modes, CPU tracing, trainer, drag and drop support, graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, frame skipping, and much more!

Here is an overview of the changes since the last release:

Summary:

• Added preliminary Signetics TWIN minicomputer emulation.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Details:

• wa: fixed: some non-auditable filetypes were being audited.
• wa: phunsy: fixed: “project|open”: mdcr files were not being considered as signetics files nor as tapes.
• added preliminary emulation of signetics twin minicomputer (incl. added DRIVE debugger command).
• disassembler: now indirect jumps into ROM are threaded as code.
• now CPSL $FF pseudocode is given as PSL = 0 .
• binbug: fixed: floppy drive subwin: block contents gadgets: colours were not always changed when changing sector or track.
• fixed buffer overflow that could result in incorrect next default disassembly address.
• fixed: opcodes subwindow had incorrect information for pseudocode and flags for some instructions.
• enhanced tooltips for opcodes subwindow.
• floppy subwin: now says “sector contents” instead of “block contents”.
• aa: CPU monitor: revised gadget layout somewhat.
• aa: tr: fixed: opening cpu monitor could cause a crash/hang.
• fixed: cpu monitor: flag button was wrong colour.
• wa: floppy drive subwin: thickened current track/sector arc for easier visibility.
• assembler: added support for extended instruction set (as used by signetics RASM assembler).
• pipbug,binbug: fixed: it was temporarily refusing to process guest input in some circumstances.
• assembler: fixed: it was emitting spurious warnings when using indexed addressing.
• localized some more strings.
• wa: fixed: floppy subwin: “insert disk…” button wasn’t localized.
• incorporated Anthony’s latest Greek translation.

Miscellaneous News

Now for one of the biggest news of this month. The A1222+ is now finally available for purchase! It is great to see that the computer is now available. It has been a long journey for Trevor Dickinson, A-EON Technology, and the other parties involved, but now it is finally out in the market. 

AAA Technology is currently working hard shipping out motherboards and pre-built systems to customers around the world.

A complete system costs 1,599 EUR. This price does also include VAT.

The motherboard with 4 GB of RAM costs 1,238.90 EUR. VAT included. Without RAM, it costs 1,1199 EUR.

Please visit the website of amigakit.fr for more information about what the options include in terms of hardware and software. 

Hopefully, we’ll see some reviews and videos about the A1222+ soon. 🙂 In the meantime, I recommend having a look at Epsilon’s look at the A1222 on his blog. He has been a beta tester of the system for many years.

Eldee Stephens updated “The QuickStart Guide for New A1222+ Users” on March 22nd. This is a valuable resource for A1222+ users. It contains information about everything from compatibility to helpful tips and tricks. I highly recommend that you check it out via the link below:

http://eliyahu.org/tabor/

AmiWest 2024 has just been announced! The event will take place on October 25th, 26th, and 27th. It has a new theme, which is “Get your game on!”

Here is the announcement from the official website:

AmiWest 2024 theme is “Get your game on!”. Gaming has been a mainstay of the Amiga platform since before it’s inception. The last few years have seen a resurgence in Amiga games and gaming across all platform flavors. This year AmiWest will focus on a celebration of all things Amiga gaming. This includes HW innovations, the latest modern retro releases, the latest game engines like Redpill, Hollywood, and Scorpion, with the latest tools like UniJoysticle. Watch amiwest.net for the latest updates and information.

Show Dates

AmiWest 2024 will be held October 25th to October 27th, at the Holiday Inn Express Cal Expo, 2224 Auburn Blvd.,Sacramento, California 95821, USA. Tell everyone you know and bring a friend to AmiWest.

Format Change

The show will be three days in 2024. In past years we used Thursday and Friday for the AmiWest on site DevCon. For 2024 we are going to change our format and shift the DevCon to a virtual event, more details will be provided in the coming months. For Friday, October 25th, the show will focus on long form presentations on leading hardware and software projects.

Sign up to receive email updates

The AmiWest Organizing committee has begrudging decided that the email fad is not a flash in the pan and decided to implement a robust newsletter mail server. Please follow this link to sign up and show your support!

A new issue (167) of Amiga Future has been released for March and April. Not much AmigaOS 4-related content this time, but still an interesting read; Trevor’s Soapbox, Passione Amiga Day 2023, Dynamic websites with PHP.

As usual, we are running a games contest over at Amigans.net! 🙂 This month we’ve been playing Tap Jewels for AmigaOS 4 by Entwickler-X. This game was suggested by BillE. Many thanks for the good suggestion!

Tap Jewels

Another addictive Match-3 diamond/jewels style game with three great game modes. These are Puzzle Quest, Time Challenge, and Survival.

In this contest we play Time Challenge:

Match 3 or more identical jewels, be fast to get more time to play, because the time goes by. The game is over if the time is up.

The goal is to score as many points as possible. Please post a screenshot of your score in the appropriate forum thread to participate. It is still some time left to play. 😉

Here is the link to the competition thread over at Amigans.net.

Tap Jewels is a commercial game, which you can purchase as a download from Alinea Computer:

https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-So … ownload-version::803.html

If you are unsure about whether this is a game for your or not, you can try the demo version at OS4Depot first:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/puzzle/tapjewelsdemo.lha

Videos

Rene Engel a.k.a. Maijestro has created many videos this month. One of these shows the the new Heretic II for AmigaOS 4 from Hyperion Entertainment running on QEMU (Pegasos II):

McFly PPC uploaded several videos in March. One of these shows Gorky 17 running on his AmigaOne X5000:

Never mind what I wrote about videos of the A1222+ above. It turns out that Mister JBAM has released videos of him unboxing the A1222+ and installing it.

Mister JBAM made a video of playing Tower57, too.

The videos are in French, but you can turn on auto-generated subtitles in English.

George Sokianos, a.k.a. Walkero, did a live stream of him installing and playing Heretic II for AmigaOS 4.1. Unfortunately, he had difficulties with his capture card, so he could not record much of the gameplay. It was still a good stream, and he provided helpful information concerning the game. The port of the game, TheMagicSN, was present in the chat.

Until next time

You’ve now reached the end of this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

I’d like to send a big thank you to everyone for supporting this initiative by reading, spreading, commenting, and sending me messages. It is much appreciated!

If you would like me to mention your project in a roundup, please feel free to contact me. You can also send me news, links to interesting videos, and so forth. Thanks in advance.

I wish you all a great day! See you next month! 🙂

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler

https://oldschoolgameblog.com/2024/03/31/amigaos-4-monthly-roundup-march-2024/

#Amiga #AmigaNews #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #AmigaOS41

AmigaOS 4 News – February 2024

Hi,

Welcome to the second AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup of 2024!

It has been yet another active month in the world of AmigaOS 4. We’ve got plenty of updates to software and releases. The A1222+ is not out the door yet, but hopefully, it will be in March. As you’ve noticed, you are reading this on the Old School Game Blog, not on the Gaming on AmigaOS 4 blog. I’ve melted the two together, so from now on the roundups will be hosted here.

Without further ado, let us move on to the news! 🙂

Software News

Let us start with some AI-related news. AmigaGPT is a text generation program that runs on the classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4. Utilizing the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 architectures, this program provides state-of-the-art language modeling.

Features:

– Generates text based on input prompts
– UI customization
– Full conversation history
– Text-to-speech

Version 1.4.2 (2024-01-31) is now available from OS4Depot. They replaced clicktabs for AmigaOS 3.x since the version is too old and will crash. 3.x users can select the mode at startup.

After hard work, HunoPPC is back with a massive update to the Super Nintendo emulator for AmigaOS4 called SNES9X NG.

Here are the changes from the previous version:

– Added modifications of prefs KEYBOARD on native GUI now!!

– Added on engine, new converter of keys intuition events to keys SDL2 events for new function of keyboard prefs

– Added recognition of duplicates in modified keys

– Added 2 new image for recognition, one for OK (green) and one for NOK (red) 

– Rewinding cool option working now on game :-), use GUI for activate and add number of Mo for rewind dans on game press F12 for a moment to operate rewinding, IMPORTANT!! this hack is very big for your CPU, on X5000 90% of usage with 60FPS  

– Fixed Vsync, now working with -vsync and for disable using -novsync (thanks to Kas1e)

– Fixed limiter of fps without Vsync

– Fixed loading Rom offset “Tintin in Tibet (Europe) (En,Es,Sv) 

– Fixed loading Wild Guns, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers – The Fighting Edition with a good IRQ cycles and DMA delay

– Fixed LowMapRom and HiMapRom on memmap functions

– Optimized DSP2 for AmigaOS4

– Fixed small audio Crackling 

– Fixed Speedup audio DSP1 and DSP2   

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Privacy Settings

– Tipo fixed on locale (thanks Javier)

– Tipo fixed on SuperFX Mhz-> to ->%

– Fixed Run game selected with RETURN now!!

– Fixed quit GUI with ESCAPE

– Added cool sounds effects on native GUI (mario voice and yoshi voice)  

– Added option -interpolationmethod for Sound Interpolation Method, Gaussian=0 / Linear=1 / Cubic=2 (default) / Sinc=3

– Remove Key Q for quit Snes9X

– Added new filters:  

    * 2xBR

    * 2xBR-lv1

    * DDT

    * Scanlines 25%

    * Dot Matrix  

– Fixed draw time with FPS count

– Fixed HACKVIDEO config write

– Fixed INTERPOLATION config write

– Fixed OVERCLOCKCPU config write

– Added button for sounds effects on GUI

– New all catalogs

– Sound now is Threaded 

– Fixed timing for all games with Vsync

– Fixed Joypad2, now working with the GUI launcher

– Added new hack option “-disablespritelimit” disable max sprite tiles rendered per line. Default = 34, Unlimited ~= 128 

– Fixed Mute now working!! 

– On game FULLSCREEN/WINDOW mode now working with = L_ALT + RETURN

– Added new option -emulatedmachine for a virtuel machine, activate a correct software rendering on internal engine (disable: vsync, FULLSCREEN_DESKTOP) 

– Fixed commandline for all filters

– fixed commandline for support optical games: mouse, superscope, justifier and macsrifle.

– GUI is now V1.0.7

– Added to GUI news options: sound thread and Emulated machine (for QEMU and WinUAE machines)

– Fixed Vsync disable if you use emulated machine or rwinding options (thank to Javier)

– Added new images for inputs : Keyboard, joypad, mouse, superscope, justifier and macsrifle

– Now superscope working with a mouse Amiga 

– fixed disabled prefs Buttons of joypad if you use other input

– Center the cursor on screen

– Support all optical games with cursor and mouse for shooting (move working, now i working on the buttons) IMPORTANT: Correctly choose the type of weapon suitable for the game otherwise it may not work correctly, MOUSE ONLY!!!

– Added new folder “Roms-Optical” for copy your games Guns or Optical (Konami Justifier, superscope, mouse and a special MacsRiffle)

– Fixed -nooverscan and center a screen on 320×240 mode (window and fullscreen)

– Fixed on mode -nooverscan and 320×240 centered screen with L_ALT + RETURN

– Fixed Justifier1 AimOffscreen Trigger button, now working with the center button of mouse 

– Added 2 KEYS on KEYBOARD with optical mode:

 * KEY HOME : “Superscope Pause”

 * KEY END : “Superscope AimOffscreen” 

– Fixed mode -emulatedmachine on all renderer

– Fixed if you use optical games with with L_ALT + RETURN disable a pointer on window mode

– Added 3 new images availablecover3dMSU1.png, availablecover3dOPTICAL.png and availablecover3dSUPERFX.png for not available previews 

– GUI checking now all datas dependency for interface on launching and push requester if you have an error 

– Fixed disable vsync on GUI with -emulatedmachine -nooverscan and -rewinding options

– Fix fps limiter on PAL mode

The emulator is available for download on OS4Depot:

OS4Depot – Your one stop for AmigaOS4 files

Rene Engel has created a video showing the emulator running on his AmigaOS 4 setup through QEMU. The footage was created with the previous version of SNES9X NG.

Leu is a spreadsheet application by Marcus Sackrow, which started as an Excel and OpenOffice viewer. Now it also features basic editing functions and a fully working parser.

It supports the loading of Excel (XLSX), Libre/OpenOffice (ods), ASCII (CSV), and TurboCalc (TCD) files. You can export the tables to Excel, Libre/OpenOffice, ASCII, HTML, or wiki tables. Version 0.08 is now available for download at OS4Depot.

A. Pankalla has released an update to Luettje Bookholler, which is a personal finance program. For those of you who are curious about what «Luettje Bookholler» means (I have mentioned this in an earlier roundup, but will repeat it for new readers), I can tell you that it is German and means «Little Accountant». Version 1.87 contains several bug fixes and changes:

• Bug: Report account-flow has not offer the last years, only last 12 months.
• Bug: Long catogory names are not shown in ignition tables.
• Changes: Now also the values are shown in ignition pie-graphics.
• Bug: Corrects some little bugs in ignition-sheets.

SDL2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer 2) 2.30 was released in February. You can download it from OS4Depot, as well as find more information about it there:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=library/misc/sdl2.lha

Version 30.81 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
•  Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples are ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, windowed and fullscreen modes, CPU tracing, trainer, drag and drop support, graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, frame skipping, and much more!

Here is an overview of the changes since the last release:

Changes since V30.8:

 Summary:

• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Details:

• arcadia: improved overlay text for basketball and horse racing.
• wa: arcadia: changed white to grey in sidebar game glyphs (for better contrast against default sidebar background).
• wa: arcadia: fixed: sidebar game glyphs for red clash and robot killer were swapped.
• incorporated Mikhail’s latest Russian translation.
• aa: fixed: it was crashing during exit if eg. a needed ReAction class was not available.
• assembler: fixed: INCBIN directive was broken.
• pipbug: now autostarts biorhythm (300 baud) and life (machine code).
• pipbug: fixed: VDU autoadjustment could result in a mislocated LED display.
• pipbug: adjusted VDU autosense settings for biorhythm, calendar maker, mazemaker.
• fixed: WC,WP command were writing garbage error messages.
• pipbug: improved compatibility (improves random number generator, russian roulette, etc.).
• pipbug,binbug: now silences sound when resetting.
• pipbug: now translates ENTER to Ctrl-L automatically for mastermind and revised mastermind.
• wa: fixed: first string sent to output window was not being displayed.
• pipbug: added knowledge about good dump of RYTMON.
• pipbug 2: added comment support for pipla example.
• pipbug: fixed: baud rate addresses were incorrect after reset (fixes pipla test).
• pipbug: added autostart for Micro BASIC programs.

AmiArcadia is free to download. 🙂 You can grab it from OS4Depot here:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/gamesystem/amiarcadia.lha

Here are the links to the authors websites:

http://amigan.1emu.net/releases/

http://amigan.yatho.com/

HunoPPC and the Amiga French Team 2024 have ported Wipeout Rewrite to AmigaOS 4!

The rewrite of WipEout was done by Phoboslab. Here is the link to the Github page.

Please read on for more information from HunoPPC:

AmigaOS 4.1 Port by HunoPPC with the Amiga French Team 2024

Important: OpenGL renderer with MiniGL Library (no software)

A big thank you to Samo79 because this port for minigl would never have been made if he had not insisted 🙂

Use glewMGL port and code for minigl by HunoPPC 2024

Use SDL2 port by Capehill

IMPORTANT!! If you use hack GUI please check your DEVS/MONITOR/”driver” for add all new resolutions, thanks.

First release 1.0.0 AmigaOS4

• Added GUI for start a new prefs on live (important !! it’s an hack)
• Added Icon created by me
• Fixed loading texture with glewMGL
• Fixed fullscreen mode on glewMGL
• Added KPH counter on screen (thanks Samo79)

The game can be downloaded from OS4Depot, but the archive does not contain the assets (textures, 3d models, etc.) required to run the game. You can find the download link for the data files in the documentation on OS4Depot. 🙂

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/driving/wipeout.lha

Version 2.4.6 of the WHD-Load front-end iGame was released in February. The AmigaOS 4 port is maintained by George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero. This is a front-end application for launching WHDLoad games and demos.

Features include:

– Multiple WHDLoad slaves repositories on hard disk partitions
– On-demand scanning in repositories for installed WHDLoad slaves (games, demos etc.)
– Use game tool types on the run
– Shows game screenshot (screenshot window can be altered through
– tool types/settings use datatypes to load foreign formats)
– Categorization of the games and filtering
– Manual addition of non-WHDLoad games, demos, etc.
– Simple statistics
– Find-as-you-type search filter

If you’d like to read about the changes since the previous version, please have a look at the appropriate page on GitHub.

An update to Report+, a ReAction-based utility with nine functions, has been released by James Jacobs. It was made available on OS4Depot on February 18th. This tool can help you with generating Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readme files, performing batch processing on icons, and much more. Click here to go to the download page or to find information about the recent changes.

Several language catalog files For AmiUpdate have been uploaded to OS4Depot thanks to the work of Niels Bache (Danish), Samir Hawamdeh (Italian), Michael Merkel and Gerd Frank (German), Petrol (French), Javier de las Rivas (Spanish).

René W. Olsen has released version 1.27 of the Amiga VNC Server. It has been written from scratch, and according to the author, it still needs some work. The source code is available on GitHub. Click here to download the archive. He has also released version 2.7 of ReSrc4, an MC680x0 Disassembler.

Heretic II from Hyperion Entertainment is getting close to becoming available for purchase! I’ve been in touch with the Alinea Computer Shop. They will stock the game. I wrote them and asked them to reserve a copy, which they will. 😉 If you want to know more about Heretic II for AmigaOS 4, I recommend checking out this interview I did a while back with Steffen Häuser a.k.a. TheMagicSN, who ported it to AmigaOS 4.

AmiGemini version 0.11 was released on the February 20th. It was created by Karl Jeacle and uploaded to OS4Depot by Samir Hawamdeh. It is a browser for Gemini, Spartan, Gopher, and Finger. The source code is included.

Kas1e has released version 0.10 of WB2Filer. WB2Filer is a hack that patches Intuition’s functions via SetMethod() to allow transparently run of the Filer binary pointing to the given partition on Workbench’s desktop instead of the original Workbench windows. Please click here to get an overview of the changes since the last release.

HexSee, a hex viewer that displays file contents in blocks of 16 characters per line, has been updated to version 1.1. The author is Retrami Software. It contains a few extra features that are not always available in other AmigaOS hex viewers. It can read any file up to 4 GB in size, while a single file buffer will not use more than 128 KB even for the largest file. Text and background colors can be set to any color, and it was written especially for AmigaOS 4.1.

– Added program information to the Screen Bar
– Added Tool Tips to the gadgets
– Enabled Localisation
– Added Text & Hex Search
– Added Text & Hex selection
– Enabled Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys

You can download HexSee from OS4Depot.

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 115 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 14.61. Changes include a Dungeon Master 2 save game editor, and miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

On February 23rd, Michael Rupp released an update for the SonosController program, which allows you to control your Sonos speakers from any Amiga connected to the same network. The changelog can be found on OS4Depot, along with the program itself.

– NEW: first release for AROS x86
– NEW: ARexx command REINDEX to invoke re-indexing the Sonos music library
– NEW: include all icons in every distribution in new subdrawer “Icons”
– NEW: include additional icons by AMIGASYSTEM (thanks Carlos!)
– IMPROVED: reloading the browser with F5 will not loose the selected position and item anymore.
– FIXED: loading of data (playlists, queues, etc.) is no longer limited to 100 entries (bug introduced with 1.3).
– FIXED: if network is off the app won’t crash on startup but show an error message.
– FIXED: possible crash when clicking the “looking for Sonos…” entry.

A major release this month was the update to Rave. Daniel Jedlicka, a.k.a. Trixie on Amiga forums, has released an updated version of Rave, his sound editor for AmigaOS 4 compatible computers.

Changes since the previous release are as follows:

– The program now keeps a list of recently opened files and has an associated item in the Project menu for quickly opening these files again.
– Reworked the file requester, which now features a more flexible Access Panel with a user-definable Favourites section.
– Another addition to the file requester is the Browsing History pop-up for selecting recently used paths.
– Fixed a playback-related bug that would make Rave unresponsive, waiting for a signal that never arrives.
– Updated documentation.

Download link:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=audio/edit/rave.lha

Rave requires AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 2 or newer. It also requires Enhancer Core classes (toolbar.gadget, infodata.gadget, select.gadget, shared.image).

Here is an overview of Rave’s features:

– A modern, configurable graphical user interface (GUI).
– A tabbed environment for managing multiple projects from within a single program window.
– A powerful custom file requester with preview playback and other useful features.
– A wide selection of editing functions with unlimited Undo.
– Asynchronous operation: performing a task in a project doesn’t block the other projects.
– Support for multiple clipboard units.
– Modular design with an object-oriented plugin system, which makes the program easy to extend.
– A wide range of supported audio file types and formats.

Trixie has also published a new post on his blog, Rear Window, which is called Crawling back to life. There you can read more about the development of Rave.

Amiga-news.de reports that AmiUpdate has been updated twice in February. First to version 2.50, then to 2.51. Please visit amiga-news.de here to read the full story.

Another piece of news from amiga-news.de is about QEMU and the BBoot bootloader version 0.6. According to amiga-news.de, “BBoot is a simple, minimal bootloader for loading AmigaOS on QEMU-emulated AmigaOne and Pegasos2 machines, written by Amiga QEMU developer Balaton Zoltan.” Please click here to read the whole article concerning BBoot.

The last news is the release of version 6.22 of Codesets. More information and a download is available over at OS4Depot.

Miscellaneous

Versus is a demoscene chart and disk magazine created by two demo groups, Nukleus and Void, for Amiga OCS/ECS and AmigaOS 4. Nine issues have been released so far. The last one, Versus #9, came out for Classic Amiga and AmigaOS 4 in 2019.

Versus #10 is on the way, and voting has officially opened!

Cast your vote for your favorite demos, intros, programmers, musicians, and so forth! 🙂 The more votes collected, the more accurate the charts will be. Thank you in advance for your support!

You can find the Online votesheet here:

https://www.nukleus.nu/VersusVote.php

It is worth mentioning that you are not required to fill out all the fields.

We are very grateful for every vote we receive, and we really hope you’ll spend a few minutes filling out the votesheet as soon as possible. 🙂

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve not published much on Gaming on AmigaOS 4 recently. AmigaOS 4 related posts have been published on the Old School Game Blog instead. The reason is that I’ve decided to continue Gaming on AmigaOS 4 on Old School Game Blog from now on. I’m involved in many projects, such as those with Void (Amiga demo group), so it easier to blog in one place. 🙂

The AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup will continue, but on Old School Game Blog instead. I’ve added an AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup section to the site. Here is the link. I hope you’ll continue reading my blog posts about AmigaOS 4 and Amiga in general at Old School Game Blog.

The A1222+ motherboard and a full A1222+ computer system were listed on the website of amigakit.fr in February. The price for a motherboard without RAM is 1,199 EUR. 4 GB of RAM costs 39,99 EUR extra. A full system will set you back 1,599 EUR. The final price depends on taxes, fees, and shipping. You can not order either one from the shop yet, but according to AmigaKit, they should be available soon. Here is a quote from AmigaKit dated February 12th:

“No, AmigaKit FR is getting ready for general sale. First stock arriving is for Early Adopters very shortly. A date for non-early adopters will be added to the webstore in the next week or so.”

Source: https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9258&start=60

A date has not been added yet (today it is February 29th). March is just around the corner. When the A1222+ was announced (again) in October, one was told that the boards would ship in October, or November at the latest. This information can be found at Discord, as well as on Amigans.net. Several months have passed since then, and as far as I know, no one has received the A1222+ yet. The Facebook page of AAA Technology has not been updated since October, so it is not easy for customers or potential buyers to know what is going on. I really hope the A1222+ will be released soon though, and I feel for all those who are waiting and waiting for it to arrive. I’m sure it will be a fun system to experiment with!

A preview of the March/April issue of Amiga Future has been published on the official website of the magazine. Here is the link.

The Lost C has published a video on YouTube showing the new HunoPPC port of WipeOut for AmigaOS 4.1 in action. He shows it running a Sam440, Sam460, and an Amiga 1200 with BlizzardPPC and BVision. The video is in Italian.

He is not the only one who has created a video of Wipeout. So has McFlyPPC. His video shows it running on an AmigaOne X5000.

Rene Engel has uploaded a video showing version 1.33 of the Dgen SEGA Mega Drive emulator running with QEMU / Pegasos 2.

Muf has created a review of the Velocap HDR Tbox Deluxe, which you can see here. It is in Polish.

In February we’ve been playing a game by Entwickler-X called Balance Blox on Amigans.net.

BillE is currently in the lead with a whopping 124,200 points! There’s still a little bit of time left if you want to try to beat the score and become this month’s game champion over at Amigans.net.

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9472

Until next time

You’ve reached the end of this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. Hope you have enjoyed reading the news. 🙂

Thanks to all of you for supporting this initiative by reading, spreading, commenting, and sending me messages. It is much appreciated!

Have a great day, and see you in the next roundup! 🙂

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler

Rate this:

https://oldschoolgameblog.com/2024/02/29/amigaos-4-monthly-roundup-february-2024/

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Hi everyone,

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve not published much on this blog recently. AmigaOS 4 related posts have been published on the Old School Game Blog instead.

The reason is that I’ve decided to continue Gaming on AmigaOS 4 on Old School Game Blog from now on. I’m involved in many projects, such as those with Void (Amiga demo group), so it easier to blog in one place. 🙂

The AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup will continue, but on Old School Game Blog instead. I’ve added an AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup section to the site. Here is the link.

I hope you’ll continue reading my blog posts about AmigaOS 4 and Amiga in general at Old School Game Blog.

Thanks for reading and for visiting my blog! I wish you a good weekend! 🙂

https://amigaos4gaming.wordpress.com/2024/02/23/important-gaming-on-amigaos-4-continues-on-old-school-game-blog/

#Amiga #AmigaOS4 #AmigaOS4MonthlyRoundup #blogging #OldSchoolGameBlog

AmigaOS 4 News – December 2023

Hi,

Many thanks for visiting my blog! 🙂

As I write this (December 30th), we’re approaching the end of 2023. It’s been a year with a lot of activity in the AmigaOS 4 community. Some people seems to claim the AmigaOS 4 scene is dead and that not much is happening. Is that so?

If we take a look back at everything that has happened this year, I don’t think one can say that the platform is dead. We’ve got three different hardware options in the form of the X5040, the Sam460LE, and now the A1222 Plus. We’ve had plenty of software developments, as well as many ports of games and programs. Not forgetting all the progress that is being made with the Enhancer package from A-EON Technology!

Last, but not least, think about QEMU and all the extra firepower it is bringing us! We see new users coming on stage, helping with porting software, testing software, developing, participating in discussions, and much more. I for one am positive about what 2024 can bring, that’s for sure. 😉

One would think that December would be a bit more quiet during the rest of the year, but this month has brought us a lot of interesting stuff. 🙂

I’d like to take the opportunity to send out a big thank you to all developers, users, enthusiasts, gamers, retailers and others in the AmigaOS 4 community for a great 2023! Happy new year everyone!

Without further ado, let’s get on with this month’s monthly roundup!

Software News

Juan Carlos Herran Martin released version 4.0 of Pintor Web, which is a program you can use to edit pictures when making websites.

The new edition has been compiled with the latest Hollywood version (10.0). It has a new PDF manual with 12 MB of examples and tips, as well as new visual effects.

He also released version 2.0 of Font Tester. With this utility, you can check the appearance a font has when matched with backgrounds, pictures, or how it looks in your Hollywood projects.

Besides this, Juan Carlos Herran Martin has updated iConecta to version 5.20. This is a utility you can use to test your Internet connection. The latest release contains a new skin (Cyborg) and new fonts. Bugs have also been fixed.

AstralGame is also a creation by Juan Carlos Herran Martin. With this program, you can discover Astral, Chinese, and other zodiac signs, your personal magic number, events, holidays, and more. The new version, 4.10, fixes a problem with a missing button.

Bernd Assenmacher has released version 2.4 of the Image2PDF utility. With this tool, you can convert PNG- or JPG files to PDF. The author labels it as “EmailWare”, so please send him an e-mail if you use the program. 🙂 The new version contains a lot of new functions, an updated guide, and cosmetic changes to the GUI. For a full overview, please have a look here.

It’s been quite a while since I last played the classic game Rick Dangerous from Core Design. I remember it very well from my Amiga 500 days in the 1990s but have only played it from time to time since then. If you’d like to enjoy Rick Dangerous on AmigaOS 4, I’ve got some good news. An SDL 2 port of the game was ported in December!

This clone of Rick Dangerous is called xrick, made by carefully reverse-engineering the PC and Atari version of the game, and re-coding it in C. The author of xrick is Stephan aka ZpqrtBnk. The original author is Simon Phipps. The people responsible for porting it to AmigaOS 4 are Javier (Jabirulo) and Marek (smarkusg). Thanks so much, guys!

If you want to have a look for yourself, you can download it here. Read more about it on GitHub. There is also a thread on Amigans.net with discussions about the port. Hope you’ll check out the game and that you will enjoy it! It is certainly a blast from the past.

AmigaGPT is a text generation program that runs on the classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4. Utilizing the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 architectures, this program provides state-of-the-art language modeling.

Features:

• Generates text based on input prompts

• UI customization

• Full conversation history

• Text-to-speech

For speech on AmigaOS 4, you’ll need Flite Device (http://aminet.net/package/mus/misc/flite_device).

The changelog for version 1.3.1 is as follows:

• Fix pasting into chat input textbox (AmigaOS 3.2 and 4.1 only for now)

• Remove trailing newline from user messages

• Enclose all user lines in asterisks to make bold

• Fixed a memory leak that was present in downloading responses from OpenAI

Version 6.1 of FFmpeg was released at the beginning of December by MickJT. FFmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter that can also be grabbed from a live audio and video source. It can convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high-quality polyphase filter.

Speaking of FFmpeg, Kevin Taddeucci (ktadd) released version 3.5 of the GUI for this program, so you should get this one as well if you want to use FFmpeg. It supports some basic options via the GUI and allows the user to add additional options via a command line string gadget.

IRA, MC68000/10/20/30/40 reassembler, version 2.10 is out. It contains several bug fixes, but also new features.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed parsing of HUNK_RELOC32SHORT/HUNK_DREL32.

• Renamed itoa() to avoid conflicts with compilers providing that function.

• Binary option always overrides the automatic format detection.

• Fixed detection of memory rotate instructions.

• Instructions with 32-bit absolute addressing, but with a relocation that extends into the following instruction, cannot be valid.

• Fixed ROMTag detection with a NULL-pointer for the Init-code.

New features:

• Supports HUNK_RELRELOC32 and EXT_RELREF32 in executables and object files. But cannot create labels for such references at this time.

You can download the archive from OS4Depot.

An update has been made to the AmigaOS 4 version of Worm Wars, a freeware arcade game by James Jacobs of Amigan Software. Version 9.34 is available for download here.

NallePuh (Swedish for Winnie-the-Pooh), a program to emulate the Paula chip from classic Amiga, has been updated thanks to the work of Damien Stewart and Kjetil Hvalstrand. After 13 years without updates, they found out it was time to dust it off and get it working again. Version 1.8 was released in December.

• Updated translation for Italian.

• Updated translation for Norwegian.

• Bug fixed: logPUH() maybe it can cause ISI error. (So rewritten to make it safer under forbid state and now use DebugPrintF to log output instead, of ugly callback hook. requester used if in GUI mode. text printed in the console if not.)

• Puh.c: Improved audio validation, (to prevent playback of bad data.)

• Puh.c: clean code style.

• Package change, tooltype settings disabled as default.

• Reorganized lots of arrays into one array. (to reduce indexing)

Please click here to download the NallePuh version 1.8.

Hollywood developers will be happy to hear that some plugins have been updated. The one for APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics) animations has reached version 1.3, while Plananarama (allows Hollywood to run on planar palette screens) has reached version 2.2. More information is available on the website of Hollywood.

In previous reports, I’ve written about Seq, a MIDI sequencer, by Tuomas Hokka. A new update is out with the following changes:

2.9 (10th December 2023):

• FIXED note playback: A note was not released correctly always

• FIXED setting some values in Base Note window

• FIXED saving Base Note Shift enabled/disabled, that value was never saved

• FIXED saving Base Note Shift Splitter value, that value was never saved

• Splitted Base Note Shift Splitter to separate note and octave values

• Disable all base note selections holding CTRL down while clicking any of the mute buttons

SimpleSub is a program by Kevin Taddeucci (ktadd) for creating and editing .srt format subtitle files. It can also encode the subtitles onto the video using mencoder. It supports a “Preview” mode that allows full control of MPlayer with its on-screen display showing the current time for determining display time for subtitles. The editor supports full keyboard control and auto-time formatting for ease of entry. SimpleSub also supports “Title Settings” such as font selection, position, size, blur, and outline. Version 2.0 has been released and has a ton of changes, which you can read all about here.

Michael Trebilcock has released YT (YouTube URL Extractor script) version 2.5. YT.rexx is a script for providing direct video & audio links from YouTube URLs, and the ability to stream them within MPlayer. Just provide a URL and it will display all of the available video links found and let you play them.

2.5 – 13th Dec 2023:

• Increased stack size for DukTape

• Fixed issue with some live streams

• Updated bundled cURL to 8.2.0 (using AmiSSL)

• Fixed issue creating T:YT/ on some systems

• Added command line option ANDROID. Shows more stream-mapped options for some videos. Very short expiry on links.

CompressionOS4 is a PDF generator by Achim Pankalla which is nearly working with WYSIWYG. The program is still in early development, but version 0.20 was released in the middle of December. There have been several improvements and fixes since 0.10. You can read more about it on OS4Depot.

Kas1e has released version 0.9 of WB2Filer. WB2Filer is a hack that patches Intuition’s functions via SetMethod() to allow transparently run of the Filer binary pointing to the given partition on Workbench’s desktop instead of the original Workbench windows.

Snes9X NG is being developed by the well-known programmer HunoPPC, who has ported many games to the platform in the past. He also works on Doom 3 for AmigaOS 4. Version 1.62.3 of Snes9X NG is available for download at OS4Depot. The archive is 63 MB.

Here are the changes for the new version:

• New Snes9x engine version 1.62.3

• New concept of GUI version 1.0.5

• New all supports for Roms

• Added Roms SuperFX on GUI with special Icon

• Added native overscan

New prefs:

• OverclockCPU (speedup SNES CPU to 10/20%)
• vsync (limit to 60 fps with low CPU usage)
• Displaytime (activate on screen a time)
• SuperFXoverclock (Overclocking SuperFX GSU-1 and GSU-2 to maximum 100Mhz, by default is 80Mhz)

• Fixed auto frameskip command line on GUI

• Added automatic renderer adjustment on all supported SNES resolution

• Fixed load/save savestate, now speedup with this new engine

The last version of Snes9X NG was released back in 2017. It is fantastic that HunoPPC is now back with a brand new version for us to try in 2023!

On December 22nd, a new version (3.0a) of IBrowse was released. At the same time, AmiSSL 5.13 became available.

Here is the full news from the official IBrowse website:

Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings to all our IBrowse 3 users. We hope you’ve been just as happy as the IBrowse 3 release last month as we have been. Although things have gone pretty smoothly, there were a couple of issues that slipped through the net, which we have remedied today with the release of IBrowse 3.0a. This includes one critical fix for a bug in the HTTP(S) module which could trash memory, resulting in either instant crashes or seemingly random crashes at a later stage, sometimes in different applications. For this reason, we are recommending that all users update their IBrowse 3.0 installation using the supplied installation utility. See the History log page for full details of the changes in this update.

This update is free for registered IBrowse 3 users. The prices for registering IBrowse 3 are up to 35% off the previous IBrowse 2.5 prices – please take your time to try IBrowse 3 before purchasing, as we are not planning to withdraw this offer at this time.

Today also sees the release of AmiSSL 5.13, marking the arrival of OpenSSL 3.2 to AmigaOS for the first time. IBrowse 3.0a will continue to work with AmiSSL 5.12, but will also work fine with AmiSSL 5.13, so you are free to update it at any time. See the details on the changes made in AmiSSL 5.13.

If you’re interested in purchasing IBrowse, you can find all the information here.

A new version (1.5) of the video player MPlayer has been released! MPlayer can play most standard video formats out of the box, as well as almost all others with the help of external codecs.

Here is the news by Samo79 as posted on Amigans.net:

After several months of development we are pleased to present the first public release candidate of MPlayer 1.5 … the initial aim of the project was to try implementing support for va.library (VAAPI) providing hardware video decoding and of possibly reunify all the main features of the previous scattered releases, from the ancient one from Andrea, up to the most recent versions from LiveForIt and MickJT.

As often happens in projects of this size, things then evolved a little differently, the various features were now unified, making our version certainly the most complete (yes, no more different versions to download to choose which one to use based on your needs) but the video acceleration project has currently been postponed for a later date!

However, this gave us time to implement a lot of new features and solve a large number of bugs that had accumulated over the years, as well as obviously allowing us to merge with the latest SVN version of the main branch of MPlayer and FFmpeg 6.0.

There are many people to thank, Javier de las Rivas for the bulk of the work on the code and for his enormous patience in solving a massive number of bugs, Marek for managing the collection of new changes, as well as for having implemented some code himself (I am thinking of the iconification function for example), to MickJT for several fixes and obviously for providing us his updated code, to Joerg for his newest Amiga video driver based to p96, to Guillaume Boesel for the implementation of the MenuClass, for the AISS icons in the menus and other small graphically appealing things, to Mason for the iconsets and the banner and finally in small way also me to managed the project by put the various piece toghter, making small corrections here and there, minor changes to the source, added new video/audio formats into the EXPATTERN and finally the re-implementation of the AmiUpdate support. I learned a lot from you all, thank you guys!

The archive is currently available in the upload section of os4depot, download it while it’s hot!

Here is the complete changelog:

• MPlayer 1.5 (MPlayer 1.5) – MickJT, Marek, Javier and Samo79 (25.12.2023)

• Based on MPlayer 1.5 SVN-r38440 (FFmpeg 6.0)

• From now on, the AmigaOS4 release will follow the official versioning scheme!

• Compiled with GCC 11.3 + LTO (currently compiled with optimisation -O2)

• Added support for append, now dragging more than one file will append them

• Added support for AmiUpdate (yes again!)

• Added Amiga video output (a new modern P96 video output written by Jörg Strohmayer!)

• Added video’s path in all available video outputs (show file path in MPlayer window)

• Added more audio/video formats in ASL requester and reorder them alphabetically

• Added gadgets for iconification and fullscreen in all available video outputs

• Added “Iconify” option menu to iconify MPlayer from the menu

• Added “Open subtitles” option menu to load the subtitles from MPlayer

• Added “Unload subtitles” option menu to unload the subtitles from MPlayer

• Added “Subtitles size” option menu to increase/decrease the size of the subtitles

• Added “Properties” option menu to show information about the video playing

• Added “MPlayer-GUI” option menu to open MPlayer-GUI from MPlayer

• Added catalogs for French, German, Polish, Russian and Spanish (Credits: zzd10h, Maijestro, Marek, Samo79 and Javier)

• Fixed support for AppWindow, now drag and drop of files over AmiDock really works

• Fixed external windows problems when opening on fullscreen

• Fixed crash on AltiVec version if launched on non-AltiVec CPUs

• Fixed crash on quit in the GL video outputs

• PIP: Added support for the menu

• Disabled some more debug outputs that were printing to shell

• MPlayer can now be controlled with the Exchanger commodity (Show, Hide and Quit)

• Separation of video outputs for SM502 G4 vo_sdl_sm502.c (Useful in QEMU emulation)

• Made screen/window titles standard in all available video outputs

• Made drag and drop standard in all available video outputs

• Improved RegisterApplication support

• New banner and icon sets (thx Mason!)

• A lot of bugfixes and code cleanup

• MPlayer 1.0.2 (MPlayer 1.4) – MickJT & Guillaume “zzd10h” Boesel – Internal release

• Based on MPlayer 1.4 (FFmpeg 4.1)

• Added missing VCD AmigaOS4 specific support from the older port

• P96_pip: Properly fix of distorted videos with some resolutions

• Comp_yuv2: Allow driver to be used with RadeonRX.chip

• Stay paused if using MPlayer-GUI and paused outside of it ^ Yet to be added in (*bugged)

Modifications by zzd10h:

• Added MenuClass support if available (AmigaOS 4.1 FE required)

• Added AISS images to MenuClass if available (TBIMAGES: assign required)

• Added locale/catalogs support

• Added Italian catalog (Samo79)

• Added GCC version in InfoWindow about window

• Added GNUC and #if HAVE_ALTIVEC in version.sh

• Use of MenuImageSize environment variable to specify AISS picture size (SETENV SAVE MenuImageSize 16)

• Use of AEon InfoWindow class for the about window, if available

• Use of environment variable Disable_Banner_Images to disable about window banner (SETENV SAVE Disable_Banner_Images 1)

• Reenable AppWindow support to handle drop of files over the icon (^ Yet to be fixed)

• Fixed new about window crash and avoid multiple openings

• When a window is still opened, trying to open another window or quit MPlayer will blinks the screen

• PrintMsg timeout is now set to 15 seconds instead of 10 seconds

• MSG_Requester_Title_About for InfoWindow about window

• Menu shortcuts modifications

Wow, that is a massive update for sure! 🙂

Here is the download link:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/play/mplayer.lha

Trixie has released a new version of the AmigaOS 4 port of Protrekkr, a powerful multi-platform music tracker created by Franck “hitchhikr” Charlet.

Please read on for more information from Trixie. The source is Amigans.net.

As a Christmas present to all AmigaOS4 users, I have just released a new OS4 port of Protrekkr, a powerful multi-platform music tracker written by Franck ‘hitchhikr’ Charlet. With its superb features that include software synthesis, Roland TB-303 emulation, and numerous effects, Protrekkr is by far the most capable tracker ever available on an Amiga platform. The release comes with almost 50 example songs (modules) to show what the program can do.

This new AmigaOS4 port is special in that it allows further configuration via tooltypes in the program icon. These additional settings allow tweaking the GUI to make Protrekker more usable in large-screen resolutions.

Find the program on OS4depot.net (currently in the Uploads queue) and enjoy!

AmiArcadia by James Jacobs has been updated to version 30.72. Here is a summary of the of the changes:

• CD2650: added printer emulation.

• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

More detailed information can be found here.

JSON-C, a C library for processing JSON, has reached version 0.17. More information about the new features, changes, and bug fixes are available here.

AAMP offers a development environment on your Amiga, with which you can create and test your own web projects. Similar to the well-known XAMPP package for Linux and Windows, it contains the HTTP (web) server “Apache” with compiled-in support for the scripting language “PHP” (version 8.0.28 and 5.2.10) and the database server “MySQL” version 5.5.10. AAMP is not only interesting for developers. This means that web applications can also be run locally on the Amiga. These are e.g. the database administrator “phpMyAdmin” or the image manager “Coppermine” – just to name a few.

You can create your own tools with the included “php” interpreter. “PHP” is easy to learn and with its extensions a powerful language.

Last but not least, data can be managed with the “MySQL” database server, which can then also be accessed via the network. External programs (e.g. IODBC) can use this server as a database backend.

New in AAMP 2.1:

• The “AAMP-Control” tool is now available for the central administration of all servers and settings. In addition to Apache and MySQL, it can also be used to manage the PHP development server and the Subversion server “svnserve”. The scripts “Start_AAMP.bat” and “Stop_AAMP.bat” are now obsolete and no longer included.

• All other start and stop scripts are still included, but the use of “AAMP-Control” is recommended.

• Update of the Apache web server from version 2.2.11 to version 2.2.34.

• The configuration of the Apache SSL module is now complete and working. So that clients can work with it without problems, there is a selection of CA root certificate collections in the Contrib folder, which also contains the server’s certificate. Simply replace the required file of the client or browser.

• The package now also includes a complete package of “phpMyAdmin” in version 5.0.4. This has been patched for better compatibility with PHP 8 and is already preconfigured. The package will be installed automatically during the installation of AAMP.

• Optimized autostart at system start or when starting “AAMP-Control”.

• Update of the CA root certificates (Mozilla certificates as of 20.11.2023).

• The default WebDAV directory is now “AAMP:Apache/uploads” and no longer “AAMP:Apache/htdocs/dav”.

• The Subversion package has been recompiled using the new Apache 2.2.34 libraries.

• Various bug fixes.

George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero has released a new version of aiostreams, as well as a website connected to the project. You can read the full news from him here:

For more than 3 years, I devoted a lot of time working on the aiostreams package for the AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS, making online video and audio streaming easier for the user, especially for websites that are resources hungry like YouTube and Twitch. Those websites need a lot of power and a strong web browser to work, which plenty of times the AmigaNG systems do not have. So I created a few Python scripts, which can also be used on other systems like Linux and MacOS.

The last couple of days, I was working to resolve some issues and make the YouTube support more reliable. As a companion to these scripts, I set up an online website at https://aiostreams.amiga-projects.net, which is useful to find content. For some time now, there is support for discovering streams from the Twitch.tv website, but I always wanted to add more content in there.

So today I uploaded the newer version, which brings the YouTube content to the users who can find the trending videos based on 4 different categories (Music, News, Gaming and Movies) and specific regions, search for channels and videos based on a description, and find the videos of a specific channel.

The website works as a proxy to YouTube and when something is available on YouTube it will be available on mine as well. To retrieve the lists and videos information, I am using Invidious API which is also an alternative frontend of YouTube. Of course, my website targets browsers who do not support CSS and the JS support is limited. That’s why there is no Javascript code included, no CSS is needed and that makes it work perfectly on IBrowse. Which also means there is no tracking of your activity at all.

If you use the video URLs that you can see in the https://aiostreams.amiga-projects.net with the aiostreams scripts, you can have video playing back on your system in seconds.

I also released a new version of aiostreams scripts, with some fixes and changes. You can find the new version at my GitHub repository and soon on the Aminet and the OS4Depot.

Hope these new features will help every user to have a great time with their Amiga.

Excellent work by George Sokianos! 🙂

Woof is a continuation of Lee Killough’s port of Doom. Changes since 1.397 are as follows:

• Added versioning to the SDL window

• Transient assigns of ETC and USR to avoid requests caused due to soft-openal if ETC/USR are not assigned (caused due to soft-openal) (reported by jabierdlr)

Some may wonder why they chose the name Woof. Here is an explanation taken from the GitHub page of the project:

“If you turn the Doom logo upside down it reads “Wood” – which would be a pretty stupid name for a source port. “Woof” is just as stupid a name for a source port, but at least it contains a reference to dogs – and dogs are the Marine’s Best Friend.”

NetSurf 3.11 has been released! According to amiga-news.de, the following changes were made specifically for the Amiga port:

• Added page theme option.

• Improved handling of bitmaps.

• Improved and optimized handling of Unicode.

• Stability improvements.

It’s great to see that the development of NetSurf continues. Have had a lot of use for this browser on the Sam Flex. It was fast, but also quite compatible with many websites out there. Very happy to see a new version out in the wild!

On December 29th, George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero released version 2.1.2 of Lite XL. He stated that it was released for every system by the official development team as they usually do after Christmas. Sokianos therefore thought it was the perfect time for a new AmigaOS 4 version as well. You can find more information about the newest Lite XL on his Ko-fi page:

https://ko-fi.com/post/Lite-XL-2-1-2r1-released-B0B1SQ17X

In a video on YouTube, Entwickler-X showed upcoming games for AmigaOS 4 running on an AmigaOne X1000. The first one was Radon Break, which belongs to the bat’n’ball genre. The other one was M.A.C.E. Remastered (Warp3D Nova). Both games look brilliant, so looking forward to playing these when they are released! You can watch the video below:

In the second half of December, QEMU 8.2.0 became available. This release contains 3200+ commits from 238 authors. With QEMU you can emulate a full computer, such as an AmigaOne XE, Sam460ex or a Pegasos II. To be able to do this, you’ll need the official AmigaOS 4 for AmigaOne, Sam460ex, or Pegasos II. Behind the Amiga support is Zoltan Balaton, and you can find more information about his BBoot bootloader (for running AmigaOne) and QEMU project here. Speaking of which, a new version of the BBoot (version 0.5) was released on December 3rd. Maijestro, who has his own YouTube channel and does a lot of testing with QEMU, has released a video of it in action.

ScummVM 2.8.0 is out for AmigaOS 4! Thanks to Raziel for his work porting it! It contains a lot of improvements and support for new games, such as Muppet Treasure Island, The Dark Eye, Might and Magic Book One, Dark Side, and The Vampire Diaries. A full list of changes is available here:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/misc/scummvm.lha

Looking forward to test some of the new games listed! 🙂

That was all the software news for this time. Let us move on to the next section!

Miscellaneous

Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology has made a new post on his blog entitled “Christmas Present”. Here he looks back at the events and developments in 2023. The upcoming A600GS from AmigaKit is mentioned, as well as the long-awaited A1222 Plus. Also, which I found very interesting, was a picture of an Amiga 1222 Plus box! I’ve included it below here.

Hope Trevor does not mind that I included it here. 🙂

Anyway, here is the link to the blog post:

http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/index.php/2023/12/24/christmas-present-2/

Not long after Christmas, I posted an interview with Steffen Häuser a.k.a. TheMagicSN on my blog (Gaming on AmigaOS 4). He’s currently working on porting games such as Heretic II and Sin to AmigaOS 4 for Hyperion Entertainment. I’d like to thank him again for taking the time to answer all my questions! 🙂 Here is the link to the interview:

Interview with Steffen Häuser a.k.a. TheMagicSN – Porter of Heretic II for Hyperion Entertainment

TJ Ferreira is back with another video featuring his AmigaOne X5000. This time he’s installed a new graphics card in his computer! You’ll get to see him testing the old one (Radeon HD7750) and then comparing it to the new one (Radeon RX580). TJ is very active on YouTube and you can find his channel here.

Mufa has created a video showing Wipeout 2097 running on his AmigaOne.

Helge Kvalheim, an Amiga user from Norway, creates a lot of music on his AmigaOne X5000. He has his own YouTube channel and there you can find songs from him. You can visit his channel here. In December he uploaded several videos containing music.

On Amigans.net, we’ve had another game competition (it is still going on as I write this).

The game we’ve been playing is the new port of Rick Dangerous. At the moment, VooDoo is in the lead, with Antique in second place, and mcleppa in third. Time will show who is victorious in the end! The competition ends night to January 1st. 🙂 Good luck to everyone partcipating!

Andy Broad a.k.a Broadblues has released his traditional X-Mas card, sketched in SketchBlock, captured with SRec at 1080p and edited in Blender. All on the AmigaOne X1000!

Until next time

You’ve reached the end of this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

Thanks you for visiting my blog and for reading this report.

Thanks to all of you for supporting this initiative by reading, spreading, commenting, and sending me messages. It is much appreciated!

I wish you all a great day and a happy new year! 🙂

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler

https://amigaos4gaming.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/amigaos-4-monthly-roundup-december-2023/

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