AmigaOS 4 News – February 2025
Hi,
Welcome to a new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup! 🙂 Many thanks for visiting my blog.
Today it is March 1st and the weather is finally warmer here in the southern part of Norway. We’ve had a many days with cold temperatures, not to mention snow and ice, during the last weeks. It is good to see it melting away. Spring is coming!
Anyway, here is the AmigaOS 4 news from February. Hope you’ll enjoy the roundup, and see you in the next one!
Software News
We’ll start off with some news directly from Steffen Häuser a.k.a. TheMagicSN. He is busy with many projects, and one of them is the development of GemRB. Work continues and a lot of progress has recently been made. Below you can see several screenshot of GemRB running on AmigaOS 4:
Here is Baldur’s Gate II:
Icewind Dale:
Planescape Torment:
The installer in action:
All the pictures courtesy of MagicSN. Many thanks!
The port supports four games. These are Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Icewind Dale, and Planescape Torment (plus the add-ons for the three first mentioned, although without 100% guarantee these add-ons is fully supported).
For AmigaOS 4, a Sam440EP is the least required hardware. It is presently uncertain whether a Micro AmigaOne is fast enough, but MagicSN believes it to be. In the resolution of 640×480, it runs as follows:
Sam440EP – 15 FPS
X1000 – 30 FPS
X5000 – 30 FPS
In 1024×768:
X5000 26 FPS
The reason you see 30 FPS max here is that the games are capped at 30 FPS. This is, according to MagicSN, a limitation in the game system.
It’s great to see progress being made and I’m sure there are many AmigaOS 4 users out there eagerly awaiting to play. 🙂
SDL 3 (Simple DirectMedia Layer 3) version 3.2.0 was uploaded to OS4Depot in the beginning of February. More information is available on the mentioned site, as well as the page on GitHub.
https://github.com/AmigaPorts/SDL
SDL 2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer 2) version 2.32.0 came out on February 18th. It is available here.
Video Vortex is a frontend GUI for YT (.rexx) to search and view YouTube videos. It is developed by Thomas Kölsch and vesion 1.1 is now available for download from OS4Depot. The author has now added an Online and Emotion check. Below you can see TJ Ferreira checking it out. 🙂
IRA, MC68000/10/20/30/40 reassembler, version 2.11 is out. It includes several bug fixes, but also new features.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed TRAP_nn symbols for address range $80 to $bc.
- Instructions with PC-relative references outside of the current section
are no longer ignored but generated with a constant displacement. - Paths are no longer trimmed to their file-part before adding an
extension. Support for ” and ‘/’ as path separators. - Fixed references using an offset relative to a section’s start, when a
symbol is defined for that start address. - Referencing a location before the program’s first section made the
reassembler fail and probably crash. Patch by Howard Price. - OFFSET from the config file needs to be parsed before the source file.
- Fixed missing hex-dump for 8-bit jump-tables. Patch by Howard Price.
- Ignore symbols at section start, whenever the current or the previous
section is empty (-keepzh). Otherwise it would be undefined to which
section such symbols belong.
New features:
- IRA reads Atari TOS executables!
- Option -LABEL= lets you select the label-style.
0: original style with 4-digit continuous index: LAB_NNNN, EXT_NNNN
1: use hexadecimal address in label: LAB_ADDR, EXT_ADDR - Option -RADIX= selects the radix for displacements and equates.
0: use hex for values >= 10, decimal for the rest (including negatives)
10: print as decimal
16: print as hexadecimal, except -9 to 9, which is printed decimal - -compat=bi writes the original 16-bit value for a negative 8-bit immediate, which can be reproduced by vasm V2.
- Option -FIXLABELS prepends ‘L’ in front of symbol names which might be illegal or have local scope on many assemblers.
- COMMENT and BANNER directives allow text with leading blanks. Patch by Howard Price.
- New config file directive EXTSYM to define replacement symbols for the auto-generated EXT_nnn equates
AmiSSL received an update to version 5.19. 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!
Developers might be interested in the AmiSSL SDK, which is available here.
Bernd Assenmacher has released version 1.13 of the LhArchiver, which helps you to create LHA archives intuitively, easily, and fast.
Version 0.6 of SQLMan by Lazar Zoltan has been released. The author explains in the documentation that “This application is based on the SQLite database engine and lets you create, view and modify databases. The database handling can happen via the GUI or there is an SQL command shell to serve any needs. There is a preliminary support for open xml spreadsheet files which can be converted to databases and even to native Amiga spreadsheets.” Features include:
- View database structure and content
- Edit database content
- Console for sql commands
- Create new table structure
- Memory database for testing purpose
- XLSX spreadsheet import
- External import modules
- For every platform that supports MUI or Zune
The game T’s Imbiss, by Achim Kern – KeHo Software, has received an update bumping it up to 4.5. The game is in German language only.
Achim Kern – KeHo Software has also released Mars Tank Attack, an action game. You are in control of a tank and the goal is to destroy the enemy tank on the other side of a Mars canyon.
MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 122 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 15.3, which provides miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes, as well as a Goal! roster editor.
Version 0.50 of the PDF generator Compression has been released. This tool is being developed by Achim Pankalla. The goal is to make a PDF generator that is complete with WYSIWYG. Progress has been made since the last version and many errors have been fixed. You can download it from OS4Depot, where there’s also information about all of the recent changes to the program.
V.A.M.P. – Virtual Amiga Multimedia Player version 3.20 has been released by Juan Carlos Herran Martin a.k.a. Templario and Samo79.
V.A.M.P. display the next multimedia formats currently:
- Amiga Anim formats: anim, anim5, ham6, ham8, yafa.
- MovieSetter movies format.
- Web animation formats: gif, apng.
- Show pictures: jpg, png, gif, lbm, bmp, svg, jp2(jpeg 2000), tiff, pcx, webp (with Datatypes).
- Video formats: cdxl, ogg, avi, mpeg, mpg, wmv, flv, mp4, mov, 3gp, m4v.
- Music&Sound files: mp3, mod, med, 8svx, 16sv, iff, aiff, wav, ac3, wave, riff, ogg, flac, m4a, wma, dbm, hvl, aiff, s3m, xm, sid.
Available in the next languages: Spanish. English. Italian. French. Finnish. Swedish. Polish. Greek.
Improvements in this version:
- Little improvements and new logos.
- Fixed some problems with the special video sizes to play the videos downloaded from: Facebook Reels, Tik Tok, CapCut, Instagram Reels, Kwai and Whatsapp videos.
NOTE: The video sizes recommended are 360xNNN pixels, sizes greater than Width of 360 will be play slow depending on CPU speed.
On February 21st DRIDI released version 5.5Final of the Arabic Console Device. In the new release, “action disk info” has been implemented.
An updated version, 3.3, of the YouTube URL Extractor Script by Michael Trebilcock was released on February 21st. YT.rexx is a script for providing direct video and audio links from YouTube URLs. Changes from the previous version include:
3.3 – 21st Feb 2025:
- Autoselect original audio language when autoplaying.
- Miscellaneous fixes.
More history within the archive.
Unshield, a tool and library to extract CAB files, has previously been ported to AmigaOS 4 by MagicSN and Walkero. It was ported from the v1.5.1 release as found at https://github.com/twogood/unshield. Please visit OS4Depot to find more information.
A statically compiled version (1.4) of iconv for AmigaOS 4, WarpOS and 68k(060) has been released.
Domenico Lattanzi has released version 1.0 of Piramide, a soliatire card game played with French cards. You can read more about the game over at OS4Depot.
Andrea Palmate has published the article Inside clib4: Crafting a Modern C Library for AmigaOS4. You can read it here:
https://ko-fi.com/post/Inside-clib4-Crafting-a-Modern-C-Library-for-Amig-F1F41A95KJ
That was the software news from February. Now let us move onto other news! 🙂
Miscellaneous
It is still possible to purchase an A1222+ motherboard or a complete system. These are available here:
If I’m not mistaken, ACube Systems in Italy has one Sam460LE motherboard left in stock. If you want a brand new one, you can purchase it from here:
https://shop.acube-systems.biz/sam-motherboards/124-sam460.html
The Lost C has published three videos featuring the A1222+ from A-EON Technology.
Marek Glogowski has published a video of AmigaOS 4 on QEMU running E-UAE with compositing.
The Norwegian musician Helge Kvalheim is back with several new music videos. All of them are available to watch and listen to on his YouTube-channel. Here is one of the songs:
Maijestro of the The Amiga Retro Channel has also published more videos. One of them shows Amiga 68k demos running in E-UAE on his AmigaOS 4.1 setup.
If you are interested in first-person shooters, then I recommend checking out Muf’s top 15 list. It is available on YouTube. The language is Polish, but you can turn on subtitles.
Maurizio Casolari recently published a video on VideoVortex with MPlayer on his AmigaOne XE. It is in Italian.
He also published a video of Torcs running on AmigaOS 4.
Ghettofinger Gaming has created a short clip showing that his AmigaOne 1222+ setup is now alive. 🙂
If you enjoy playing games on AmigaOS 4, why not join the current games competition over at Amigans.net? They are playing A Frog Game from Entwickler-X.
https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9758
You can find information about the game here:
At the time of writing, 328gts is in the lead with 6,125 points.
Until next time
You’ve now reached the end of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup for February.
Thanks to all readers and supporters out there for visiting my blog and for reading the AmigaOS 4 Monthly roundup. Big thanks as always for all the feedback, comments and encouragement.
Have a great weekend everyone! 🙂
Best regards,
Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler
Old School Game Blog 