AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup – March 2023

AmigaOS 4 News – March 2023

Hi everyone!

Welcome to a brand new edition of the AmigaOS 4 Monthly Roundup. 🙂

Please read on to discover what has happened in the world of AmigaOS 4 in March! For those of you who likes to play games, there are several good news this time.

Thanks again for visiting, and see you in another monthly roundup here on Gaming on AmigaOS 4!

Software News

The final version of the game High-Low-Equal Poker by Juan Carlos Herran Martin has been released! This version fixes bugs, as well as makes it playable in a window of 800×600 pixels. He also released The Widow II e-Card 2 and Evil’s Return e-card, which advertises the upcoming The Widow II adventure point-and-click game, using Hollywood. He states that this game will be available if the fans send him an e-mail, due to the hard work involved in programming it, as well as the work behind all the artwork.

Raziel has uploaded a new version of the well-known ScummVM to OS4Depot. This time it is version 2.7.0. For a comprehensive changelog, please visit https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/commits/. You can download the program here. It is great to see development continues with this fantastic program. There are so many good games to play with ScummVM, such as The Curse of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

InstallerLG version 1.0.2 was released on the 4th of March by Ola Söder. This is a reimplementation of the Installer-utility included with AmigaOS as of version 2.1. InstallerLG aims to be fully compatible with the original as described in the V44.10 documentation. Most resource limitations found in the Commodore implementation are gone, and the GUI has been replaced by an MUI / Zune-based one.

Version 9.0.1378 of Vim has been released! It is a highly configurable text editor. MUI-Vim is maintained by sTix (Ola Söder) and ported to AmigaOS 4 by kas1e. It has support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats, powerful search and replace functions, and much more.

Among its features are:

Persistent, multi-level undo tree
Extensive plugin system
Support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
Powerful search and replace
Integrates with many tools

The new version is available for download here.

libFLAC 1.4.2 was released on the 8th of March. FLAC is open-source software that can reduce the amount of storage space needed to store digital audio signals without needing to remove information in doing so. The files read and produced by this software are called FLAC files. As these files (which follow the FLAC format (https://xiph.org/flac/format.html)) can be read from and written to by other software as well, this software is often referred to as the FLAC reference implementation. You can download it here.

Edgar Schwan has returned with a new version of AmiCygnix! 1.7r2 brings innovations around the topic “start of external programs” (remote start). In addition, a Unix shell and an Amiga shell adapted to AmiCygnix are now available. With the complete revision of the utility library “libaos4util”, some bugs have been fixed. The addition of the coreutils package also removes some dependencies on the OS4 SDK.

New in 1.7r2:

The English GUI file for the prefs editor “XServer-Access” was broken. Is fixed now.
The “echo” command of coreutils was buggy. Is fixed now.
Slightly bug-fixed AmiCygnix Unix shell (acxsh, a special version of the ABC-shell).
The integrated root certificates for GnuTLS and OpenSSL have been updated.
Updated Italian translations. Thanks to Samir Hawamdeh!
Fixed a minor bug in the Install script.

An SDK for Hollywood 10 has been released by Andreas Falkenhahn. This is the full Hollywood SDK required to build plugins. The SDK contains extensive documentation on Hollywood’s plugin interface, all required C includes as well as the source codes and makefiles of several example plugins.

Compression is a utility by Achim Pankalla for creating PDF files. Version 18.20 is an early BETA version, which you can download from OS4Depot.

Videntium Picta by Juan Carlos Herran Martin is a picture viewer respecting the privacy of the user. It has no recent files list and no playlists. It is portable, so you can use it from a USB stick, CD-ROM, etc. Version 2.60 was released on the 15th of March. You can find information about all supported formats and functions here.

A new release of the Vintage Song Player is out! It supports a wide range of formats, such as MP3, MOD, MED, SID, S3M, and many more. You can control the player with either the keyboard or the mouse (or both).

Earlier, we reported that Tuomas Hokka had released an update to Seq, a MIDI sequencer. He is now back with a new version. For an overview of the changes, please have a look here. You can download the program from OS4Depot.

Have you been eager to play Heroes of Might and Magic on your AmigaOS 4 computer? If yes, then you’ll be happy to read that Fheroes2 has been ported by Sinan Gurkan and AfxGroup! The port is based on the one done for MorphOS by BeWorld. Fheroes2 is a recreation of the Heroes of Might and Magic II game engine. You can purchase the complete game from GOG or download the demo. The game runs at about 30 frames per second on an AmigaOne X5000, but only 4 to 5 on weaker systems.

Sylpheed is an email program based on the GTK+ GUI Toolkit. The design and the user interface are similar to many well-known e-mail programs from the Windows world, e.g. Outlook Express. Version 3.0.3r3 was released on the 18th of March. The original was created by Hiroyuki Yamamoto, AmigaOS 4 port was by Edgar Schwan.

The Maestrix 2 has been released for AmigaOS 4 by Damien Stewart! This is a MaestroPro Maestix driver simulator that redirects audio to AHI to allow applications with MaestroPro support to work over AHI.

New features in the version 2.1 release of The Maestrix: Reloaded:

Includes The Maestrix Tester! This will test that the library is working and can play a sound.

Updated OctaMEDIC. Coming again to the rescue for MorphOS to heal OctaMED. Now clock works and copyright requesters are disabled.

Support for extended dual stereo audio streams.

Fixed a bug where an oversized input buffer in buffers mode resulted in playback length being cut short.

Version 41 API support.

You can download it from OS4Depot.

Now for a strange game called Terri-Fried. Everyone is dead except for… an egg. Humanity is depending on you to make sure this egg survives. Balance power and precision in Terri-Fried, a game made in 72 hours with raylib for Ludum Dare 46! Right-click and drag your mouse to form a trajectory for the egg, and release the mouse button to send it flying! The game ends when the egg falls into the boiling lava. To get a high score, aim for the falling platforms and collect as many coins as you can! The original was created by PolyMars. The AmigaOS 4 port was done by Andrea Palmate. We played this game in the Amigans.net monthly games competition in March. 🙂 Thanks to Levellord for the screenshot.

More gaming action! PETSCII Robots SDL has been brought over to AmigaOS 4! The authors are Vesa Halttunen (SDL port) and David Murray. George Sokianos ported it to AmigaOS 4.

AmiGemini version 0.10 was released on the 20th of March. It was created by Karl Jeacle and uploaded to OS4Depot by Sami Hawamdeh. It is a browser for Gemini, Spartan, Gopher, and Finger.

AmiSSL received an update to version 5.8. 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.

More gaming news! Most of you have probably played the good, old Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo. 🙂 Now you can enjoy it on AmigaOS 4 as well thanks to Amigasoft.net! A classic game well worth playing. Check out uNext – the Super Mario clone!

A new version of V.A.M.P. (Virtual Amiga Multimedia Player) has been released by Templario and Samo79. This is a multimedia player made with Hollywood 10. With the program, you can play a wide range of formats. A full list is available here.

NM2MW by Thomas Rapp is a program that properly translates NewMouse events into native IECLASS_MOUSEWHEEL events.

MCE, Multi-game Character Editor, is a user-friendly open-source editor of character files, saved games, high score tables, levels, and graphics for 108 games. James Jacobs, the author, has now released version 14.11, which includes an enhanced TV Sports Basketball team editor and bug fixes.

Version 1.1 of the port of Tiberian Dawn/Vanilla TD was released on the 25th of March by Sinan Gurkan. It is based on the current development version of Vanilla Conquer for MorphOS by Mark “Bigfoot” Olsen. This archive contains the “Vanilla TD” part of the Vanilla Conquer project which, together with the data files from Command & Conquer, allows you to play a game that’s very similar to Command & Conquer but isn’t Command & Conquer.

Sinan Gurkan also released version 1.1 of Red Alert/Vanilla RA for AmigaOS 4. This one is also based on the MorphOS port by Mark “Bigfoot” Olsen.

AmiArcadia has been updated to version 29.37 by James Jacobs. The latest version includes miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.

H. Kanning has released version 53.1 of the NVMe driver for AmigaOS4. NVMe is short for Non-Volatile Memory express. It’s a transfer protocol for the attachment of mass storage to a computer. Unlike SATA, NVMe is specifically designed for solid-state flash memory. There is no separate storage controller. Instead, the NVMe SSD is directly connected to the PCIe bus through an M.2 slot. The author has a warning in the readme at OS4Depot though, which reads as follows: “First of all: !! DON’T USE THIS DRIVER. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING SO YOU WILL MOST LIKELY LOSE ALL YOUR DATA. !!”. Download at your own risk. 🙂

Juan Carlos Herran Martin, a.k.a. Templario, is once again back with a new release! This time it is version 5.10 of the utility AnimWebConverter. With this program, you can play or convert animations in various formats, such as GIF, YAFA, LBM, and more. He has done a lot of work in March, releasing several productions on OS4Depot. 🙂 That reminds me he also made an update to the PDF viewer Grimorium, which was compiled to use the latest Hollywood 10.0.

Thomas Kölsch has released version 1.2 of AmyStromWifiSwitch. This utility lets you control the power of the myStrom WiFi Switch. Changes include removing bugs with IP address and powertextbox.

Near the end of the month, on the 30th of March, version 2.04 of myBlockTetris was released by Michael Christoph. This game is similar to Tetris, but there is a big difference. Here, the pieces do not fall into the playing field, so you must select where to put them yourself. You’ll always have three random pieces to fit on the board.

Version 2.1 of Avalanche, a GUI for xadmaster.library using the ReAction gadget set, has been released by Chris Young. An overview of the changes since the last version can be found on OS4Depot.

Misc

A new issue of Amiga Future (March/April 2023) has been released! In the magazine, you can read about Billy Frontier for AmigaOS 4, RNOTunes, Wonderboy, and much more!

You can purchase the magazine directly from the publisher or from an Amiga store.

On the 4th of March, ACube Systems reported the following:

Dear customers,

We are pleased to announce that, finally, after all the delays we suffered, all the remaining Sam460LE boards were delivered to us from the assembly line, and we are finalizing the QA and functional tests. After all the stress tests for every board are completed, we will start shipping the boards to customers.
We plan to start shipping at the end of next week.

Thanks again for your patience.

It is great to see that the problem with the faulty Ethernet controllers has been sorted out and that the remaining boards are now on their way to customers. 🙂 They do have three Sam460LE motherboards in stock in the webshop. You can click here if you are interested in having a look, and perhaps making a purchase.

HunoPPC is continuing his work on the Doom III port for AmigaOS 4. Amigaone.pl on YouTube recently published a time demo video showing the game running in Ultra High settings.

On Amigans.net we have played the game Terri-Fried in the monthly games competition. If you too would like to participate in the contests, please header over to Amigans.net and get registered (or participate directly if you are already a forum member). 🙂

Until next time

Many thanks to you 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

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