Hi everybody. I've been asking questions in the AMOS Factory forum and only just started looking around the Ulimate Amiga forums.
So I'd better put a few words in here by way of an intro.
I'm Australian and an Amiga user from long ago.
My first 'machine' was a DREAM 6800 that I built myself from a magazine article way, way back. A massive 1Kb RAM and 1Kb ROM with a 64 x 32 pixel display! Magic stuff. Still managed to write a very good Space Invaders in 6800 machine code ("What's an assembler?" was the cry back then - used lots of graph paper and a pencil). It saved and loaded code to a cassette player and the display was a direct input to a portable B&W TV. Input was from a hex keypad (luxury!
).
Got hooked on computing straight away. Next acquisition was an Hitachi Peach with a 6809 processor and a
colour display. I wonder where they got the idea of naming it after a fruit from? Got into commercial programming in COBOL and worked my guts out. Don't remember much about the Peach apart from its BASIC and a nice language called Comsol that I used. Amazed at the time to realise that Comsol was written in itself. I do remember getting heavily side-tracked by games (in colour!).
An Amiga 500 by proxy with a good mate came next - he owned it, I programmed and played with it.
My own Amiga came next - an A2000 with two floppies and a hard drive. Had great fun and was totally gob-smacked by the capabilities. Played around with Lattice C without much success in the more exciting aspects of Amiga capabilities - a bit too impenetrable for someone used to COBOL and Basic. Then came AMOS. Beautiful! I programmed a music composer. "Not another tracker!" do I hear? No. This composed directly into the AMOS Music Bank format and had an interface more like a piano roll. The aim was to be able to simply 'draw' music with the mouse. It worked well. Wish I still had the source as I can't remember much about it now. One bit I really felt good about was a bit of assembler that would re-sample a sample file into any other pitch in just 32 bytes of code. It used a similar method to the early algorithm for drawing lines on a raster screen - incrementing registers and actioning the output on overflows. I
really wish I still had the source for that! "Eat yer heart out Messysoft" with all your modern PC 'bloatware'.
COBOL went out of fashion and the dictates of work meant a PC had to be purchased. The A2000 went into retirement to a good home and VB, VBA and Office stuff replaced my programming ventures on a PC. In commercial-land I worked in Oracle and Sybase databases. Unfortunately the A2000 quit in its new home years ago and the sources, etc went with it. Damn!
More than 20 years passed...
Then I discovered WINUAE and the Amiga Forever launcher and it's all come flooding back. Primary tool will be AMOS with a bit of assembler if required. Approaching full retirement, I should have more time to have a good soak in nostalgia. All I need to do is drag myself away from all the Amiga games stuff (playing them, not coding them
).
It's easy to forget how good that stuff was. Just last weekend we had a great time around the PC re-living Amiga games nostalgia with a couple of friends (ex Amiga owners). We hadn't had such a great time for years. We don't get that same feeling from modern over-complex PC Games.
Don't get me wrong, I also love my PC and the huge amount of power I've now got on the desktop. I use Visual Studio 2010, Office Pro 2010 and SQL Server 2008 think they're great. It's just that the Amiga had so much personality and potential. A bit like the difference between an E-Type Jaguar and a modern Aston Martin. (A bit of ex-pat Brit showing there
.)
Many thanks to all those posting to these forums. You've all been a great help in my getting back into the Amiga and AMOS.
