AmigaOS 4 News – September 2023

Hi everyone,

Thank you for visiting my blog! 🙂

October has arrived and that means that it is once again time for another roundup of AmigaOS 4 news.

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

Hope you’ll enjoy this month’s news and I hope to see you again next month!

General News

The 2nd of September brought us three new downloads on OS4Depot. Libxvidcore, an MPEG-4 codec. Libspeex is an open source patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. LibXML2, XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project, but usable outside of the Gnome platform.

Andrea Palmate has brought the game Koala Seasons to AmigaOS 4. Koala Seasons was created by Emegeme to be used as a benchmark test for raylib on Android. It is a nice platform game with cute graphics. 🙂 If you want to try the game, you can get it here.

Not surprisingly, the always active and productive Juan Carlos Herran Martin strikes back with a brand new release. It is a Blackjack clone called BlackIvan. The goal is to win against Nikky, a skilled Blackjack player, in the shortest time possible to get your name into the Hall of Fame.

A new program has been released for AmigaOS 4. It is called RNOSlides and was created by jPV^RNO. This is a GUI-based slideshow creator which has the option of saving these as videos. Currently, the formats of MPEG and AVI are supported.

Version 2.4.4 of the WHD-Load front-end iGame was released in September. 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.

An update to Report+, a ReAction-based utility with nine functions, has been released by James Jacobs. This tool can help you with generating Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readme files, perform batch processing on icons, and much more.

Libwebp 1.3.2 has been uploaded to OS4Depot. WebP codec is a library to encode and decode images in WebP format. This package contains the library that can be used in other programs to add WebP support, as well as the command line tools “cwebp” and “dwebp” to compress and decompress images respectively.

REminiscence is a re-implementation of the engine used in the game Flashback made by Delphine Software and released in 1992. It is developed by Gregory Montoir and you can find it on GitHub (https://github.com/cyxx/REminiscence). Thanks to George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero, who has ported this re-implementation to AmigaOS 4, you can download it and try it out. 🙂

Mediathek is a program you can use to download videos from various German TV stations, such as ARD, ZDF, and 3Sat. It is based on MediathekView, which is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and uses the same database. The author, Joreg Renkert, uploaded version 0.35 to OS4Depot in September.

AmiSSL received an update to version 5.11. 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!

Version r164 of Libx264 was uploaded to OS4Depot on the 20th of September by Michael Trebilcock. A third-party patch has been applied to fix YUV422 encoding with AltiVec instructions enabled. x264 is a free software library and application for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Mike Steed has created and uploaded GifAnim datatype and GifLib-Extra to OS4Depot. You can find the downloads here and here.

DTConvert by Fredrik Wikström has been updated by Mike Steed. Changes are as follows:

• Added the ability to convert animation and movie formats, in support of the new GIFANIM v. 54 datatype (ANIM and CDXL formats are supported too, but those datatypes are currently unable to save files).
• Now sets the source type automatically based on the selected source file.
• Error messages now appear in a requester, rather than in a console window.
• Now copies the annotation data (if any) from the source to the destination
  during a conversion, if the datatypes involved support this (the GIFANIM
  datatype does).

AmiArcadia has been updated to version 30.03 by James Jacobs. The latest version includes many miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes, including improved MIKIT 2650 emulation and improved PHUNSY emulation. A full list is available here.

Version 2.4 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.

SonicCD-RSDK, a full decompilation of Sonic CD 2011, has been released! The game was ported to AmigaOS 4 by Sinan Gürkan. It was previously ported to MorphOS by BeWorld.

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 112 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 14.3. Changes include a save game editor for Tass Times in Tonetown and bug fixes.

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. Version 1.1 was released in September and you can find a list of the changes here.

Alfredo Amendolagine has released version 0.8b of TouchBench. This is an application that converts touchscreen events produced by touch.device into mouse events.

At the end of the month, HunoPPC released version 0.7.21 of EGL_Wrap. Earlier in the same month, he released version 0.7.20. The library is designed as an all-in-one system for making games and to be able to do easy ports to AmigaOS 4.

You can read more about EGL_Wrap on the official webpage. I also recommend visiting the appropriate thread on Amigans.net for direct information about the development. Here the author shares the progress. 🙂

Here is a video HunoPPC uploaded to YouTube showing the game Prey running on AmigaOS4. Excellent stuff!

Misc

Issue 164 of Amiga Future was released in September.

As you can see from the picture above, it contains a special article about the A1222+ written by Eliyahu, the author of The Quickstart Guide for New A1222+ Users. Trevors Soapbox is included as usual, but also various game reviews and show reports. The magazine can be purchased directly from the publisher or from different Amiga Shops.

AmiWest 2023 is getting closer. 🙂 As you can see from the promotional poster, it will take place from the 12th to the 15th of October in Sacramento, California, USA. If you don’t have the possibility of attending yourself, like me, you can follow the Online stream. Hopefully we’ll get some good news concerning the A1222+ at this event.

Another event coming up is Amiga38 in Germany. It takes place on the 6th and 7th October at Kunstwerk Wickrath, Mönchengladbach. The amount of exhibitors is huge! Please have a look at the list below. 🙂

At Amigans.net we’ve been playing Open Tyrian this month.

It was fun contest and it seems like I got in 2nd place, right after 328gts (hi! :-D). My last attempt at beating his score failed, but I did manage to beat my personal best though. In October we will be playing a game called Bubbelsche Deluxe from Entwickler-X. I’m hoping as many as possible will participate. It is not a long game (if you are not exceptionally skilled), so it does not take much time to have a few goes at it. 🙂 The contest will be launched soon!

YouTube and Videos

Mufa has uploaded a new video showing several games running on AmigaOS 4, including the new Koala Seasons. You can have a look at it below:

Rene Engel has released several videos showing AmigaOS 4 in action through QEMU-Pegasos 2. You can find all of them on his YouTube-channel. One example is SonicCD-RSDK.

Maurizio Casolari tested Resident Evil DC with FPSE and SREC on his AmigaOne XE G4:

Until next time

Thanks so much for eading this roundup and also for visiting my blog.  Thanks to all of you who are following the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup each month and of course to new readers and those who pop in from time to time. 🙂

I wish you all a great day and a nice October! See you in the next roundup!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler