AmigaOS 4 News – February 2023
Hi everyone!
Welcome to a new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. 🙂 Plenty of interesting news this month, perhaps extra interesting for those who like to play games. 😉
Please read on to discover what has happened in the world of AmigaOS 4 in February!
Thanks again for visiting, and see you in another monthly roundup here on Gaming on AmigaOS 4!
Software News
The first news this month comes from the demogroup Void, who released a brand new issue of the music-pack Feedback for AmigaOS 4. As it happens, I’m a member of Void and made this production in Hollywood. Rahow created the panel, Powerslave made the intro-picture, while the music included comes from the 4-channel music competition at GERP 2023, which was held in Skövde, Sweden. I really hope to do more AmigaOS 4 projects in the future, so time will show what happens. Right now we have our eyes on the Revision 2023 demoparty. 😉
Version 1.34 of the AFA-Viewer has been released. With this program, you can use the Amiga Future Archive-DVD in a very effective and easy way. Find the item you are searching for, then double-click on the right line to read it straight away.
Speaking of Amiga Future, Michael Christoph has released version 1.05 of Amiga Future Everywhere, a news-related Docky. With this one installed, you’ll be notified of Amiga news in different ways.
If you enjoy playing the different card games created by Juan Carlos Herran Martin, you might be interested in his newest program for creating card sets. With the SDK, you can make decks for HLE-Poker, Blackjuan, and Siete y Media. Templates and examples are included.
Sinan Gurkan has returned with a new port! This time it is the classic racing game Death Rally from Remedy and 3D Realms (Apogee Software). It is based on the MorphOS port by BeWorld and BSzili. Original game assets are needed to run the game. Fortunately, the game is available for free on Steam, but you can also use the MorphOS version to obtain the data files. Requirements is AmigaOS 4 and SDL2.
AmiArcadia has been updated to version 29.36 by James Jacobs. The latest version includes miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.
AmiSSL received an update to version 5.7. 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.
Bernd Assenmacher has released version 1.4 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. 🙂 He has also released a new version of LhArchiver, which helps you to create LHA archives intuitively, easily, and fast.
AnimPlayer is a program that can play several formats, such as ANIM5, ANIM7, ANIM8(L), ANIM16, and YAFA. You can also play FLIC files. It supports playlists, drag and drop, as well as resizing. One of the new additions in version 2.4 is the ability to save a loaded animation as a GIF-anim.
If you need an application that can extract data from a wide range of file formats, you might be interested in Deark. Developed by Jason Summers, this tool can help you get data from everything from AMOS ABK files to Doom WAD. You can read more about supported formats, as well as download the utility from OS4Depot.
Now, one of the bigger news this month is the port of Fallout 2 to AmigaOS 4. This game was a big deal back in the day and it is still being enjoyed by many people today. Thanks to the hard work of Sinan Gurkan, as well as BeWorld for the MorphOS port, we can now enjoy this game on our platform. 🙂
Fallout 2 is an RPG developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay. The game takes place in year 2241, 80 years after the events in the first Fallout game, and 164 years after the atomic war which reduced most of the world to a nuclear wasteland. As a player, you take the role of The Chosen One, the grandchild of the main character in the first game. Your quest is to save your tribal village. The game is in isometric 3D and contains excellent graphics, atmospheric music, and a ton of quests and interesting stories to read. I used to play this a lot of years ago and it is still one of my favorite games. The port is work in progress, so all features are not yet supported.
Version 2.2 of Mr. Wolf, a Pool-friendly SNTP time sync client, has been released by Chris Young. New in this release is a bug fix that corrects a bug where Mr. Wolf would wait 15 minutes in certain circumstances (DELAY etc).
Cabextract is a program by Stuart Caie to extract Microsoft Cabinet files. Cabinet (.CAB)-files are a form of archive, which Microsoft use to distribute their software and things like Windows Font Packs. This program unpacks these files.
Thomas Kölsch has released version 1.1 of AmyStromWifiSwitch. This utility lets you control the power of the myStrom WiFi Switch.
On Amigans.net, we can read that Hollywood 10: Xcelicious is now available!
Version 10.0 is a major update and comes with many new features. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what’s new in Hollywood 10:
- Almost 100 new commands for lots of new programming fun!
- Text and font engine is now completely extensible by plugins
- Support for the macOS arm64 platform (Apple Silicon)
- Vector text objects are now supported
- Layers can now be grouped or merged
- Support for char spacing and line spacing
- Popup menus (aka context menus) are now supported
- New serialization modes for the JSON serializer
- Advanced console functions for creating TUIs
- Support for filesystem plugins
- Greatly improved joystick support
- Support for AmigaInput on AmigaOS 4
- MagicBeacon and Ranchero support
- Greatly improved plugin interface with user tags
- Custom vector brushes can now be used
- Advanced locale functions like date and number formatting
- Ready for at least three 10.0-exclusive plugins!
- Over 100 new pages of PDF documentation, 1272 pages altogether!
- Lots of other changes, optimizations, and bug fixes
Check it out on the official website. 🙂
Daniel Jedlicka, a.k.a. Trixie, has returned with a brand new version, 1.6, of Rave, a sound editor for AmigaOS 4 compatible computers. New features and updates include:
- Import and export of raw files.
- Saving in the Ogg Vorbis format.
- Reworked the IFF-8SVX saver, which now also supports stereo.
- Saving WAV files is no longer limited to PCM: several other data formats and
encodings can be selected in the WAV configuration window. - Reworked the MP3 saver configuration window for better user control.
- When using the Save function, compressed files (MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis) are no
longer overwritten silently, without giving the user a chance to review/adjust
the compression parameters. - Added a Save As button in the program toolbar.
- Added a Pause button in the transport bar.
- Linked with the latest versions of libogg and libvorbis for improved Ogg Vorbis support.
- Various other smaller improvements and fixes.
- Updated documentation.
The new version is available for download on OS4Depot.
Other News
The gaming competitions on Amigans.net continues. This month we play VoxelNoid, a fun game by Cherry Darling. The only problem with this game is that the music sticks in my mind after playing it. 😉 In its core, VoxelNoid is a break-out-variant with 3D voxels: the bricks, balls, extras, even the bat, all voxels. If a brick is destroyed then it explodes into the tiny voxels it is built of, filling the playfield with voxel debris. As soon as the ball approaches such debris it starts to swirl around and flies to the bat, where it is converted into energy to charge the laser. If you want to have a look at our games competitions on Amigans.net, please click here.
amiga-news.de reports that Martina Hřebcová has released part 4 of her extensive and detailed report on PowerPC hardware. In this article, she compares the Micro A1-C, Sam440ep, Efika 5200b, and the Mac Mini G4. I highly recommend you check it out by clicking here. 🙂
Speaking of amiga-news.de, they also reported that Andrea (afxgroup) Palmate created a fork of the official clib2 library, included in adtools. The library is exclusively for AmigaOS 4 to make it easy to maintain and to be able to add all the missing clib2 functions that are hard to add on 68k Amigas.
The website Obligement has published an interview with Nikola Tomic a.k.a DJ Nick. The interview was done by Ras Voja a.k.a vox. Here you can read about DJ Nick’s career and his usage of Amiga, such as the AmigaOS 4 platform.
Croatian Amiga WARP Organization published two new calendars for the year 2023 that are available in PDF format in English and Croatian language. The tradition from the year 1997 continues and calendars are free for download on the Amiga WARP Organization webpage.
In a thread on the Amigans.net forum, m3x from ACube Systems reports that they’ve received new Ethernet chips to replace the faulty ones. These have been sent to the factory.
In February, I updated my article called “Where to buy AmigaOS 4 compatible systems?”. I’ve contacted several shops and received information about what they have to offer. You can read it here.
Until next time
Many thanks for reading and for visiting my blog. Also thanks to all who are following the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup series, as well as sending in feedback and commenting on forums. It is much appreciated! 🙂
Thanks again, and see you in the next AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup!
Best regards,
Puni/Void a.k.a AmigaOldSkooler
Gaming on AmigaOS 4 