AmigaOS 4 News – April 2023

Hi everyone!

Welcome to a new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. 🙂

The month of April was a bit more quiet than usual, but we’ve seen quite a few updates to several programs. Please read on to discover what has been happening in the world of AmigaOS 4 since March.

Thanks for reading! See you in another monthly roundup here on Gaming on AmigaOS 4.

Software News

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 14.12. It adds a hint oracle for Bard’s Tale 3, as well as fixes bugs in Citadel of Vras and TV Sports Basketball.

Version 0.89.0 of Lhx has been released by Marko Seppänen. Lhx is a file compression utility that compresses files to an AmigaOS compatible XZ/LZMA compressed archive. where all AmigaOS file system protection bits and
possible comments are preserved. XZ/LZMA is the same compression method used as in the acclaimed 7-Zip. The utility is available from OS4Depot.

Seppänen also uloaded a new version of ShowFiles, which is a DIR command (written in C). It displays a sorted and text-formatted list of files, drawers (dirs) and soft/hard-links on disk or other storage medium. It will also display their additional information such as size, date, possible comment, executable header type (68k or PPC program), protection-bits, etc, etc.

Shadejoy 1.25 is out! Shaderjoy allows you to display and create Shadertoy (https://www.shadertoy.com compatible fragment shaders. Fragment shaders (sometimes called pixel shaders) are programs that are executed per fragment (pixel) on the GPU. Changes since the previous version:

• Add keyboard channel. Also remove some keyboard shortcuts to avoid conflicts.
• Add projects files (.sjp) for those example shaders that require textures.
• Replace text buttons with more compact images.
• Show busy pointer during shader compilation.
• Disable uninitialized variable check (in icon) due to glCompileShader issue with some shaders:
  future ogles2.library should fix this.
• Fix loading of arexx.class.
• Fix busy looping of ChannelWindows.
• Refactor some GUI code.

Version 1.0A of AirScan has been released. This is an Amiga scanner utility based on the ESCL protocol. This alpha release contains a minimum of configuration options. You can search for scanners in your network with the MDNS protocol. You can also add scanners by its IP address. Changes since last time includes, but is not limited to, a preview mode where you can select the area you want to scan. Please have a look here for information on all the changes.

On April 11th, jPV of RNO released a new version of RNOTunes, a GUI-based audio player application with support for many different audio formats. The list of fixes, changes and improvements is quite long, so I recommend that you check it out on OS4Depot. 🙂

Sometimes one needs to make a screenshot. The program called Grab, which was created by Thomas Rapp, does this for you. The new version is available here.

Juha Niemimaki has relased version 1.0 of a program called Tequila. This is a CPU-profiler which samples currently running tasks. At the moment is is not very accurate or rich in features, but it will detect if a task is using the CPU.

APPBuilder is a tool that can increase your Hollywood-MAL productivity. With this program you can compile and pack your cross-platform projects with a single click without bothering with long shell commands.

If you are looking for a utility to join files, then you should be happy to hear that version 1.1 of JoinGUI by Yannick Buchy has been released. The interface makes it easy to join multiple files into one. It has been tested working with formats such as ISO, VOB, MP3, PNG, and more.

A new version of the WHD-Load front-end iGame has been released. This time it is version 2.3.2. It has many features, which you can read more about here.

Bernd Assenmacher has released version 2.1 of the Image2PDF utility. With this tool, you can convert PNG- or JPG files to PDF. The author labels it as “EmailWare”, so please send him an e-mail if you use the program. 🙂 The new version contains optimized code, fixes of minor glitches, and support for uppercase extensions.

Frank Wille has released new versions of Vasm, the portable and retargetable assember. You can find them available for download on OS4Depot.

AmiArcadia has been updated to version 29.39 by James Jacobs. The latest version includes miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Smb2-handler is a filesystem for accessing files remotely using the SMB2/3 protocols. Fredrik Wikström released version 53.5 of Smb2FS on April 29th. The download is available here.

amiga-news.de reports that mySQLcontrol 2.10 and myApacheStarter 3.10 has been updated by Michael Christoph. They write that mySQLcontrol is a database administration and editing program for the mySQL database server under AmigaOS 4. You can find out more about this by visiting amiga-news.de here.

Miscellaneous

The installation guide on amiga-news.de for getting AmigaOS 4.1 to run under QEMU was updated on April 20th. It is a great guide, so I highly recommend you checking it out. 🙂

Trevor Dickinson from A-EON Technology has published a new post on his blog:

http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/index.php/2023/04/18/spring-fall-edition/

It contains a lot of information about various events, using ChatGPT on an AmigaOne X5000 (with Linux), and more. Sadly, he has no news to report concerning the Amiga 1222+.

In a thread on Amigans.net, A-Cube Systems confirms that they are working on testing and sending out pre-orders of the Sam460LE. According to Elwood, they have a list of orders they are processing one by one.

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9159

The M.A.C.E. games competition over at Amigans.net is nearly finished. The kind fellows over at Entwickler-X has sponsored this month’s competition. Thomas Claus has announced the following prizes:

1st Place: 3 EntwicklerX game codes
2nd Place: 2 EntwicklerX game codes
3rd Place: 1 EntwicklerX game code

The game codes can be valid for Xbox, Playstation, Switch or Steam, depending on the prize winners choice.

Here is the link to the competition.

Until next time

Thanks for reading and visiting my blog.  Also thanks to all who are following the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup series, as well as sending in feedback and commenting on forums. It is much appreciated! 🙂

Thanks again, and see you in the next AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler

PS: Thanks to Capehill for the screenshots of Shaderjoy and Tequila.