Hello to everyone. It's the beginning of a whole new year and, even if politicians and economists always remind us (in particular here, in Europe and moreover in Italy) that hard times are coming, we would like to give our users and followers some good news, at least about our favourite hobby. First of all, I'd like to say "Thank you!" to Lloyd Blommaert, who not only made a kind donation, but he also told us that our donation buttons weren't working anymore. Well, I guess that the recent, complete lack of donations had at least another cause than the crisis. It required some tweaking, but PayPal donations are now working again, so if you wish to make a late Christmas gift to Icaros Desktop, you have a nice opportunity.The first big news of the year, however, is the release of a whole new game for classic Amigas, the tiny and pretty platformer Mr Beanbag, a game inspired by great classics of the genre like Mario and Sonic. Development of this game began many years ago, when the Amiga was still a good player among the gaming platforms of the time. Authors, however, had to place their project on hold and someone managed to finish the job only in the latest weeks of the past year. Mr Beanbag works flawlessly under AROS' Janus-UAE and you don't even need the original Amiga KickStart to run it: just grab the AROS M68K bootdisk on www.aros.org and use AROS ROMs in the emulator, they will be absolutely enough.
The second news, somehow tied to the first, is that Icaros Desktop will include these free M68k AROS ROMs within the next update, allowing users to play games and demos on ADF files straight from AROS and without the need of original Amiga ROMs anymore. AmiBridge scripts have already been updated on our development systems, and time for public release is approaching.
Last, but absolutley not least news, is that our great friend Krzysztof Smiechowicz is still working really hard on Wanderer, trying to fix all the little and bigger bugs that make it barely usable in everydays system management. After allowing free icon placing on drawer windows and desktop, he fixed drag'n'drop and added a beauty transparency to icons while moving them. Icaros users will be able to enable all these changes with the next patch or update.
PS: a great thank you to the 500+ people who like Icaros Desktop on Facebook. Their number is growing, and we're really proud of it!