Amiga & AROS Archive

Hyperion Entertainment is proud to announce the immediate release of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 for all supported systems including PowerPC equipped 68K Amiga machines. Building on the existing AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition platform, Update 1 is the culmination of many man-months of work by our dedicated team of AmigaOS developers, translators and beta testers. It delivers a selection of new features and a host of bug fixes.

The SDK Browser provides any Amiga Programmer a quick reference tool into the live AmigaOS4 SDK (Development Tools) installation on your AmigaONE, via a 100% graphical (GUI) based tool.

It can help you find the format (prototype) for any AmigaOS4 system call as well as lookup a specific structure reference, method, tag item, what-have-you, quicker than any other tool. Or, you can simply use it as a great way to wander through the AmigaOS4 development documentation (AutoDocs, Includes, etc.) to learn more about how to program for this great machine and its powerful operating system. There is a great deal of (largely untapped) power available with the "standard" OS if you only know where to look.

Based on VS1063 chip, it can playback many music formats in full 16-bit 48Khz audio and additionally mix with the Amiga's native Paula sound. When it is decoding and playing back a MPEGA audio file or various other formats, it frees up the Amiga to do other things. An MHI driver is supplied with the card for AmigaAmp and other various music playing software.

Hyperion Entertainment is pleased to announce the first official Workbench 3.1 and Kickstart 3.1 updates in over twenty years for Classic Amiga systems. The new versions, which have have been re-built from the original source code, include a number of enhancements and bug fixes and are fully compatible with both real Amiga hardware and Classic Amiga emulation software.

In terms of planning our lives around what our TVs spit out, we've come a long way from the overly condensed pages of TV Guide. In fact, the magazine was already looking awful obsolete in the 1980s and 1990s, when cable systems around the country began dedicating entire channels to listing TV schedules.

The set-top box, the power-sucking block that serves as the liaison between you and your cable company, is a common sight in homes around the country these days.

But before all that was the Commodore Amiga, a device that played a quiet but important role in the cable television revolution.

You might be asking yourself, less stripes? No, not the colorful stripes on your breadbin badge. We're talking about the stripes on the video image. The same stripes that we've all become accustomed to over the many years of playing Commodore 64 games, watching demos and carrying on with modems and BBS's. These stripes, which are actually interference, come in a variety of flavors: horizontal, vertical, and checkerboard patterns. The intensity of the stripes also varies from machine to machine. Some say with that these stripes become even more apparent when using a C64 with a modern LCD monitor.

Whether you love them or hate them, there is a solution for easing or even completely eliminating the stripes all together. The user e5frog on lemon64.com came up with a design for a carrier PCB that would sit between the VIC-II and the motherboard. It's purpose was to invert certain signals back into itself, each with an adjustable degree. These signals AEC, PHI0 and chroma are all thought to contribute to the stripes on the final output image of the C64. It's a fascinating discussion that I urge you to read.

A-EON Technology is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Warp3D Nova, its advanced 2D/3D shader based graphics system for AmigaOS 4 supporting selected RadeonHD 7xxx and Radeon Rx graphics cards with Southern Islands series GPUs.

Icaros Desktop 2.1 might be named "the handlers release", but also "the YouTube one", since the best enhancement over the previous versions are the addition of new NTFS and EX-FAT filesystem handlers and the free, read-only version of GoogleDrive handler, a "driver" which allows to mount your Google Drive handler onto AROS as if it was a normal USB stick or a CD-ROM. But that's not the only good news: we've talked bout YouTube because Deadwood did the miracle again, and we can now enjoy HTML5 video as well, playing your favourite contents from YouTube and other sites. But there have been lots of little/big additions, fixed and enhancements.

The days between last Christmas and New Year were actually clouded by the sad fact that the source code of AmigaOS 3.1 and additional content dating back to 1994 was published and widely spread without permission of the rights-holder. Note that no code of AmigaOS 4.x was released or distributed.

While this would be already more than enough of a reason to care about the unauthorised disclosure and distribution, it is also the very same settlement agreement which made all of this possible in the first place, which contractually requires Hyperion to enforce and protect any intellectual property rights associated with AmigaOS including the AmigaOS 3.1 source-code.

Two major developments related to Linux hosted version of AROS reached significant milestones in November. Jyrki Koivisto continued development of the USB driver that communicates directly to Linux USB subsystem and brought it to a state where storage devices now can be accessed on the AROS side. Second development, the ALSA based AHI driver developed by Krzysztof Smiechowicz reached release level and is now included in the AROS nightly builds. It replaces the obsolete OSS based driver. This development was done based on bounty hosted by Power2People.org and this bounty has been closed as well.

While on topic of bounties, a bounty to deliver a working implementation of FUSE filesystem and read/write driver for NTFS filesystem has been completed by Frederik Wikstrom. The bounty was also hosted by Power2People.org. The sources of the port are not yet integrated into AROS, but are freely available on GitHub.

A-EON Technology Ltd is pleased to announce that Tabor, a new powerful, low cost, entry level PowerPC motherboard, which forms part of our A1200 series, is about to undergo beta testing.

As part of our drive to create more powerful lower cost, entry level hardware and expand the Next-Generation user base we commissioned Ultra Varisys to create a new PowerPC motherboard. The result is Tabor, a 170 mm x 170 mm mother-board based on a Freescale QorIQ P1022 32-bit e500v2 dual-core PowerPC processor running at 1.2 GHz. Prototypes have already been shipped to key developers and members of A-EON Technology’s Core Linux support team and, as a result, several Linux distributions are already up and running on the Tabor board. Working in cooperation with ACube srl, a beta test programme is about to commence, which is already over-subscribed.

With the permission of Electronic Arts, Inc. the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1986 version I of DeluxePaint. There are 89 files of C language source, comprising almost 17,000 lines of code in about 474 KB of text.