|
DEUTSCHE VERSION |
|
 |
| Links | | | Forums | | | Comments | | | Report news |
|
| Chat | | | Polls | | | Newsticker | | | Archive |
|
| ||
| ||
| 18.Dec.2022 |
Advent Calendar: Door 18 - Marcus Sackrow For the fourth Advent, Marcus 'ALB42' Sackrow is our storyteller. Marcus is a Free Pascal programmer and has managed a lot of projects over the years, which he regularly informs about in his blog. In 2014, he started porting Free Pascal first to AROS and later also to AmigaOS 3.1. Most recently, he released Free Pascal 3.2.2 for all Amiga systems in May 2021. Likewise, in 2015 he started working on his text editor EdiSyn with syntax highlighting for AROS (latest version 0.54. In mid-2016, he began working on his OpenStreetMap viewer Mapparium, which he further developed to version 0.8 and also made available again for all Amiga systems. His extensive creative output also includes his free Pascal programme Leu for loading and limited editing of Excel (xlsx), OpenOffice and LibreOffice (ods), TurboCalc (tcd) and ASCII (csv) files. The list could go on, but of course his current project AmiTube must be mentioned: a YouTube client for all Amiga systems that makes it possible to watch YouTube videos on an Amiga. To do this, they are converted into Commodore's CDXL format and downloaded. To shorten the time until Christmas a little, he has kindly put another game behind his 18th door: his "Amigale" is a conversion of the well-known "Mastermind" (or logic trainer) with words for Amigas from Kickstart 1.3, which is currently popping up everywhere as "Wordle". The task is to guess a word, whereby the programme tells you whether a letter is included or even in the right place. "Amigale" (download at the end of the story) contains both a German and an English dictionary:  (I should definitely have some more lessons in English...: what is "Spahi"??) Thank you very much, Marcus, and keep up the good work on your projects! And with his anecdote, we wish him and all our readers a happy fourth Advent: Amiga, Chemistry and Internet In 1997 I started studying chemistry at the University of Siegen. My professor in the General Chemistry lecture (Prof. Meixner) was quite new at this university and had a lot of interest in computers and the internet. He had a nice new idea for a new website and a student for it. But since he was new at the university, he only knew us first-year students and someone from my fellow students probably gave him my name when asked. So I introduced myself for the job. The general chemistry lecture I had with him is a very basic lecture on chemistry, a bit of repetition from chemistry classes (so that everyone is on the same level) but also new things quickly so that it doesn't get too boring. One feature in contrast to later lectures was that it contained a lot of chemical experiments as a presentation on the professor's desk. And there were really many, sometimes 5-6 per lecture hour. Especially popular, of course, were all the experiments that had something to do with fire or explosions. (The phophore explosion left a deep memory, after the whole lecture hall had a whistling in their ears for 20 minutes, not healthy). Professor Meixner's idea was to give the students a better way to prepare or review the lecture, which works best via the experiments. Of course, films work much better than simple pictures and text, so the idea was to record the experiments and put them on the internet with an explanation. I was to be responsible for the technical implementation, i.e. creating the films, converting them and creating the HTML pages. To show that I can do this well, I should first create the website for his research group. At that time I only had my Amiga 1200, at that time still with modem as connection to the university's network. So I created and tested the whole page on my Amiga and then uploaded it via FTP to the university's server. The HTML texts themselves were all created with a plain text editor (GoldED), I tried some of the HTML editors but wasn't that satisfied. Especially since I tested the pages against the online HTML validator (HTML 3.2 was still quite new back then). Professor Meixner had such a key phrase for his research, "Espionage in the world of molecules", for which I had designed a logo: a water molecule with a magnifying glass in front of it. And since I had just read some 3D course in an Amiga magazine, I implemented the logo as a 3D animation (Lightwave for the 3D, ADPro for converting/shrinking images, MainActor for the GIF animation). I was satisfied and the professor was thrilled. Later versions of the page are still available on archive.org (a little warning: 90s wepage-overload ;)) For the actual project, money was now requested, a computer with frame grabber card and a very cheap (PAL) camera were bought - cheap USB cameras did not exist yet, hence this combination. The camera was chosen because some of the experiments were very dangerous and we had to expect that the camera would be destroyed or at least damaged. However, this did not happen, as we were always quite careful and protected the camera extra, partly with its own, additionally protective housing. There were three people involved in total, a technical assistant who prepared and carried out the experiments (she had a lot of experience there as she also did this for the lecture). An advanced student (I think he was about to graduate) for the technical support and texts on the website and me as the person responsible for the technology and the actual website "programming". The basic idea was to record the experiments, then put pictures of them and descriptions on the web, and if possible even the videos themselves. But we quickly ran into the problem that almost all students only had access to the internet via modem (like me with my 33,600 modem). This meant that the films could not be too big. On the other hand, there were hardly any video formats that could be played universally. So we decided on MPEG, because you can almost always find a player there (even on the Amiga) and, as a stopgap, GIF-Anim. Professor Meixner set the file size limit at 500 Kb. The Amiga was again used to create the web pages and especially the GIF animations (including the background image, which was also created on the Amiga with PPaint). The recording and processing of the experiments took several months, and later the descriptions of the experiments were translated into Spanish and French and supplemented with small quiz questions. A funny anecdote at the end: when the site went online, the university was very worried because it described how to make explosives (black powder is one of the experiments, but also phosphorus or termite; they are pretty violent experiments). So they didn't want to see these experiments on the free internet, we had to install an IP filter so that only students of the University of Siegen could see these experiments. A few years later, nobody was interested any more. The website still exists today, on archive.org, but also as a copy on my own site. Download: Amigale1c.zip (88 Kb) (dr) [News message: 18. Dec. 2022, 06:57] [Comments: 1 - 18. Dec. 2022, 18:43] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version] |
| 17.Dec.2022 |
Advent Calendar: Door 17 - Thomas Claus Behind the 17th Advent calendar door awaits the anecdote of Thomas 'imagodespira' Claus, who as a graphic designer forms the duo of EntwicklerX together with the programmer Frank Menzel. When one thinks of EntwicklerX, two things come to mind: the commercial media player Emotion and elaborately written games for AmigaOS 4. And there is something for everyone. A small list:
"My first computer was an Atari 130XE. At the time of the German reunification, there was a "welcome money" for GDR citizens and my brother and I begged "our" money from our parents to be allowed to buy a computer in the Intershop. Of course, we had no idea about computers, we just wanted one. When we were standing in the Intershop, there was only one option for the 200 DM (100,- per child). An Atari 130XE for 192,- (the value is burnt into my memory, I hope it's right ;)). So we bought this one. Of course, there were also C64 computers and Amigas in the corner, but financially unattainable. Once home, the device was connected to the Raduga TV (Russian brand, very explosive). A blue screen came up with the text "Ready". That was it. By trial and error we got into a screen where notes could be seen. Our English skills were close to zero, so we couldn't even translate "Self Test" (I was 13 and we were learning Russian at school). However, Self Test brought us a tune and made us want to hear more. After that, there was some digging in the manual and we found out that we couldn't go on without external media. We needed a "datasette". We begged and pleaded with parents again and were able to dust off my little sister's money for our Atari and thus buy a Datasette XC12 and a game (Kikstart). That was the entry into my computer world. In the course of time we found out that our neighbour had an Atari 800XL and so we got some software. My favourite game at the time was Montezuma's Revenge. Actually, it's still my favourite game. In the meantime I have an Atari 130XE again, Datasette and every now and then I give myself a round of Montezuma... Back to my youth. As a happy Atari fan, I dreamed of the Atari ST, MegaST and other Atari devices that were also in our computer shops at some point. Amiga didn't interest me at all. But one day my cousin who lived one street over called. "Come over, I want to show you something". No sooner said than done. Now I was standing in his room. There was an old TV on the floor, an Amiga 500 in front of it and Rick Dangerous was playing. I've never seen such graphic splendour, it looked like the real thing. The sound was amazing, especially the dying in the game. You heard that a lot... Yeah, what can I say. It was a quick conversion. After that afternoon, I didn't even know how to spell Atari anymore. I wanted an AMIGA! Some time later I was able to sell the Atari, my brother was in training and gave money for an Amiga 500 and I shovelled out my aunt's coal cellar to be able to buy a memory expansion... From here on there was no turning back. To get a reference to today: as some may know, I develop small games with Frank Menzel at the EntwicklerX. Also for AmigaOS 4. I already dreamt of this with the first Atari. Here I drew simple pixel pictures in Basic with the commands "Plot" and "DrawTo" (I didn't have a drawing programme). Later I pixelated in Deluxe Paint, mostly small game scenes for platformers. So running levels and obstacles. Montezuma's Revenge but also Rick Dangerous never really let me go and so we were able to finish our "Pyramid Quest" in early 2021 and release it on Windows, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox. My 14-year-old Atari self had already dreamed of this, but would never have thought it possible to pull something like this off. We're not well-known developers, don't have a hit, but get by and still dream of new projects that are viable for 2 people. Often our games are interpretations of old games and game principles that we used to love on the Amiga and still love and enjoy playing. You can find our projects on various platforms, for example itch.io. You will certainly recognise one or two of the game principles, even if the realisations are often somewhat different and the templates usually remain unattainable...". (dr) [News message: 17. Dec. 2022, 09:45] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version] |
| 16.Dec.2022 |
Advent Calendar: Door 16 - Günter Bartsch The 16th Advent calendar door is opened and we look forward to an anecdote Günter Bartsch. At the end of August 2021, the developer had not only published the source code of his Amiga QuickBasic (AQB) compiler on GitHub, but also a first early version 0.7.0 and aroused great interest in the comments to our corresponding news item. With AQB, the author wants to provide a "modern, clean, OS-compliant and future-proof BASIC. An important feature of AQB are the modules: AQB has only relatively few built-in commands, but a - also syntactically - quite powerful module concept. The modules can be implemented fully transparently in BASIC (AQB) or also in C (GCC) or even mixed; AQB is fully link-compatible with GCC. As the developer further explains, it should be possible to give AQB different "personalities" - currently only _aqb is implemented, which is intended as a default dialect and is oriented towards AmigaBASIC, QuickBASIC and FreeBASIC. But it should also be possible to give AQB a GFA, Blitz or Amos personality, for example. In general, the focus of AQB (at the moment) would be on system-compliant application development. With version 0.8.0 he then introduced a source level debugger and since the last, current version 0.8.2 there are now instructions and functions for sound output, new tutorials and also a simple music demo programs. Even though almost a year has passed since the last version, Günter continues to work on his project. As he tells us, there have already been quite a lot of further developments, which he "only" needs to finally bring into a release-ready state. We keep our fingers crossed for this and for the further development of his project and look forward to many more exciting discussions about it here. His anecdote or, in this case, short story :) "The year is 1988. At the beginning of the year an event occurred that would change my life forever: I had gotten an Amiga 500 for my birthday. Ever since I had watched an episode of "ARD Computerzeit" on public TV in which the Amiga was introduced I knew: I want that computer and no other. At that time (I was 12) my funds were very limited - but at some point my parents had had enough of my whining so they fulfilled my wish. Driven by a lot of euphoria and even more childish naivety and curiosity I had spent every free minute of the year (and also many minutes in which I was supposed to do other things) with this dream computer (I still couldn't really wrap my head around the fact that now one of these actually was sitting in my bedroom). A lot of people would probably imagine that I mainly wanted to play games on the Amiga - but that wasn't the case. In fact I didn't have any games for it and being a true geek with no friends the temptation to drift into the gaming world through private backup copies was rather small. Instead, I did with the new computer what I had done - again in the absence of other software - with my Commodore Plus/4 which I owned before the Amiga: I wrote programs in BASIC. On the Amiga that meant coding in AmigaBASIC which was supplied on the Extras disk. Despite all the euphoria, I soon had doubts as to whether this really was the greatest tool for the job. The execution speed of the Programs might have been OK compared to my Plus/4, but the editor was extremely sluggish. Of course those were thoughts that I first had never dared to say - after all, the Amiga was the best and fastest computer in the entire universe and AmigaBASIC was the official BASIC, which came directly from Commodore, the company where (in my mind) those gods worked who had created this dream computer - how could there be anything better? Luckily I got my hands on a copy of the german magazine "Amiga Magazin". Even though I certainly didn't understand all the articles in it, from studying it I did learn that there were other programming environments for the Amiga that could possibly represent an improvement over the AmigaBASIC. And so it came about that, together with my mother, I trudged through the Christmas-decorated downtown Stuttgart heading for department stores and computer shops looking for a Christmas present. So I described to various salespersons my troubles with AmigaBASIC and boldly asked them about compilers and assemblers. Usually the last two terms confused the staff, but at least two of them knew about the problems with AmigaBASIC so each offered their respective in-house recommended solution for that. Luckily I had enough doubts right there on the spot about the "True Basic" which was offered to me in the local "Karstadt" department store that I encouraged my mother to let us try again somewhere else. At smaller computer shop called "Schreiber Computer" I was then offered a product called "GFA BASIC" and the saleswoman actually succeeded in convincing both my mother as the sponsor and me as the user. Compared to AmigaBASIC, GFA BASIC turned out to be a downright revelation - speed, instruction set, documentation - all a difference like night and day, I was amazed! If there were any last doubts in my mind whether this investment was the right one (the label "Interpreter" on the box bothered me a bit, as I much rather wanted to have a true compiler), these were finally scattered on the day when I got my hands on a copy of the "Sonderheft 3: Basic und Spiele" issue of "Amiga Magazin". It contained an article comparing various BASIC implementations for the Amiga in which GFA BASIC did very well. The first weeks with GFA BASIC were very productive indeed - all those small sample programs from the manual worked fine, a small vocabulary training program was implemented just as quickly as various small graphics and sound experiments. Accordingly, I felt well prepared and even more motivated, to tackle bigger projects now. Among other things, I had a painting program in mind, a kind of DeluxePaint clone in BASIC (now that I have this great programming environment, I don't need to buy any more software, I can write everything myself - so I thought). The beginnings of these projects were always done easily, first successes came - opening screens and windows, drawing pixels using the mouse, no problem. However, as the programs grew in size, so did the number of bugs - not surprising, I knew that even back then. However, those errors turned out to be increasingly difficult to find: Program functions that just worked perfectly suddenly refused to work at all, although the code in question was the same. Yes, even the interpreter's built-in commands occasionally stopped working they way I expected them to. I debugged deeper and deeper, wrote small test programs - most of which worked fine - but as soon as I put the code back into my big program, it suddenly behaved completely differently or crashed completely. Of course, that didn't deter me one bit - obviously there was just a lot to learn for myself, obviously I just kept doing something wrong and that's why my programs didn't work. I quickly realized that the commands apparently interacted with each other in complex ways - with this insight I was then able to solve many of my problems. "Ah, I have to first set the foreground and then the background color, then it works" - that was the kind of discovery, which I diligently noted in the manual. Over time, my hypotheses, with which I tried to explain to myself the behavior of the interpreter in particular and of the Amiga in general, grew more and more complex. Apparently there was an enormous wealth of secret knowledge there to discover about how these miracle machines actually worked. Of course, such secret knowledge wasn't to be found in the manual, but could only be acquired laboriously through many experiments and collected from many sources. I wasn't discouraged - quite the opposite, I was fascinated by the thought that there was apparently a mystical world to explore there and motivated by the idea of me maybe someday too would belong to that secret circle of people who possess this knowledge. So, undeterred, I kept experimenting and consulted more and more literature. "GFA BASIC 3.0 - Training for advanced users" was one of the books from which I hoped for enlightenment. The book - published by GFA Systemtechnik GmbH themselves, at least - actually opened up new horizons for me. Some of the techniques in there I had never seen before, some of the commands never heard of - that most of the example programs on the floppy that came with the book didn't work for me unless I modified them astonished not me in the slightest. For one, the programs I had previously typed in from books and magazines hadn't usually worked right away either and on the other hand I was able to put all that secret knowledge I had accumulated up to that point to good use to get the programs running - which actually was successful for most of them. Despite all these partial successes and insights - a real breakthrough never seemed to happen for me. My larger programs tended to stay quite brittle and so very slowly a feeling of frustration set in. During my literature research I came across the book "AMIGA Programming with MODULA-2" from Markt und Technik publishing company. There was even a matching compiler available - though only a very limited demo version - on a fish disk. That then was once again another revelation: a true compiler, I can write real programs like the professionals - and they even worked! Everything so clear and structured everything does what it should, just as it says? Should something like this be possible should there exist a world without any mystical secret knowledge? At that point, GFA BASIC was quickly forgotten in my life - I was fascinated by Wirth's languages, so I spent the following years happily coding in Modula-2, Pascal and Oberon, but that's another story. It was then more by chance that at some point during this period I found out what was behind my experiences with GFA BASIC: in some magazine article GFA BASIC 3.5 was reviewed and the author casually mentioned that while the first versions of GFA BASIC for the Amiga were quite buggy, the situation seemed to improve with each update. GFA BASIC had errors?! This product I purchased for money that was packaged so neatly and made by absolute professionals could have been not perfect? Those many surprising properties that I had so painstakingly explored could it possibly be that they were not intended at all? I can hardly put into words what I felt when the full dimension of these insights slowly dawned on me: I simply had never considered that a bug could not be my mistake! What's more, probably the only mistake I had made was that I had never sent back this software registration card that came with the box - so I was never informed about available updates. Well, today I like to think back to those days with a smile - those were very important lessons I learned back then, many of them still guide me to this day. Without the Amiga, without these programming environments - I would have never gotten to where I am today, I am very grateful for that." (dr) [News message: 16. Dec. 2022, 06:51] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version] |
| 1 13 20 ... <- 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 -> ... 40 334 633 |
|
|
Masthead |
Privacy policy |
Netiquette |
Advertising |
Contact
Copyright © 1998-2024 by amiga-news.de - all rights reserved. |
|