Amiga & AROS Archive

The VA2000 is a FPGA based graphics card for Amiga 2000/3000/4000 computers featuring high resolutions and color depth over DVI-D/HDMI. It has a hacker-friendly expansion header for upgrades and custom mods and features a slot for MicroSD cards that can be mounted in AmigaOS.

Now it is super fast because it uses the latest WinUAE emulator running on Wine. This concept, paradoxically, is much faster and actually more stable than the previous E-UAE edition. ​

AmiKit 9 for Mac also includes the Rabbit Hole which allows you to launch Mac apps from AmiKit desktop! You can also open Amiga files with your favourite Mac apps!

Viva Amiga is a wonderful look at the the history of the platform, the people who built it, and the users who loved it. The opening title says it all: "One Amazing Computer. One chance to save the company. One chance to win the PC wars." This message sets the stage nicely for a dramatic and passionate tale.

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 pre-release version of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update #1 is an official update to AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition released by Hyperion Entertainment in 2014. It is the combined result of many many years of effort by the core AmigaOS developers, translators and beta testers and includes a number of bug fixes and updates to the original AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition release.

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.

Three months after v2.1.2 release, we've built a little update which fixes some of the issues found with applications and introduces some new ones as well. Almost no system file has been updated, but with this release you'll find a brand new version of Mapparium (which now allows to compute routes), a new, more secure build of OWB with upgraded openssl to 1.0.1t, the latest version of SimpleMail and PortablE (which was unluckily left-out by mistake in version 2.1.2). But this is not just a "refresh" update, it also includes some new applications like the FinalBurnAlpha emulator, meteMP3 player and, why not, the ColorCLI scripts, which will help customizing your system a little more.

And yet, from our collective memories, we all believe there was some sort of Commodore product in nearly half of US households that owned a home computer, not to mention sales worldwide. The "other people" had various Atari computers or green monochrome Apple II or II+, Tandy or, ultimately DOS Frankensteins. We'll be nice and not mention the sad Coleco Adam, since most everyone has forgotten this lonely child.

But are our memories real? Was what we saw around us true, or were we living in a bubble?

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.

The first killer app, VisiCalc, came out in 1979. It turned an ordinary Apple II into a financial planning tool that was more powerful and flexible than anything the world had ever seen. A refined version of this spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, became the killer app that put IBM PCs in offices and homes around the world. The Macintosh, which floundered in 1985 after early adopter sales trailed off, found a profitable niche in the new world of desktop publishing with two killer apps: Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop.

To keep up with the Joneses, the Amiga needed a killer app to survive - it found one with the Video Toaster.

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.

Generation Amiga has reported today a tweet from Hacker Fantastic saying that the Amiga OS source has been leaked, including both Kickstart and Workbench. Looking at the @hackerfantastic's tweet, there is another user with the handle @TheWack0lian that offers a link to download the OS in a 130MB tar file which expands to 540MB of source code.

Apparently the source code is really related to Amiga OS. The tar file name refers to OS 3.1 but folders from the source code refers to version 4, which could mean the source code is pretty much up to date.

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.