AmigaOS 4 News – May 2023

Hi,

Thanks for visiting my blog. 🙂

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

This time we’ll have a look at what has been happening in the month of May.

Software News

We start with music related news. Capehill uploaded a new version of Milkytracker to OS4Depot on May 3rd. This time it is version 1.03. This one has been cross-compiled with GCC 11.3.0 and statically linked to SDL 2.26.5-RC2.

To read more about changes, please visit:

https://github.com/capehill/MilkyTracker

Version 2.22 of The Bywater BASIC Interpreter (BWBasic) has been released for AmigaOS 4 by Michael Bergmann. BWBasic is an original creation of Ted A. Campbell, who stopped working on it in 1993. Since then it has received contributions from other programmers: Jon B. Volkoff, Paul Edwards, Howard S. Wulf, Ken Martin, and Jon Foster. Bergmann recompiled BWBasic from its original 3.20 sources, using GCC v2.95 with only minor changes to the source code. Added some custom makefiles for various CPU targets. The same source easily recompiles under Linux and Windows, too. All you’d need is GCC or MinGW installed on the target system.

The download is available from OS4Depot:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=development/language/bwbasic.lha

If you love playing RPG games, you’ll be excited to hear that Fallout, a classic post-apocalyptic RPG, has been ported to AmigaOS 4 by Sinan Gurkan. His port is based on BeWorld’s MorphOS port. The Fallout Community Edition is a fully working re-implementation of the original game. It has the same gameplay and quality-of-life improvements (and more). To play it, you’ll need the original game, which can be purchased from GOG or Steam. You can also source a second-hand copy through sites like eBay. Here is the link to the AmigaOS 4 port.

Yannick Buchy has released version 1.1 of HollywoodCompile, which makes it possible to easily compile Hollywood scripts for many platforms. He has also created Sploiner GUI, which makes it easier to join and split files. Later in May he released version 1.0 of SMB2-GUI, which is a GUI to create DOS drivers for the SMB2 handler.

Lil Calendar by Nathan Hesterman is a versatile calendar and reminder program using MUI 3.8+ and an existing function SQLite3 installation in your path. The Hollywood SQLite3 and MUIRoyale plugins are also required. For an overview of the new features in version 2.0, please have a look here.

An updated version of WarpPNG is available, with the following changes:

– Updated with libpng 1.6.39 and zlib 1.2.13.

A new version of WarpDTPrefs has also been released, with changes as follows:

– Fixed the default background checkboxes being disabled incorrectly due to the re-ordered alpha channel mode lists in the previous release.

– Increased minimum stack size to 16K, for safety.

– OS3 and MorphOS versions recompiled with VBCC 0.9h.

– OS4 version recompiled with GCC 11.2.0.

Hans de Ruiter has released a collection of CPU benchmarks, with a script that runs them all. The benchmarks that are run are:

– RageMem

– SortBench

– DhrystoneV2

– Quicksort

– Sieve

– WhetstoneV2

Version 2.2 of Avalanche, a GUI for xadmaster.library using the ReAction gadget set, has been released by Chris Young. An overview of the changes since the last version can be found on OS4Depot.

Ryan Dixon has returned with a new update to the Mednafen emulator for AmigaOS 4! This time there have been changes to the Readme document. The document and description fields now include which game systems are supported, so that searches for those systems now actually match with Mednafen. With this program, you can emulate Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear, Sony PlayStation, SNES, NES, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), and many others! Version 1.253 can be downloaded from the usual place.

A new version of the WHD-Load front-end iGame was released on May 14th. This time it was version 2.4.0. It has many features, which you can read more about here.

Version 2.1.1r2 of the lightweight text editor Lite XL has been ported by George Sokianos. You can find the complete list below as well as the download:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/text/edit/litexl.lha

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 14.13. It adds a hint of oracle for Faery Tale Adventure, as well as miscellaneous improvements. Besides this, the author released a new version of AmiArcadia as well, this time 29.4.

The Merlin browser is a simple web browser by A.P. Spijkerman that was developed as part of NarrowCasting software, but the emphasis has shifted to Amiga computers. Version 0.08 is available for download on OS4Depot.

SDL2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer 2) 2.26.5 was released on May 16th. You can download it from OS4Depot, as well as find more information about it:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=library/misc/sdl2.lha

Now for some great news when it comes to gaming. Remember the classic platform game Super Mario 64? It was a big hit when it was released back in the day. Now you can enjoy Mario on your AmigaOS 4 setup thanks to Ryan Dixon. 🙂 Two versions are currently available. One for SDL2/MiniGL and one for GL4ES/SDL2/ogles. The game is not included, so you will have to add that yourself.

InstallerLG version 1.0.3 was released on May 16th by Ola Söder. This is a reimplementation of the Installer-utility included with AmigaOS as of version 2.1. InstallerLG aims to be fully compatible with the original as described in the V44.10 documentation. Most resource limitations found in the Commodore implementation are gone, and the GUI has been replaced by an MUI / Zune-based one.

Daniel Westerberg has released version 1.0.1 of the MickJT-MPlayerRX. This is a hacked version to make the comp_yuv and comp_yuv2 modes work with the RadeonRX.chip driver for Radeon Polaris gfx cards. The comp_yuv/2 modes will not work with RadeonHD with these executables.

Version 9.0.1546 of Vim has been released! MUI-Vim is maintained by sTix (Ola Söder). It is a highly configurable text editor. It has support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats, powerful search and replace functions and much more.

Many plugins for Hollywood have been uploaded to OS4Depot. These are JPEG2000, PCX, FLICAnim, YAFA, TIFF, and APNG.

The popular audio player AmigaAMP has been updated to version 3.34. 🙂 You can grab the new release from here.

In previous reports, we have reported Seq, a MIDI sequencer, by Tuomas Hokka. He is now back with a new version. For an overview of the changes, please have a look here. You can download the program from OS4Depot.

Bernd Assenmacher has released version 1.11 of the LhArchiver, which helps you to create LHA archives intuitively, easily, and fast.

Smb2-handler is a filesystem for accessing files remotely using the SMB2/3 protocols. Fredrik Wikström released version 53.6 of Smb2FS on May 26th. The download is available here.

AmiSSL received an update to version 5.9. As mentioned in earlier 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. The download is available here. If you are interested in the SDK, it can be found here. It is a must-have if you use AmigaOS 4 to browse the web.

Misc

Hans de Ruiter, developer of graphics card drivers for A-EON Technology for AmigaOS 4, has evaluated the survey he started concerning the usage of AmigaOS 4 on dedicated computers or via emulation. You can read the results here:

https://keasigmadelta.com/blog/amigaos-4-x-hardware-and-emulation-survey-the-results

You can also watch his video about it:

Issue 162 (May/June 2023) of Amiga Future was released this month. Read about CroMag Rally, Hollywood 10, Treffen Berlin, and much more. If you want to purchase it, please follow this link:

https://www.amigashop.org/

HunoPPC has uploaded a video on YouTube based on the EGL-wrap library renderer, showing a new core and optimized DSP for Virtual Jaguar on AmigaOS 4.

Maurizio Casolari has tested AmyBox v1.2 on his AmigaOne XE G4. You can check out the video of it on YouTube. The video is in Italian.

Until next time

Thanks for reading and visiting my blog.  Big thanks to all who are following the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup series, sending in feedback and commenting on forums. Much appreciated! 🙂

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

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler