Heading back home…
It’s been another long pause in blogging, but this is how things work on my end. Wish to do better next year ;)
To make Christmas even more merry, go ahead and download the new issue of 880 Gamer. Mark did it again. And this is splendid. Even if you are not a gamer, and more fond of demoscene or anything, go and check it out. It really does have that vibe! Click on the picture or use the following link: http://www.users.on.net/~stanners/
Merry Christmas to all!
Wow! A brand new release of Icaros Desktop is available for download. And I am downloading it just now…
I am truly amazed by dedication and craftsmanship of all the hackers involved in that project, including AROS team of course. This is not another GNU/Linux distro and they cannot rely on the shoulders of giants so much.
Sure, it is not an OS for everyone. It can not compete with leaders of the desktop world. Most likely it won’t be your desktop of choice either. But if you want to try something else, have a breath of fresh air, go for it.
Once I have it installed (running as a VM for now) I’ll share some impressions on how it feels and tastes.
http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/2014/10/trick-or-treat-icaros-desktop-20-is-here.html
I’ve just realized that it’s been a year (and a month) since Patrick vel Coder passed away… His blog – The Bucket Diary – was a true inspiration to me.
Time flies, indeed. Let the music speak then.
Cheers Patrick.
OK. I’ve finally purchased a recent desktop set-up and could take a serious look at the Android development platform. With a surprise, I discovered that Google made a interesting shift toward IntelliJ. Is this kind of a fish slapping dance? It doesn’t really matter who is who here, but Eclipse Foundation does not feel particularly well I’m afraid.
Anyway, this is not about an IDE war.
Let put it straight – what a horribly bloated environment is this! With simplicity on the user side, comes complexity on the developer desk. Isn’t it? Java and tons of XMLs. I never liked that couple.
But still, this is an interesting platform, to make money of course. And could be worth to invest few hundreds hours in it.
Is there an Android demo scene? A rhetorical question :)
I think I’ve seen this couple months back, but today it drawn my attention more successfully. So successfully, I put that thing on my wish list. This is not a critically expensive but 200 Euros is not 20, unfortunately. What I am talking about?
MIST is a successful project of two people. Till Harbaum stands behind the software (FPGA to be precise) part. Hardware was done by a hero of 8 and 16-bit folks – Lotharek. The board looks amazing. The casing is not so cool to me, but it was a price/value decision I believe.
It is very temping, to have a magic box that can be either an Amiga or Atari ST, by one SD card swap. I’ve heard that Atari 8-bit project is ongoing. How cool!
Alright. Where is my beer money…
Like Lemmings used to say “Oh no!”. It’s mid-February, and I haven’t came up with anything new for this a <coming back> blog… This is embarrassing.
I did not bury the idea though. I have been continuously reading code, trying to understand code and practice. The steps are tiny however and progress is hardly visible. Stamina is shaking.
The one thing that keeps me busy since a long time, is a nice stars routine I found at Legacy SCAT webpage: 
This is the rightmost one.
Yes, dots. I love dots. Star dots in particular. The source code lacks of good comments, and it is rather hard for 30+ years old rookie to understand the flow, data structures and tricks. Interruptions do not make the learning process easier too. I still don’t know how to debug and play with that code in a right way.
What keeps me smiling still and make that effort worthwhile, even though you can not monetize that, are the emotions and fun when another brick in that hecking wall is coming crashing down. A brick of ignorance. Hell yeah!
It’s been few last days of 2013 for me, when I’ve finally caught up with Amiga coding. It was just few days free from work routine… Amazing. I hope I will post something worth reading in 2014 :)
Alright. It is coming. Australia has a hangover yet but it is still few hours till midnight for us…
Happy New Year to you!
Take care!
Auto zoom hurts. At least in FS-UAE. The story is short, but actually it took me (it hurts…) a week or so to find the guilty.
I was playing with totally basic Copper stuff. Two bars moving up and down, up and down. And up and down. Until you press LMB.
That simple code worked but the bars were extremely slow, freeze actually, when moving through middle of the screen. I still did not buy a new computer, and still using that T60 with core solo crappy Intel, but come on! Two copper bars?
I was playing a bit with fs-use performance settings – video_sync, accuracy, A500 instead of A1200. To no avail. Is this really that hard to emulate Copper?
By an accident, and somehow inspired by that “auto” lines printed to the FS-USE stdout, I pressed F11 and zoom mode was changed to full what… made a huge difference. It was like a boost ;)
And I can go to bed now. Thank you F11.
I haven’t been doing much with my Amiga and retro stuff recently. The reason being… I am simply too tired after hit home. Either work is getting harder, or I am getting old ;) Maybe both.
Commuting is part of my daily sickness, but public transportation has an advantage – you can read books. And I do. Kindle device is a great commute companion.
I am multitasking when reading. Or maybe I am multireading, but the spell checker says there is no such a word. Not sure it is a right way to read books, but it does work for me.
One of the mobi files I’ve recently loaded onto my Kindle is “IT’S BEHIND YOU: the making of a computer game“. A book written by Bob Pape, a game coder from the golden era of bedroom-coders. It tells a great story about how games got developed back in the day, in times of Spectrum, C64 and BBC Micro. When Amiga and Atari ST were a high class machines. Highly recommended!
Aside from other projects I’ve been trying to move forward, back to Amiga coding is one of the most important ones. You may ask why… It is hard to explain (since English is not my 1st language as you might have noticed ;) but in short, this is simply something I want to push beyond level I “achieved” in 90s (I have to refresh all that stuff first!). The road to hell is paved with good intentions, some say. Usually they are right.
Since a month or so, I’ve been moving step by step, using the following setup:
All the editing is done in gVim (it has 680×0 syntax coloring). Don’t know yet how to trigger a quick reread of the source file in Trash’m One once I modified it in editor, but will get to that :)
With my current hardware, I am not able to run two Amiga emulators in parallel as vikke does, but for now it is not a problem to me. I am playing with simple stuff that is not crashing so often yet.
Speaking of stuff. I came across a very nice video tutorial being developed by Photon/Scoopex. It is hosted on ScoopexUs youtube profile. What is important, the tutorial is not a gem from the ancient times. The most recent part is dated for September this year! Highly recommended.
Back to the Code 