AmigaOS 4 News – June 2023

Hi,

Thanks for visiting my blog. 🙂

July has arrived and that means that it is time for a brand new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

Please read on and discover what has happened in the world of AmigaOS 4 in June.

Software

We start June with two benchmark utilities, DiskSpeed and SCSISpeed. Both were developed by Michael Sinz and ported to AmigaOS 4 by Daniel J. Andrea II and Stéphane Guillard. As the name suggests, you can use these to measure the speed of your drives.

Bernd Assenmacher has released version 2.2 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 adds support for BMP, IFF, ILBM, GIF, TIFF, and PCX for conversion to PDF. It also gives you the possibility to register for free, improved preview while converting, and improved handling of invalid images.

Version 0.89.0bRC2 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 tool is available from OS4Depot.

Speaking of Seppänen, he also uploaded 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.

RNOXfer is a graphical multipurpose file transfer client with support for FTP, FTPS, and SFTP protocols. It’s the first all-in-one program for any Amiga-compatible operating system! It has been developed by the productive coder jPV^RNO, the man behind programs such as RNOTunes, RNOEffects, and RNOPublisher. Version 1.4 is available now and contains a lot of changes and improvements:

• Added editing fields in the server list window
• Added the comment column on the server list
• Added the default local path setting
• Added the private key file setting for SFTP connections
• Added a check for server list changes at exit
• Added UTF-8 support to be RFC 2640 compliant
• Massive speedup in directory handling
• More verbose file size comparison when a file exists
• Added an option to save selected files/dirs as a text file
• Fixed advanced. conf handling
• Fixed issues with the settings file format
• Adjusted window sleep modes
• Disconnects from the previous server when double-clicking a new server from
  the server list
• Uses hURL 2.0 (requires MorphOS 3.16, AmiSSL 5 on AmigaOS, AmiSSL 4 on AROS)

If that was not enough, jPV^RNO released the first AmigaOS 4 version of RNOWidgets, which contains several helpful desktop widgets in one package. Here you’ll get a calendar, analog and digital clocks, notes, weather, and more. Features are as follows:

– Stylish user configurable widgets (graphics, fonts, colors, etc., can be freely swapped)
– All widgets are freely re-sizeable and moveable
– Pre-defined themes
– Supports alpha channel transparency and has the option to create window drop shadows automatically (with or without compositing)
– ARexx support
– Compatible with clock skins from the Enhancer Software package

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 14.15. This includes an enhanced save game editor for Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2, as well as miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

Nanosaur is a third-person shooter developed by Pangea Software for Mac OS 9 and Windows. The player takes on the form of a genetically engineered intelligent dinosaur (Nanosaur). An initial port to AmigaOS 4 has been released by Ryan Dixon. It does have some graphical issues to be ironed out. It requires Radeon HD/RX.

Juha Niemimaki has released version 1.1 of the CPU profiler known as Tequila. Changes and improvements include custom rendering, locale support, reduced heap memory usage, and more.

Smb2-handler is a filesystem for accessing files remotely using the SMB2/3 protocols. Fredrik Wikström released version 53.7 of Smb2FS on June 17th. The download is available here.

AmiArcadia has been updated to version 29.41 by James Jacobs. The latest version includes many miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. A full list is available here.

Juan Carlos Herran Martin is back with version 2.0 of a game called EAQNE 1. It was uploaded to OS4Depot on June 22nd. It is a point-and-click adventure in a classic photo novel style.

A new version of glUAE, a utility that integrates UAE into AmigaOS 4, has been uploaded to OS4Depot. The author is Simone Bevilacqua, known for creating great games such as Blastaway, Ring Around the World, Huenison, and many more. glUAE makes the emulation experience perfectly natural by transparently integrating the emulator into the system, thanks to the AmigaOS flexibility and the UAE configurability.

amiga-news.de reports that Juha “capehill” Niemimaki has published the first release candidate of version 2.28.0 of the multimedia library SDL for AmigaOS 4.1. The library is intended to make it easier for programmers to develop portable applications and is used by numerous open-source games.

Misc

ACube Systems have now shipped all of the pre-ordered Sam460LE motherboards to customers.

For those of you who did not pre-order, you can still get a Sam, since their webshop states that there are currently 13 of them in stock. The price is 962.58 EUR, VAT included.

https://shop.acube-systems.biz/sam-motherboards/124-sam460.html

ACube Systems wrote an announcement concerning the delivery of the Sam460LE, which you can read below:

Dear Valued Customers,

We are pleased to announce that all preordered Sam460LE boards have been shipped after extensive testing and preparation. We sincerely hope that our customers will enjoy using this latest Sam460 board, and we would like to express our gratitude to all of our preorder customers for making this board possible. Your continued support is truly appreciated.

Furthermore, we would like to take this opportunity to inform you that the Sam460LE of this production run is now running at 1.14 Ghz instead of 1.10 Ghz. Although this may not be noticeable from a certain standpoint, we believe it is still interesting information to share.

For those who placed orders after the preorder period ended, we have also shipped your orders. We hope this will make more Sam460 Amigans happy. If you have not yet ordered your Sam460LE, don’t miss the chance to own one with the names of the whole team on the board itself.

Get yours now:
https://shop.acube-systems.biz/sam-motherboards/124-sam460.html

Thank you for choosing our products.
The ACube Systems Team

With the Sam460LE currently being available, I’m wondering when we will see the release of the Tabor (Amiga 1222 Plus). In a video recorded at Retcon 2023 this weekend, Trevor mentions that he is having a meeting with AmigaKit and ACube next week about getting the A1222 in production soon.

It will be interesting to see what we will happen after this meeting.

For those of you interested in the technical aspects of the PowerPC CPU, I’d like to recommend having a look at a comprehensive article written by Martina Hřebcová. The text is in Czech, but you can use a translation tool to convert it to your language of choice.

https://www.amigaportal.cz/node/162841

Are you looking for AmigaOS 4 compatible hardware? amiga-news.de published a report concerning the current availability. You can read it in full here.

Interested in Mario games? If yes, then please have a look at this video by the YouTube creator Wzdymacz. 🙂 Here you will see games such as Mega Mario, Super Mario 64, and Super Mario War.

The YouTuber, TJ Ferreira, released a video of him playing BreakHack on his AmigaOne X5000 system. The video has been embedded below.

Maurizio Casolari created a video showing Super Mario 64 in action on his AmigaOne XE G4. 🙂

As many of you know, you can run AmigaOS 4.1 through emulation with Amiga Forever from Cloanto. James Mattson has created a video showing his experience with it.

Until next time

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

Have a great weekend all! See you next month in another roundup!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler