AmigaOS 4 News – January 2022
Welcome to the first edition of the brand new AmigaOS 4 monthly news roundup! Here you’ll find a summary of news concerning the platform for the month of January 2022.
We can safely say that 2022 started off with a bang. The release of an updated port of Odyssey from MorphOS by the well known developer kas1e on the 2nd of January, came as a very welcome surprise to many users. Browsing is an important and essential part of computing these days, so to have nice and functional program for AmigaOS 4 is important. Thumbs up to kas1e for a massive job! 🙂
Issue 154 of the magazine Amiga Future was released in the beginning of the month. As usual it has a lot of interesting articles to read. 🙂 You can find out more about the magazine by visiting the official webpage here.
The always active George Sokianos, who many probably know from his Amiga related videos on YouTube and MediaVault, released a new version of the text editor Lite XL on the 11th. This is a light-weight editor written in LUA. People interested in this project can keep an eye an eye on this page for updates:
https://git.walkero.gr/walkero/lite-xl/issues/12
Mr. Sokianos has uploaded a sneak peek of version 2 on YouTube, which is included below. 🙂
A couple of days later, on the 13th, we saw a new release of AmigaAMP by Thomas Wenzel. Yes, that is right, AmigaAMP is back in action and brings you a superb solution for listening to everything from MP3’s to regular ProTracker modules. This version contains many bug fixes, but also new features you can read more about here. I made a video of the program running, which you can view below:
The same day, we got some news from Trevor Dickinson from A-EON Technology concerning the upcoming computer A1222+, Enhancer Software V54 and LibreOffice. According to Mr. Dickinson, they are currently preparing early adopter production depending on component availability in relation to the A1222+, but no firm release date has been set. If you are interested in reading all the updates, please head over to amiga-news.de, where they’ve provided the full news report.
On the 15th of January, version 1.03 (SDL2) of the music program MilkyTracker was released for AmigaOS 4 by Capehill. Being similar to the legendary FastTracker 2, you can compose music in formats like MOD and XM. Let’s get “tracking”! 😉
Gamers will be happy to read that a patch was released for the strategy game Exodus: The Last War was uploaded to OS4Depot on the 19th of January. The author, kas1e, states that “this patch fixes both major and minor issues (…)”. Examples are that it now works on RadeonHD/RX, and that it has a new Reaction Prefs binary. It is worth mentioning that kas1e also released a patch for Foundation Gold a few days prior to that, which also fixed minor and major issues with the game.
Hollywood is a popular programming language for AmigaOS 4. Not only does it allow you to code in a text editor, but it offers a point-and-click based programming setup called Hollywood Designer as well, which makes it much easier to create small programs, presentations, slideshows and much more. There are plenty of add-ons available for Hollywood enabling the usage of various music formats, animations and so forth. On 23rd of January, a new add-on was uploaded to OS4Depot called “Iconic”.
According to the author, Iconic is “the ultimate loader and saver plugin for Hollywood. It will make all your icon dreams come true, because it can load and save a largeriety of different icon formats.”. As we can see from the list in the readme on OS4Depot, it supports everything from AmigaOS 1.x icons to those used on Windows.
On the same day, there was a new surprise for gamers. If you like tile-matching puzzle games, you’ll be delighted to hear that Freegemas has been ported to AmigaOS 4 by IamSONIC. I must admit I have not played the game myself yet, but from the screenshots I’ve seen it looks very nice!
If you want to give it a go, you can download it for free here.
Hans de Ruiter, well known for his work on graphics drivers for AmigaOS 4 through A-EON Technology, has released an updated version of the benchmark tool GfxBench2D. With this tool, you can measure the 2D performance of various graphics cards, and if you want, upload the results to a public database people can use to compare cards. You can download the program here.
At the end of the month, Dino Papararo and Edgar Schwan uploaded a new version of FlashMandelNG. With this program you can create beautiful Mandelbrot and Julia fractals on your computer running AmigaOS 4. According to the authors, the new version includes a lot of fixes “under the hood and improvements, as well as providing a real fading effect in 24-bit screenmodes.
Are you looking for a program to keep track of contact information? Then you’ll be delighted to hear about the release of PerCIMan, a program that does exactly that. It was created by Ulrich Beckers uploaded to OS4Depot by Samir Hawamdeh on the 30th of January and is available for free here. The program sounds quite advanced, as you can store everything from phone numbers, addresses, social media links, birthdays and more.
Now, this is not exactly news, but if you have Sonos equipment at home, as well as an AmigaOS 4 compatible computer, you might be interested to learn that there is a program called SonosControll for your platform. The author, Michael Rupp, has created a thread on the forum Amigans.net looking for testers. If you can help you, I’m sure Mr. Rupp would be very happy for your support. 🙂
The last thing to report is that ACube Systems are looking for information about AmigaOS 4.1 compatible hardware to include in their AmigaOS 4.1 compatibility list. I have published a post concerning this earlier today, which you can read here.
Thanks for reading and see you in another post here on Gaming on AmigaOS 4!
Greetings,
Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler
Gaming on AmigaOS 4 
Very nice roundup. Thanks!
Kevin (ktadd)
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Hi Kevin! Many thanks for your feedback! 🙂 Glad you liked it! Cheers!
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[…] like to thank you for all of the positive feedback I’ve received after publishing the AmigaOS 4.1 Monthly Roundup last Monday. Much appreciated! Thanks everyone! […]
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