Great christmas gifts for Amiga users of all kinds! WinUAE, IBrowse, and AmigaAMP have received (sometimes substantial) updates.
WinUAE 4.10.0
WinUAE is the king of Amiga emulation. You can read about all the details on WinUAE's homepage, but here's the big one in this latest release: 100% cycle accuracy! Oh wow, this is a blessing not just for hardcore classic gamers and sceners, but for all Amiga software developers. Very good!
IBrowse developer team, again, proves its dedication to Amiga webbrowsing: this latest version contains all hotfixes since the previous one, and adds a round of new bugfixes and improvements, such as re-enabled Gemini protocol support and better stability.
Thomas Wenzel wishes everyone a Merry Christmas, and has released AmigaAMP 3.33. Improved sound playback and repeat/shuffle features make listening to some music on the Amiga even more enjoyable!
As has been announced on Jan. 17th 2022, the "Amiga37" event will take place in Mönchengladbach, Germany, on October 15th and 16th 2022. Tickets are available since April 25th.
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.)
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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)!
The good news is: it's NOT cancelled! But public health still comes first.
Due to the ongoing Corona virus outbreak, with social life in the Netherlands being restricted to a minimum since Monday 23rd, the organisers of the "Flashback 20/20 feat. Amiga 35" event, originally to be held on June 27th/28th, have decided to postpone it to September 12th/13th 2020. According to the announcement, event tickets will remain valid for the new dates. It is recommended to reach out to your travel booking partners, if required.
"We will make sure that we use the extra time between now and September to prepare for an even better event!", the announcement says.
Yes, indeed, there used to be no facebook group specifically for Amiga BlitzBasic/AmiBlitz coders. This situation has just changed.
BlitzBasic, or AmiBlitz, is a BASIC dialect, originally developed specifically for the Amiga, keeping the Amiga hardware's special features in mind, allowing reasonably unexperienced coders to get great results, and quickly. Many games have been written in BlitzBasic, including the outstanding Lemmings-clone Blobz.
Surprisingly there wasn't a facebook group dedicated to Amiga BlitzBasic - until now. Amiga BlitzBasic coders now have a group on facebook to share, exchange, and chat about their BlitzBasic experiences.
The group's name is "Amiga BlitzBasic & AmiBlitz", it's a closed group, and as such of course you need to have a facebook account, and request to join the group.
New games! Amiworx and Amiga68K-Productions have some new stuff waiting for you classic Amiga gaming aficionados.
"Tales of Gorluth" by Amiworx got some sort of sequel by the name of "Heroes of Gorluth". It's an action adventure platformer, and claims to have some interesting NPC interaction, boss battles, lots of action, and high quality graphics and sound. It's available as digital download, and CD-ROM edition, which is limited to 300 copies, and requires a 68020 CPU, ECS/AGA, and 2MB RAM. You can get a glimpse of it's epicness over at:
Finally, "Elfie the Unicorn" is a cute new game for kids by Amiga68K-Productions. It's a Gianna-sisters style jump-and-run game made especially for the developer's daughters, and requires a 14Mhz CPU, ECS/AGA, 2MB and Kickstart 3.0 or higher. "Elfie the Unicorn" is still in production - more testing/balancing, new difficulty levels, and maybe new levels will be done - but you can already download a beta version, and it's free:
