AmigaOS 4 News – September 2022

Hi there,

Thanks for visiting my blog, and welcome to the 9th edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup!

Once again it has been a busy month in the AmigaOS 4 community with plenty of releases and updates. 🙂 It is great to see so much going on these days!

The events Amiga37 and Amiwest are not far away. Hopefully, we’ll get some good news from those, possibly about multicore on AmigaOS 4 and the release of the Sam460LE. Time will show!

Anyway, thanks for popping in, and hope you’ll enjoy this month’s roundup. Cheers!

Software

On the 1st of September, Ryan Dixon released an updated version of the Space Cadet pinball game. The new version, 1.1, includes an updated codebase and now runs with linear filtering at an acceptable rate. A bug causing the game to crash has been fixed too.

James Jacobs has released version 29.11 of AmiArcadia. This program is a multi-emulator, assembler, and disassembler of many old systems, such as those belonging to the Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family, the Chaos 2 computer, the Dolphin Trainer, the VTech Typeright machine, and many more. If you are interested in checking it out, it can be downloaded for free here.

He has also released an update to Worm Wars, a freeware arcade game. The new version has miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

The Battle for the Solar System: The Pandoran War has been ported to AmigaOS 4 by George Sokianos (walkero). This is a 2D mission-based space shooter based on the Battle for the Solar System space opera novel trilogy. You can play as starfighters from the trilogy and engage in battles against pirates, traitors, the Pandoran Army, and much more. It requires a fast system to play nicely, which means a graphics card supporting either OpenGL or OpenGL ES2 with SDL2. It has been tested working fine on an AmigaOne X5000/40 with a RadeonRX 550. To play the game, you need the data files here. You can click on this link to visit the official website.

George Sokianos has also released an updated version of BlobWars Attrition, a game I wrote about last month. There are several improvements, including speed optimization. You can grab the new version from here.

If that was not enough, Mr. Sokianos also released a new version of Lite XL, a text editor written in Lua. It now contains plugins for both AmigaGuide and Hollywood files. Many fixes have been implemented. You can click here for a full list of fixes and for downloading the program.

The CIA hardware and resources emulator by Damien Stewart, The CIAgent, has received an update and is now at version 0.5. The code and structures have been overhauled to optimize timer emulation. Timers can now be paused by disabling commodity or using the Pause command in CLI. For more information about the changes, please have a look here.

Ignition, the spreadsheet for AmigaOS 4, has once again been updated. It is now at version 1.21. The add-on making it possible to read and write files with the suffix ODS (files created by OpenOffice and LibreOffice) has also been improved. Besides this, an add-on for reading files with the suffix .XLSX has been released. This opens the door to files created by Microsoft Excel. All releases are available for download at OS4Depot here.

Daniel Jedlicka, a.k.a. Trixie, is back with a new version of Rave, a sound editor for AmigaOS 4 compatible computers. Many issues have been fixed, while new functions such as unlimited Undo and support for WAV files containing IMA ADPCM-encoded data have been added. You can find an overview of this via this link.

El Asesino Que Nadie is a game in progress by the productive developer Juan Carlos Herran Martin. Not long ago he released the game Nore More Toxic Man, which was featured in a recent issue of the magazine Amiga Future. This upcoming title is a point-and-click adventure game in the style of film noir. A demo version can be downloaded on OS4Depot. The author plans to release the full version in 2023.

An updated version, 2.4, of the YouTube URL Extractor Script was released on the 15th of September. YT.rexx is a script for providing direct video and audio links from YouTube URLs. Changes from the previous version include:

• Compatibility fixes
• Updated bundled cURL to 7.85.0 (using AmiSSL)
• Updated DukTape to 2.7.0. Added stack cookie.
• Temporary files are now stored in T: YT/

Please click here for more information and to find the download.

If you are interested in chess, you’ll be happy to hear that the game called Chess-SDL2 has been ported to AmigaOS 4 by Sinan Gurkan (SinanSam460). It has two game modes, player versus player and player versus a computer, as well as 5 different difficulty levels. You can also save your game so you don’t have to play a whole match in one go. There is also an undo function if you made a mistake. Chess-SDL2 is available for free on OS4Depot.

The game above is not the only one Sinan Gurkan ported in September, since he also released Open Supaplex the same month. Supaplex was created back in the 1990s and the source code was lost. Enthusiasts, however, have disassembled the game, fixed bugs, and added new features. Open Supaplex is therefore a 1:1 re-implementation of the original in C and SDL. Now you can play this title on your AmigaOS 4 computer. The full game is available for free on OS4 Depot, datafiles are included.

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 September. There are too many programs and scripts to list here, so if you want to learn more, here is the link. 🙂

The ZitaFTP Server by Hans de Ruiter has received an important fix. AmiSSL was crashing on startup and this error has been corrected. A free 30-day trial version is available from here.

Version 2.8r1 of Cppcheck was released on the 23rd of September. This is a static analysis tool for C/C++ code. It provides unique code analysis to detect bugs and focuses on detecting undefined behavior and dangerous coding constructs. The goal is to have very few false positives. Cppcheck is designed to be able to analyze your C/C++ code even if it has
non-standard syntax (common in embedded projects). This is the first AmigaOS 4 public release.

The SFML Library, short for Simple and Fast Multimedia Library, has been brought over to AmigaOS 4 by kas1e. Not all modules have been ported yet, but those for System, Audio, and Network are done. What remains are Graphics and Window. The libraries were compiled with GCC 11.3.0.

Kas1e also uploaded a new version of the AmigaOS 4 port of Vim, which is a highly configurable text editor. MUI-Vim is mainted by sTix (Ola Söder). It has support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats, powerful search and replace functions, and much more. The new version is available for download here.

We’ve already covered two games ported to AmigaOS 4 by Sinan Gurkan above, but that is not all. He has done more work! 🙂 If you are a fan of Diablo, the classic game by Blizzard Entertainment, you will be very happy to hear that you can now enjoy this masterpiece on your AmigaOS 4 computer in the form of DevilutionX 1.4.1. This is a source port of Diablo and Hellfire striving to make it simple to run the game while providing engine improvements, bug fixes, and optional quality-of-life features. Sinan Gurkan thanks Afxgroup, Kas1e, and trgswe, for their help with porting. The port is based on the MorphOS one by Filip “widelec-BB” Maryjanski and previous work by Kas1e on the AmigaOS 4 port.

Here is the link to the game:

DevilutionX 1.4.1 on OS4Depot

You will need data from the original game to play, which is available in places such as GOG.

AMOS Kittens is a project by Kjetil Hvalstrand, a.k.a. LiveForIt, which aims to be a 100% compatible AMOS interpreter for AmigaOS 4. It has come a long way and the latest release can be used to run AMOS programs in Workbench for example. I have seen a video of it being used on YouTube and it looked very good! Have also tested it myself with an example source and it worked well. You can grab the latest version, 0.9, here.

A couple of days ago, forum member Utri007 on Amigans.net posted a thread about porting a racing game from MacOS PPC to AmigaOS 4. This game is CroMagRally and it does look fun to play! Kas1e jumped on this opportunity and started working on a port straight away. As of today, the 29th of September, the first release is already available for download on OS4Depot!

Amazingly fast work and great to see a new racing game in 3D is available. 🙂 Well done!

While writing this report, Kas1e published news on Amigans.net about another game port. This time he has ported a game called Dungeon of Chess, which you can get here. 🙂

That was all for the software news this time.

Miscellaneous

On the 15th and 16th of October, the Amiga37 will take place in Mönchengladbach in Germany. Exhibitors includes names such as ACube Systems, Alinea Computer, Plexilaser, Apollo Computer, GoldenCode, and APC&TCP.

It is now possible to vote for the award recipients of the Community Award! If you would to participate in deciding who gets the award, you can submit your vote by following the link below:

https://amigaevent.de/ticket

If you want to read more about the event itself, you can visit the official website here:

https://amigaevent.de/WB.html

Amiga-news.de has an extensive overview of the event and the exhibitors here:

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2022-09-00085-EN.html

Another edition of the well-known Amiwest event will take place in Sacramento, California, from the 18th to the 24th of October. The schedule is filled with interesting presentations and events! Please visit their website to have a look:

http://amiwest.net/schedule2022/

As last year, the event will be streamed on YouTube. 🙂

Issue 158 of Amiga Future was released on the 5th of September. Here you can find a preview of Amiga37, reviews of games such as Vanilla Conquer and EmotiWorld, a review of RNOArchive, as well as Trevor’s Soapbox. If you are interested in purchasing an issue, you can buy it via the link below:

https://www.amigashop.org/

The latest RadeonHD V5 driver has been available as a boxed item from AmigaKit. It was also made available on the Updater tool for registered users. AmigaKit reports that specific platform licenses for the driver are available to purchase directly from the A-EON website. The main features of RadeonHD V5 are support for Video Acceleration Library (Enhancer Software 2.2 required) and GART support on X1000 and X5000. You can find more information about it here.

Until next time

Thanks again for visiting my blog and for reading this report. Also thanks for the positive feedback I’ve received since releasing the previous edition. 🙂 Much appreciated!

We have a lot to look forward to in October, especially the two events (Amiga37 and Amiwest). I’m very curious about what news we’ll get!

I have also noticed that an attempt has been made at porting Fallout 2 to AmigaOS 4. Wouldn’t that be great? Fallout 2 is one of my all-time favorite games and it would be extra fun to play it again on AmigaOS4.

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

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler