AmigaOS 4 News – July 2022

Hi and welcome to the seventh edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! Many thanks for visiting my blog. 🙂 Hope you’ll find this month’s news interesting. If you have not read the previous roundups, please have a look at this page. There you can find them all sorted from first to last. 🙂

Software

On the 7th of July, AmiSSL received an update with version 5.3. As has been mentioned in an earlier edition 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, this can be obtained from here.

DeepL, which was featured in Amiga Future a few months ago, has received an update and is now at version 1.0. It is based on the DeepL REST API and supports up to 500,000 characters a month. The tool now uses hURL instead of cURL. Support for Indonesian and Turkish languages has been included. Please click here to download it.

YouTube is popular, no doubt about it. With version 1.2 of AmiTube, you have a good tool on your hands to check out videos on YouTube on older platforms, even Classic Amiga. This is possible by converting the video on a server to CDXL or MPEG1 and then downloading it to the HDD, where it can be watched. I have tested it on a Sam440 Flex and it worked fine. Here is the link to the download page.

Wouldn’t it be nice with a program where you could test fonts in an easy way? Juan Carlos Herran Martin, an author of games and programs for AmigaOS 4, has released such a utility. With Font Tester you can check the appearance a font has when matched with backgrounds, pictures, or how it looks in your Hollywood projects.

Retream has updated several games for AmigaOS 4 recently, including the excellent Blastaway and Huenison! You can find more information about the updates by visiting the website of Retream here.

Do you remember PowerPacker? I sure do and I used to stumble upon quite a few files having been crunched with this packer. Actually, I still do when thinking about it. 😉 Nowadays one does not crunch files so much as in the old days though, since we generally have more storage available. Still, many of us look through old files from time to time. In those situations, the new PowerPacker library for AmigaOS 4 by Kjetil Hvalstrand comes in handy. With this library compression and decompression is supported! Now you can play old mods packed with PowerPacker without sweat on your system. 🙂

Speaking of PowerPacker, Kjetil Hvalstrand also released the ppmore2tool, which makes it easy to unpack text files crunched with PowerPacker and view them in your favorite editor or text viewer. This utility was also released in July and can be found here.

Chris Young is back with a new update to Wet, version 6.9, which improves error handling with connection problems and enables unsafe legacy renegotiation.

In May this year, we reported that Tuomas Hokka had released an update to Seq, a MIDI sequencer. He is back with a bug fix, which fixes a problem in the project file parsing route (note lengths were ignored). The new version can be downloaded here.

The always-active jPV^RNO is back with two updates. The first one is version 1.1 of the RNOArchive program, while the second is version 1.6 of RNOPDF, a viewer for .PDF files. Downloads and information can be found on OS4Depot.

Version 2.0.19r1 of Flawfinder by David A. Wheeler has been released. Flawfinder searches through your C/C++ source code looking for potential security flaws.

George Sokianos is back with an update to All In One streams (aiostreams)! This time it is version 1.7.4. For those of you who are not familiar with the tool, it is “(…) a pack of scripts, written in Python, that can be used to stream and watch videos from different online networks, like Twitch.tv and Mixer.com. Also, there is a radio script that helps you discover and play online radio stations from all around the world.” You can check it out here.

On the 29th of July, the author DRIDI released version 2.9rFinal of the Arabic Console Device. This update contains several corrections, which you can read more about on OS4Depot.

Version 1.1.1 of the RSS client (and Atom) called IvoRSS has been released by Aleksei Gerasimov. Several changes have been made, such as fixing a crash related to uncovered HTML characters and making the layout look better under AmigaOS 4.

Daniel Jedlicka has returned with an update to his music program Rave. This time is is version 1.2. New in this release is that files can be previewed from the file requester before opening, updated program documentation, and more options for the file requester in the settings. The program can be downloaded from OS4Depot.

Do you enjoy using emulators on AmigaOS 4? If yes, then you’ll be happy to hear that Ryan Dixon has ported the Mednafen Emulator to the platform. With this program, you can emulate Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear, Sony PlayStation, SNES, NES, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), and many others! The port is a work in progress. If you want to follow the development, you can check out this thread on Amigans.net. The download is available on OS4Depot, while the homepage of the emulator is here. Great job by Ryan Dixon!

According to a thread on Amigans.net, a release of a new Enhancer from A-Eon Technology is around the corner. No release date has been given, but AmigaKit wrote the following: “I am pleased to confirm that the latest Version 2.2 will be released shortly. It is the most advanced and polished Enhancer Software created to date representing 9 months development work from its predecessor.”.

Miscellaneous

Trevor Dickinson from A-Eon Technology updated his blog this month. It contains news concerning the upcoming Amiga37 event, the A1222 Plus, and the ExecSG team.

Sadly, it looks like the A1222 Plus (Tabor) will be further postponed due to problems getting a manufacturer to produce the boards. The factory that produced the prototype is committed until next year, while another factory wanted twice the price to make them. They have approached two other manufacturers who they are waiting for a reply from. Hopefully, they’ll get this sorted soon!

Due to the circumstances above, I’d guess that there is a very high probability that the Sam460LE boards will arrive before the A1222 Plus. I have recently sent an e-mail to ACube Systems asking if they have news to share concerning the current status of the Sam460LE boards. 🙂 I will publish the answer as soon as I get a reply.

According to a post on the Facebook page of A-Eon Technology dated the 25th of July, AmigaOne X5000’s are in good supply. If you are looking for new hardware to run AmigaOS 4 on, please have a look at my post called “Where to buy AmigaOS 4.x compatible systems?”.

Development is continuing with Doom 3. Currently, only those who are beta-testers of Enhancer from A-Eon can play it, since the new version of Enhancer has not been released as of yet (see above). HunoPPC has uploaded a new video showing the game running very fast without shaders. You can find the video below:

According to HunoPPC, this video was done for fun, since the game will include shaders. Amazing to see how fast it runs though. 🙂

After a successful competition in Blastaway at Amigans.net in June, we are now playing Giana’s Return in July. Several people are playing, so if you want to jump in and have a go, please click here to be taken to the thread at Amigans.net. 🙂

The website Obligement has published an interview with the author of Rave for AmigaOS 4, Daniel Jedlicka. Here you can read about the development of Rave, the origin of his nickname (Trixie), and much more. 🙂

Issue 157 of Amiga Future is out! Here you can read about No More Toxic Man, Hollywood 9.1, Hollywood Designer 6.0, and much more. The issue can be bought directly from the publisher here.

The dates for this year’s AmiWest have been announced! It will take place from October 20th to October 24th at the Holiday Inn Express Cal Expo in Sacramento, USA. Tim Jenison of NewTek fame will be the featured banquet speaker this year.

The website Amiga-Look.org has received an update! Amiga-news.de reports that George Sokianos has been hard at work improving several aspects of the site. He has added more security for users, and a responsive fresh look. It also works fine with AmigaOS web browsers. I enjoy this website since it gives you so much cool content to customize Workbench with. If you want to check it out, here is the link.

Until next time

Thanks again for visiting my blog and for reading. Also a big thank you to everyone for all the positive feedback I’ve received since last time. 🙂

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

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler