amiga-news.de - Advent Calendar: Door 21

21.Dec.2022 Advent Calendar: Door 21 - Frank Wille
The 21st door goes online and for this one Frank Wille has taken time out with an anecdote.

If you want to take a look at Frank Wille's wealth of work, his Homepage is the best place to start. For more than 20 years he has been working together with Volker Barthelmann on vbcc, a highly optimised, portable ISO C compiler for Amiga 3/4 and MorphOS, last updated in March this year. The vbcc distribution also includes the portable linker vlink and the portable assembler vasm.

In any case, one should not forget to take a look at the "Other Projects" to get an impression of Frank's versatility: he is responsible for the game Solid Gold and the Amiga conversions of Retroguru games such as the Sqrxz series (1, 2, 3), Giana's Return, Xump or Fruit'Y, but also for the assembler PhxAss, the involvement in the Amiga and Pegasos versions of the operating system NetBSD as well as for ppclibemu ppclibemu. He was also involved in the beta test of the Pegasos II adaptation of AmigaOS 4.1. Furthermore, he indirectly supports the Sonnet-Amiga project through corresponding adaptations of vasm and vlink.

Many thanks also to you, Frank, for your long-lasting commitment. We read your story:

"I have been in love with Denmark for decades. Wonderful nature and carefree freedom. All is still right with the world. It's no wonder that the Danes are considered the happiest people in the world. I'm sure that's true of the rest of Scandinavia too, but Denmark is the best place for me to be. Because of all the time I spend there, I have also learned the language - well, at least I don't have any problems understanding everything - and I have also become a fan of the Danish charts, which you can listen to on long drives in the car. I have written many titles on a USB stick, so that I can remember them here on journeys as well.

Back to the Amiga: With our games (Solid Gold, Sqrxz, Trap Runner, Celtic Heart, etc.) I attach a lot of importance to the classic feeling, with trackloader from disk. I.e. the game starts already in the bootblock, loads a 2nd-stage bootloader, which then shows the team logo and loads the main part.

The boot block has 512 bytes and still has some unused space. Then I remembered that some programmers in the past liked to put hidden messages in such areas, like the ROM song in the flash ROM on Phase5's CSPPC (and BPPC?) cards. I think it was something from Morissette at the time.

So in each boot block of our games, I put a verse of various songs from the Danish charts that I just happened to have in my head. Among others, from the following artists: Celina Ree, Medina, Jokeren, Rasmus Seebach. All in Danish. Only Celtic Heart has a verse in English by Tuomas Holopainen (Nightwish) "The Life and Times of Scrooge", which of course was not in the charts. :)" (dr)

[News message: 21. Dec. 2022, 16:21] [Comments: 0]
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