AmigaOS 4 News – October 2022

Hi there,

Thanks for visiting my blog, and welcome to the 10th edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! This edition has been published on my main website, Old School Game Blog, first. The reason is that I’m considering merging the two blogs since I want to save some money by paying for hosting on one website instead of two. 🙂 Time will show what happens. It is safe to say that I will continue writing these monthly reports, as well as covering as much AmigaOS 4-related content as before. The difference will only be that it gets published on Old School Game Blog instead of on Gaming on AmigaOS 4.

October turned out to be a busy month in the world of AmigaOS 4! We had two fantastic events, Amiga37 and AmiWest, new game releases, a new version of the SDK from Hyperion Entertainment, NovaBridge, and much more! We also got news about a possible release of the A1222 around February, as well as the Sam460LE in November. Great stuff!

Thanks again for checking out this monthly roundup. Hope you’ll enjoy it! Cheers!

Software

October started with several releases of games. These are games by Pangea Software, which were originally released for PowerPC-based Macs, but ported to AmigaOS 4.1 recently by Kas1e.

The first is the port of a cowboys-in-space themed-game called Billy Frontier. This is an arcade-style action game where you get to fight in duels, shootouts, and stampedes.

If you are interested in checking the game out, you can find the download on OS4Depot:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/action/billyfrontier.lha

The second one is a racing game called Cro-Mag Rally. In this game, you are a speed-hungry caveman named Brog who races through the Stone-, Bronze- and Iron Ages in primitive vehicles such as the Geode Cruiser, Bony Buggy, Logmobile, Trojan Horse, and many others.

Brog has at his disposal an arsenal of weaponry ranging from Bone Bombs to Chinese Bottle Rockets and Heat Seeking Homing Pigeons. Cro-Mag Rally has both single- and multiplayer modes.

Sure looks like a fast and fun racing game! 🙂 There are not many games of this kind on AmigaOS 4, so great to have another one available to play.

You can grab the game from here if you are interested in having a look.

The last one looks very interesting in my opinion. It is called Otto Matic:

The year is 1957 and a fleet of flying saucers from Planet X has come to Earth. These saucers are under the control of the evil Brain Aliens who are abducting helpless human beings and taking them away to strange alien worlds to become slaves of The Giant Brain. Luckily for the human race there exist the Otto Matics, robots who police the galaxy in name of all that is good and decent.

You are Otto Matic, the robot who is given the job of saving Earth from the clutches of The Giant Brain from Planet X. You must rescue as many humans as you can while defeating the Brain Aliens and all of their evil followers. Your mission will take you to strange and fantastic alien worlds which are often treacherous and will require Otto to perform amazing feats.

Your rocket ship will take you to each of the planets, starting with Earth. While on each planet you must save as many humans as you can, but be careful because the Brain Aliens will try to abduct the humans before you can save them. When you save humans, they are teleported to your rocket ship. To escape the planet you must also collect rocket fuel. Once The Giant Brain has been defeated and peace restored to the galaxy, you will return to Earth with your human cargo where they will be freed.

The game is available for download at OS4Depot here:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/adventure/ottomatic.lha

Very impressive work of Kas1e to bring such quality games to our platform. Great job! 🙂

Speaking of games, the AmigaOS 4 port for Caesar III, namely Augustus, has received an update from Sinan Gurkan. It is now version 1.02. The most important fix here is the “Shovel” cursor position, which tended to be a bit out of line. The game has also been recompiled with the latest development tools.

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor) is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 108 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 14.02, which contains an enhanced Phantasie 1 & 3 save game editor and miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. He has also updated AmiArcadia to version 29.12 this month, as well as the ReAction-based utility Report+ to version 8.41. Being a friendly enhanced replacement for the official Commodore bug reporting tool, it can be pretty handy for developers. It can also generate and editor Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readmes, and much more.

The program Digital Audio Player by Thomas Rapp has been updated to version 1.14. This player can do everything from MP3 and ProTracker modules to audio CDs. I’m not sure what kind of changes has been made since the last release.

Juan Carlos Herran Martin, also known as Templario, is back with a game for AmigaOS 4. This game is called Virtual Voodoo Job, and according to the author, it is a black magic tool made to bring evil to your enemies. You can personalize a doll with a photo and use up to 7 cloves. I have not tested it myself, but if you want to give it a go, here is the link. He has also released a new tool called Sacrificio Pagano, which is a program for people believing in magic or Wiccan practices. I don’t have any knowledge about this, but if you do and would like to give it a try, please click here.

Oliver Roberts has uploaded updates to several datatypes, namely WarpJPEG DT, WarpWebP DT, WarpTIFF, and WarpPNG DT. You can get these from the official website. These datatypes are shareware, which means you are expected to register if you find them useful after an evaluation period of 30 days.

Hollywood developers will be happy to read that a new plugin has been released. This is the AVCodec plugin which enables Hollywood to load and play many video and audio formats supported by the FFmpeg library.

Version 2 of the lightweight text editor Lite XL has been ported by George Sokianos. There have been many changes and fixes. You can find the complete list here, as well as the download.

AmiSSL received an update to version 5.4. 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. It is a must-have if you use AmigaOS 4 to browse the web. 🙂

In previous reports, we have read about the FlashMandelNG tool. Dino Papararo and Edgar Schwan are once again back with an update. In version 4.5 they have included full new support of the A1222 (Tabor) with a native SPE binary! This is good news for budding A1222 owners.

The utility called Lupe has received a big update from the author Matthias Böcker. This program magnifies an area surrounding the mouse pointer and displays it in a separate window. The magnification factor is adjustable, you can jump to any screen, and it can show the RGB values of pixels. A lot has changed since the last version, which you can read about here.

If you require an application that can extract data from a wide range of file formats, you might be covered by Deark. Developed by Jason Summers, this tool can help you get data from everything from AMOS .ABK files to Doom WAD. You can read more about supported formats, as well as download the utility from OS4Depot.

For those of you enjoying emulators on AmigaOS 4, I’m happy to report that Ryan Dixon is back with a brand new version of Mednafen. With this program, you can emulate Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear, Sony PlayStation, SNES, NES, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), and many others! Version 1.186 can be downloaded from the usual place. 😉

Version 53.7 of Drawing Datatype, a superclass for structured art and vector drawings, has been released by Chris Young. The archive also includes SVG and IFF DR2D datatypes that use the mentioned superclass.

I was thrilled to discover that a new version of AmigaAMP had been released! I have already downloaded and installed it on my setup and it works fine. 🙂 There have been several bug fixes and two new features added. To have a look, please click here to read more about it.

Another music release is a brand new version of HivelyTracker from IRIS and Up Rough! HivelyTracker is an application based upon the AHX format created in the mid-’90s by Dexter and Pink of Abyss. The format was relatively popular, and many songs were created and used in demoscene productions and games. AHX was designed to create a SID-like sound on the Amiga. Click here to read more about the new version and to download it.

Spotless 2, a debugging tool, has received an update. Version 2.1.0 includes several fixes.

A big release this month was version 54.16 of the AmigaOS 4.1 Software Development Kit from Hyperion Entertainment.

New functionality includes but is not limited to:

• The inclusion of different versions of the GCC compiler starting from the old 6.4.0, to 8.4.0, 10.3.0 and 11.2.0 which can be selected during installation including the option to install multiple versions
• The addition of a tool added to set the default gcc version
• SPE optimized binaries can be generated by using GCC 6.4 for maximum performance on systems equipped with an SPE
• vbcc compiler is once more included in the SDK, configured to work “out of the box”
• Simplegit and Subversion are now included
• Profyler 1.1 added and Hieronymus updated to 0.50 version
• Updated the include headers and the autodoc documentation
• Added extended documentation for all the GCC versions included
• AmiSSL 5.3 SDK is included
• Latest AutoDocViewer 1.4 is included
• newlib and clib updated to the latest versions
• ExecSG SDK updated to the latest version
• Many code examples were updated to reflect the newest changes, removing obsolete API calls
• Updated the “AmigaOS 4.1 SDK.pdf” with new sections and format
• Many more tools were updated to their respective latest versions

Hyperion Entertainment wishes to extend its special thanks and appreciation to George Sokianos as well as the AmigaOS 4.x development team for making this happen!

https://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/index.php/component/content/article/306-new-amigaos-41-sdk-5416-available-now

Another piece of important news is that NovaBridge V54 from A-EON Technology is available for purchase at AMIStore. The price is about 50 EUR plus taxes and fees. With NovaBridge, all 3D applications for Warp3D and MiniGL will work on RadeonHD graphics cards (Southern Islands or Polaris). Warp3D Nova from Enhancer 2.2 is required.

At AmiWest 2022, George Sokianos did a presentation on the WebKit-based browser initiative. I have included the presentation below, which is from the live stream from AmiWest. 🙂

That was all for software this time. Now, let us move on to the next section!

Miscellaneous

Martina Hrebcova, also known as Sailor, is back with a new article. This time she has written an extensive report about an AmigaOne XE computer, which she received from a colleague in the US this year. 🙂 The text is in Czech but can be translated with Google Translate. You can read it here.

A preview of the upcoming issue of Amiga Future (November and December 2022) has been published:

It looks like it will contain a review of M.A.C.E. Tower Defense from Entwickler-X! 🙂 Great! If you want to order the magazine, please click here.

Now over to ACube Systems. There has been confusion about whether the Sam460LE was in stock and available for purchase or not. I was under the impression that one could buy these boards from ACube System’s webshop and other retailers earlier this month, but this was incorrect. ACube Systems released an update stating that they are expecting to ship the boards in November instead. Please click here to read the official update.

AmigaKit, the well-known Amiga shop, has started its blog. Here you can read about what they are working on at the moment, information about hardware, updates, and much more. The latest post is about the Amiga 37 Show.

Trevor Dickinson has written his review of the Amiga37 event. This was published on amiga-news.de on October 30th. An interesting read for sure!

amiga-news.de has also written a very good review of Amiga37, which includes news from A-EON Technology and ACube Systems about the upcoming A1222 board. You can read the whole article here.

They have also done an extensive review of AmiWest which took place a bit later in October in Sacramento, California. There you can see all the slides presented by A-EON/AmigaKit, as well as the ExecSG one by Steven Solie.

http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2022-10-00104-EN.html

Speaking of Amiga37 and AmiWest, many videos have been released on YouTube covering the events. One of my favorites is the one from Radio PARALAX covering Amiga37. This video covers all the exhibitors! I have embedded it below in case you would like to have a look:

As for AmiWest, the YouTuber TJ Ferreira did a nice one covering the various exhibitions:

Bill Borsari and the team did a good job streaming live from AmiWest. The streams are available on his YouTube channel. 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/user/Amigatekmage

Both events were very successful, no doubt about it. 🙂 I don’t know if there will be an Amiga37, but AmiWest will most likely be held as usual.

Until next time

Thanks again for visiting my blog and for reading. 🙂

See you next month in another edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! Possibly on Old School Game Blog like this time. 😉

Cheers!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler