AmigaOS 4 News – February 2022

Welcome to the second edition of the AmigaOS 4 monthly news roundup! It is the last day of the month and once again it is time for a summary of what has been happening during the last month.

New Hardware

It is safe to say that the biggest and most discussed news of the month was the announcement from ACube Systems concerning a new batch of Sam460’s. On the 15th of February they launched a pre-order campaign for the new Sam460LE (LE stands for Limited Edition). The new board differs from the previous ones in that it has extra room for double-slot graphics card (important in relation to graphics drivers from A-Eon Technology) and a MicroSD slot placed at the back of the board for easier access. The board is both designed and will be manufactured in Italy.

It is great that it is finally possible to buy new AmigaOS 4 hardware again. The second-hand market has been more or less dry during the last year (have followed sites like eBay and AmiBay and compatible computers are far between), while shops have ran out of AmigaOne X5000’s. If I’m not mistaken, Amedia in France and GGS Data in Sweden still have some of these in stock for those of you who are interested.

Now, the topic discussed the most about these boards is the price. As it stands, the pre-order price is 739 EUR VAT excluded. According to ACube Systems, European buyers should add about 22% to the price in VAT. To join the pre-order campaign, you must pay a deposit of 240 EUR VAT excluded. This sum will be deducted from the 739 EUR when the board is ready for shipping. The campaign is for the motherboard itself, so you will need to source the RAM and other components on top of this.

For those of you who would like to pre-order a complete Sam460LE computer with SSD, graphics card and memory, Amedia Computer France has you covered. They’ve launched a pre-order campaign for such a setup, which you can see here:

With this package you’ll get a MicroATX case, Sam460LE motherboard, 2 GB of RAM, 240 GB SSD 2.5 storage, Radeon HD 5450, PCI Express sound card, PCI SATA card, as well as AmigaOS 4.1 FE. The price of the deposit is 399 EUR VAT included. The final price with deposit looks to be 900 EUR according the webpage.

It will be interesting to follow the pre-order campaigns in the weeks to come. I’m also curious about how this will affect the production of the A1222+, since ACube Systems has agreed to do this for A-Eon Technology. Maybe we’ll get two new AmigaOS 4 hardware releases this year? Time will show. 😉

Software

Now over to software. Remember FlashMandelNG from last month? It has once again been updated by Dino Papararo and Edgar Schwan. Improvements includes a fix of the Turbo Mode (rendering in memory) on 8-bit screens and a fix of the bitmap scaling effect for zooms

On the 9th of February, 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. Updates include room grouping functionality, better handling of switching Sonos devices on and off, as well as localization and translations.

The same day also brought us some other interesting software. 🙂 One of these is AmigaTText, which makes it possible to view ARD/ZDF teletext from the Internet. It was developed by TearsOfMe. It has been a long time since I use teletext on the TV, but remember it very well from back in the days. Interesting stuff! The other is Mr. Wolf. It is perhaps a bit strange title for an application, so I guess I should give a quick explanation. This is a time synchronization related commodity that is SNTP Pool-friendly developed by Chris Young.

An update to AmiSSL was released on the 12th of February and can be downloaded from OS4Depot here. It brings security and bug fixes, updated root certificates and more.

If you enjoy streaming on your computer, I can recommend checking out the latest release of All In One streams by George Sokianos (walkero). This is, according to the readme-file, a pack of scripts written in Python, which can be used to watch videos from a variety of Online networks, like Twitch, Mixer, Vimeo, YouTube and so forth. There is also a radio script that helps you discover and listen to Online radio stations from all around the world. Version 1.7.3 was released on the 14th of February and is available for download here.

On the same day, Airsoft Softwair, uploaded a new plugin for Hollywood to OS4Depot. This one allows Hollywood to run on planar (palette) screens, which makes it possible to run scripts on plain AGA or ECS systems with no graphics board installed.

The card game High-Low-Equal Poker by Juan Carlos Herrán Martín has been updated to version 2.0. You can now load new decks with ZIP-files, view a high-score table, and more. The game is freely available for download via this link.

If you are interested in FTP’s, you should be delighted to hear that Hans de Ruiter released a brand new version of his ZitaFTP Server on the 22nd of February. This time is is version 1.31 and it contains bug fixes and improvements. The big new features is that you can now use proper signed SSL/TLS certificates, which is useful when making ZitaFTP Server accessible over the Internet. If you want to check it out, you can find more information on his website here.

Also on the 22nd, a new version of Vim, a highly configurable text-editor, was ported to AmigaOS 4 by kas1e. It has support for hundreds of programming langues and file formats, powerful search and replace function, and much more. I have tried to load one of my Hollywood source codes into it and it worked straight away. Vim is available for download here.

For those of you who are interesting in emulating other platforms on AmigaOS 4, Eugene Sobolev has ported SDL Vice 3.1. With this program, you can emulate the Commodore 64, VIC-20 and many more! You can download the program for free here.

If you have watched classic Amiga demos, you are probably familiar with the Danish demo group Kefrens, formed in 1987 by Razmo, Metallian and Mellica. They’ve made some big hits like Desert Dream and the Guardian Dragon demos, but also tools, like the IFF-Converter. With this tool you can convert images in the .IFF format to RAW and then include them in your programs. The Amiga developer, Kjetil Hvalstrand (a.k.a LiveForIt), has made an AmigaOS 4 version of this program. It offers several improvements like DataTypes support for loading images, zooming, and the option of saving palettes with or without the RAW image. It also runs nicely on the Workbench desktop. If you would like to check it out, you can find the program freely available here.

SDL 2.0 was released on the 24th. Its requirements are AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition, MiniGL (optional), OGLES2 (optional). If you want to get hold of this version, here is the link to the page on OS4Depot.

I remember reading about the DeepL in the last issue of Amiga Future, which was interesting. Now we can see that this translation tool has been made available for us AmigaOS 4 users thanks to the developer called root. It is based on the DeepL REST API and supports up to 500,000 characters per month. The program was uploaded on the 26th of February. Here is the link to the download.

Miscellaneous

If you want to learn more about AmigaOS 4 and its possibilities when it comes to developing, productivity and general computing, George Sokianos (walkero) has released several videos focusing on these topics in February. He does livestreams every Friday and afterwards he makes these available for us to watch on YouTube and Twitch. You can visit his channel here.

Mr. Sokianos has also been busy updating and improving the Amigans.net discussion forum as well, with many improvements “under the hood”.

The Amiga developer kas1e, released a great video focusing on gaming on AmigaOS 4 on the 26th of February. Here he shows how titles like Napalm, Heretic II, Payback, and Software Tycoon runs on his AmigaOne X5000. Brilliant video with a very interesting intro. 😉

In my own YouTube-channel called Old School Game Blog, I’ve made a few gameplay videos of games such as Super Methane Bros., Amoebax, and Open Sonic. Due to not having gotten hold of a hardware video recorder for my Sam, I must still resort to emulation while recording, which is not optimal of course. 😉 However, I find it fun nevertheless, and it is a good way of helping OS4Depot with quick gameplay videos and screenshots.

When it comes to AmigaOS 4 related videos, we must not forget to mention Hirudov. Not only has he created and ported software for and to AmigaOS 4, but he also makes a massive amount of videos each month. In February, he has made videos about WordPerfect for Apple IIGS running in emulation, the invitation demo called Wake Up, a MyZ80 emulator, and the new version of Odyssey. You can find his channel here.

The next issue of Amiga Future (number 155) is coming and a preview has been published on the official website of the magazine. According to the publisher, this issue will be released on the 5th of March. Should be, as last time, interesting content for AmigaOS 4 users in it. Some readers, myself included, is probably curious about what Trevor Dickinson from A-Eon Technology has to report concerning the development of the A1222+.

As a last piece of news, I’d like to mention a new Kickstarter campaign by Lukas Remis, a designer from Poland. He has made the design of a new, wireless Amiga tank mouse.

I’m thinking that such a mouse would look pretty neat beside an AmigaOS 4 computer. 😉

Until next time

The month of February turned out to be an active one in the AmigaOS 4.x community, with the announcement of new hardware from Acube Systems taking the spotlight, but as we can see, there has been many interesting software releases this month as well.

For the coming weeks, it will be interesting to follow the pre-order campaign from ACube Systems, what news is in store for us concerning the A1222+, and much more. 🙂

Before I stop writing, I’d like to mention that I’ve purchased the domain amigaos4gaming.com for this blog, so that you don’t have to type in the long, old address that had WordPress in it.

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and for reading. Hope to see you in another post here on the Gaming on AmigaOS 4 blog!

Greetings,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler