A from-scratch, native MTProto Telegram client for Amiga-family systems: log in with a normal Telegram account, list your chats and exchange messages. Zero external dependencies: no MUI, no ixemul, no AmiSSL. All the cryptography (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, SRP/2FA, AES, SHA) is built in.
It is an unofficial client: it uses the Telegram API and is part of the Telegram ecosystem, but it is not made by Telegram.
Two front-ends share one engine:
- TelegramAmiga is a native Intuition/GadTools GUI: chat list with real avatars and persistent unread badges, conversation view, scrollbars (wheel, knob drag, arrow keys, pixel scroll), scroll-to-top history paging, click-to-compose with multi-line wrap, online chat search, drag-and-drop reorder and remove, live receive, "<name> is typing", read receipts, file sharing and a pinned Saved Messages chat. A double-click starts it with no flashing console and no launcher script. Drawn by the client itself on a RastPort.
- TelegramAmiga-TUI is the text/console client, at home on a 68030 with a serial console: same engine, launched from the second icon.
Status: alpha 0.0.98 - everyday direct-message and group chat works on all the platforms below. 0.0.98 brings reactions: they show under each bubble, and React... in a message's right-button menu opens a grid of emoji to add or take back yours. Each chat decides whether it rings and with which sound: six short sounds of our own come in the sounds/ drawer, and any sound the system's datatypes read will do. A group's pop-up says who wrote, messages from earlier days show their day, and typed emoticons such as :) become emoji. The text client, on the plain 68000 too, shows its chats as tabs under F1 to F10. The plain-68000 package exists thanks to Paolo Arus (DaRkHoRaCe), without whose tenacity in testing, round after round on an A600, it would never have come out.
It retains 0.0.97's new-message notifications (title, pop-up, chime and AppIcon), 0.0.96's window at home on a stock A1200 and its plain-68000 text client, 0.0.95's faster transfers and full-size photos, 0.0.94's sixth platform, its icons and its fixes for FAT volumes, 0.0.93's emoji panel, attachment chooser and working logins, 0.0.92's link previews, video frames and attachment labels, 0.0.9's photo pipeline, and the messaging, file sharing, replies, editing, read receipts and avatars delivered by earlier releases.
Development on main now heads for the 0.1 beta, through the slots the
roadmap keeps for field reports and for the features waiting there. Work there
is unreleased and remains subject to real-system validation on every
platform; see ROADMAP.md.
License: MIT. A non-commercial community project, a gift to the Amiga community. Development diary: https://androidlab.it/en/telegram-amiga-mtproto-client-development-diary/
Telegram Amiga remains free and open source. If you find it useful, you can support my work on Patreon. Contributions help me dedicate time to development, testing and documentation. No subscription is required to use the client; public code, releases and articles remain available to everyone.
Each package bundles both clients (the plain-68000 one the text client alone),
icons, a public telegram-api.txt and per-architecture IT/EN manuals, and
no private files.
| Platform | CPU | Release |
|---|---|---|
| AmigaOS 3.x (68020+) | m68k | os3-alpha-0.0.98 |
| AmigaOS 3.x (plain 68000, text client) | m68k | os3-68000-alpha-0.0.98 |
| AmigaOS 4.x | PPC | os4-alpha-0.0.98 |
| MorphOS | PPC | morphos-alpha-0.0.98 |
| AROS i386 (ABIv0) | x86 | aros-i386-alpha-0.0.98 |
| AROS x86_64 | x86-64 | aros-x86_64-alpha-0.0.98 |
| AROS aarch64 (Raspberry Pi) | ARM64 | aros-aarch64-alpha-0.0.98 |
All releases: https://github.com/kaffeine1/telegram-amiga/releases.
Full history in CHANGELOG.md (also bundled in every package
as CHANGELOG.txt).
AmigaOS 3.x is a native clib2 build (no ixemul, no AmiSSL) and needs a 68020 or better; the plain-68000 package runs the text client in about 2 MB of free fast RAM, with its first login made on a faster Amiga or in an emulator. AROS x86_64 targets trunk-SDK-matched systems (AROS One v0.38 pairs a different kickstart and will not run it); AROS i386 ABIv0 is the broadest AROS build. AROS aarch64 (ABIv1) runs on the native AROS image for the Raspberry Pi 4, 400 and 5, from the image of 2026-08-22 on.
- Download your platform's package and copy the drawer to a writable
volume (e.g.
Work:): it writes its files next to itself, so not the CD. - Double-click TelegramAmiga, which opens the GUI directly with no flashing console window, or TelegramAmiga-TUI for the console client.
- First run signs you in: phone number → login code → optional 2FA password. A
telegram-auth.binsession is saved; later runs go straight to your chats. It signs in to an existing Telegram account and cannot create one yet: if you have none, create it first in the official Telegram app on a phone.
2FA on a slow 68k: checking a Two-Step Verification password takes a PBKDF2 key derivation (100000 rounds of SHA-512): under a minute on a Vampire, about half an hour on a stock 14 MHz 68020. Up to 0.0.94 Telegram dropped the login before a slow machine was done. From 0.0.95 the client does that work with the connection closed, then connects again for a fresh challenge and finishes: a real login went through on a stock A1200 in 35 minutes. Start it and let the machine work; there is no need to turn Two-Step Verification off.
Full IT/EN instructions are inside each package.
- MTProto auth-key creation, phone/code login wizard, 2FA, saved session.
- Chat list (users, basic groups, channels/supergroups): the full list is fetched once on first login, then your curation wins: drag-reorder, remove (menu / Del / right-Amiga+R), online search to add, persistent unread badges.
- Reading history with scroll-to-top paging (load older on demand) and sending long, multi-line text where the account has permission.
- File sharing: send and download big files (up to 125 MiB on 68k, 250 MiB elsewhere; live %, retry, cancellable), plus a pinned Saved Messages chat as a cloud transfer drawer (fully editable).
- Message edit & delete (right-click), replies on double-click, live updates for messages edited elsewhere, clipboard Copy/Cut/Paste with text selection (mouse or Shift+arrows), @username autocomplete.
- Real profile-picture avatars (blurred previews instantly, crisp on open).
- 0.0.9 photo support: inline photos with instant blurred previews, an on-disk decoded-pixel cache, a larger click-to-open viewer and an optional text-only mode for slower machines; send JPEGs as Telegram photos, save received photos to a chosen path, forward messages and find hidden chats in local search.
- Native GUI scrolling (wheel / scrollbar / arrows / pixel), remembered window size and position, optional own screen, Iconify to a Workbench AppIcon, dark theme, script-free flashless Workbench launch.
- Live receive, "<name> is typing…", read receipts (v / vv), message styling/entities, reply quotes, cross-chat notifications.
gzip_packedresponses decoded in-tree (embeddedpuff, no zlib needed).
Reactions, contact management, albums and media playback, and files served by Telegram's CDN (some big public-channel downloads). The aim is a dependable text-and-files client first; richer media comes later only where the platform makes it realistic.
Never publish these (or screenshots/logs that reveal them):
telegram-auth.bin phone-code-hash.txt telegram-password.txt
telegram-peers.txt telegram-seed.bin telegram-token.txt
telegram-auth.bin is your logged-in Telegram session: anyone who gets it can
access your account. If it leaks, treat the account as compromised.
On targets without a system CSPRNG/TLS, the crypto secrets come from an in-tree
DRBG seeded from local entropy (timer jitter, keystrokes, a persisted
telegram-seed.bin). A first login in a fresh emulator/VM is the weakest
moment: prefer real hardware, or an AmiSSL/OpenSSL target, if your threat model
needs it.
Six lanes (see the Makefile.* files and docs/): AmigaOS 3.x (m68k clib2),
AmigaOS 4 (PPC), MorphOS (PPC), AROS i386, AROS x86_64, AROS aarch64 (Raspberry
Pi, built on a Linux host with the AROS crosstools). Host smoke test:
make -f Makefile.aros clean all ENABLE_GZIP=0 ENABLE_GZIP_PUFF=1
./build/TelegramAmiga --mtproto-self-test-fastA token-based Bot API mode remains in the tree for diagnostics and TLS/HTTP validation; it is no longer the product direction.
The icon is our own design. Carlo Spadoni optimised it for each system, put
it on a standard drawer for the drawer icon, and let me ship his versions with
the program. His files as delivered are in assets/icons/carlo-spadoni/;
scripts/build-icons.sh turns them into one launcher set per platform.
Developed with the help of LLM agents used as engineering tools (analysis, implementation, packaging, docs, test prep). Local diaries, transcripts and secrets stay out of Git.
Useful bug reports: platform + version, real/emulated, CPU, TCP/IP stack, and what failed, with secrets removed. Never post tokens, auth files, phone numbers, login codes, 2FA passwords or private message text.