AmigaOS 4 News – November 2023

Hello there,

Many thanks for visiting my blog! 🙂

Did you know that in January 2024, I’ve been writing these monthly news reports for two years?

I’m a bit surprised time has passed by so quickly. It does not feel that long ago when I decided to embark on the journey of collecting and publishing AmigaOS 4 related news.

It has been great fun so far, and I’m looking forward to continuing with this project in 2024 and beyond. 🙂

Thanks to all of you for reading, following, providing feedback, and submitting news.

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

Now, it is time to dive in and explore what November offered us in terms of AmigaOS 4 related news.

Hope you’ll enjoy this month’s report and I hope to see you again next month, or possibly in the new year. 🙂

Software News

First up in November is AstroMenace, a 3D scrolling shoot-’em-up game by the independent game developer Viewizard.

The AmigaOS 4 port was done by Sinan Gurkan. It is based on the big-endian MorphOS port by BSzili and BeWorld. An X5000 or an X1000 is recommended for smooth gameplay. You can read more about the game on the website of Viewizard:

https://viewizard.com/

The game is available for download on OS4Depot.

By the way, TJ Ferreira made a video he uploaded to YouTube that shows the game running on his setup:

Many of us used to play around with ProTracker on our Amiga back in the day. Countless music modules have been composed since the tracker was first released.

PT2-Clone is a ProTracker 2 clone created for Windows, MacOS, and Linux by 8bitbubsy. The goal is to make a highly accurate clone of the classic ProTracker 2.3D. It contains additional audio filters, as well as audio mixer improvements to make it sound close to a real Amiga computer. More information is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone

The first port was released recently for AmigaOS 4 by the developer smarkusg. Unfortunately, it had a few bugs in windowed mode. This was fixed in the latest release, which you can find for download here:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=audio/tracker/pt2_clone.lha

If you’d like to use the classic ProTracker on your AmigaOS 4 setup, I highly recommend checking it out. 🙂

Version 2.4.5 of the WHD-Load front-end iGame was released in November. 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.

Features include:

• Multiple WHDLoad slaves repositories on hard disk partitions
• On-demand scanning in repositories for installed WHDLoad slaves (games,
  demos etc.)
• Use game tool types on the run
• Shows game screenshot (screenshot window can be altered through
  tool types/settings use datatypes to load foreign formats)
• Categorization of the games and filtering
• Manual addition of non-WHDLoad games, demos, etc.
• Simple statistics
• Find-as-you-type search filter

If you’d like to read about the changes since the previous version, please have a look at the appropriate page on GitHub.

A few days ago, I contacted MagicSN concerning the upcoming release of Heretic II for AmigaOS 4.1 from Hyperion Entertainment. He wrote me back and told me: “It will be available soon, this time for real”. 🙂 As for the port of Sin, he has a stable beta version of the game up and running, which is great news. I’m personally really looking forward to both of these, especially Heretic II.

Martin Gierich and Alexandre Balaban have released version 1.2 of CompareDirs. This utility allows you to compare the directory structure of two directories, comparing all files found (also in subdirectories) byte by byte. CompareDirs provides either a text interface (to be used in CLI) or a Reaction GUI. Here is the download link to the program.

The always active and creative developer jPV^RNO from Finland is once again back with a new release. This time with version 1.6 of RNOWidgets.

RNOWidgets is a collection of small and helpful utilities that is placed on your desktop. Here you’ll find a calendar (ISO), an analog clock, a digital clock, notes, pictures (local and net), RSS/Atom feeds, stickers, and weather.

Changes in version 1.6 are as follows:

Added a fullscreen 5-day forecast display for the Weather widget
Added a 12-hour option to the Digital Clock widget
Added support for Atom feeds and renamed the RSS widget as the Feeds widget
Added fullscreen mode for the Feeds widget
Added placeholders for date/env content in the Pictures widget’s paths/URLs
Fixed a Pictures widget fullscreen crash issue that was introduced in v1.5
Fixed a memory leak in the Pictures widget
Rewrote the weather API code
Other small changes

If you are interested in downloading RNOWidgets, you can click on the link below:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=utility/workbench/rnowidgets.lha

The program is free to download and use.

Please visit https://jpv.amigaaa.com/ for screenshots, support, and donations, and to find out more about his software. 🙂

Frank Wille has released vasm m68k std, vasm PPC std, and vasm 68k mot. vasm is a portable and re-targetable assembler to create linkable objects in various formats and absolute code. Multiple CPU-, syntax, and output-modules can be selected. More information is available here:

http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/

The WBToolbar commodity adds a toolbar to every open Workbench drawer window. It currently has two buttons. One top open selected icons with WBInfo. The other one unpacks selected archive files (requires the XAD-Master library). No more features are planned, but the source code is included for others to make improvements if they are interested.

Juan Carlos Herran Martin, a.k.a. Templario, has been very active in November. First up is version 6.0 of the utility AnimWebConverter. With this program, you can play or convert animations in various formats, such as GIF, YAFA, LBM, and more. In the new version, you’ll get a new intro and improved program environment. The same goes for version 2.50 of Grimorium PDF, which has a new intro design.

Videntium Picta, also by Juan Carlos Herran Martinm, is a picture viewer respecting the privacy of the user. It has no recent file list and no playlists. It is portable, so you can use it from a USB stick, CD-ROM, etc. Version 3.0 was released on the 22nd of November. You can find information about all supported formats and functions here.

If that was not enough, he did also publish version 5.10 of iConecta as well. This is a utility you can use to test your Internet connection. The latest release contains a new look, as well as improvements in the code.

Last, but not least, he released version 1.20 of Omanko! This is a small utility created to get the MD5 and CRC32 checksum codes to check if a file is correct.

Now for some great news concerning IBrowse! Version 3.0 was released in November. 🙂 Here is the news from the official website:

IBrowse 3 has arrived. It’s finally time to move on from IBrowse 2, which has been developed for over 20 years! IBrowse 3 makes available the previously unreleased features that were originally being worked on alongside IBrowse 2.4 (on a completely separate development branch), whilst retaining everything from IBrowse 2.5.9 and all the new developments since its release. The IBrowse 2 and 3 development branches are now fully merged, which was a complex and time-consuming task, due to considerable divergence. The process was completed methodically and carefully, to not compromise stability or lose any functionality. Development can now move forward without being restricted to the limitations of the IBrowse 2 framework, allowing for more substantial changes.

See the new What’s New and History log pages for full details of all the changes, but a summary follows:

• IBrowse 2 and IBrowse 3 Unification
• New Reimagined HTML Parser
• Improved HTML Engine
• The HTML engine has been improved with numerous layout and rendering enhancements, including tables, lists, and superscript + subscript text.
• Hotlist Multi-aliasing
• Early Data / Zero Round Trip Time Resumption (0-RTT)
• Better GIF Animation Playback
• AmigaOS 3.2 Context-Sensitive Mouse Pointers
• NList GUI Consistency
• Improved Preferences Window
• Decompression and Image Decoding Libraries Upgraded
• Space Saving Improve Efficiency
• We hope you enjoy the new version and we look forward to adding new features and improving the HTML engine much further over the coming months.

IBrowse 3 is a free upgrade for those who registered IBrowse 2.5 (or upgraded) at the full 68K/PPC rate – the existing key can be used with IBrowse 3. Users of the 68K-only version of IBrowse 2.5 and older IBrowse versions will need to upgrade to unlock full functionality.

If you’d like to register IBrowse, please click here to be taken to the appropriate page on the official website. To celebrate the release, they are offering registration at reduced rates for new users (25-30% off) and upgrades (30-35% off) compared to the previous IBrowse 2.5 pricing.

Maijestro from Amigans.net (and other forums) created a video of the new IBrowse running. He uses QEMU and emulates a Pegasos 2 with AmigaOS 4.1.

You can watch the video in full below:

AmigaGPT is a text generation program that runs on the classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4. Utilizing the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 architectures, this program provides state-of-the-art language modeling.

Features:

• Generates text based on input prompts
• UI customization
• Full conversation history
• Text-to-speech

For speech on AmigaOS 4, you’ll need Flite Device (http://aminet.net/package/mus/misc/flite_device).

In previous monthly roundups, we’ve read about the FlashMandelNG tool. Dino Papararo and Edgar Schwan are once again back with an update. In version 4.9 they’ve added 16-bit “HiColor” screen modes, mainly for QEMU and low-end system users.

An update to Report+, a ReAction-based utility with nine functions, has been released by James Jacobs. It was made available on OS4Depot on the 23rd of November. This tool can help you with generating Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readme files, performing batch processing on icons, and much more. Click here to go to the download page or to find information about the recent changes.

AmiArcadia by James Jacobs has been updated to version 30.6. Here is a summary of the of the changes:

• BINBUG: enhanced floppy disk drive subwindow (WinArcadia only).
• Debugger: added FPEEK and FPOKE commands.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

More detailed information can be found here.

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. Two versions were released in November, 1.6 first, then 1.7.

Version 1.7 changes:

• More text strings translated.
• BLTSIZEH is now handled correctly.
• Experimental uaeblit.library can be now used as an alternative
• You now enable or disable blitter.
• Some work on the save/load routines.

Version 1.6 changes:

• GUI now uses ReadOnly more places, instead of disable.
• A few more text strings can now be translated.
• Tools type support was added, (was requested, by tekmage)
• Lots of typos corrected.
• Makefile was updated.
• Some code was not the same for CIAA as CIAB (merge).
• Set priority 2 on CIA process.
• Created process CIA for timers, so it’s not handled by GUI
• ReplyMsg was added to TimerRequest.

Examples of programs already working are HippoPlayer, Payback, MiniArcanoid, and SamplitudeOpus Light 3.5.

On Amigans.net, Kas1e asked a question about emulating the Super Nintendo (SNES) on AmigaOS 4. He wondered if any such emulators are small and fast and can be played on high resolutions screens such as ScummVM and DosBox for example. After a few days of discussions, the people in the thread managed to get in touch with Olle (Per Johansson) who is the author of WarpSNES! He’s been away from AmigaOS 4 for a long time but seems to have become active again trying to improve the emulator. 🙂 Work is under way and a link to a new version has been shared. This is great news and I think it is fantastic that they are trying to improve WarpSNES. The SNES has a wide range of high-quality games, such as Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario Kart to mention two. I wish all participants in the thread the best of luck! Keep up the good work!

Amiga-news.de reports that George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero, has provided an update on the WebKit browser project for AmigaOS4. You can read it in full below:

For some time now, the port was around 54% of the WebCore library compilation. At that point, I was getting around 10K of errors, and I was trying to figure out why this was happening and where exactly was the problem. Just last week, with the help of Kas1e who discovered what was wrong, he found that the problem was a missing curly bracket I stupidly removed a year ago accidentally. By fixing that, I managed to have WebCore library compiling up to 99%.

What needs to be done as the next step, I hear you asking. Actually, I already started working on a minimal window with a web view that will be able to show just one website. That’s the next goal.

I know that this is not much, but it is the next step we need to make. Depending on how hard or easy it is to do, I plan to have more frequent updates on how it goes.

You all can track the development at https://github.com/AmigaLabs/webkitty

As you might see from the link above, we changed the main repository, as it is now moved under our organization named AmigaLabs. We decided to gather all our projects in one place, so that people can find them easier and track their progress. More on that in future announcements, as it is still quite new for us.

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=144073#forumpost144073

That was all the software news for November. 🙂 Let us move to hardware!

Hardware News

This month I updated my blog post called “Where to buy AmigaOS 4.x compatible systems?” with new information from AAA Technology and Amedia Computer. If you are looking to purchase a computer compatible with AmigaOS 4.1, I recommend having a look. 🙂

It turns out that the X5040 has been added to the store of Amedia! You can now purchase a complete system as seen here. It contains 4 GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, and an RX560 4GB graphics card. The price is currently 3299 EUR for a complete setup.

An e-mail has been sent out by AAA Technology to Early Adopters of the A1222+. Thanks to Bigmac on Amigans.net for sharing information about this in this thread, as I would not have heard about it otherwise. According to the e-mail, the Early Adopters have received an offer to purchase the motherboard for 1089 EUR including Luxembourg VAT. The price includes the latest Enhancer and an AmigaOS 4 license.

So, how is the delivery of the A1222+ going? I asked AAA Technology about this earlier this month and in early November, almost all testing was done on the motherboards by the manufacturer. Hopefully, the boards have now been received in Luxembourg. If not, then I hope they will arrive soon. 🙂

Miscellaneous News

In November it was once again time for a new games competition on Amigans.net.

We played the excellent Blastaway by Retream! Some of you might remember that we had fun playing this game back in the summer of 2022. Back then, Levellord won the competition, with VooDoo and mcleppa not far behind.

Blastaway is a highly playable and entertaining arena shooter, gameplay-wise heavily and shamelessly inspired by Wizard of Wor and graphically somewhat inspired by The Chaos Engine. Graphics have been pixelated by hand and music has been tracked as modules to let the player live a true 16-bit experience. The 50 arenas, spread over 5 different stages, have been designed to make that experience intensely enjoyable… and last long! Are you brave enough to step into the arenas and clear them of the wors they swarm with?

I must admit that there are still a few hours left of the competition, so we don’t know who became victorious yet, but the current top three are as follows:

1. VooDoo – November 20th – 663,770 points
2. TSK – November 27th – 479,260 points
3. Levellord – November 5th – 320,410 points

It will be exciting to see if someone jumps in at the end and takes the victory home. 🙂

On this blog, I published a review of ZGloom for AmigaOS 4. If you are interested in reading it, please click here.

YouTube TJ Ferreira published a video called “Falling In Love With Amiga Again – X5000 & A1222 Last of the Next Gen Amigas?”. I found it both entertaining and interesting. 🙂 The video is available here:

Until next time

You’ve reached the end of this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. Thanks so much for visiting my blog and for reading this report. I hope you found the news interesting.

Thanks to all of you for supporting this initiative by reading, spreading, commenting, and sending me messages. It is much appreciated!

I wish you all a great December! See you next month!

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler