AmigaOS 4 News – November 2022
Hi,
Thanks for visiting my blog, and welcome to the 11th edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup!
As we are approaching December, we can look back on an active November with many releases and updates. On the hardware front, ACube Systems are now in the process of delivering boards to customer before Christmas. Will we get any news on the A1222 before Christmas? Time will show. 🙂
Hope you’ll enjoy the report! Cheers!
Software
A new version of ScummVM (2.61), called “Incremental Escapism”, was released on October 31st, and became available on OS4Depot on November 1st. Big thanks to Raziel, who is working hard to keep the AmigaOS 4 port up-to-date, so that we can enjoy all those great games on our systems! Changes and improvements are too many to be listed here, but you can find an overview here. If you’d like to download the new version, OS4Depot is your friend.
AmiSSL received an update to version 5.5. As has been mentioned in previous editions 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. It is a must-have if you use AmigaOS 4 to browse the web. You can grab the package, as well as the SDK, from OS4Depot.
Hollywood developers will be happy to hear that version 1.0 of the XLSX plugin was released on November 4th. According to the authors, the XLSX plugin makes it possible to conveniently read and write XLSX documents from Hollywood scripts. It offers a wide variety of functions to set and get cell values, cell types, cell formulas, document/worksheet properties, and several other attributes. It also offers an iterator function for a high-performance iteration of a large number of cells. On top of that, the XLSX plugin also supports the new serialization interface introduced in Hollywood 9 which means that scripts can conveniently serialize Hollywood tables to XLSX documents with just a single call to Hollywood’s SerializeTable() function. In the same manner, scripts can also deserialize whole XLSX documents into Hollywood tables by a single call to Hollywood’s DeserializeTable() function.
A NoClick utility has been released for AmigaOS 4 by Patrik Axelsson. This small program enables the NoClick functionality of trackdisk.device V36+. This is not the first utility for enabling NoClick, but the unique feature of this one is that there are also native binaries available for both AmigaOS4 and MorphOS running on classic Amigas with PowerUP accelerators.
Version 53.9 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.
A new version of IBrowse for Amiga was released this month. 🙂 Please read on for the full report:
IBrowse 2.5.7 is now available for download (OS4 users may use AmiUpdate instead), which is the seventh free update for registered owners of IBrowse 2.5. IBrowse 2.1-2.4 and 1.x owners may upgrade to IBrowse 2.5.7 via our store at discounted rates.
Please note: Anybody who was quick and downloaded IBrowse 2.5.7 before 2030 UTC today will have an old javascript.library and should download/install again (the archives have been updated). Also, IBrowse 2.5.7 now requires AmiSSL 5.5, so you are advised to download it before updating IBrowse, otherwise, you will be left without HTTPS access.
This is a maintenance release with a few fixes and improvements, including these main changes:
- Reworked Brotli Huffman decoder to avoid triggering a bug on the 68060 processor, which prevented pages from loading
- Tweaks to the loading of external modules
- JavaScript improvements
- Switched to GCC 11, with all warnings enabled, which identified numerous previously unknown bugs which have now been fixed
- Hundreds of minor internal changes
- See the history log or changes list for IBrowse 2.5 for a full breakdown of all the changes made.
https://www.ibrowse-dev.net/news.php?id=1667643221
Great to see that the development of IBrowse continues!
Juan Carlos Herran Martin, a.k.a. Templario, is once again back with a new release! This time it is version 5.0 of the utility AnimWebConverter. With this program, you can play or convert animations in various formats, such as GIF, YAFA, LBM, and more.
While we are discussing animations, Kevin Taddeucci has released version 2.5 of his program VideoClipper this month. The new version contains bug fixes and a change that should help the synchronization of audio when cutting short clips. A full overview of the changes can be found here, as well as a download.
Have you been looking for a program to convert PNG- or JPG files? If yes, then you’ll probably want to download Image2PDF by Bernd Assenmacher. This utility was released in the middle of November and is completely free. The author labels it as “EmailWare”, so please send him an e-mail if you use the program. 🙂
Remember AmiFTP? This program has not been updated for quite some time but is now back thanks to several developers. Here is the story about how the new version, 1.953, came to life:
“At the beginning of 2020, Matthias Münch (OS4Welt: djBase) started a discussion about the further development and maintenance of the FTP client. A source code was found, but not for the OS4 version. After asking who would take care of the matter, Frank Menzel (OS4Welt: Goos) agreed to look at the source code.
After checking, the first changes were made and adapted to OS4 and the compiler, errors were removed and new small functions were added.
After a long break (time, motivation, Corona Blues), the first version was published on GitHub in August 2022. An important step is to preserve the source code and motivate other developers to contribute to the project (SSL support would be appreciated ;)).
Javier de las Rivas (javierdlr) has made many improvements and bug fixes since releasing the source code, which has been reviewed by Frank Menzel and merged into a public main branch.
With that, version 1.953 is available for AmigaOS4 users and possibly a start for further developments on AmiFTP.”
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.
A. Pankalla released an update to Luettje Bookseller, which is a personal finance program. For those of you who are curious about what «Luettje Bookholler» means (I have mentioned this in an earlier article, but will repeat it for new readers), I can tell you that it is German and means «Little Accountant». Version 1.85 contains bug fixes and changes, which you can read more about here.
NallePuh (Swedish for Winnie-the-Pooh), a program to emulate the Paula chip from classic Amiga, has been updated thanks to the work of Damien Stewart and Kjetil Hvalstrand. After 13 years without updates, they found out it was time to dust it off and get it working again. Changes include WB-startup support, loading and saving functions for the configuration file, an install script, and more.
The always-active jPV^RNO has returned with more releases! 🙂 In November he released RNOInfoScreen, a front-end to various music and media players by displaying the “now playing” information with cover art images, and offers basic media control options for the user (play, pause, next, etc.). He also released RNOTunes version 1.0, a GUI-based audio player application with support for many different audio formats. It has a lot of features, so please check out the readme over at OS4Depot for more information.
Portabl E recreation of the AmigaE programming language, along with many improvements, and the aim of being portable across different platforms. Portabl E works by translating your E code into C++ and then using GCC to compile it into an executable that you can run. Version r6b was released on November 25th and contains several changes. You can read more about this by following this link.
Spotless 2, a debugging tool, has received an update. Version 2.2.0 includes several fixes, such as correct highlighting of source lines on trace/stepwise execution, Iconify now shows the Spotless icon on the Workbench, corrected menu texts, and added Date macro in version cookie and screen title.
If you’ve been looking for a quickstart solution for programs and games on your AmigaOS 4 setup, then you should consider downloading Quickstarter by Tuomas Hokka. Version 2.3 was released on November 28th, and takes only 322 KB of space.
AmiArcadia has been updated to version 29.32 by James Jacobs. Changes since the last version is an improved Assembler, as well as miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.
Kas1e has released a new version of the port of the game Heart of Darkness. There are far too many improvements to list here, but if you’d like to learn more, please head over to this thread on Amigans.net where Kas1e lists all of them. 🙂 Download is available on OS4Depot as always.
Other News
Until next time
Old School Game Blog 
Thanks Puni, much appreciated!
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Hi Levellord! 🙂 Thanks! Glad you liked it!
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