AmigaOS 4 News – May 2022

Hi and welcome to the fifth edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! Thanks so much for visiting and I hope you’ll find the news below interesting. 🙂

Without further ado, let us have a look at what has been going on in the community during the last month.

Software

On the 2nd of May, Kevin Taddeucci released version 2.4 of his tool called VideoClipper. This is a program for cutting and optionally joining various format video files while converting the files to a common format. Video effects can be added, such as applying sharpness and blur, adjusting speed and so forth. You can also insert subtitles and audio files to the joined video. The program is available to download for free from OS4Depot here.

The same day also brought us an update to the ZitaFTP Server from Hans de Ruiter. The changes includes support for the EPSV command, IPV6 when available and miscellaneous improvements and fixes. If you are interested in getting hold of a free trial of version 1.31, please click here.

If you’ve ever wondered why a program is hanging, a small utility called Frozenat by
LifeForIt (Kjetil Hvalstrand) might provide the answer. This command line tool was uploaded to OS4Depot on the 4th of May and is available for download here.

The picture viewer Videntium Picta by Juan Carlos Herran Martin received an update on the 7th of May. The main feature of the program is to secure the privacy of the user with no recent list of files used and no playlists. It supports most common formats when it comes to both pictures and animations. The program can be downloaded here. He also released an update to the PDF viewer Grimorium the day after, which was compiled to use the latest Polybios plugin for Hollywood.

Speaking of Hollywood, I must mention that there has been a lot of activity with this program during May:

• Hollywood Player 9.1 was released for all supported platforms
• Hollywood SDK 9.1 for developing plugins was released
• Hollywood 9.1 add-on for Cubic IDE
• Hollywood 9.1 wordfile for UltraEdit
• Hollywood 9.1 Online reference manual
• Hollywood SDK 9.1 Online reference manual

If that was not enough, version 6 of the brilliant program Hollywood Designer was released on the 15th of May! The new version includes lots of cool new features and improvements, such as over 10 new action evens, support of vector animations, new presentation mode specifically designed for USB presenters and fully asynchronous thumbnail window including live refresh and regrouping. A complete list of changes be found via this link.

According to amiga-news.de (which the above list was copied from), these add-ons completes the Hollywood 9.1 release. If you are interested in the SDK for AmigaOS 4.x, you can get it from OS4Depot here.

Fresh ports of SDL and SDL 2 for AmigaOS 4.1 was uploaded to OS4Depot and listed on the 9th of May. According to the authors, SDL 1 is deprecated and it is now time to start using SDL 2.

Version 2.4 of Seq, a MIDI sequencer, has been released by Tuomas Hokka. The new edition features a new layout of the user interface and a fix concerning the muting of channels. The program is freely available for download here.

Alper Sönmez released version 1.0 of the open source Workbench Nonogram game called AmiNonogram. According to the author, Nonograms, also known as Hanjie and Picross, are logic picture puzzles in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to numbers at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. The game can be obtained from OS4Depot. If you are interested in creating or editing packs for the game, the author released an editor on the 27th of May which lets you do this. Please check it out here.

A brand new version of iBrowse (2.5.6) was released for AmigaOS 4/PPC on the 21st of May! It is great to see that development continues with this web browswer. Updates includes:

• JS: form.onSubmit and form.onReset can now be changed in a script – not set only in HTML (fixes Google account login)
• JS: Fixed return value from being ignored when individually calling a function externally
• Updated zlib to version 1.2.12
• Fixed HTTP decompression corruption that occurred where initial read length was less than 16 bytes
• Added gemini:// shortcut to location gadget FAB menu
• Updated Russian catalog translation by Mikhail Malyshev

Here is the link if you want to check it out.

HunoPPC is hard at work on porting Doom 3 to AmigaOS 4. For those interested, you can follow the development in a thread at Amigans.net. HunoPPC shares updates and interesting information about the process, including videos. The most recent video is from the 21st of May, which you can view below. It is great to see how the game is coming along! 🙂 Nice!

On the 22nd of May, we could see that an update (version 5.1) of AmiSSL had been released, as well as an SDK. The AmiSSL project is a collaborative effort to develop a port of OpenSSL in a shared library for Amiga-based systems. Version 5 was a major release with full compatibility with OpenSSL 3.0, which includes important security related fixes, a built-in HTTP(S) client and the latest encryption ciphers required to connect to modern SSL-based services such as HTTPS and SSH.

Do you like using a calendar to keep track of things? Now you can create your own unique calendar with the tool Crono by Domenico Lattanzi. This generator can create calendars in the A4 format with the option to customize the number of months on each page formatted as grids or lists, adding photos, set fonts, mark holidays and more. 26 languages are currently supported and it outputs to the PDF format. The download is available for free here.

On the 25th of May, the always active Juan Carlos Herran Martin released a game called The Siete y Media. This is a Spanish Blacjack 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 interesting in making their own decks of cards.

An update to the OO library (version 2.4) was uploaded to OS4Depot on the 27th of May by Tuomas Hokka. This fixes an important bug in the Window class JumpToPublicScreen method. All GUI objects will be set to the new window pointer. OO library brings object class style and easier programming to plain C language and AmigaOS.

Developers might be interested in RevFlex 1.0 by Matthias Böcker. This utility helps to automatically update version, revision and build numbers. It is designed to be very flexible and it should be possible to configure with almost any programming language. It was inspired by FlexRev by Daniel Kahlin. The AmigaE source code is included in the archive. If you want to give it a try, click here.

Miscellaneous

Sam440ep was the first AmigaOS 4 compatible motherboard released by ACube Systems in Italy back in 2007, 15 years ago. Now with a batch of Sam460LE being produced, they decided to release the electrical schematics of the Sam440ep to the public. If you are interested in having a look, you can find them here.

If you are interested in purchasing an AmigaOS 4 system, but don’t know where to look, I have compiled a list of shops on Gaming on AmigaOS 4.x that can help you out. You can find the list here. Hope some of you out there will find it helpful. 🙂

Speaking of systems, Relec in Switzerland is now offering a pre-order for The Red One Limited Edition featuring the upcoming Sam460LE for CFF 1.450. The configuration includes a Radeon R7 graphics card, 512 SSD and more. You can pre-order the system here. Beside Relec, Amedia Computer in France and ACube Systems has pre-orders for the Sam460LE, which has been mentioned in previous editions of this monthly round-up.

Until next time

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for reading. 🙂 June is just around the corner and it will be interesting to see what that month will bring in the world of AmigaOS. Will we get any news concerning the A1222+ or Sam460LE? Time will show!

Thanks again and see you in another edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Round-up!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler