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`13.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 13 - Richard Körber ust in time for lunch break, the 13th door of our Advent calendar opens. We may introduce: Richard 'Shred' Körber. This could be a record so far: Already on 04 May 1999 we reported (in German) about Richard Körber's newly established website "Palmiga", which was aimed at Amiga users who wanted to connect their computer to a PalmOS PDA. In mid-2001 he was kindly asked by Palm Inc. to rename his site because "Palmiga" and "PalmLink" would infringe trademark rights. So Amiga-PDA was born, which was originally part of his homepage which already existed since 1998. For all those who are still interested today, please refer to his PdaLink library and the corresponding GitHub project. The developer is probably best known for his identify library, which recognises Zorro cards by their manufacturer and product ID, provides information about the system (CPU, FPU, memory, clock frequency, etc.) and decodes Guru codes and function offsets. Originally, in early 2003, he announced (in German) on our site that he had to stop development due to lack of time and published the source codes of the project on Sourceforge. More than a year ago, however, he not only published the source codes on GitHub, but also resumed development and made the current version 40.2 available for download in mid-October. He also wrote his own driver for the internal sound card Maestro Professional, developed YAMI, a mouse interface that makes it possible to use serial PC mice on Amiga or ATARI ST computers, and resumed work on his debugging tool PatchWork. His articles in the Retro Blog of his site are definitely worth reading, for example about the restoration of an Amiga 1000 or the problem of the right mouse button on the Amiga 1200. Many thanks for your development work, Richard! He remembered the following anecdote for us: "It was in 1998, at a time when the Internet was massively growing. As a young professional, I was working in the web department of a startup in Cologne and felt like a pioneer in a new country. After weeks of work, our team had completed a new website. The design template had been created by an external advertising agency via Photoshop. We manually converted the designs into individual web pages, which was common practice at that time. In the late afternoon, everything was finally finished, the launch was imminent and the press had already been informed. The other colleagues had already called it a day, and I was just about to pack my bag, too, when an email from my boss popped up in my inbox. 'The agency has asked us to make one last small change to the layout', was his comment. Below that I found a forwarded email with the details. I looked at the request and groaned. I would have to change all one hundred pages by hand for that. Those are the tasks you love. I could forget my plans to leave in time. It would probably even take until late at night. With an Amiga, yeah, this would have been a piece of cake. I would have opened the web pages in GoldEd, and would have let it do the changes automatically, remote controlled by a quickly crafted ARexx script. With my Windows computer at work this was unthinkable. There was no possibility to control programs with a script language. Oh, if only I had my Amiga here now, I thought to myself and sighed. Then I remembered that I had installed an Amiga emulator on my work PC a few weeks earlier because I wanted to try it out. But that was just for fun. Now I have a job to do. Is that professional? Is it even possible to do that? Why not! I transferred the web pages to the virtual Amiga hard disk, programmed an ARexx script and let GoldEd apply the changes. The plan worked. After less than an hour the change was completed. So the Amiga saved the launch date. And I made it home in time." (dr) [News message: 13. Dec. 2022, 13:46] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`12.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 12 - 'Prince' The Amiga-News.de Advent Calendar starts with 'Prince' and the twelfth door into the new week. 'Prince' is the founder of the demo group 'Phaze101' and an incredibly busy Amiga developer: he might be best known to our readers for his assembler coding course. Between 1994 and 1996, Fabio 'Randy' Ciucci, a member of the demo group RamJam, wrote the assembly programming course "Corso completo di programmazione assembler in due dischi". With Ciucci's permission, RamJam published this programming course as a book in 2016. 'Prince' is currently streaming this course in English on Twitch and then uploading the respective episodes to YouTube. Almost in parallel, he recorded his 16-part Let's Make an Amiga Game Tutorial and also published it on YouTube. The resulting game "Mr Poo's Journey" is available on itch.io for a price that you can choose yourself. Among other projects, he also regularly organises "Game Jams" with the aim of expanding knowledge and awareness about retro computers. Recently, for example, there was the Retro Trex Game Jam, which resulted in his version Dino Run or also DRex by another developer. The Racing Cars Game Jam will run until 31 January 2023. His anecdote: "When I look at the source codes I wrote 30 years ago and more, I am totally fascinated. I love them! As a teenager, I didn't think twice about what I was writing! Mainly I had written demos and tools at that time, and I must confess that these source codes are often a mystery to me as well. On the one hand, I realise how little I knew back then. On the other hand, I still somehow managed to get programmes to work. Some of these source codes were also written for experimental purposes. They contain all kinds of errors! Mistakes that I wouldn't make now. I have improved my programming skills over the years. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for my memory. On the contrary: sometimes I have the feeling that it is going steeply downhill! There is one thing that is all over my sources back then that I can't remember. Most of the sources begin with comments that has something like this: "Dedicated to the one ______ I love". Who was her, "the one I love" back then? Memory is playing tricks on me and this is something that didn't improve :)" (dr) [News message: 12. Dec. 2022, 13:58] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022` Amigaworld.net (Forum)	Video: Beth Richard disassembles an Amiga CD 1200 (English) The CD 1200, which was only produced in a few copies as a prototype, was not only to equip an Amiga 1200 with an external CD-ROM drive, but also to ensure compatibility with Commodore's game console Amiga CD³². In the video at the title link, Beth Richard, who was involved in its development as lead engineer, opens the specimen in the British Retro Computer Museum (amiga-news.de reported) - 28 years after she last saw a CD 1200. (snx) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:41] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
`11.Dec.2022`	Advent Calendar: Door 11 - Alain Fontanin For the third Advent and the eleventh door, we asked Alain Fontanin for an anecdote. Alain and his text editor "Amiga Source Editor (2019)", of which he has recently released version 2.0, is on the one hand a wonderful example of how nostalgia and the "memory of the good old days" can give rise to active software development in the here and now, and on the other hand how the Amiga community can help each other and other readers and developers can advance projects through feedback. In our introductory news item to the new edition of his editor almost exactly two years ago, Alain reported that development had originally begun in 1989. Then, when he watched the documentary "Viva Amiga" in 2019, he was reminded of what was for him a "wonderful time". Since he was no longer programming for his Mac, he decided to pick up where he left off in 1991 with the development of his text editor. This was driven forward by feedback from our readers, especially in the early days, and now you can see the current state of his project for yourself. In an interview with Alain conducted by David Brunet (French Amiga magazine Obligement) you can learn more about him. Among other things, he has promised implementations for other Amiga systems. We continue to keep our fingers crossed for his editor and now look forward to his anecdote: "When Amiga-News.de proposed me to participate in this project, I found it very interesting. Then while thinking about what to tell, I was afraid of "Grandpa tell us the war", well kids sit down, grandpa will start the story! I participated in only one professional development project on the Amiga, it was during my military service in an electronic squadron in 1992 (my military diploma says C programmer on PC and Amiga!). Why should I tell you about this? Well, this is the only computer project in my career for which I could neither exchange with the users nor visualize the final result (security reasons). The project consisted in managing through an Amiga 2000, the display of the video network of the electronic operations center. I had to exchange on the specifications, the evolutions and the bugs with a non computer scientist correspondent, who did not have access to the operational center (!) and I had only an Amiga 500 with a color screen (whereas the display of the video network was monochrome). The first deliveries were catastrophic: nothing worked properly, I was ashamed when I reported to the IT manager. I tried at first to improve my code (without success), before understanding that my salvation lay in the collaboration with the correspondent, I trained him in the use of the Amiga system, I fully integrated him in my development project. He was thus able to exchange more efficiently with the users and to give me reliable information. Finally, in 6 months (part-time, because I was also developing on Windows 3.0), I had a functional product for my return to civilian life. What I learned from this experience is that it's not enough to be technically competent, you have to be able to interact with all the stakeholders and this is often the most complex thing for a developer to do. This has served me well since then!" (dr) [News message: 11. Dec. 2022, 07:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

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