AmigaOS 4 News – August 2022
Greetings,
Welcome to the 8th edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup!
August turned out to be a very busy month in the community with plenty of new releases and updates. 🙂
Hope you’ll enjoy the report! Cheers!
Software
The month started well with a brand new ScummVM release from The ScummVM Team and Raziel. The new version (2.6.0) is called «Insane Escapism» and adds support for a whole range of new games, including The 11th Hour, Sanitarium, Hades Challenge, and Wetlands. Besides this, the program has received a large number of updates and fixes, too many to list here. If you would like to get an overview, please check out the overview on OS4Depot. Great to see ScummVM being supported and maintained on AmigaOS 4!
The 2nd of August also brought us a utility by Matt Martz and George Sokianos, which is called «speediest-cli». This is a terminal script that uses speediest.net API, based on Python. It has now been adapted to work on AmigaOS 4.
On the same day, an update to PerCIMan was released by Ulrich Beckers. PerCIMan is a program for managing contacts. It allows you to store phone numbers, birthdays, image files, and so forth. People can be marked as friends, relatives, business contacts, alumni, etc. If you are interested in checking it out, you can find it here.
If you are looking for a GUI for xadmaster.library, then I’m happy to report that Chris Young has written one using the ReAction gadget set, since all the others on Aminet appear to require MUI. It supports decrunching with cfdmaster.library, and scanning for viruses with the xvs.library. It is available for download on OS4Depot.
Back in June, I wrote about a new release of Ignition, a spreadsheet for AmigaOS 4. In August this program received an add-on that makes it possible to read and write files with the suffix ODS, such as files created by OpenOffice and LibreOffice. To read more about the add-on or to download it, here is the link.
A. Pankalla released an update to Luettje Bookseller, which is a personal finance program. If you are curious about what «Luettje Bookholler» means, I can tell you that it is German and means «Little Accountant». 🙂 A bug has been fixed and UTF characters are now converted to Amiga characters. Check it out here.
Kjetil Hvalstrand, a.k.a. LiveForIt, continues his work on AMOS Kittens. In August he released a re-implementation of the MusiCRAFT extension allowing you to use «St Load», «St Play», «St Stop», «St Resume», and «St Pause». The extension provides support for modules made in programs such as Protracker. Besides this, also brought over the AmosExtension.library, which enables you to call functions from AMOS extensions in C/C++ programs.
Version 2.2 of Enhancer Software from A-Eon Technology was released in the beginning of August. It is the result of 10 months of work by The Amiga Developer Team. It contains too much to mention in this report, but the keywords are Warp3DNOva V54, OpenGLES Library, RadeonRX 2D driver, AmiDVD fix, and more! Read more about it here. 🙂
Ok, it is time for the first piece of gaming news this month. BlobWars Attrition 1.2.2 has been ported to AmigaOS 4 by George Sokianos. It has been tested and runs well on an AmigaOne X5000/40, as well as an AmigaOne Micro. It did not run fast on the Micro due to the lack of graphics memory (only 32 MB), so a better graphics card is recommended. The game is available on OS4Depot, but to run it you also need the data files which can be found in the original game. A purchase is needed here to play it. Here is the link.
Retrami Software is back with a new AmigaOS 4 release called «HexSee», a viewer that displays file contents in blocks of 16 characters per line. It can read any file up to 4 GB (!) in size! You can customize the viewer by choosing colors for text and backgrounds. The download is available here.
Many of you are probably familiar with the program RNOEffects by jPV^RNO. A brand new version was released on the 14th of August, and it contains a lot of updates. You can now save images as NewIcons, GlowIcons, and many other icon formats. A freehand drawing mode has been included, as well as a redo option. There are too many changes to be mentioned here, so I recommend heading over to this webpage to find out more. 😉 Enjoy the program!
Capehill has made an update to Shaderjoy and the program is now at version 1.23. It requires Ogles2.library 3.2 and Warp3DNova 1.86 to run, so I have not tested it myself. A download is as always available on OS4Depot, along with information about the new changes.
Now, here is some big news. If you are a fan of the classic RTS game Command & Conquer, you will be happy to hear that Sinan Gurkan, a.k.a. SinanSam460 on Amigans.net, has ported VanillaConquerTD to AmigaOS 4. Well done! 🙂 His port was based on the ones by Arczi (Amiga Vampire) and BeWorld (MorphOS). I have tested the game on a Sam440 Flex and it ran well, so if you have better hardware than that, you should be good to go. 😉 Please check out the game here.
Juan Carlos Herran Martin has released an update to Pintor Web, which is a program you can use to edit pictures when making websites. The new edition has been compiled with the latest Hollywood version (9.1). It has an improved watermark routine and a few effects called «Parchment». There have also been bug fixes.
«All In One Streams» («aiostreams») is a pack of scripts, written in Python, that can be used to stream and watch videos from different Online networks, such as Twitch.tv, YouTube, and Vimeo.com. Version 1.7.5 has now been released by George Sokianos and includes many fixes. To find out more, please have a look here.
«Report+», a ReAction-based utility, has been updated by James Jacobs. It has received an enhanced icon processor and gotten miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes. It can be downloaded freely from OS4Depot.
On the 25th of August, Steffen Gutmann released the first version of BeeBase on AmigaOS 4. This is a relational, programmable database system with a GUI for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Amiga. It is well suited for managing structured data with clear semantics that can be organized into tables and fields. It can be regarded as an application development environment. You can find more information about the program on the website of the program. https://beebase.sourceforge.io/index.php
Many people enjoy using emulators on their computers. For those of you who enjoy doing this on your AmigaOS 4 computer, I can happily report that the emulator «Mednafen» has been updated to version 0.135 by Ryan Dixon. With this program, you can emulate Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear, Sony PlayStation, SNES, NES, Neo Geo Pocket (Color), and many others! A download is available at OS4Depot.
Here is a big one from the well-known developer kas1e! He has ported Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy for GL4ES! You can read all about it in the news posted on Amigans.net via this link. Brilliant stuff!
Fans of shoot’em up games will probably give a thumbs up to the news that EntwiclerX is bringing the game Super Star Blast to AmigaOS 4. This game is, as some of you might know, currently available on platforms such as Steam and Xbox. Super Star Blast features a single-player campaign, 2-4 player co-op mode (split-screen), an upgrade center (agility, firepower, shield, ships), unique enemies, and challenging levels of increasing difficulty. The final version will require Warp3DNova and a compatible graphics card. This means that it should run on Sam460, AmigaOne X1000, and AmigaOne X5000.
This is not the only game EntwicklerX has been busy with. They have also released M.A.C.E. Tower Defense! Yep, a brand new commercial AmigaOS 4 game! Nice! It is a classic tower defense game with an in-game shop. There you can purchase new towers or upgrade existing ones. You can also buy unique items. In-game coins are earned by defeating bosses, saving lives, and unlocking new maps. M.A.C.E. Tower Defense requires an AmigaOS 4.1 computer with Warp3D Nova.
If that did not satisfy your hunger for games on AmigaOS 4, then I have one last bit of news for you in this regard. Are you ready? Do you want to know what it is? 😉 Well, OK, I will tell you now… It is a brand new port by Sinan Gurkan of the strategy game «Augustus»! Yes, finally «Caesar III» is coming to our platform! 🙂 That is magnificent news because this strategy game is excellent (in my opinion) and well known amongst many retro gamers. The port was based on the MorphOS one by BeWorld.
Matthias Münch has ported an AES-256 ECB cipher file-based encryption tool to AmigaOS 4. If you want to have a look, here is the link to the utility. He also recently ported libxslt with shared and static libraries.
Weather.py, a DWYWWI-Ware program (Do What You Like With It), has been released by Nick Clover with help from Andy Broad. This utility grabs an RSS feed from the BBC Weather and converts it so that you can display your local weather in Workbench or on the Dopus5 title bar.
Capehill provides the first release candidate 1 for version 2.24.0 of the multimedia library SDL for AmigaOS 4.1. This should make it easier for programmers to develop portable applications and is used by numerous open source games, amiga-news.de reports. You can find out more about this on their website.
Miscellaneous
Now over to hardware. As you know, ACube Systems are busy making a new batch of Sam460LE motherboards for AmigaOS 4 fans out there. This month they could report that production is well underway and that the boards will be ready in time for the Amiga37 event in Germany. This should be great news for those who pre-ordered since the board will be available in about two months. Well done, ACube Systems! We must have an alternative to the very expensive AmigaOne X5000 range. Once again ACube delivers when it comes to providing this. 🙂
A new issue of Amiga Future is on the way and will arrive in the beginning of September. In issue 158 you can read about Vanilla Conquer, the Command & Conquer port I wrote about earlier in this report, and much more.
The current game competition at Amigans.net in Huenison from Retream is nearing an end with a deadline today to submit your best score. Currently, the user «mcleppa» is in 1st place, with 328gts behind in 2nd place, and Levellord in 3rd. Good luck in the contest folks!
That was all the news for now. My fingers are tired of all the writing since this report become much longer than I had anticipated! 🙂
Until next time
Thanks again for visiting my blog and for reading. Also a big thank you to everyone for all the positive feedback I’ve received since last time. It is much appreciated! 🙂
Thanks again and see you in another edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Round-up!
Best regards,
Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler
PS: What a month! 🙂 So many great releases!
Gaming on AmigaOS 4 
Thanks for the extensive write-up – that’s a lot of news for Amiga users. What concerns me though is that you also draw attention to the Enhancer software. As far as I understand it, A-EON is trying to introduce non-compatible OS replacement programs that risk splitting the AmigaOS community. Any AmigaOS friend should really reject that, right…?
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