AmigaOS 4 News – December 2024

Happy New Year everyone!

First, I’d like to thank you for visiting the Old School Game Blog and checking out this month’s AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup.

Today it is December 30th and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. It’s been a year filled with activity on all Amiga platforms, including the AmigaOS 4 one of course.

We can look back at the release of the A1222+, the new port of Heretic II from Hyperion Entertainment, Super Star Blast from Entwickler-X, the Wipeout Rewrite from HunoPPC, and much, much more. The month of December this year proved to be an eventful one, which you can read more about further down in this roundup.

Without further ado, here is the monthly news summary for December 2024. Hope you’ll enjoy it! 🙂

Software News

First up is JonoF’s Duke Nukem 3D port, jfduke3d, by Jonathon Fowler, with contributions by Ken Silverman and others. The porting to AmigaOS 4 was done by Marek Glogowsky. It requires the original game data to run. Most of you are probably familiar with this classic first person shooter. If you have not discovered this gem yet, please click here to find more information about it.

Now it is time for another classic. PrBoom is a version of the legendary first person shooter Doom, originally written by id Software. I assume most of you are familiar with that game. If you want to read more about it, you can find more information here.

This is PrBoom Plus edition. It was developed by the PrBoom Plus Team. Marek Glogowsky ported it to AmigaOS 4. Here is the link to the GitHub-page.

Version 2.6.6 for AmigaOS 4 is available on OS4Depot. Here is the link. Also, Marek Glogowsky created a video showing it running on AmigaOS 4 through QEMU:

mGBA is an emulator for running Game Boy Advance games by Jeffrey Pfau. It aims to be faster and more accurate than many existing Game Boy Advance emulators, as well as adding features that other emulators lack. It also supports Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. The port to AmigaOS 4 was done by Marek Glogowski and version 0.10.3 was released on December 1st. More information, as well as a download, is available at OS4Depot.

EntwicklerX has returned with a new game for AmigaOS 4.1!

Please read on for their news release:

AmigaOS4: Super Star Blast – Space Shooter
Super Star Blast has been available on PC and consoles for a while now. We are pleased to finally be able to release the AmigaOS4 version of the game. You can get the game as digital download version on your favorite AmigaOS Shop: @AlineaComputer @A-Eon

Super Star Blast is a space based game with challenging levels of increasing difficulty. All enemies must be shot down to finish a level and go to the next one. A scanner around the player tells roughly where the enemies are located. The player ship can fly forwards to attack and backwards to fight during the retreat against the opponents. After clearing a level you can purchase equipment to boost the ship, as well as extra shields and firepower or more ships.

Features:
-Massive challenging levels of increasing difficulty
-Enemies with unique flying and fire characteristics
-Upgrade center (agility, fire power, shield, ships)
-Single player campaign
-Simple and clean 3D space graphics
-Quality and performance Settings
-Warp3D Nova / OpenGLES Support (required!)

Hardware Requirements:
AmigaOS 4.1 F.E. Computer with Warp3D Nova/OpenGLES compatible graphics card

Disclaimer:
Because of the many different configurations, it is difficult to cover all problems. Just send us an email to mail@entwickler-x.de and we will try to fix bugs. Also play with the quality and performance settings to adapt the game to your hardware. The “FPS” setting shows you the current frame rate. In the ToolTypes you can also activate your own screen mode. If the setting is put in brackets, the Workbench resolution is used.

Shop Links:
https://www.amiga-shop.net/Amiga-Softw … per-Star-Blast::1399.html
http://www.amistore.net
https://entwicklerx.itch.io/super-star-blast

Thanks for your support!

Great to see EntwicklerX out with a new release! 🙂

Capehill has released a new version of the AmigaOS 4 port of the renowned music tool MilkyTracker, currently at version 1.05 Release Candidate 1. You can also find a discussion about it in a thread on the Amigans.net forum.

Kjetil Hvalstrand released a new of version of IFF-Converter, a replica of a program created many years ago by Metallion of Kefrens. Hvalstrand has added major improvements including DataTypes support for filetypes like PNG, GIF, and others, as well as zooming and drag-and-drop support. It became available on OS4Depot on December 1st.

He also released version 0.5 of ProcessActionReplay, a fun hack that works like an Action Replay trainer. We can read the following in the documentation:

“It can crash your program, it can crash your computer… so your warned! you see this program as something that revels a security hole in AmigaOS. its not intended for evil use, its intended use is for giving player unlimited lifes.”

A new version of the lightweight text-editor Lite XL has been released for AmigaOS 4.1. This time it is version 2.1.6R1.

The port is being maintained by George Sokianos a.k.a Walkero. The program itself was created by Francesco Abbate and the Lite XL team.

We can read the following news at Amigans.net:

“Today I released a new version of Lite XL, the code editor I have ported and maintained for more than 3 years now, for both AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS. I love this editor, and I use it for coding on my Amigas all the time. That’s why I keep it up to date with the upstream changes done by the original team for other operating systems.

It was compiled with the latest SDL2 2.30.9 as well, and updated to the latest 2.1.6 upstream code.

Rogue Football Card Game is from the AmiGameJam created by One Joyful Day. According to the author, it was inspired by Tim Blacklock Premier Picks freeware game from 1993 on the Amiga. The game is under development and has no sound and temporary graphics, but the foundation is there. More information is available here.

At Amigans.net, we can read that a brand new version of Dir Me Up has been released!

This program allows users to explore and manipulate files, links, and drawers of their Amiga.

I’ve never tried this program before, but it does definitely look interesting!

Here is the news item as posted in the forum:

Dir Me Up 4.10 released for AmigaOS 4

The modern explorer for AmigaOS 4, Dir Me Up, is back in version 4.10 to celebrate Christmas… with the preview of MP3 tags and Unicode text files! Merry Christmas!

The list of new features is available on our dedicated page.

Dir Me Up is, of course, compatible with the brand-new A1222+ from A-EON Technology!

As usual, this update, free for all registered users, has been put online. To install it, just run Dir Me Up.

You can download a demo allowing (only) browsing here or there.

Dir Me Up, enhance your Amiga!

The price is 19.99 EUR. It is available in several languages, including French, English, Italian, German and many more. Requirements are AmigaOS 4.1 FE and a minimum desktop resolution of 1024×768.

LoView Suite – The Easy Viewer and Thumber was released on December 8th by Simone “Tuxedo” Monsignori. The program was designed to let the user choose what to do in a fast and comfortable way. It supports a wide range of formats and may save in JPG, PNG, IFF or BMP.

On December 7th, issue 10 of the Amiga diskmagazine Versus was released for Classic Amiga. On December 8th, the AmigaOS 4 edition became available.

Versus is not only a diskmagazine. It is also a Demoscene chart. The chart includes lists of the presently most popular demos, coders, musicians, and so forth. People have sent in votesheets where they have voted for their favorites. Curious to see who is on top? Then get Versus now… 😉

Two groups, Nukleus and Void, collaborated on this release. As some of you know, I am a member of Void and the Versus Team. I’m thrilled to see this issue finally seeing the light of day. It’s been a long journey. Now it is here. I hope you will enjoy reading it. 🙂

You can download it from Pouet.net.

Version 10.44 of PCRE2 (Perl-compatible regular expression library), libcre2, was uploaded to OS4Depot on December 15th. This is a port by Philip Hazel for AmigaOS 4, as found at the GitHub repository https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2.

Cppcheck 2.16.0r1 has been released. This is a static analysis tool for C/C++ code. It provides unique code analysis to detect bugs and focuses on detecting undefined behavior and dangerous coding constructs. The goal is to have very few false positives. Cppcheck is designed to be able to analyze your C/C++ code even if it has non-standard syntax (common in embedded projects). It was developed by the Cppcheck team and ported to AmigaOS 4 by George Sokianos.

According to the information on OS4Depot, Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Version 5.4.7 is now available for download thanks to the work done by George Sokianos a.k.a Walkero, who ported it to AmigaOS 4. The official website of Lua can be found here.

He also ported Unshield, a tool and library to extract CAB files. It was ported from the v1.5.1 release as found at https://github.com/twogood/unshield.

An update to Report+, a ReAction-based utility with nine functions, has been released by James Jacobs. It was made available on OS4Depot on December 16th. This tool can help you with generating Aminet- and OS4Depot-style readme files, performing batch processing on icons, and much more. Recent changes since 8.61 includes ASCII processor (can now convert to/from HTML entities) and miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. More detailed information can be found on OS4Depot.

Raziel has been busy with ScummVM in December, which has resulted in version 2.9.0 of the brilliant software becoming available on AmigaOS 4! With ScummVM, you can play legendary adventure games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Curse of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and many, many more. 2.9.0 brings support for a wide range of new games such as Castle Master, Rise of the Dragon, Thimbleweed Park (wow!) and Moonbase Commander. Especially great, in my opinion, to see Thimbleweed Park support. That was great news!

In connection with the new ScummVM, Raziel released ifarchive.org DL version 0.16, which you can use to download supported games (ScummVM’s Glk engine) from ifarchive.org and put them into their respective sub directories, depending on the engine used. He also released version 2.9.0 of ScummVM-Tools with many improvements. More information is available on OS4Depot.

On December 19th DRIDI released version 4.0Final of the Arabic Console Device. Changes and improvements are as follows:

• More robust
• No more need for s:scripted
• Use ArabicLauncher instead with none or “ARABCON[2|3]:” parameter ;
• Edit by launching “Sys:Arabic/stevie/stevie T:titi” (not stevi_a) or Ed (not ed_a) inside ArabicLauncher ;
• Now, if you want editors in parallel, launch another ArabicLauncher with ARACONX: parameter ;
• Use Arabic pipe a lot like: “dir | pisa 0 | pl 1”.

Here is the download link.

George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero has returned with a brand new port! This time he has brought over Catacomb 3D and the Catacomb Adventure series to AmigaOS 4.

Catacomb 3D was originally released for PC back in 1991. It was developed by iD Software, Inc., known for classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. It is a first-person fantasy shooter.

The port for AmigaOS 4 requires the original data files, which can be obtained from GOG (Good Old Games):

https://www.gog.com/en/game/catacombs_pack

Main features are as follows:

• Runs native on AmigaOS 4
• Hardware accelerated 3D rendering via OpenGL, supporting widescreen
  resolutions, a customizable field of view and an uncapped frame rate.
• Player, projectile and monster movement with floating point precision.
• Configurable mouse and keyboard controls.
• Supports all four Catacomb 3D games as included in the Catacombs Pack from
  GOG.com.
• Supports The Catacomb Abyss version 1.13 (shareware).

CatacombGL is available for download from OS4Depot.

If you’d like to read more about the port, please visit Walkero’s page on Ko-Fi.

Juan Carlos Herran Martin has updated iConecta to version 5.50. This is a utility you can use to test your Internet connection. The latest release contains a new intro picture, new themes (Hacker, Pirate, Space) and HD graphics.

An updated version, 3.2, of the YouTube URL Extractor Script was released on the December 22nd. YT.rexx is a script for providing direct video and audio links from YouTube URLs. Changes from the previous version include:

• Compatibility fixes.
• Support /live links as valid YouTube links.
• Added more player client options. Read the docs for more info.
• Fixed minor issue when WEBSAFARI was used in .cfg
  Note: WEBSAFARI only currently working with HLS links.
• Cookies now only used when using COOKIES parameter.

Please click here for more information and to find the download.

Many game related uploads reached OS4Depot in December. Amongst these are two game ports from Daniel Jedlicka a.k.a Trixie and George Sokianos a.k.a. Walkero.

If you enjoy a session of Mahjong, I think you will be right at home with Shisen-Seki and Lopan.

Shisen-Seki is a game of Shisen-Sho, a Japanese logic game using Mahjong stones. The goal is to remove all the stones from the table by matching pairs with the same face. According to the instructions, you can only match stones if they can be joined by three or fewer lines. Each line must be either horizontal or vertical and can’t cross other stones on the board. Also, not all games are solvable. The game was created by Artur Rojek (zear) (code and fonts) and Joe Vargas (jxv) (graphics). Port was done by Trixie and Walkero as mentioned earlier. The game should run on all AmigaOS 4 setups.

Lopan is also a game that is similar to Mahjong. The goal here is to remove all the pieces from the table. The game was created by Dave Ashley and ported to AmigaOS 4 by Trixie. It should work on all AmigaOS 4 setups like Shisen-Seki.

If you’d like to try these games, please visit OS4Depot via the links below:

Shisen-Seki at OS4Depot

Lopan at OS4Depot

In previous monthly roundups, we’ve read a lot about the FlashMandelNG tool. Dino Papararo and Edgar Schwan are once again back with an update. Version 5.2 sees the following changes:

• New color palettes and fractals
• New mouse pointers
• Improved and fixed benchmarkmode
• Fixed use of a powerpc condition register in main asm core function
• Fixed speed regression about periodicity check
• Fixed use of middle mouse button
• Code cleanup, minor improvements and bug fixes

Bernd Assenmacher has released version 2.8 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. Changes and improvements are as follows:

• Localization done
• Added german language
• Added english and german catalog files for translation purpose. So if someone wants another language, just translate and create a specific catalog file. Save the catalog file as UTF8 text file and send it via email to me. I will then compile Image2PDF with it and upload a new version. For the longer sentences do not forget to place the linebreak characters (“backslash”+n). This is important especially for Aros.
• Fixed an issue where the guide file was not found when pressing “F1” or choosing “Help(F1)” in the menu (thanks Daniel :-))
• Fixed a similar issue where pdftops was not found when printing
• Fixed an installer bug where the path was not set correctly in s:user-startup on AmigaOS3/4, MorphOS and Aros
• Other minor corrections were done

He also released version 1.12 of the LhArchiver, which helps you to create LHA archives intuitively, easily, and fast.

Mplayer-GUI, a GUI for MPlayer for OS4, has been updated by Daniel Westerberg. Version 1.62 is now available for download on OS4Depot. This is a stand-alone RA-GUI/launcher for all Mplayers on AmigaOS 4. News and changes:

• NEW * Added new extensions for the file requester since newer MPlayer
  recognizes more formats.
• NEW * Added peg2ide.device, p1022sata.device and p50x0sata.device as options.
• FIX * Some internal size limit fixes to allow longer paths and correct number
  of video drivers.

A new game has been released. It is called PuzzleTiles and was created by Domenico Lattanzi. This is a video game that essentially consists of decomposing an image chosen by the user into pieces, which the user must rebuild by swapping the pieces two by two by selecting them with the mouse.

Features:

• Any image in a format recognised by the system can be used
• Window’s size customisable
• 5 difficulty levels
• A progress bar is available to know the point reached in rebuilding image
• Is possible to peek completed image for 5 seconds to have an hint
• Audio effects who also helps user in rebuilding image

You can download it for free from OS4Depot:

https://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=game/puzzle/puzzletiles.lha

XircomCE2, a driver for Xircom PCMCIA network cards, by Neil Cafferkey was uploaded to OS4Depot on December 29th. Xircomce2.device is a SANA-II network driver for Xircom CreditCard Ethernet PC Cards (PCMCIA cards).

AmigaGPT is a text generation program that runs on the classic AmigaOS and AmigaOS 4 by Cameron Armstrong (Nightfox). Utilizing the power of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 architectures, this program provides state-of-the-art language modeling. Version 2.1.0 became available for download on OS4Depot on December 29th.

Features:

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

A list of changes can be found in the documention at OS4Depot.

Version 33.72 of AmiArcadia for AmigaOS 4, a Signetics-based machines emulator, has been released by James Jacobs.

According to the documentation, AmiArcadia supports the following systems:

• Emerson Arcadia 2001 console family (Bandai, Emerson, Grandstand, Intervision, Leisure-Vision, Leonardo, MPT-03, Ormatu, Palladium, Poppy, Robdajet, Tele-Fever, Tempest, Tryom, Tunix, etc.) (c. 1982);
• Interton VC 4000 console family (Acetronic, Cabel, Fountain, Hanimex, Interton, Prinztronic, Radofin, Rowtron, Soundic, Voltmace, Waddingtons, etc.) (c. 1978);
• Elektor TV Games Computer (1979);
• PIPBUG- and BINBUG-based machines (EA 77up2, EA 78up5, Signetics Adaptable Board Computer, Eurocard 2650, etc.) (1977-1978);
• Signetics Instructor 50 trainer (1978);
• Signetics TWIN minicomputer (1976);
• Central Data 2650 computer (1977);
• PHUNSY computer (c. 1980);
• Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer aka 2650 Minimal Computer trainer (1984);
• Hofacker MIKIT 2650 trainer (1978);
• Astro Wars, Galaxia, Laser Battle and Lazarian coin-ops by Zaccaria (1979-1981);
• Malzak 1 and 2 coin-ops by Kitronix (c. 1981);
• AY-3-8500/8550/8600-based Pong systems (Coleco Telstar Galaxy, Sheen TVG-201, etc.) (1976-1977);
• VTech Type-right machine (1985)

It is packed with features, far too many to list here. Examples include ReAction GUI, load/save snapshots, and windowed and fullscreen modes. Other features are CPU tracing, trainer, and drag and drop support. Additionally, it offers graphics scaling, PAL/NTSC modes, and frame skipping, among many other features!

Here is a summery of the changes since the last release:

• Debugger: added table tracing option (VERBOSE 1).
• CD2650: added “Settings|VDU|ASCII” option.
• Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

AmiArcadia is free to download. You can get it from OS4Depot via the link below:

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=emulation/gamesystem/amiarcadia.lha

Here are the links to the websites of the author:

http://amigan.1emu.net/releases/

http://amigan.yatho.com/

Amiga-news.de reports that version 9.20 of QEMU has been released. This is an open-source computer emulator that makes it possible to emulate a computer in software, such as the Pegasos 2 and Sam460 for example. The support is provided by QEMU developer Zoltan Balaton, who has set up a dedicated website with helpful information. Amiga-news.de writes that IRQs on the Pegasos2-PCI.0(AGP) bus have been fixed with the new version.

An update has been made to the AmigaOS 4 version of Worm Wars, a freeware arcade game by James Jacobs of Amigan Software. Version 9.36 is available for download here.

That was the software related news for December. Let us move on to other news.

Miscellaneous News

Ktadd has published a new post on his blog. This time it is about using MediaVault & mediavault_script. It is very well written and contains a lot of helpful information. I highly recommend checking this out, especially if you are a MediaVault user.

Amiga 40th in Silicon Valley has been announced! On the official website we can read the following:

It’s been ten years since the highly successful Amiga 30th in Mountain View, California. Over the last ten years, we have seen an incredible vibrancy in the global Amiga community. With projects like the Vampire, Emu68K, and Amiga OS 3.2 combined with AROS, AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS, never has there been so much activity and energy for the Commodore Amiga and its many derivatives.

July 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the Commodore Amiga 1000 release. To celebrate this milestone the team that brought you the Amiga 30th in Silicon Valley is planning their next major Amiga Anniversary Event.

Martina Hřebcová a.k.a Sailor has once again returned with a great article about the Sam460. It is in Czech, but you can use an online translator tool to get it in your language. It is richly illustrated and provides information about the historical background of the Sam460, technical details and much more.

https://www.amigaportal.cz/node/169580

An interview with Oliver Roberts, the current developer of the IBrowse browser, has been made available in English over at Boing Attitude.

http://glames.online.fr/boing/boing9_itw_oliverroberts.html

This interview was featured in the paper magazine of BOING issue 9, November 2024.

Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology has published a new blog post called “Another one bites the dust!”. A great read which is available here:

http://blog.a-eon.biz/blog/index.php/2024/12/19/another-one-bites-the-dust/

Amiga-news.de reports that the Amiga 40 event in Germany has been announced. They write:

“As announced by the organizers at a1k.org (registration required, German), the next edition of “Amiga xx” will take place on 18 and 19 October 2025 at Kunstwerk – das rote Krokodil in Mönchengladbach-Wickrath, admission is from 10 a.m. each day. Some details about the event have already been communicated by the organizers.”

Please visit amiga-news.de here to read the complete article.

https://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2024-12-00099-EN.html

Amigatronics has done an exclusive interview with Trevor Dickinson from A-EON Technology. It is available on YouTube:

EntwicklerX has published a video on YouTube showing Super Star Blast running on the A1222+.

The AmigaOS 4 user Maijestro has been very active with his YouTube-channel, Amiga Retro Channel, during the last month. He has published several videos including ones featuring the new Super Star Blast game and the port of CatabomGL. Please visit his channel to see them all. 🙂

The Norwegian AmigaOS 4 musician, Helge Kvalheim, is back again with two new songs which are available on YouTube. You can also download his work from Aminet and play it on your Amiga. One of the songs, Santa Zombie, can be seen below:

Hans De Ruiter of the KSD has released a new video called “Hello MUI – Your First AmigaOS App Using MUI”.

The Polish YouTube-channel Amiga bez ściemy has published videos with AmigaOS 4 content in December. Here is one of the videos:

Skateman has published a review of the Alkmaar Amiga Meetup 2024 with focus on next-gen. 🙂 It is available on his blog:

Alkmaar Amiga Meetup 2024: A Next-Gen Review!

Until next time

You’ve now reached the end of this years last AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. I must say the month has been filled with news, that is for sure! 🙂 Hope you have enjoyed reading them!

Thanks to all readers and supporters out there for visiting my blog and for reading the AmigaOS 4 Monthly roundup. Big thanks for all the feedback and comments during the year. It is much appreciated!

I wish you all a Happy New Year 2025! 🙂

Best regards,

Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler