Since I took a small, unexpected break at the beginning of the year, there have been plenty of developments in Amiga-land that are of interest. Let’s look at just a few of them, shall we?

Hyperion Entertainment went Bankrupt
Okay, so one of the biggest is that Hyperion Entertainment, current owner of Amiga OS 4.x, has gone into bankruptcy. Not much info about what happened but they’d just released OS4.1 Final Edition. What first happened was that Acube announced on their website that if customers wanted to get OS4.1 FE upgrade for previous SAM boards/ AmigaOne 500’s, they’d better hurry up and order immediately, because once the current stock ran out, it might be a long time before more was available. Then, an entry on Hyperion’s Wikipedia page showed bankruptcy. The main Amiga forums blew up with little response from Hyperion other than someone saying it was a mistake on someone’s behalf and they were going to clear it up. The most recent reports showed up on OldSchoolGameBlog: “The company started an opposition procedure. I expect the decision of the Court at the end of the month. ”

What does this mean for AmigaOS4.x development? Just after this news flooded the big Amiga forums, one of the Frieden brothers posted an update about their progress on Multicore support in AmigaOS 4.2, but didn’t address the current situation.

I guess we’ll have to wait to see if they come back or if AmigaOS gets thrown into the winds again for someone else to pick up.

Community Project: PowerPC PCI for Amiga
This isn’t the UltimatePPC that was announced a few years ago, this is an opensource (there’s even a github available) project to allow a G3 Accelerator card, originally created for some PowerMacs over 10 years ago, to be used on Amigas that have PCI slots (currently Mediator boards). The idea is to be something that will work with WarpOS, so that this card will be like a co-processor, instead of a main processor (at least for now).

In just a couple of months, the guys working on it have made custom built sonnet and pci library files and have gotten the basic card set up and running some powerpc commands. It’s truly a fun project to watch.

WinUAE 3.1.0 continues to march forward
Toni Wilen continues to work his magic, and the latest version of WinUAE works great! I hope to have some previews of some Classic software soon for people to see, using this latest version.

Here’s the latest –>changelist<–.

VBCC Crosscompiler gets an upgrade
After more than a year, the latest version of VBCC is out, and is sporting a huge list of –>changes<–

RapidRoad USB avialable
This is actually from late last year, but Individual Computers finally released their USB host adapter for classic Amigas. It works with clock ports on the A1200 (and other products that provide a clockport interface), as well as an attachment to their X-Surf zorro card. Read a review –> here <–

Custom made clockport expanders available
There is a community project where you can take your single clock port on the A1200 (and I’m guessing others that have clock port aftermarket adapters), and turn that single port into 2 or 4 ports. The 2 port version is for towers that have a GREX-II expansion (due to room I guess). The expander has been shown to work with the USB adapters, serial ports, sound cards and MP3 decoders. It looks like it will be less than 30 Euros with shipping internationally. Check out the link –> here <–

Custom Amiga Power Supplies
A guy named Ray Carlson is building Amiga power supplies for $80. You can contact him at: rcarlsen(at)tds.net

Super-fast Amiga Accelerators coming soon
The Apollo core team are taking a poll to see who would be interested in their new Apollo Phoenix Accelerator for the Amiga 600 and Amiga 500/2000/CDTV. It sounds like they will be about 150Euros. They had previously updated the core on Majasta’s Vampire 600 board for faster-than-68060-speeds results. Majasta is taking pre-orders for version 2 of the Vampire board –> here

The link for the new boards are –> here <–

The performance page (old info) is –> here <–

Pictures of their progess are updated often –> here <–