Hyperion and the team of AmigaOS 3.2 developers show their dedication with an updated release of the Native Developer Kit.
The new NDK was released on June 30th 2021. According to the file description, it improves compatibility with different compiler environments. Also there seem to be "strategic" changes, simplifying future updates (see "ReadMe" picture below).
Probably not directly related to the NDK's contents, but also mentioned in the file details is what appears to be a new strategy of distribution with wider availability through additional sources.
An odd feature of this latest release (just like rel. 2) might be that it's incomplete by design (see "ReadMe" picture below), and it speaks of a "worthwhile endeavour" of "seeking out on earlier NDKs" - umh, maybe not exactly "worthwhile". (But we've done the work for you, see link at end of article.)
Whatever the case, this is certainly another welcome update, and a must-have for all Amiga developers.
If you don't have one of the earlier - complete - NDKs, you can get the "Amiga Developer CD 2.1" with NDK3.9 (yes, 3.9 comes before 3.2 in Amiga land) and lots of other stuff from your preferred vendor, or download NDK3.9 from Haage&Partner's website - here's a link: https://www.haage-partner.de/download/AmigaOS/NDK39.lha
The "Amiga Art Contest 2021" has begun! There has never been a shortage of creativity on the Amiga, and once again this year Amiga artists can submit their work to 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast's art contest.
Pixel graphics, 3d rendered graphics, photo retouche, sound modules, animation - pretty much everything "creative" is accepted as long as at least the final result has been created on an Amiga computer.
You can take a look at the 2019 and 2020 submissions to the contest for inspiration, if you like.
This year, a couple of nice little prizes for the winners in each category have been added, for extra creative motivation.
As always: good news on the Amiga gaming front, lots of stuff going on. A refreshing, very cool looking, almost-3D soccer game, an arcade driving game, a new clone of a very notorious modern classic, a point-and-click adventure, and the release of a new shoot-em-up.
Souverän Soccer, work in progress
Daniel "Daytona675x" Müßener, aka GoldenCode, is working on "Souverän Soccer", which is a remake of SNES game Super Formation Soccer (1992), aimed at stock Amiga 1200 and CD32 machines.
Next-Gen-Amiga gamers might have heard the author's name before, as he's also the creator of "Atomic Bomberman Fan Remake" for AmigaOS4/AROS/MorphOS.
"Souverän Soccer" is an attempt to recreate the bitmap-scaling, 3D-scrolling visual experience known from SNES graphics hardware on AGA Amigas, and from what we can tell so far it's a successful one. Low-res full screen graphics, redrawn at 50hz, with distance shading and copper gradients for hundreds of colors - not bad at all!
A very exciting, and promising, project, and another proof of the seemingly endless capabilities of the (AGA) Amiga, we're very much looking forward to some sort of public release.
Here's his latest work-in-progress video, published May 18th 2021, on his YouTube channel Dän Bänän:
From the people who brought us the awesome TinyInvaders, TinyBobble, TinyGalaga, and Tinyus, comes another nice production by the name of "Wrong Way Driver". It was released around April 2021, and works on all Amigas, no expansions required.
It's a simple, but great looking, great sounding, and well playable mini arcade game, in which you control your car along a six lane highway, driving the wrong way. You have to avoid oncoming traffic, and take care of your fuel supply by collecting fuel tanks. As all aBYSs productions, it looks polished and is technically flawless - you just have to admire the beautiful multi layered parallax scrolling, and smooth scaling of the player's car.
Now this is not a "full" game, more of a demonstration of parallax scrolling done with the Scorpion engine. And it's a clone of the most played, and most dangerous game ever, the one that must not be named. And it looks even more difficult and frustrating than the one game that must not be named.
(Well, of course it looks really good, and sounds as good. As far as "playability" goes in the-one-game-that-must-not-be-named type of games, this one is top notch, too.)
So for your own safety, we'll just leave you with a moment of silence here, to enjoy the beautiful parallax scrolling and music of "Flighty Fox" from the safe distance of your YouTube player, in a video from Saberman's channel:
In April 2021 substantial news were published about upcoming point-and-click adventure "Athanor 2" by Eric Safar and Francois Gutherz, a conversion of Safar's Amstrad/Schneider CPC game of the same name released a couple of years ago. Shortly after first screenshots from the Amiga version had been presented, a pre-release video was uploaded to YouTube.
A point-and-click adventure isn't about a complex physics engine, but all about graphics, storyline and atmosphere. And "Athanor 2" has tons of graphics, the very beautiful, handdrawn type.
An Atari ST version has been released previously, from which we can guess the Amiga physical release package contents: game floppy disks, a booklet/manual, some sort of coins with runic writings on them, a vial, a little octopus amulet, ...
The very promising "Inviyya" horizontal shoot-em-up game is delivering: With final versions released you can now experience it in it's fully polished glory, on your own Amiga and CD32!
Here you can watch a video from YouTube channel "Amiga Fan"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3SwMbf9Rc
...but of course you're much better off purchasing the actual game:
Boxed "Collector's" and "Budget" editions for Amiga (1MB RAM required) and Amiga CD32 are available at: https://www.polyplay.xyz
The boxed "Collector's Edition" features awesome stuff, including 3.5 inch floppy disk, MicroSD card with disk image and bonus material, a "mission patch" to iron onto your shirt, a booklet with short story (by Constantin Gillies), game manual, poster, and sticker!
The CD32 version media is an exclusive visual CD-ROM with transparency effect in Digipak, instead of floppy disk.
Again a good round of really nice stuff this time - an arcade remake, updates to OCS/ECS first person shooter "Citadel", some sort of "re-release" on AmiNet, a modern lightgun game ahead of it's time, and a little bonus for fans of platformers.
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
Yet another remake of an arcade classic, and yet another game built using the Scorpion engine. In Feb. 2021, an early alpha version of "Pitfall II" for Amiga was released to the public!
Activision's original "Pitfall II" for the Atari 2600 was a real stunner upon release, with its huuuuge playing area, context sensitive music, improved graphics, and more. It was later released by SEGA as an arcade game.
Highly active Amiga game (engine) developer Eric "earok" Hogan is working on this new version of "Pitfall II", which is based on the C64 version, and requires an Amiga 500. A little bit of acceleration (e.g. Amiga 1200) is recommended for smooth performance.
The game is in alpha stage at the moment, but it already very much looks like "Pitfall II"!
1995 game first-person shooter "Cytadela"/"Citadel" - from Poland is undergoing some updates by the original authors.
"Citadel" is certainly one of the better first-person-shooters on the Amiga, and probably the best that runs on OCS/ECS Amigas. It received very good reviews when it was first released.
In March 2021 the original authors annouced some updates to the original game. There are no to little gameplay changes planned, but some fixes and enhancements, like optimizations for faster Amigas, better animations, and things like that.
You can watch a video of "Cytadela"/"Citadel" running on a (emulated) high-spec Amiga on Kane's YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-k4-aK8Zk
It looks as if as of now no updates have been made available to the public, so a little more patience is required.
Meanwhile, you can download the original 1995's "Citadel" from Polish Amiga Portal (Polski Portal Amigowy) (Polish and English version available): https://www.ppa.pl/rodzynki/cytadela.html
Just a quick note about "Renegades Deluxe" from 2014, which is a new version of 1995 PD classic "Renegades":
"Renegades Deluxe" has recently been uploaded to AmiNet - which is great, because this beautiful 2-player-split-screen-deathmatch "Alien Breed" clone apparently hasn't been available elsewhere for some time.
Here's a video of "Renegades" and "Renegades Deluxe", including some background information and awesome prototype cover art, from CaptainNow Creations' YouTube channel:
Have you ever held a lightgun in your hands? I bet not everyone did, because most lightguns we know depend on the cathode ray of a CRT (cathode ray tube) TV. Many CRT screens, especially millions of home TVs, have been replaced with LCD flat screen ones over the last 20 years, so lots of lightguns became useless.
But with the help of increased CPU performance, HD video, kickstarter, and indiegogo, the Sinden Lightgun was created, or is still being created - a lightgun that works with LCD displays. Somehow, it wouldn't be long until Amigans picked up such a thing - and here we have it: near the end of Feb. 2021 the first new Amiga lightgun game in a looooooooooong time was shown to the public, Terminator-style shoot-em-up "Bean Vs The Animator"! (You can also play it with a mouse.)
The Sinden Lightgun doesn't seem to be widely available yet, and the game is currenly just an exclusive pre-release (see video below), no release dates or further updates have been published so far. But from what we can see there's some great artwork here, some serious atmosphere and level of difficulty, and a lot of shooting. Plus it's a game you can play with a lightgun, plus it supports a lightgun device so modern it's not even available - yay!
Watch a video of Amiga Bill from "The Guru Meditation" reviewing his exclusive edition of "Bean Vs The Animator" (2021-02-25):
(Out of respect for the author of the game and indieretronews - the game's preview video is set to "unlisted" on YouTube - let's just leave it here with this little note. Click the link for more details and game preview video. By the way, the game looks great.)
* * *
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for "Games galore #20"!
due to numerous legal changes, we've decided to discontinue sales through this shop. You may contact us at any time via media-net-point.de. We still have a lot of Amiga parts in stock. We ask for your understanding.
...we find this message from probably March 2020 (rough translation):
"
Dear customers,
due to the current situation regarding the Coronavirus we close our shop as of now until April 4th 2020 for the time being. Also we have to take care for our employees.
Open orders will still be processed!
We ask for your understanding.
Your Amistore.de Team
"
About two months later, it seems to have been replaced with the one that currently can be seen there. The Corona virus certainly leaves its marks all over the world.
Best wishes and good luck to Amistore.de team, hope to see them around (again)!
There wasn't too much noise surrounding the follow-up to AmigaOS3.1.4, but the patience has paid off, and now they're breaking the silence: It's been less than 24 hours since the completion and release of AmigaOS 3.2 has been announced via facebook, and Hyperion's website!
Great news for AmigaOS users: The next updated version of official classic AmigaOS has been released. Here's a quick rundown of some of the changes and new features:
ReAction GUI toolkit is included, with lots of bugfixes, and classes backported from AmigaOS4
"DAControl" and trackfile.device provide near-perfect ADF handling and integration. Amiga disk files can be created, formatted, erased, ejected, etc. and mounted via double-click on Workbench icon.
New help system and reference manual included
Improved AIFF, GIF, JPG, WAV, PNG, BMP, CDXL and ANIM datatypes, and new datatypes for icons (.info files) and ACBM images. AmigaGuide datatype can now display inline images, picture.datatype is much faster, sound.datatype supports up to 32 bit resolution, text datatype adds search functionality.
Workbench updates: title bar with date, CPU and tasks information, windows resizable from any border, windows can be iconified, window contents can be sorted increasing/decreasing, wheel mouse support
a partition mounter, and "find" utility
shell TAB autocompletion, configurable
a "history" command
updates to Early Startup Menu, including optional step-by-step execution of Startup-sequence
...and many more! This is really just a short excerpt from the official announcement. (Of course a new iconset is included, too.) See link below for full list.
AmigaOS3.2 is available on CD-ROM, containing ADFs for emulator use, a ready-to-run AmigaOS environment that can be copied to your harddisk, all Amiga models' disks and kickstart ROM images (oh, wow), and printable labels.
Congratulations to the developers!
Go to Hyperion's website for more details, and AmigaOS3.2 vendors:
Two exciting remakes, two freeware games, and "The nameless platformer". Amiga game developers are busy, and especially many ports and remakes are an impressive display of the technical know-how present in the community - the results often surpass the originals in quality.
Metal Gear
At
the end of January 2021 a port of MSX classic "Metal Gear" to the Amiga
was announced by coder "hOffman". "Metal Gear" was a milestone, and is a
classic in it's own right, as it started the stealth-and-survival genre
in computer gaming. In this type of games it's not just kill-em-all,
but more importantly stealth tactics and strategy.
The game is
still under development, but nearing completion, and already looks and
sounds very good. The graphics are pretty much a pixel perfect recreation of the MSX original. According to the author, it runs at full framerate on
the Amiga (even where the original would slow down due to lots of
on-screen action), and special care is taken to reproduce and possibly
enhance the original soundtrack and sound effects.
"Metal Gear" requires an Amiga 500 with 1MB or higher.
In January 2021 news popped up about turn-based freeware space strategy game "Imperium Terranum 2" by Virtual World Productions. The game has been available on AmiNet since (at least) 2001, but has obviously been resurrected recently.
Coder Rene "fook42" F. is converting the Pascal source code from the AmiNet game version into C code, and adding some improvements. Currently, his new version has no new gameplay features etc., but you can now freely set the game's screenmodes.
This is pretty cool, as it opens up a path for future updates, and portability (maybe AROS?).
Note that if you want to play the new C based version, you need to copy it over the installed previous (AmiNet / Virtual Worlds) version - see GitHub link below for files and instructions.
"Space Pilot of Death" - doesn't that sound awesome? Now if a title like that doesn't catch your attention, I don't know what will.
In Jan. 2021 this game by Marten "goldmomo" Wobst was uploaded to AmiNet, as a result of the author reviving his Amiga, and assembler programming skills, after a break of more than 20 years. It's looks similar to Asteroids, but it's a dodge-and-survive, not a shoot-em-up, that runs on any Amiga with 512KB RAM and able to display a 50Hz PAL or NTSC screen. It can be played with joystick or keyboard. (Note: there seems to be a mistake in the readme file: Space key is not needed.)
It's quite a simple game, but it's also quite well done! The title music gets you into the right mood, terrifying red alert messages pump up your adrenaline level, huge asteroids are approaching, and lots of them - pretty much everything about it feels just right. Yes, this isn't Elite or Wing Commander, we are aware of that. But it's a good looking, well done, quick little release with addictive qualities, for kids and casual gamers, we are aware of that, too. The author also has given hints he might be improving the game further. And, heck, it's... "Space Pilot Of Death"! So what are you waiting for?
"The nameless platformer" is a port of a ZX Spectrum game called "Black and White" - but currently the Amiga version lacks an official name, so we'll just call it "The nameless platformer".
It's a three level demo created using the Scorpion engine, in which you control a little wizard on a single-screen playfield, collecting lots of valuable items. This game is obviously still under development, as you can see in the video below there are a couple of glitches, the title screen looks like it will be changed, maybe sound effects will be added, and so on. But it looks promising with it's cute wizard and overall visual style, some music playing along (I think I've heard the tune before...?), and what appears to be quick and fluid playability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzrf6CJqoeQ
The demo was first shown at the end of Jan. 2021, so far there seem to be no news, but can certainly be expected in the near future.
Another update to "Super Sprint AGA": It now goes by the name of "Turbo Sprint" - and you can actually play it, it's finished! Since we last reported about the game, development has made lots of progress, in Feb. 2021 a playable 5-minute demo has been released, and on April 28th author Graeme Cowie announced the finished game on facebook and YouTube.
After a year of development "Turbo Sprint" now really feels like a complete game, with lots of stuff going on visually, everything moving around and interacting reasonably, sound effects that create proper atmosphere, yeah, you almost start smelling burning rubber. Up to four players, hires graphics, 8 tracks, car upgrades, ...you name it - and it runs from Workbench. Very good, congratulations!
The game requires an AGA Amiga to run, and will be commercially released as digital download very soon, with a glossy boxed edition following.
