After three years of work, SymbOS v4 by Prodatron is available. It's a GUI OS for Amstrad CPC, PCW and Notepad 100/150/200, MSX, Elan Enterprise, ZX Spectrum Next, SymbOSVM.

The Desktop Manager has received new controls, such as one for drawing large grids and the long-missing fully functional tree view with collapsible nodes. Lists, trees and pulldown menus can now contain icons thanks to the new inline support of the Advanced Text Control.

The Sound Daemon provides platform-independent sound services for multiple programs. With Arkos Tracker-based PSG and MOD-based Wavetable support, users can enjoy high-quality sound effects and music in apps and games. GUI events can be assigned to system sound effects, improving the interactive experience.

The Printer Daemon acts as a spooler for multiple print jobs and supports unified formatting codes and network TCP/IP printing. It ensures seamless printing from different applications using a printer-specific driver.

SymbOS C Compiler (SCC) is the new ultimate developer kit for building SymbOS applications using the C programming language. Based on the Fuzix compiler, it features a proper libc port for plug-and-play compilation of existing code, extensive (Posix) wrappers and helper functions for SymbOS system calls, detailed documentation to help you get started with SymbOS programming, multithreading, graphics and sound support, and a complete sample application for reference. It can run on Windows as well as directly on SymbOS !

SymbOS 4.0 supports kernel-level data compression to save disk space. Transparent file management allows compression of existing file formats, data blocks can be decompressed up to 63 KB at a time.

Many other improvements have been added, such as the famous Alt+Tab task switcher, Usifac II/Ulifac support, Nova RTC support and countless more things.

Three new supported platforms have been added to the SymbOS family, including Amstrad NC100/150/200, ZX Spectrum Next, and SymbOSVM, which allows SymbOS to run almost natively on modern 32- and 64-bit platforms.