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What just happened? Even though the Amiga hardware is long gone, a small team of developers and testers is still working on the software side of things. A new update for AmigaOS has just been released, bringing new features and bug fixes to a machine that just doesn’t want to die.
Hyperion Entertainment recently announced the availability of a second point release update for AmigaOS 3.2, the operating system designed to run on classic Amiga machines based on the Motorola 68000 CPU series. The company once known as Commodore doesn’t exist anymore, and the history of the Amiga brand is a convoluted mess of acquisitions, sell-offs and lawsuits, yet the company now owning a “perpetual, worldwide license” to AmigaOS is still milking the Amiga fanbase cow.
The new Update 2 is coming more than a year after AmigaOS 3.2.1, which was released by Hyperion in December 2021 as a bug fix and feature update for the monumental AmigaOS 3.2 release. Rather than adopting the PowerPC CPU architecture like in AmigaOS 4, Amiga 3.2 came 28 years after the last point release and still retains compatibility with the classic Amiga machines and the features of the original AmigaOS 3.1.
AmigaOS 3.1 source code was eventually leaked to the web in 2015, while Amiga 3.2 development took more than two years of “intense and relentless work” from a team of over 60 contributors. The feature list of this particular version included the integration of the ReAction toolkit for GUI programming, native support for mounting .adf disk image files – the standard format for Amiga software dumps within the emulation community – integrated help and online documentation, and much more.
The first “minor” update for AmigaOS 3.2 was mostly a bug fix release which added some cosmetic enhancements, support for the ancient Rexx programming language in the new Text Editor, and more. Since releasing AmigaOS 3.2.1, Hyperion now says, developers and testers of AmigaOS have worked “tirelessly” to fix (more) bugs and implement some new features.
As listed on the company’s official site, highlights of the new AmigaOS 3.2.2 include several new improvements to the aforementioned Text Editor, revision ID for 68060 CPUs, and better handling of icon files. Furthermore, AmigaOS 3.2.2 can now co-exist with previous versions of the OS thanks to support for the old “Kickstart” bootstrap component. Select gadgets have also been improved or overhauled, and the RAM disk has been redone to make it less likely to cause issues.
AmigaOS 3.2.2 is available as an official download from Hyperion’s website for users who already own an officially licensed copy of AmigaOS 3.2. There’s also an official AmigaOS merchandising store for diehard fans of the platform.
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