AmigaOS 4 News – July 2023

Hi there,

Thanks so much for visiting my blog! 🙂

The month of August is here, which means that it is once again time for another AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

One of the biggest news of July was the announcement of the production of the A1222+, which you can read more about below.

If you’ve missed any of the previous roundups, you can find them all listed on a separate page.

Hope you’ll enjoy the roundup!

General News

The A1222+ Production Underway

A-EON Technology posted the following news on their Facebook page on the 5th of July concerning the upcoming production of the A1222+ (also known as Tabor):

In an exciting collaboration of Amiga technology companies, ACube Systems, AAA Technology and A-EON Technology have come together to announce the production version of the long awaited A1222+ computer.

This joint effort brings a new era of collaborative computing for Amiga enthusiasts by leveraging the expertise and resources of the three companies. The A1222+ is custom designed to run AmigaOS 4.x and also supports compatible Linux PowerPC operating systems as well as AmigaOS 3.x under emulation.

The motherboard’s compact and robust design is powered by NXP’s QorIQ P1022 dual-core PowerPC processor running at 1.2 GHz. It is supplied with version 2.3 of A-EON’s Enhancer software package which includes advanced video and graphics drivers and a whole host of updated applications, utilities and datatypes. ACube Systems have already successfully produced updated A1222+ v1.3 prototypes and will manage the new motherboard production and testing while AAA Technology will act as the main distributor for the new Amiga machine.

Enrico Vidale, Matthew Leaman and Laurent Zorawski, the CEOs of the three companies expressed their enthusiasm for this collaboration. They jointly stated,

“We are excited to announce our partnership and the beginning of A1222+ production. By combining our strengths and expertise, we aim to deliver an enhanced computing experience for Next-Generation Amiga enthusiasts. This collaboration marks a significant achievement for future hardware and software collaboration between the companies.”

Trevor Dickinson, who is funding the manufacturing run on behalf of A-EON Technology added,

“It has been a long and at times challenging task bringing the A1222+ to market. The project has been beset by delays and extreme world events which has resulted in component shortages and massively increased manufacturing costs. I am extremely grateful to ACube and AAA Technologies for helping to make the A1222+ system a commercial reality.”

Amiga enthusiasts who have eagerly awaited the A1222+’s commercial release can now look forward to its upcoming availability. Pre-orders for the A1222+ are expected to open in the coming months, with shipments set to begin shortly afterwards. Customers who committed to A-EON’s Early Adopter scheme will have first choice of refusal after which orders will be accepted on a first come first served basis.

Stay tuned for further updates as we explore the features, specifications, and availability of the A1222+.

About A-EON Technology Ltd.

Cardiff based A-EON Technology is well known for its long time dedications to the Amiga computing scene with its X1000, X5000 Next-generation power user systems and its growing software library tailored to Classic and Next-Generation AmigaOS platforms.

About ACube Systems srl

Italian Amiga specialist ACube Systems is recognised for its successful range of PowerPC based Sam computer systems. With a focus on quality and attention to detail, ACube will oversee the A1222+ production and ensure that each unit meets high standards before being made available to customers.

AAA Technology

AAA Technology is the Luxembourg based joint venture between, Amedia Computer France, AmigaKit Ltd. and A-EON Technology created to supply computer hardware and software systems to European Union and beyond.

As you can read above, pre-orders for the A1222+ are expected to open in the coming months, with shipments starting shortly afterward.

This means that those who signed up as early adopters back in 2019 will be first in line and can opt-out if they want.

For budding A1222+ owners, I highly recommend checking out the Quickstart Guide for A1222 Users written by Eliyahu from the Amigans.net forum. He covers everything from benchmarks to game compatibility. 🙂

The price of a complete system will be in the ballpark of a Sam460LE setup from Amedia Computer in France. It is currently selling for 1,268 EUR, tax included. This information was provided in several Facebook comments by Amedia Laurent. He states “You can have an estimated price regarding the Sam460LE slim configuration we offer on our webshop, A1222+ full configuration should be a little more expensive.”

In connection with this, the well-known developer Daytona675x, Golden Code, has begun updating his AmigaOS 4 software to support SPE, since the A1222+ lacks a normal FPU found in most PowerPC designs. He has now released three videos on YouTube showing how well the SPE versions of Tower 57, Atomic Bomberman Remake, and Battle Squadron is running on the A1222 Plus.

The website dedicated to the release of the A1222+ has also been updated. Check it out here:

http://www.a1222plus.com/index.php

The print magazine Amiga Future is still going strong. Issue 163 was released in July and contains many interesting articles. You can read about everything from Amiga meetings to new software releases. The magazine is available for purchase here.

Martina Hřebcová is back again with another brilliant article! In this one, she swaps the CPU in a MicroA1 and measures the improved performance against other systems. The text is in Czech but can be translated. 🙂 Highly recommend giving this a read!

Competition in the game BreakHack is currently running on Amigans.net. It started in July and will continue through August. Please check it out here if you are interested in participating. 🙂

Software News

July started with the release of IMP3, which is a utility created by Juen a.k.a Pawl Nowak. The program is meant for 68K but does run OK on AmigaOS 4. With IMP3, you can listen to over 168.000 music files through the Internet. These are ProTracker modules, SID tunes, and so forth. Besides this, it has cloud storage and Online gaming with high scores.

SilkRAW is a program developed by Domenico Lattanzi that allows you to work with RAW files generated by digital SLR cameras, acting as an interface to the dcRAW program written by Dave Coffin. Version 2 is out now and can be downloaded from OS4Depot.

BreakHack is a small, roguelike game developed by Linus Probert. It was ported to AmigaOS 4 by George Sokianos a.k.a Walkero. Version 4.03r2 of the port was compiled with the latest SDL 2.0.28 and released in July. Changes include making it work better under QEMUP and a fix of the high-score date. If you want to try the game, it is available for purchase on Steam. It is also worth mentioning that a BreakHack competition has been running on Amigans.net in July, so it has become a popular game amongst users.

If you are interested in using a text-to-image application on your Amiga, then you’ll be happy to read that a program called AmiDream has been released by Marcus Sackrow. This tool is based around Stable Diffusion, which is an open-source AI designed to generate images from text. You can input a request using natural language and the AI will interpret and generate an image from this.

Version 2 of the zip.hwp plugin for Hollywood has been released. This plugin allows Hollywood scripts to read and write zip archives. It uses Hollywood’s file and directory adapter plugin interfaces which allow you to iterate through zip archives as if they were normal directories. Files within zip archives can also be accessed as if the zip archive was a normal directory. It is not necessary to unpack a file stored in a zip archive to a temporary file before it can be opened. Hollywood’s file adapter plugin interface allows direct streaming from the zip archive into the respective file handler.

Juan Carlos Herran Martin is back again and this time with the second and third chapters of the point-and-click adventure game EAQNE. If you are interested in playing a game in classic photo novel style, both chapters are available on OS4Depot.

Besides that, he also released a new game called Baccarat. This is a tribute to the mythical card game, popularized by the James Bond movie Dr. No with Sean Connery. Be sure to check it out! 🙂

Bernd Assenmacher has released version 2.3 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 fixes an issue that could lead to a crash when using invalid PNG files. It also contains optimizations for conversion, loading, and saving.

A. Pankalla released an update to Luettje Bookholler, 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 1.86 corrects a problem with long booking notices.

Librtmp 2.4 was released on the 20th of July. As stated in the readme, “The Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is used for streaming multimedia content across a TCP/IP network. This API provides most client functions and a few server functions needed to support RTMP, RTMP tunneled in HTTP (RTMPT), encrypted RTMP (RTMPE), RTMP over SSL/TLS (RTMPS) and tunneled variants of these encrypted types (RTMPTE, RTMPTS). The basic RTMP specification has been published by Adobe but this API was reverse-engineered without use of the Adobe specification. As such, it may deviate from any published specifications but it usually duplicates the actual behavior of the original Adobe clients.”.

Version 3.1.1 of libOpenSSL is out. The readme explains: “OpenSSL is a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured Open Source Toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol formerly known as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. The protocol implementation is based on a full-strength general-purpose cryptographic library, which can also be used stand-alone. OpenSSL is descended from the SSLeay library developed by Eric A. Young and Tim J. Hudson. The official Home Page of the OpenSSL Project is http://www.openssl.org.”

An update of Rtmpdump has been uploaded to OS4Depot. Rtmpdump is a toolkit for RTMP streams. All kinds of streams are supported. The update is linked against OpenSSL 3.1.1. The version itself is unchanged.

Also updated is the Zlib data compression library. zlib 1.2.13 is a general-purpose data compression library. All the code is thread-safe. The data format used by the zlib library is described by RFCs (Request for Comments) 1950 to 1952 in the files http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1950 (zlib format), rfc1951 (deflate format) and rfc1952 (gzip format).

Libcurl has been updated to 8.2.0 and built against OpenSSL v3. “Libcurl is a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP. Libcurl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form-based upload, proxies, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, Kerberos), file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and more!”.

The same goes for Curl which has been updated to 8.2.0. Curl is a command line tool for transferring data specified with URL syntax.

Also in more or less the same boat is Libwebp, which is now at version 1.3.1. This is a shared object and static build of libWebP for the OS4 SDK.

GIFLIB is a package of portable tools and library routines developed by Eric S. Raymond for working with GIF images. You can now get version 5.2.1 on OS4Depot.

SDL2_image 2.6.3 by Sam Lantinga has also been updated. This is a library to load images of various formats as SDL surfaces. It can load BMP, GIF, JPEG, LBM, PCX, PNG, PNM (PPM/PGM/PBM), QOI, TGA, XCF, XPM, and simple SVG format images. It can also load AVIF, JPEG-XL, TIFF, and WebP images, depending on build options.

Libpng is the official PNG reference library. It supports almost all PNG features, is extensible, and has been extensively tested for over 28 years. Grab version 1.6.40 here. Also, Libjpeg has been updated. This package contains C software to implement JPEG image encoding, decoding, and transcoding. JPEG is a standardized compression method for full-color and grayscale images.

Another library, another update on OS4Depot. This time it is Libsdl_image. As the readme explains, “This is the last version of SDL_image (1.2.12) from 2012. The library has been rebuilt to link the .so against libWebP 1.3.1, libTIFF 4.5.1, and libPNG 1.6.40 This version is modified to allow WebP images to display correctly on OS4. Furthermore, a patch has been applied to support lossless and alpha channel WebP images.”

Version 2.4.2 of the WHD-Load front-end iGame was released in July. The AmigaOS 4 port is maintained by George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero. This is a front-end application for launching WHDLoad games and demos.

Ignition, the spreadsheet for AmigaOS 4, has been updated. It is now at version 1.22. The author has fixed errors and improved the program. You can find a list of changes in the readme.

A utility called set_get_ts for obtaining time in scripts has been created by Lorence Lombardo. You can find it for download here.

Kevin Taddeucci has released version 1.4 of his script aimed at MediaVault 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 allowing the user to choose the stream player or to download a stream via a requester. The update contains the following changes:

• Now use the already running instance of the audio player without displaying the requester.
• Added error requester if the audio player cannot be found with AppDir.
• Added error requester if ffmpeg cannot be found with AppDir: when downloading.

amiga-news.de reports that George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero has posted a status update for the Webkit port. A lot has happened behind the scenes and the work is continuing at a steady pace. Two experienced developers, FlynnTheAvatar and sTix, joined the team.

That was all the software news for this time. 🙂

Until next time

Thank you for reading and for visiting my blog.  Thanks to all of you who are following the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. It is much appreciated! 🙂

Have a nice day!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler