The decorations I posted about last month have finally made their debut in AROS! Darius Brewka has released them and Nic "Kalamatee" Andrews really helped last night by enabling them in the AROS Nightly build. So you can now download the latest Nightly build from http://www.aros.org and check them out yourself! They are enabled by default. The current theme available is called "Ice". The graphics for this was made possible by our very own Damir "d980" Sijakovic. The screenshot I posted this time is from me, showing the Ice theme in action. Be sure to notice the transparency on the menus.
Darius said he plans to write a small tutorial about how to create themes for the Decoration tool. In the near future, I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot of nice themes coming. This Decoration tool is fabulous and it gives AROS some eye candy that helps it shine! I'm all giddy that we get to enjoy it now!

Fabien, a MorphOS Developer is looking for someone to port his latest MAME port to AROS. At one time AROS had a port of MAME, but it is obsolete now. This new version of MAME would really be nice to have in AROS. Fabien is in the #aros channel on irc.freenode.net a lot. He goes by Fab1 there. Please contact him if you are interested in doing this.

Michal Schulz is still wanting people to test the new USB stack. He has updated his blog recently stating this and giving more detail.

I have been playing with some customization of my AROS shell and prompt lately. I plan to post a little tutorial on this very soon.

Mithrandir has released a new alpha version of AROSAmp! This new version includes skinning. How sweet is that? If you ask me, it is very sweet! This version is AROSAmp 0.20 Alpha. It can be downloaded at the AROS Archives. You can also visit the AROSAmp home page. Mithrandir would like people to heavily test AROSAmp and let him know of any bugs that are found. He is known as Tom_Kun in the #aros IRC channel. He is also writing a skinning tutorial. This will really help all of those great graphic artists out there to make some cool skins. It is great to see another fine application started and shining in AROS.

There have been quite a few happenings around AROS land lately. Let's start off by mentioning the new AROS Wallpaper Competition. AROS is in need of a Wanderer background to use for the Nightly builds. So a contest has been started to give graphic artists out there a great way to contribute. The rules are posted on AROS-exec here. Paolone has already entered the contest with a spring, summer, autumn and winter version. You can download them here.

Robert Norris is offering his code for a port of John Jordan's Frontier: First Encounters. A replacement executable for the game Frontier: First Encounters. He posted in the forum on AROS-exec.org explaining more about this port. If you are a fan of the game Elite, this is a piece of that series. They were a lot of fun to play and a port to AROS would fit perfectly! With Robert offering a good start on the port, this is an offer someone should take advantage of.

I am still working on porting the newest version of Python into PyAROS. I am a beginner at porting, so it's taking awhile. I have been receiving help from Mazze and Blacky Stardust. They have been my Jedi Porting Masters, while I'm just a young Porting Padawan. I want to thank those two, they have provided me with very good information and they have been very patient. The current PyAROS is based from the 2.2.1 version of Python. I have recently downloaded that version and ran a diff command to compare that version with PyAROS. I took this patch and applied it to the new version of Python, which is 2.5. When doing this, I directed the output into a file. I looked at the file to see how many rejections it had. There were so many, I didn't even count them. My plan now is to gradually go through the rejections one by one and try to manually make the changes. So, needless to say, it will take awhile. I'll keep working on it.

Our friends at DiscreetFX LLC are sponsoring an Amiga Game Creation Contest. They are offering $1000.00 for a three level demo of a platform game starring Hottie. The winner will get a chance to complete the game and release it on Amiga OS 4.0, MorphOS, AROS, and other gaming systems. Check out the announcement at Amiga.org. I think this is really cool of them to sponsor something like this. I hope it turns out well and I definitely want to see it running in AROS. Good luck guys!