AmigaOS 4 News – March 2022

Welcome to the third edition of the AmigaOS 4 monthly news roundup! Once again it is time for a look at what has happened during the last month.

Hardware Production

In the previous roundup, I wrote quite a bit about the launch of a pre-order campaign for the brand new Sam460LE from ACube Systems. Consider me surprised when I received news on the 20th of March that the production of these boards had already started! That is excellent news for all of those who have put in a pre-order. 🙂

Sadly I’ve not seen any news this month concerning the upcoming A1222+ (Tabor) from A-Eon Technologies. At the moment it looks like the Sam460LE will arrive first. If you want to read more about this, ACube Systems has shared schematics, as well as other info, for the motherboard on their website. Here is the link.

Software

At the beginning of the month, more precisely on the 2nd of March, the Hollywood plugin hURL 1.2 received a bug fix. According to amiga-news.de, the author (Andreas Falkenhahn) asks users to download the plugin again. You can find it on OS4Depot.

Programmers should be interested to learn that version 1.1 of Profyler was released by Mike Steed on the 6th of March. This is a software performance profiler for AmigaOS 4. It allows the execution speed of the various functions that make up a program to be measured. More information, as well as a download, is available here.

The same day also brought us a new version of FlashMandelNG, a program I wrote about in January this year. The update, version 4.3, includes maxed recursion algorithm up to 4×4 pixel blocks, new ToolTypes SMREQUESTER and PLAYSOUND, fix of a memory allocation bug, and more.

15th of March brought us a rebirth-release of the program Hieronymus, a statistical profiler. The last version came out in 2014, but now the program has returned in 2022. The aim of this utilitiy, as far as I’ve understood, is to locate where programs are slow. The man behind the tool is Mathias “Corto” Parnaudeau, and you can find several of his projects (including Hieronymus) on OS4Depot.

Also on the 15th, Prism II, a driver for 11 Mbps wireless network cards, was uploaded to OS4Depot. 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. In this version support for the Epson/Toko TMW1008 has been added, as well as changes to the manual. You can find out more here.

If you are interested in the Demoscene, you might be thrilled to hear that Kjetil Hvalstrand (LiveForIt) has done a brilliant remake of Cheap Disk by Analog, a classic music disk. The production runs nicely in a window on Workbench and contain many nice songs to listen to. LiveForIt has also added an extra feature, which consists of bubbles rising upwards on the screen. The music disk can be downloaded from OS4Depot. The original version is available from Pouet.net. Hopefully we will see more remakes like this for AmigaOS 4 in the future. 🙂

If there is one category of games that our platforms has been lacking, it is pinball games. Sadly we haven’t had a native game of this kind to play in the past, so emulation has been the only way to get some pinball action on AmigaOS 4. This has now changed, due to the excellent work by the developer rjd324. The reason is that he has ported the Windows classic “Space Cadet”! Some of you may be aware that this game has been available on MorphOS for some time, but now we can enjoy it on AmigaOS 4 as well. Development is currently on-going, so the release is not final yet. If you want to give it a try, please follow this link.

Speaking rjd324, he also recently ported MicroEmacs (JASSPA) to AmigaOS 4.1 under AmiCygnix. The editor is available for download here.

News has also emerged concerning another game. We are talking about a port of Doom 3 by HunoPPC! He has recently released videos showing the progress of the porting. Here is the newest one from the 30th of March:

It looks very promising and I’m sure many will be happy to be able to play this game on their setup when it is released. Best of luck to HunoPPC with the porting!

Apart from what I’ve written about above, there has been several other uploads on OS4Depot. If you want to have a look, here is the link to the recent files.

Miscellaneous

The Amiga user Sailor (Martina Hřebcová) is known for writing very interesting Amiga NG related articles on the Czech website Amiga Portal. This includes an in-depth look at graphics cards for the Sam440ep Flex, which I personally found very helpful. Now she has written a new article called “The Development of PowerPC Architecture and Power ISA on Amiga and AmigaNG”. The text is in Czech, but you can use Google Translate to read it. You can find the text here.

A new issue of Amiga Future was released at the beginning of March. This time it is number 155 and it contains several AmigaOS 4 related articles, including a piece on Tetris games, a review of Balloons, and of course Trevor’s Soapbox. If you are interested in buying the magazine, here is the link to the official website of Amiga Future.

On the last day of February, the AmigaOS 4 developer Trixie published a text concerning the development status of his audio editor called Rave. I’ve included this information in the March roundup here, since I missed it when writing the one for February. 😉 If you want to check out his developer diary, please have a look via this link.

A new article concerning the anniversary of the AmigaOne X1000 has been published on the website of a AmigaNG. Vincent Perkins, the author, shares his thoughts and experiences in connection to this. I remember posting his initial review and unboxing of the AmigaOne X1000 on my other blog (Old School Game Blog) back in the days when the computer was first released. 🙂 Highly recommend you check it out Vincent Perkins new article. Link is here.

Until next time

Another month has passed and we can look back on some very interesting developments. Examples are that AmigaOS 4 hardware is finally being manufactured again, the first native pinball game for the platform has been released, a wide range of utilities has been uploaded to OS4Depot, and that Doom 3 is in the works.

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

Greetings,

Puni/Void a.k.a. AmigaOldSkooler