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Telegram Amiga Alpha 0.0.97 has been available for seven platforms since 19 October 2026. Its most visible change happens when you are not looking at the client: title counts, on-screen popups and an optional sound let you notice incoming messages without keeping its window in front. But this is not just a notification release. The text client gains a chat bar, photos cost less to redraw on an A1200, and several login, update and shutdown problems are fixed.
The project remains an unofficial, native Telegram client built from scratch around MTProto, not a web wrapper. Its Intuition/GadTools GUI and TUI share one engine, without requiring MUI, ixemul or AmiSSL. Following 0.0.96 and its A1200 responsiveness work, this release focuses on a client that stays out of the way and on more consistent conversations.
Notifications without stealing focus
The window title counts messages received in other chats, for instance with (3 new). Opening a conversation clears its count. When the window is behind others or iconified, the chat left open counts too: selecting a conversation is not the same as actually reading it.
The client draws its own popup, consistently across systems and without an extra notification service. It stays in the upper-right corner for ten seconds, with a dark grey background, rounded corners, a chat-coloured name and white text. Its font scales with the screen, reaching 20 points on a 1080-line display. Clicking it opens that chat and brings the window forward; merely showing it does not interrupt typing in another application.
Settings > New messages offers Off, Count in title, Count and pop-up or Pop-up with the text, plus Beep. Capable machines default to the message preview; classic Amigas below a 68040 or without a graphics card default to the title count alone. A menu choice is remembered. If readable previews on the Workbench are unwanted, choose the count or a popup without message text.
The sound is a short chime played through AHI or the Amiga sound chip. A screen flash is used only when neither opens: flashing alone was ineffective on 16- or 24-bit displays. The chime plays once for a run of incoming news, not for every internal update.
With notifications enabled, the program keeps reading the network while iconified. Its AppIcon label shows something like TelegramAmiga (3), popups appear on the Workbench, and double-clicking reopens the window on the chat with news. Choosing Off instead leaves the iconified client asleep as before.
The TUI finds its chats, including on a plain 68000
A bar inspired by old IRC clients appears under the first line: F1 Mario | F2 AmigaIta | F3 .... F1-F10 already changed chats, but now their destinations are visible. Tabs keep stable positions, the active one is highlighted in brackets, and a star marks new messages until that chat is opened. Function keys also answer the initial chat-number question.
/move 5 1 moves chat five to the first position, under F1; the GUI shares the same order. Narrow windows, such as a console on a 320-pixel screen, use compact tabs and keep the active chat’s full name on the top line. Help shows the commands and a reminder line explains file sending; windows shorter than twelve rows give that line back to messages.
The rest of the TUI is clearer too: three introductory lines instead of the complete command list, everyday commands first in /help, a prompt naming the destination chat and You: for your own messages. An unnamed participant becomes someone. News from groups and senders outside your list no longer scrolls past as anonymous lines: the top line counts it as (+3 elsewhere) until /list. Only known chats flash the screen. /list and /chats also work like /peers.
Service messages and more consistent updates
Group joins and departures, pinned messages, name or picture changes, calls with their duration, video chats, auto-delete timers and newly registered contacts are no longer silently skipped. The GUI centres these notices; the TUI prints lines such as * Anna added Marco. Unknown actions fall back to Service message. These events do not trigger notifications. Displaying a call event does not mean the client can make calls.
- A sent message receives its timestamp on the next update, without reopening the chat.
- In Saved Messages, your account’s messages remain right-aligned after history reloads; forwarded messages preserve their origin’s appearance.
- A draft no longer stops chat-list parsing. Plain drafts are read; drafts containing formatting, replies or photos are safely skipped, without hiding subsequent chats or leaving counts and second ticks stale. This is not a full synchronised draft editor.
- Supergroups and channels can receive the second tick through live updates rather than waiting for a periodic check.
- A new message inside a bundle of updates marks its chat immediately even when another event precedes it in the bundle.
Cheaper photo redraws and sharper avatars
On displays with 256 colours or fewer, each inline photo is prepared in a bitmap matching the screen and then copied with the blitter. Redraws no longer repeat tens of thousands of colour-run fills. That bitmap is rebuilt when quality, size or screen changes.
The changelog documents a reduction from 2.7-3 seconds to about 0.45 seconds to redraw a chat with one photo on an emulated stock A1200: a 14 MHz 68EC020 at 640×512 with 32 colours. Preparing the initial copy costs around a quarter of a second. This measures redrawing in that configuration, not downloading, and is not a new benchmark performed for this article. Displays with more colours retain their true-colour path.
Avatars for unopened chats are fetched one at a time during quiet moments, every few seconds, with recent chats first. A picture on a datacenter not yet contacted still waits until its chat is opened, since establishing that connection requires a key exchange. Nothing changes when avatars are disabled. The changelog reports that most chats had full pictures within a minute and a half in the AROS x86_64 VM.
On MorphOS the off-screen frame now matches the graphics card’s format: photos enter the composition before the final copy and no longer flash on every full redraw. During a search, the header keeps the open chat’s avatar rather than adopting the selected result’s picture. On low-colour Workbench screens, a frame marks keyboard focus in the chat list, remaining visible even with four colours.
Login, shutdown and network: understandable errors
The login replaces truncated RPC strings with readable errors and a practical next step: an invalid number needs its country code, too many attempts comes with the wait time, or an unreachable service points to the connection. An expired code is no longer confused with a wrong one: the GUI returns to the already-filled number to request another, while the TUI requests it automatically.
Ctrl-C in the launching Shell, or Break from another Shell, closes both window and program cleanly, like Amiga+Q. This avoids leaving a window with no process behind it, where a click could bring down the system. Network waits also yield to the interruption. On AROS, unanswered connections now time out consistently with other systems and can be interrupted; errors describe their cause rather than reporting a misleading “No error”.
On AmigaOS 3, first-login keystrokes contribute to the new session key’s entropy using the timer’s actual resolution, rather than whole seconds. This does not turn every emulator into a strong randomness source: the project’s first-login cautions and session-file protections still apply.
Less RAM, fewer calculations and readable names
The 68000 text client takes 1.32 MB to load instead of 1.53 MB; the AmigaOS 3 GUI saves around 500 KB by sharing buffers never needed together. These figures do not replace the 68000 package’s practical requirement of about 2 MB of free Fast RAM. Key exchange and two-step password verification use roughly 17% fewer big-number multiplications, about 2560 instead of 3072 for a 2048-bit power. That is not a promise that the complete login takes 17% less time.
telegram-auth.bin is written when the session salt changes, rather than after every request. The 68000 build omits old Bot API commands requiring HTTPS unavailable in that build, and explains this when requested. The send-photo window is centred over the main one and takes focus after its first drawing; the login cursor redraws only its own field.
Cyrillic and Greek are transliterated into Latin letters instead of becoming question marks or disappearing. In the TUI, a word in an alphabet without a supported transliteration, such as Hebrew or Chinese, becomes one question mark; entirely unreadable text is labelled (another alphabet). This is not complete Unicode support. Emoji in names become text emoticons wherever the dedicated renderer is unavailable: popups, the remove-chat question and the photo viewer’s title.
Seven packages, requirements and open issues
Official downloads are listed below. The AmigaOS 3 GUI requires a 68020 or better; the plain-68000 package contains only the TUI and requires preparing its first login on a faster Amiga or in emulation, following its manual. Thanks to Paolo Arus (DaRkHoRaCe): repeated testing on an A600 was instrumental in making this version available.
AROS i386 uses ABIv0; x86_64 requires a trunk-SDK-compatible system and is not interchangeable with AROS One v0.38. AROS ARM64 uses ABIv1 for Raspberry Pi 4, 400 and 5 with the native image dated 22 August 2026 or later. The project’s limitations on reactions, contact management, albums, media playback and some Telegram CDN downloads remain.
The roadmap retains a rare, unreproduced crash in the AROS x86_64 VM, reported again while testing 0.0.97 code: it is not presented as fixed. MorphOS own-screen context-menu flicker also remains distinct from the photo correction included here. Version 0.0.97 is an alpha, not the 0.1 beta.
For this publication, all seven GitHub ZIP archives, their SHA-256 digests and archive integrity were checked. Hardware tests and measurements cited above come from project documentation, not a new test session. All seven tags point to the same release code; subsequent main-branch changes concern documentation and packaging, not new features attributed to these binaries.
Official 0.0.97 downloads
- AmigaOS 3, 68020+: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
- AmigaOS 3, 68000 TUI: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
- AmigaOS 4: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
- MorphOS: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
- AROS i386 ABIv0: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
- AROS x86_64: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
- AROS ARM64, Raspberry Pi: GitHub release, ZIP 0.0.97, Aminet 0.0.97.
The full technical journey is in the Telegram Amiga development diary. Source and instructions remain available in the official repository, under the MIT licence.