Amiga & AROS Archive

"Hyperion Entertainment CVBA announces the immediate availability of Update 2 for AmigaOS 4.1 for AmigaOne, SAM440EP and Pegasos II for registered users. Note that for this update you must have previously installed AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1. Installation of this Update 2 is required for the upcoming public alpha of Timberwolf . This is a minor update which contains mostly bugfixes."

I really wonder how I missed this one. While I'm sure most of you have already been playing this, I only discovered it a few days ago and have been hooked ever since. It's called Digital: A Love Story, and it's an interactive story set in 1988, written/created by Christine Love. The interface of the game is the Amiga Workbench, and you progress through the story by reading, replying, and hacking BBSs using your modem.

It seems like only yesterday, but in fact it's already six months ago. July last year, we published our review of AmigaOS 4.1 running on ACube's sam440ep motherboard, and here we are, six months later, and Hyperion has released AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1. This free update brings with it quite a number of new features, and since I still have the sam440ep on my desk, I could test the new features first-hand.

After days of wild speculation and ridiculously fast-growing threads on AmigaWorld.net, we finally know most of what we need to know about the new Amiga. This is not just a random PowerPC evaluation board that you can stuff in a generic case - no, this is an all-new system with a custom motherboard, and some very, very interesting innovations - like a fully customisable co-processor. Twenty-five years after the introduction of the first Amiga, this is one heck of a machine.

AROS distribution Icaros Desktop v1.2 has been released. AROS is a lightweight, portable and independent operating system aiming to recreate the original AmigaOS experience on any platform and, after many years of development, has finally reached a good degree of reliability. Icaros Desktop provides a full, already pre-configured Amiga-like desktop environment on any PC, packing it with many useful or entertaining applications, games and so on.

An effort is currently under way to port the Firefox web browser to the Amiga operating system. This effort goes by the name Project Timberworlf, and is the latest in a long line of efforts to port Firefox to alternative operating systems. This raises the question: is Firefox really suited for these small platforms?

It's really been an Amiga week, hasn't it? As such, it seems only fitting to close this week off with some seriously epic news from the Amiga community. As most of you will know, Hyperion and Amiga, Inc. have been embroiled in a tough legal battle over the distribution and development rights of the AmigaOS, and all its associated trademarks. The epic news is that this situation is now completely and utterly resolved.

The port of the Amiga USB stack Poseidon, whose bounty was reached in May, to AROS is almost complete and today officially entered its beta-testing phase, which will last a week. If no show-stopping bugs appear during testing, Poseidon will be officially added to AROS and its sources will be opened under the terms of the AROS Public License, similar to the Mozilla one. The AROS team, however, needs volounteers to test the current version on a wider range of PC configurations.

A new update for Icaros Desktop, the leading AROS distribution, has been released. It includes some new programs and features like the Protrekkr music tracker, the DosBox emulator, but this release is mainly a "mantainance one": it includes dozens of big and small bug fixes, a better desktop environment and improved support for Amiga Forever and 68K applications. Icaros Desktop 1.1.2 is available in two formats: the whole package on a Live DVD for new installations, and an update CD for Icaros 1.1.1 users. The update can be automatically downloaded, mounted, and installed directly from Icaros using the brand new LiveUpdater program, also available on the Icaros site.

While I'm still chipping away at my AmigaOS 4.1/sam440ep review (try writing a thesis and a large review at the same time), Cloanto released AmigaForever 2009. AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.

It's been a really, really long time since the last status update from the AROS team - the last one dates back to before Christmas. AROS was still progressing nicely, as evidenced by the Icaros Desktop releases we've reported on, but it's still nice to hear it straight from the horse's mouth. The AROS guys have given another status update, and a long one to boot. There's also a computer for sale with AROS pre-installed.

Icaros Desktop 1.1.1 has been released. Icaros Desktop is a distribution of the AROS operating system. "This newer version provides the latest system files, including the newer ata.device from Neil Cafferkey, which fixes many incompatibility issues and should help people who couldn't try AROS before, to boot it on their computers. This new releases includes also an improved version of the OWB browser and fixes some system issues encountered with the 1.1 release. For this reason, this update is available in two versions: an update CD for Icaros Desktop 1.1 users and a complete full live! DVD for new users."

Despite the recent emergence of several new ways to actually run AmigaOS 4.0, the supply of machines is still extremely small, and not very future proof. As such, one of the most recurring questions within the Amiga community is why don't they port the darn thing to x86?

Stanislaw Sszymczyk accepted the AROS browser bounty last December, ten months after Robert Norris' work that provided a partially working Webkit port. Now, after just three months he delivers the first public beta of the AROS port of OWB.