Amiga Addict magazine - A Community Ever Strong with Amiga Bill - Issue 01 January 2021 by Simulant

BRITAIN'S BEST-SELLING (ACTIVE!) MAGAZINE FOR AMIGA USERS

ISSUE No. 1 JANUARY 2021 £4.99 / $6.50 / €5.50

- Amiga Events - Interviews - Latest Game Releases - Readers' Letters - Demoscene - Hardware - Tutorials

A COMMUNITY EVER STRONG Amiga Bill represents! We discuss his passion for Amiga & its active scene.

DON'T COPY THAT FLOPPY The peak Amiga years of software piracy remembered inside.

PLUS A huge 6-page interview with ex-chief engineer at Commodore, the legendary

DAVE HAYNIE

WHAT, NO COVERDISK? Ask your newsagent.

ALSO THIS MONTH

(They'll probably say, "It's 2021, what did you expect?")

The Hidden Battle Against The Amiga's Pirates

NEW AMIGA GAME - WIZ Is given the full AA review treatment

FURY OF THE FURRIES

AA is joined by our special guest "Amigo" John to look back at this often-forgotten classic!

YOUR MONTHLY SOURCE OF AMIGA NEWS, INTERVIEWS & SOFTWARE FUN FOR 68K | PPC | OS4 | MORPHOS & MORE! January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

MEET THE ADDICTS We give the acronym "AA" a whole new addictive meaning...

Jonah

Ravi

ravi@amiga-addict.com (sleeps with his Amiga)

Favourite Amiga? "The Amiga 2000. I have a softspot for that military grade machine. The huge plugs, the coiled cables. Give me one! Nooow." Which Amiga mag did you read? "I used to read Amiga Format but changed sides to CU Amiga. The reason for the switch was CU's far superior SuperCD-Rom." Worst Amiga memory? "I used to hang at an Amiga store in the red light district of Nottingham. Guys with tattooed hands would try to sell me FPUs as a young boy. I really should not have been there."

Favourite Amiga? "Has to be the A1200! I couldn't wait to get my hands on one at launch." Which Amiga mag did you read? "CU Amiga - but I must admit to being rather disloyal and often just going by who had the best cover disks!" Worst Amiga memory? "The A1200 my parents had preordered and paid for not arriving at launch. With no response from the company my mum drove for hours to confront them, only to ﬁnd they had james@amiga-addict.com gone bust. Not wanting to leave empty handed (and a few threats of violence later) she managed to grab (plays games) one from the liquidators on site!"

James

Favourite Amiga? "The A600 was my first, and forever my favourite - compatibility/lack of numpad be damned!" Which Amiga mag did you read? "When picking my Amiga, I bought a few issues of Amiga Action and continued for two years. Over the next four years, I bought all other Amiga mags on and off, though Amiga Format most. I had a whole library!" Worst Amiga memory? "Probably finally getting the A1200 ian@amiga-addict.com I'd lusted after for years, only to discover that Escom had botched the floppy drive and compatibility was (keeps the peace) even worse than the A600." Favourite Amiga? "My trusty old A500 of course... All the others aren't real Amigas!?" Which Amiga mag did you read? "I didn't get into the Amiga until the early 2000's when a family member passed one down. So Amiga Future has always been my favourite." Worst Amiga memory? "I've always liked productivity software - I used my Amiga to do school work when everyone else was on PC. I once spent days cataloguing hannah@amiga-addict.com my CD collection in Final Data. Little did I realise the data was final in that (does all the actual work!) instance - all lost due to a bad floppy! Now I always backup."

Ian

Hannah

Hello Amiga users, gamers, coders and enthusiasts. Welcome to our very first issue of Amiga Addict (or AA for short). We wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! AA is a new magazine dedicated to all things Amiga (and everything associated with it) including classic 68K, Vampire, MorphOS, OS4.1, FPGA, and, of course, lawsuits! Err, maybe we won't focus on the lawsuits... Joking aside, my hope is the days of corporate Amiga division are now long past. Finally, the multitude of intellectual property owners have stopped fighting and picking over the scraps of our beloved Commodore (or what was left after bankruptcy). Let's be honest, they didn't do us - or themselves - any favours... So what have they left us with? Well, despite all the past turmoil, the Amiga was so outstanding and exceptional for its time that us users were never put off. We stayed loyal. Some, like our main cover story interviewee (see AmigaBill, page 23) never stopped using Amigas - others are now starting to pull their Amigas back down from the loft, cobwebs and all. What we all have in common is that we fondly remember the Amiga as the best computer ever made. The dust has settled, and things seem brighter everyone is united. A new monthly print magazine for the Amiga? "It's not 1985," you may think. You're correct of course - those days are gone. But as an Amiga user myself back then and now, I have always missed many of the classic Amiga magazines that are no longer with us. You can see the influence they had on us all right through this issue - The One, Amiga Power, Amiga Format, CU Amiga to Amiga Action, Amiga Computing and Amiga Force - the list is actually endless and still growing (see Amiga Scene, page 6). Let's also not forget there are A LOT of new developments in the Amiga scene currently. We think it is the right time for a new magazine. A new magazine for the Amiga is one thing, but we'd also like to do a bit of boasting this month - AA stand by the various incarnations of Amigas that we love, and try to support the scene by actually producing and designing some of the magazine contents using Amiga hardware! Take a look at the software we use for graphic design on the Amiga - PageStream - which is available for PPC or 68K (see Testbench, page 42). We're also really proud that ex-Commodore chief engineer Dave Haynie could join us for our launch (see Dave Haynie interview, page 12) - and we are unsurprised that this community has such a wealth of talented writers and documentary journalists; including you lot, the amazing AA readers! You've proven your vast knowledge and talent through the articles submitted and included within these pages of our inaugural issue. We'd also like to thank those special contributors from the Amiga scene you've most likely already seen or heard of, such as the Amigos and Kim Justice (see The Hidden Battle Against The Amiga's Pirates, page 19). And it doesn't stop there... We've packed this magazine with Amiga content such as our chat with Mike Battilana, news, game reviews, demoscene history, Simon Butler and more (see AA Contents, page 5). Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed and helped us to get this magazine launched. But most of all, we thank you. It's been a tough slog... We're a community led magazine producing this publication around our day jobs and families. We rely on you, the fantastic Amiga community to help us put this magazine out. We are the first to admit that Amiga Addict isn't perfect by a long stretch, but we aim to build on this fantastic start and make a better magazine each month. So with all that said, please feel free to email any of the team your feedback about the magazine. Send in your articles, letters, software, hardware, views, news or anything else that you'd like to see inside these pages. We want Amiga Addict to continue as it has started out, to be a soapbox for the community. Tell your friends, or even subscribe - but most of all, kick back and enjoy a fantastic first issue. All hail the Amiga! Right, I'm off to the pub. Are we allowed in again yet? - Jonah Naylor (Editor)

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

REGULARS

Favourite Amiga? "It has to be the A4000. I would drool over the expensive big box Amigas in magazines as a kid." Which Amiga mag did you read? "I had a subscription with Amiga Format, but would pick up Amiga Power too when I could aﬀord it." Worst Amiga memory? "I was desperate to see the CD32, so I convinced my mate at school to ask his parents for one, Christmas '93. (I already had an A1200, so knew I editor@amiga-addict.com wouldn't get one.) Turned out he hated it, preferred his Sega Mega (pretends he's in charge) Drive - he's held it against me ever since!"

ADVERTS??

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

ISSUE 1 - JANUARY 2021 REGULARS Meet the Addicts & Editorial............................3 Amiga News.........................................................8 Keyboard Warriors & Back In The Day.............9 Simon Butler Column........................................53 Demo Scene........................................................54 Next Month........................................................55

AMIGA FOCUS

Our exclu sive interv iew with co frontman mmunity Amiga Bil l - not to b e missed!

Breaking below the surface of some of our favourite Amiga games - Kim reveals an unexpected war of words...

AMIGA INSIGHT Dave Haynie........................................................12 Amiga Bill............................................................23 AmigaLive Q&A..................................................30 Mike Battilana....................................................38

ON SCREEN Wiz........................................................................31 Fury of the Furries.............................................32 Six of the Best....................................................36 Jump Besi Jump................................................40 Dodgy Rocks.......................................................41

TESTBENCH StarShip Next Generation................................40 Pagestream........................................................42 Arduino Amiga Disk Reader/Writer................44 WinUAE CompactFlash Setup.........................46 Raspberry Pi Amiga 600...................................48

Does it liv e up to the hype? We give Wiz by Mu tation Software a good seeing to.

PAGE 31

PY DON'T CO PY P O L THAT F ly d n fo We r the remembe a m peak A ig . rs a e y piracy

PAGE 19

Welcome To The Amiga Scene.........................6 What is an Amiga Event?..................................10 Don't Copy That Floppy....................................18 The Hidden Battle Against The Amiga's Pirates...........................................19 How the Amiga Helped Kill the Arcade.........34

CONTENTS

AMIGA B ILL

PAGE 23

YNIE DAVE HA PAGE 12 chat noured to We are ho nie, exy Dave Ha h it w th p in-de modore. er at Com e in g n e f chie

PAGE 32

PAGE 18

FURY OF THE F Our gamin URRIES g Ninja is joined by John "Boa t" Shawler (A migos Podcast) to celebra te this often overlooke d classic.

WWW.AMIGA-ADDICT.COM • MAGAZINE@AMIGA-ADDICT.COM • TWITTER.COM/AMIGAMAGAZINE • Editor, Writer & Graphic Designer Jonah Naylor • Deputy Editor, Writer & Researcher Ravi Abbott • Game Reviewer & Writer James Walker • Writer, Proof Reader & Community Correspondent Ian Griﬃths • Proof Reader & Advertising Manager Hannah Clark Amiga Addict is an independent publication. The publishing company - Simulant Systems Ltd - has no connection with Commodore, or any subsequent trademark/ branding rights holders such as Cloanto/Amiga Corporation. The views expressed in this magazine are those of the individual writers' opinions only, and are not the opinions held by Amiga Addict magazine publication or its publishers.

We take great care to ensure that what we publish is accurate, but cannot be liable for any mistakes or misprints. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without our explicit permission.

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

PUBLISHED BY

WELCOME TO THE AMIGA SCENE...

AMIGA FOCUS

Well - it's 2020, and it has been a crazy year worldwide. You may think you're going crazy yourself, as you have bought a brand new UK printed Amiga magazine. Surprisingly, as the world crumbles around us - the Amiga scene is flourishing! Magazine culture has always been an essential part of retro collecting. So why have we created a new UK Amiga magazine? Globally, the Amiga has been blowing up and this is reflected by the amount of international magazines currently flying the flag. Amiga Future from Germany has been providing a print magazine in both English and German - it has been consistently running since 2008! This is a fantastic effort and surely one of the reasons that stagnation has not set in for the Amiga scene. We have K&A Plus, a stunning Polish mag looking at the Amiga and Commodore in general. Also, there are others popping up like Amiga Joker for specials. Their one-offs and tributes are excellent! Why do we need a UK-based mag? I don’t know about you, but I have been desperate for such a magazine. Part of the UK computer scene has always been about going to your local shops, looking proudly at those shelves dominated by Amiga mags and wondering "Which one do I pick, so I can get the best value out of my pocket money?" Many of these legendary mags tempted us with demo disks and insane, ever increasing free software packages. Interestingly, after speaking with Ben Vost (former Editor of Amiga Format) for my podcast 'The Retro Hour', he explained to us that at one point an issue of Amiga Format (with Imagine coverdisk) sold 272,000 copies - becoming the biggest selling magazine issue in the UK at the time, beating other popular magazines such as GQ and Men's Health.

in 2020. Amiga User (Poland), Amiga Future (Germany) and K&A (Poland). Now we join the gang to make the count four!

As Commodore died, the Amiga mags did not. Even after the death of Amiga Format and CU Amiga, we had a magazine still on the shelves of WH Smiths: Amiga Active! Amazingly, this magazine was available commercially into 2001. I remember how much my heart would jump when I saw it on display, like a relic from my past amongst all this modern rubbish. Sadly, after that Amiga magazine disappeared from our shelves, I would desperately look in Micromart for their last remaining Amiga column. I knew that would be the only section of the mag I would read, but I still purchased the whole magazine anyway.

I really hope this magazine helps ﬁll the gap and one day, once the inevitable collapse of WH Smiths happens we can purchase the business. Then we'll force all the Mac and PC users to hunt for a tiny column about their beloved machine on a shelf overwhelmed with Amiga magazines (I can dream :P). The Amiga scene remains full of confusion and drama, but this time we have a lot of ACTUAL HARDWARE & DECENT SOFTWARE coming out. This is a very drastic change (thus the caps). It's leading to more people discussing the Amiga in the wider retro world - and amazingly in 2020 - the community is growing!

The model changed, magazines for individual niche platforms became harder to sell with the rise of the internet and forums. But it still feels like something is missing. In Australia the mail order model began with New Amigans in 2001. The last UK magazine was Total Amiga run by Amiga User Group SEAL. It was a great mag that originally started as Clubbed. Mail order is the same model the three Amiga magazines have adopted

If you are totally new to the Amiga scene, I will try to help keep you informed and untangle the mess of information out there for you. I think a good starting point to mark how far we have come is to look back 14 years to that last issue of Total Amiga.

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

In 2007 we were looking at a very diﬀerent scene. Amiga OS4 (after 7 years in development and drama)

AND AMIGA MAGAZINE CULTURE A glimmer of hope came from the MiniMig project, an FPGA Amiga created by Dennis van Weeren. The machine had a nice form factor with Loriano Pagni and really got people's attention. Events were low-key. Midlands Amiga group were running the Bash events they were small but exciting at the time.

Classic users have had a bit of an upgrade too, with new addons coming almost monthly from Poland and Germany. More turbo boards and accelerators than you can chuck a Commodore PET at! Also new funky cases from A1200.net and Checkmate A1500 Plus. Not forgetting all the user groups and repair services that are popping up online and worldwide.

"...we'll force all the Mac and PC users to hunt for a tiny column about their beloved machine, in a shelf overwhelmed with Amiga magazines..." had ﬁnally hit Final Edition for PowerPC Amigas. Lots of machines had been announced for the Power PC range (anybody remember Amiga Inc. announcing a range of ACK Software Controls, Inc. machines?). Eventually thanks to Acube Systems - we actually got the next gen hardware with the Sam 440. I remember at the time being very sceptical about that machine even being real, until it came out and proved me wrong. There was a lot of focus on next gen back then and the classic market was just slowly chugging along. The focus on gaming and software seemed to be about porting from other machines rather than creating native games. Applications were still being developed for classic, but it was slow.

I have always believed we needed the hardware before we could progress and grow the scene, but now we also have what I have dreamed of for a long time. As a sweaty Steve Balmer would put it: "Developers, Developers, Developers". Not only are companies like AEon purchasing legal rights and updating classic apps, we have people developing software for the love and challenge of using the old hardware and working with its limitations. The demoscene shows us how this is going, with mind blowing, stunning demos by TBL still winning the compos - and they're better than ever. Games being developed for love of the system like Metro Siege. A lot of these games are so impressive, I wish I had a time machine, so I could pretend I made them and make my millions! Seeing real passion and focus, for both hardware and software, makes me believe we are living in a thriving time for the Amiga Scene. Sometimes it's hard to see how much we have progressed outside of the drama and fog. But we really have, massively. It's not said often enough but whatever camp you are in, and whatever hardware you use:

Thank You Amigans for keeping the scene alive. - Ravi Abbott (Deputy Editor) ravi@amiga-addict.com

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA FOCUS

Fast-forward to 2020 and my gosh, things have really changed. The range of machines available for Power PPC has increased - that market has really slowed down, but it's not dead - some great updates keep coming out for MorphOS and new machines are on their way. I feel next generation Amigas still have a lot to offer. The FPGA market has emerged with lots of machines such as the MiSTer FPGA, Apollo Vampire Standalone, UnAmiga and many more. A lot of these machines have benefited from and built on the Minimig core, AROS, and other innovations that similar projects started. The work put in by those Amigans years ago has really paid off. This new market is great for people with ageing hardware who want new components, but also want to run other stuff outside of Amiga on their FPGA.

REGULARS

Email your news & press releases to magazine@amiga-addict.com

A New Operation Wolf? The Company are nearing completion on Bean versus The Animator, a two-player Operation Wolf-style shooter for the Commodore Amiga.

A314 expansion board which allows an internally mounted Pi client in the Amiga to communicate with its host. He then uses the Pi to decode his Spotify stream and play through his miggy from within Workbench! And Speaking of the A314 We think A500 readers should check out this brilliant co-processor solution. Using a RPi, there are all sorts of other features (besides listening to Beyoncé) mounting a PiDisk, video playback and some possible networking functions: www.github.com/niklasekstrom/a314 New Checkmate A1500 Mini from iMica Stephen Jones is currently live with a new Kickstarter for the beautiful A1500 MiniITX desktop case. Don't miss out, show your support at: checkmate1500plus.com

Set in a distant future (2010!), Earth is facing invasion by an alien race. Your job is to thwart the attacks using an array of ﬁrepower across six levels. Expected for release early 2021, stay tuned - Amiga Addict will have a full review. Vegetables Deluxe Released The popular "match-3" C64 puzzle game has now arrived on the Amiga! Name your own price and download at: mikerichmond.itch.io/vegetables-amiga

Tristam Island A new style text adventure has been released for Amiga which uses the ZMachine interpreter (originally the virtual machine used by InfoCom). "After crashing your plane at sea, you end up drifting to a small island, with not much to survive. You explore, and ﬁnd out the island was inhabited, years ago. But why did the people leave?" The game is by Hugo Labrande and should be enjoyable for fans of the InfoCom mystery-style text adventure. Priced at only $3.99 here: hlabrande.itch.io

Kick Off 2 - 30th Anniversary Edition We love our footie games here at AA Towers, so we're pleased to see a new 30th Anniversary Kick Off 2 release. Interestingly, this is original oldstock legal floppies boxed with new artwork from Ami64. They also include a collectible sticker. Available from: www.ami64.com Itching for the AmigaOne A1222? Are the AmigaOne team having a few technical problems again? The AmigaOne A1222 board may be further delayed. Let's hope they've made progress by the time you're reading this... Once it does arrive we hope to publish a full review. New "OpenFlops" Gotek-style Drive Our publisher - Simulant Systems - has been working with OpenFlops designer Sukko Pera. Together, they have released an improved alternative to the popular Gotek USB floppy disk drive emulator. It is fully compatible with all classic Amigas. For sale at: www.simulant.uk/openflops Beyoncé On An Amiga The AA crew spotted a post on Hackaday which got our attention. It involves a Raspberry Pi, Spotify and an Amiga 500! Daniel Arvidsson managed to use the

AMIGA ADDICT

urge you to give it a go (please send your games and demos in to AA for review!). See the oﬃcial website: trackerhero.wixsite.com/redpill ScummVM merges with ResidualVM There may be a brand new updated ScummVM package coming soon for Amiga. ResidualVM (which supports many 3D classic point-and-click games such as Grim Fandango, Myst II and Escape from Monkey Island) has now merged with the 2D ScummVM. This should see several great 3D games added to ScummVM's supported game list, with even more to come now the development teams are working together. Progress can be monitored at: www.scummvm.org Amiga Art Contest Success 10MARC and Pixel Vixen's Amiga Art contest was a big success for 2020, this time entrants could also submit their MOD music compositions. The winners and entry artwork can be viewed at: www.amigaartwork.com

VectorInk SVG Editor for MorphOS VectorInk is the new SVG vector editing solution for MorphOS. We'll keep you updated as it matures further: kite.morph.zone/vectorink.lha

RedPill Amiga Game Creator A new 0.8.3 version of RedPill Amiga game construction kit by Zener came out in late 2020. This tool is gaining popularity as no programming knowledge is needed to create a game and artwork can be made in DPaint. We

TDK "Retrospect" Album Released The famous UK chiptune artist TDK has now ﬁnished his new album called Retrospect - and we can't stop listening to it while we play Lemmings! TDK is a composer from the C64 and Amiga demoscene and is well worth a listen. The album has eight tracks and pricing starts at just £5. Available in both digital download and physical CD release from: www.marktdkknight.bandcamp.com/ album/retrospect

January 2021

Wayfarer Web Browser for MorphOS Most people don't get too excited by new web browsers these days. But to us Amigans with our web compatibility woes, new browsers are like a small win on the lottery. Here we welcome Wayfarer for MorphOS - a new browser that supports most modern websites! Can you believe it?! Version 1.7 is out now at: www.wayfarer.icu

Send your reader comments & letters via email or Discord: magazine@amiga-addict.com www.amiga-addict.com/discord

Keyboard Warriors (Basically just send anything in - we'll probably print it!)

These indeed are some hard times. Keep your chin up. I suggest you look forward to the future, make friends with a blocker and avoid trapdoors. Also don’t leave home without an umbrella. Elephant In The Room... I wanted to write in to give a big mention and thank you to Amiga Future magazine, who to this day, are publishing a fantastic Amiga magazine all these years on. They picked up the reigns from the ashes of all the other defunct Amiga magazines back in 1998 and are still going strong. So we already have Amiga Future doing a great job, can I ask why we now need Amiga Addict?! Jonah Naylor, AA Towers A good question indeed. Maybe we don't need this magazine? Do we need any magazines!? Maybe we're blowing hot air out of our... *SNIP* (Deputy Ed - "Err, I think we'll cut that out!"). We make Amiga Addict to have some fun whilst recapturing some of the spirit and choice that publications once oﬀered to Amiga users. We hope to bring extra article topics and variety for you to enjoy. We also aim to

Dodgy Floppy Drive I was playing Sensible Soccer, disk swapping on my A500. Of course I was munching away on some cheese and onion crisps at the time. When I tried to load the data disk, so I could update my team with files from www.sensiblesoccer.de, I realised I'd got some crisps trapped in my floppy drive. How do I get it working again? - Mr G. Lineker, Leicester Hi Mr Lineker! Great choice using www.sensiblesoccer.de - its amazing to see that community still going strong in 2020. Did you know you can play online leagues as well? Regarding your floppy drive, I would suggest you take it apart. First remove the crisps, then clean the head with isopropyl alcohol. If that does not work I would recommend getting a USB replacement solution like the OpenFlops or Gotek drive. Make sure you don’t plug a Kit-Kat in there mate. A Legitimate Reader? Hi. I really hope this works well. Hope you are trying to push this magazine, it would be a shame if your target was not hit. Hope there will be some articles about the CD32 which is awesome with TF cards. Wishing you guys all the best, can't wait. Long live Amiga. - Warren Foster via email Thanks for your kind wishes Warren - we've promoted the mag as best we can. Good news, we'll have CD32 coverage in issue 2! This being the first issue of AA, we have not had many letters in yet! Some of the above are published are in jest. Think you can do better? Please write in!

Ahh those were the days! When summers were long and computers hadn't yet discoloured. The team here at AA Towers are a nostalgic bunch - we're always thinking of original ways to entertain (such as copying something Retro Gamer has already done!) This month, our brainwave was to start a yearly chronological journey from back in 1985. We'll then continue each issue to move through the years. (Ed - "Great idea, we do like to cover the latest news!")

BACK iN THE DAY '8 5

So, why have we chosen 1985? Well, as an Amigan you may already be aware that our beloved Amiga computer was born in '85 - the Amiga 1000 was launched on 23rd July. Let's travel back to a time when previously "amigas" had always just been our female friends. Then again, as most of us were male geeky computer kids back in the 1980s, we probably didn't have many girlfriends. Thankfully the Amiga was released....

Commodore Magazines

At The Box Oﬃce

Amiga 1000 Release

Comic Relief

Your Commodore in their January issue had a corner banner revealing the "new Plus 4 revealed". Amazing to think that the Plus/4 was relatively new and being talked about in January '85 - considering it was released in mid-84 and then discontinued later in '85. Did the magazines know they were ﬂogging a dead horse?! The same month, Commodore User had a tutorial on getting 'Vibrato' from the C64 Sid chip.

Back To The Future was the biggest movie of 1985. Its sales grossed an unimaginable $210,609,762 - annihilating other classics that year including Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rocky IV, The Jewel of the Nile and The Goonies. Amazing that 1985 saw a record number of movies released, yet was still regarded an unsuccessful year for the ﬁlm industry. Amiga later received Back to the Future Part II game.

What an event - no expense was spared with Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry enlisted for the launch show! Interestingly in the US, Commodore branding wasn't used on the 1000. Personal Computer World magazine (see full review in PCW Aug '85 issue, page 136) called the Amiga "the games machine which business software writers will be able to really make hum" and "an icon micro like the Macintosh".

Comedian Lenny Henry and writer Richard Curtis founded one of the world's most successful TV annual charity events (not including Amigathon of course...). Comic Relief - later to be known as Red Nose Day - has raised over one billion pounds and is still signiﬁcant. Donations were originally taken live as UK TV celebrities performed comedy sketches, the public almost wetting themselves laughing.

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

REGULARS

Hard Times My life is depressing. I just do what I am told and I feel suicidal. - Lemming from The Game

include the community as much as we can and be impartial. Let's hope Amiga Future welcome us into the fold, they have a great magazine and oﬀer a fantastic service. The AA team are all Amiga Future readers and we have huge respect for them. I urge all readers to please check out Amiga Future magazine too. As far as I see it; the more Amiga magazines readers have the better!

What is an Amiga Event?

AMIGA FOCUS

- Ravi lifts the lid on Amiga meet-ups & User Groups

Noname and Dave Haynie at Amiga34 in Germany.

here are many types of events in the Amiga world - Amiga shows, demo parties, user group meets, and piss ups. Over the years, events have come and gone, so lets take a look back at the notable Amiga events of the past and discuss why Amiga events were growing in attendance and numbers worldwide pre-pandemic.

ack in the glory days of Amiga and Commodore, events were happening worldwide. They were usually rammed with eager Amiga lovers looking for cheap hardware, new announcements and the severely lacking customer support the system so desperately needed.

xpos were a huge thing back in the heyday, and the Amiga community was right in the middle of it. World of Commodore, which started in 1983, was a huge series of international expos held in America, Canada, Australia and Europe. These events were huge compared to today, with attendance often hitting 100,000 eager users. Amiga would always have a good amount of sellers and displays at industry mainstays CES and COMVEX too.

AMIGA ADDICT

hile the overground was very commercial and trade-show-like, the underground and creative users met up at huge copy and demo parties. Often younger attendees would turn up with their own machine, a sleeping bag and a stash of intoxicants. This culture is still strong today and huge demo events continue at Assembly in Finland, Revision in Germany , Evoke and Deadline. The demo parties have their own vibe, fuelled by creativity. They have, in a very real sense, been self suﬃcient, driven by rivalry and creative prowess.

he trade shows are a diﬀerent beast entirely. The ﬁrst big show I attended was World of Amiga 2001. This was very much the tail end of the Amiga expos. I had heard legends of these big London shows and previous American expos. Being about 13, I attended with my dad. The numbers were still huge, but there was a feeling of lost hope In the air. At the time, PowerPC was seen as a future path with many of the Amiga users happy to drop a chunk of change on a new card. The only problem - they had not manufactured enough units in time for the show! We were greeted

January 2021

instead with President of Amiga Petro Tyschtschenko trying to ﬂog us boing ball CDs, Amiga cola and underpants on the showﬂoor. This was meant to be the big relaunch of Amiga by Gateway and it felt like a real let-down. We wanted the hardware, but in its place we got a dance troupe named Annex on stage, who had to restart their performance due to a skipping CDTV playing the backing track. This was the exact point I heard many share the sentiment that "Amiga shows are over".

kept attending shows, as they got smaller and smaller. It fell to the hardcore that have never disappeared or given up to run them - the user groups. Without these folks, no meetups or events would have happened during these dark days. Amiwest (started 1985) kept going and, to be fair, a few American companies tried to get in on the game, with events that still looked like trade shows for a while.

K-wise, we had Mikey C of Midlands Amiga Group and Ant running 'The Bash Events' (2006 - 2008). These events were a mix of user groups and hobbyists with a few traders. You

he turning point for the UK was Amiga 25 in Bletchley park in 2010. Two of the great Amiga groups still operating at that point (ANT and LAG) united to celebrate Amiga's 25th birthday. This was genius - by latching onto the Vintage Computer Festival, they managed to make it successful and well attended. Being held at Bletchley Park - home of the famous Alan Turing and British War effort to decode the enigma machine - meant you could go look at other computing exhibits too, such as those displayed by Acorn collectors, ham radio and general geeky fun. The main difference this show presented was a huge tent with stuff on display from LAG and ANT, MorphOS, Amiga Kit, and of course the everdedicated Stephen Jones with his Imica system.

hen, out of the shadows emerged a character much like somebody appearing for the first time on Stars In Your Eyes - Trevor Dickinson arrived on the scene. This was with Varysis, and the first bit of new Amiga hardware in years: the X1000. The BBC were filming there and the tent got rammed with users from other platforms, looking on and exclaiming "What? A new Amiga?!" Looking around (as memory serves me) there were approximately 200 people in that marquee.

hile these events were based in the UK, it gave a boost to others internationally. By people seeing pictures, they realised it could still be done! The VIP Charity Dinner organised by Steve Crietzman at Amiga 30 Peterborough was hugely signiﬁcant. It was limited to 100 attendees with a lot of demand for more tickets. This is where all the top dogs of Amiga got together and really had a good time. This event was interesting as many had not been together for years, and we were blessed with a visit from RJ Mical and Bjorn Lynn.

miga 30 in the Netherlands was the spark that landed and really blew things up. It was held in a venue that could hold maybe 300-500 people. Not only were Amiga UK people there, German, Polish and Dutch users all met up too. The place was packed and many Amiga pioneers turned up, like RJ Mical and Dave Hanyie. We also have Petro Tyschtschenko and David Pleasance former Commodore management rivals reigniting their relationship and crossing swords in the car park. This event was a fantastic mix of Amiga fans and professionals. It was also helped by a night out in Amsterdam and all the fun that comes with that!

miga 34 in 2019 Germany was one of the biggest shows so far. I mentioned those trade-shows earlier like World Of Commodore - these shows are the closest thing to that you will get nowadays. The attendance was crazy - I would say 1000 people passed through the events over the weekend. So packed it even made the local TV news! This event was truly insane - we saw nearly all Amiga-related companies in attendance. Lots of hardware was being sold - Apollo Team sold thousands of pounds worth of hardware within an hour! It's a great

event and deﬁnitely the big boy of the Amiga calendar. I do ﬁnd that these events seem to be growing, but they are also climbing in price and seem to be for the richer Amigan rather than your Joe Commodore.

any other countries have been celebrating and expanding their own scenes and events. The Polish event scene has been huge and I hear events like Amiparty are fantastic and were very busy too! From what I hear, monthly events are being held by Chelm Amiga Legion. Judging by some of the videos, it looks awesome fun and you better be ready for some of the local moonshine!

f you are up for a warm community feel, then check out Amiga Ireland - it is such a good event, small, jolly and always up for the craic. With VIPs joining them and lots of people ﬂying there from Europe or the UK, it's fantastic. We even got a visit by Amigos Podcast's Boatofcar direct from America! Amiga events were going so well until coronavirus struck! Luckily Amiga Ireland managed to get in there early (being in January) and I still managed to turn green after a night's drinking on the way back to Dublin. Amiga Events in the COVID Era With the pandemic in full force, naturally events have been put on hold. Many are still taking place online or smaller and socially distanced. Who knows what numbers we will get for events post pandemic? I do hope they reach 2019 levels, but feel it will take a while. Amiwest 2020 - The premier North American Amiga show that been running for 23 years had to go online for 2020, with a hugely successful stream. It worked well and can be all checked out online at www.amiwest.net/broadcast Hopefully this great example can be replicated with other events. Amiga Ireland 2021 - Amiga Ireland was planned to go ahead. Sadly, with the pandemic still ongoing, it won't be happening in person. They have wisely decided to hold the event online. Really looking forward to meeting up with everybody and joining them for some Amiga Entertainment and a pint Guinness at home!

As you can see, Amiga users are not intimidating at all we really are a very friendly and happy bunch...

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Flashback 20/20 has been rescheduled currently for 26th & 27th of June 2021. A special celebration of Commodore Amiga’s 35th birthday is planned, which should be fun!

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AMIGA FOCUS

would often find many people huddled around a machine, while their wives and partners stood at the edge looking bored. In those days, it was usually a group of Amiga people chatting and showing demos, but they always seemed to struggle with numbers. There weren't many people into Classic back then, and quite a lot of Next Gen stuff made them niche; yet this was a vital lifeline for the Amiga community. We owe a lot to Mickey C for all that effort he put in!

AMIGA INSIGHT

DAVE HAYNIE We chat to the legendary ex-Chief Engineer at Commodore. Dave at CES Chicago 1984. No funny caption is needed!

Dave, thank you for your time and being part of our ﬁrst Amiga Addict. Before we go further back into your career and history with the Amiga, can I ask if you ever used to read any Amiga magazines?

There was code in VAX assembly language, BLISS, and GE-speciﬁc code in FORTRAN. Oh yeah... and all this simulation was running on a VAX 11/750 with like 50 people on it.

I read most of the North American Magazines, including Amiga World, Amiga Transactor, Amiga Sentry, Amazing Computing... maybe some others? Also the UK magazines, when I could get my hands on them. I also wrote for all of those mentioned. I had a regular thing going with Amiga Sentry, which focused mostly on software reviews. They'd send me things that were fairly technical in nature: CAD programs, languages, etc. I'd usually get a review done in under a week.

They all ran batch jobs... and you could wait hours for your simulation to come back. So imagine having to run, ﬁx a little code, run, ﬁx a little code, etc. I learned how to submit subjobs in VMS, so I got priority over batch, but it was still pretty ridiculous. I guess our time was billable to the clients, a few new VAXen were not. Oh, and this wasn't Space Shuttle work, but something to do with nuclear warheads. I didn't have a clearance yet, but that was clear enough after about a month or two. So I decided to leave.

Did you ever kick back to play games on the Amiga when not working on the hardware?

I eventually sent out a resume to a "headhunter" based in Philadelphia, one of the few not speciﬁcally asking for years of experience. Two days later, I got a call to come in... that day. So okay, there was this weird thing going on at GE. The Computational Design group was all college kids, quite a few enrolled already into GE's in-house education plans. You could get your masters, but it was all kind of in-house, you couldn't get half-way through and transfer to a real school. Anyway, there was kind of this GE look, I guess kind of a "business casual", and I gradually saw the other kids kind of vanishing into the crowd. I've never been one to be part of the crowd. So the day they called me, I was actually wearing a home-made shirt. I didn't sweat it, though: if they wanted me, it wouldn't matter.

I mostly played Amiga games to just bang on new hardware and make sure it was working right... well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it! I played quite a bit of Marble Madness and Mindwalker. I also liked Archon. OK it is 1983, you've just started working for Commodore under Bil Herd, how did you land the job? So right out of college, I was working at General Electric in Philadelphia. I had gone there with the lure of working on Space Shuttle pieces, but I got assigned to this group called "Computational Design". We were the only ones in the company allowed to touch both hardware and software. They started me out working on a compiler they were using for register-level hardware simulation. It was kind of a mess: there was the main parser, in Pascal, and a compiler that produced code from the parser, both written by diﬀerent folks.

AMIGA ADDICT

So I drive to the headhunter's place, and in the lobby, there's this sort of John Lennon-looking guy. He asks if I'm there for an interview, I say "yes".... I ask him, I think he says "sort of". And of course, he's wearing jeans. I'm summoned into an oﬃce to talk to a boss type in a suit,

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then some minutes later, they put me in the room with the John Lennon guy - you guessed it, Bil Herd. He asks me various questions, and I think it went pretty well. The next day or so, they ask if I can come out and visit the place the next Monday. I did, and the other guy, the boss, Joe Krasuki, makes me an oﬀer. That was it, at least for the next 11.5 years! Did Commodore actually use their own computers in-house? Early on, I think everyone was using CBM machines for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Most of the business types gradually switched to IBM PCs. In Engineering I had a terminal on my desk, into our VAX systems, until I could get an Amiga 2000 on the desk. I had to build it, of course, for that to happen. We also had Apollo Computers for electronics CAD. That was set up for chip design originally, but Bil and I jumped into that for systems design on the C128. We also had dedicated systems, SciCards and later Calay, for PCB design. That was pretty heavy lifting back in the 80s. By the 1990s, most of us hardware folks had Sun workstations on our desks. The software folks were using cross compilers on the VAX systems during the TED and C128 projects. For the Amiga, they started with Sun 2 workstations early on, but pretty early on, they had established native development as a goal for the Amiga. Part of that was working with Lattice to get their compiler fully Amiga integrated (it understood library linking, etc) and as good as GreenHills, which was kind of the best 68K compiler, at least when it all started out. As VP of Engineering, Henri Ruben was the only manager I know of who was trying to "dog food" as much as possible. He always wanted the fastest Amiga he

could get on his desk, and was trying to do as much of his daily work on it as possible. Do you feel Commodore really believed in the computers they were making, was there a lot of passion?

What were your initial impressions of the job and team? Pretty much just what I was looking for. See, I had been majoring in Electrical Engineering, Math/Computer Science, and Cognitive Psychology in school, so I didn't see any reason for hardware and software to have this artificial wall inbetween. I had seen a tiny bit of that working summers at Bell Labs, but it was kind of the way of life at GE. And when you're designing a system, you know up front that HW and SW are cooperative, not meant to be rivals or enemies, and that when you design a system, you start with "black boxes" that might contain HW, SW, or at Commodore, even chips. Was there ever much drama or did everyone get along well? We got along great! Everyone saw it as our mission in life. We worked together, played together, all pretty much in our twenties, at least among those who got much done in Engineering. We had occasional feuds with marketing people (aka, "Marketroids"), the facilities people and their "all-important speed-bump network" - we all had fast cars and didn't see much of a problem driving fast in the Commodore driveway - the guys in charge of the building had a different opinion! Which computers at Commodore did you initially do design work on? Bil brought me in to work on the TED project. TED had started out as Jack Tramiel's answer to the $100 Sinclair, but by the time I got there, it was expanding into the C64-like system, originally called "Commodore 264" and going to market as the Plus/4. After that, I worked for a little while with Jeff Porter on the Commodore LCD machine. But then Bil got the C128 project, and grabbed me to be his #2 on that. We worked great together, and I was sucking his brain dry on all the things he knew. Bil didn't go to college, he had learned engineering "on the street," which basically meant he had to be twice as good as anyone with a degree just to get the chance.

How? The good old-fashioned way: by attrition. There were lots of people in Engineering when I got there working on other projects, and a few who, well, you could never quite figure out what they were doing with all their time. I started in 1983, and the C264 was shown off at the CES show in January of 1984. Jack Tramiel left shortly after that, and a bunch of his people followed. That left basically two groups: the 8-bit folks, working on Plus/4, and at some point the third team, George Robbins and Bob Welland, working on what we called "The Z8000 Machine" and which had been dubbed the Commodore 900. So after the C128, Bil was pretty burned out. There were only three of us (with Frank Palaia) on hardware, plus Dave DiOrio on chips, and the three software guys. About the right sized team given the resources we got for the C128, but we never got to make as many improvements as we might have liked. After the C128 was done, Bil left the company, which left me as the senior guy on the 8-bit computers. Greg Berlin had been around a bit longer, heading the effort on disc drives... it just wasn't all that big. So after Bil left, I was of course trying to make myself useful. Frank and I started working on a "dog and pony show" for a C256 concept... after all, that was our area. We had a 256K MMU, but it wasn't a drop in replacement. I hacked that in, along with another 128K memory, while Frank, who was our Z-80 expert, got the Z-80 system running twice as fast when in 80-column mode. But no one was interested in starting a new 8-bit project. Back up a little - so of course, the C128 was first shown off at the CES show in January 1985. I met some of the Amiga guys out there: RJ Mical, Dave Needle, Dale Luck... it was pretty cool. In fact, one night Bil and I hung out with RJ and Dave, and we got to take an A1000 apart. We looked inside and both cracked up - they had one too! One what? So okay, the annoying thing about the CES show being in January is that you often found yourself scrambling to get things working around Christmas and New Years. One of those scrambles was around the 8563, the 80-column graphics chip in the C128. This chip had its own memory and clock, of course, for memory timing, pixel generation, etc. It didn't correctly synchronize to the C128's bus. I had found that trying to get a display going on an early prototype - I found if I wrote a register value twice, it usually worked.... but a real problem in practice. As well, the yield on the chip

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was almost non-existent. So Herd and DiOiro were working on a "tower" - a circuit board you stick in-place of a chip, with that chip and a bunch of other stuff on the board to fix whatever was wrong with the chip. In this case, they put in a phase-locked loop circuit to force the 8563 to sync to the C128 bus and, thus work. Meanwhile, I was sorting through hundreds of 8563 chips, along with Ted Lenthe, the head of Commodore Semiconductor Group, in order to find 30 or so "golden" chips for CES. So the C128 had this tower. It wasn't just the presence of the tower, but the fact it had to be tuned in. So when a C128 was cold, maybe it booted up, but after it was warm, if you power cycled it, you had to tune the PLL again - just a quick hack for the show, of course. There was no reason to power cycle anything - the C128 had its reset button, and we had split up all systems into 80col machines (the best of the golden 8563s, with no pixel shimmer) and the others. Of course, once the show began, Marketroids were power cycling them, running 80col mode on machines designated 40col, etc. I was running around the CES show floor at the C= booth with a can of freeze spray and a plastic "tweaking tool," resetting C128s and telling everyone "stop doing this." So when the A1000 proved to have a tower under the graphics chip - I think Daphne at that point, not yet Denise - we just cracked up. Anyway, that spring we got material about Amiga for the first time in West Chester. There was a big green book which was issued to individuals - they had to sign it out because everything was hush-hush. This book eventually became the set of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals, the Hardware Manual, etc. So Bil got one of these green books. As soon as I could, I stayed late and photocopied it, so I could learn everything about the Amiga on my own time. Which I did. There was still a bit of work getting the C128D out the door... even though the very cool plastic case with handle had been replaced by a cheaper metal/plastic case. It was actually the same motherboard - we had planned for that. The Amiga claimed a casualty: the Commodore 900. This, as mentioned, was based on the Zilog Z8000 16-bit processor, and it ran an operating system called Coherent, a UNIX clone (a commercial product, but a clone in the way that Linux became a UNIX clone). They also had a megapixel monochrome display with a very simple, very fast windowing system designed by Rico Tudor - everyone just called that Rico Windows (like saying X Windows, not related to MS Windows). So this was kind of a low cost Sun 2... who could possibly

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

In Engineering, absolutely - it was our mission, our passion, our way of life. It's kind of all I did those years. The rest of the company? It varied. Some sales folks were completely gung-ho on it, others were kind of confused about it.

How did you get the promotion to Chief Engineer?

AMIGA INSIGHT

have wanted that? But Commodore's sales and marketing was even less able to deal with these than the Amiga. And Commodore had a bad year in 1985, even with the new products in development. Several rounds of layoffs had pretty much eliminated those "no one knows what they do" folks in Engineering. The C900 guys, George (GRR) and Bob, had found a new project: a cost-reduced Amiga 1000. By summer of 1986, this had become the Amiga 500, aka the B-52. That code-name served two purposes: GRR's favourite band was the B-52s, and one of the managers had basically said "if this doesn't succeed, they might as well bring in the bombers and level this place." So lacking any new 8-bit project, I started working with GRR on the A500 and related things. There was some belief from the Los Gatos guys that the Fat Agnus wouldn't work, so they were also working on a "Fat Chip", basically integrating all of the PALs and other glue logic you needed to build an A1000. But Bob Welland was working with the chip guys, and he was years ahead of anyone else I knew on computer architecture. The Fat Agnus worked fine, and so we had an A500. The plan had been to hand off the A500 to me, since I was the "low end guy" and George would move on to the next thing. But George didn't want to give up the A500 - his baby - and so they gave me the next project: the Amiga 2000. Just me. Yikes! The Amiga 2000 was a concept from our Engineering group in Germany. It mated what was basically an A1000 design to a Zorro backplane, and of course, they had changed the format of the Zorro card. The original Zorro card looked like a mini VME card: connectors on the long edge, going into the system from outside (no need to open the case), sitting horizontally. But the Germans and Henri Ruben, VP of Engineering, had this idea for the "Bridge Card" - a PC on a card for Amigas. Most of us thought that was nuts, but those decisions had pretty much already been made. So they handed me the "Amiga 2000 cost reduction" project, the idea of which was to take the German idea and rebuild that using A500 chips with consumer product design sensibilities. And so I became a senior engineer! You've been so kind to the Amiga community over the years, giving up your time for lots of interviews and appearances. If we imagine that you'd never worked at Commodore, what would intrigue you the most about Amiga computers? Given that I was already using and learning Amigas before I had a chance to

AMIGA ADDICT

work on any, I imagine it was inevitable that I'd have dumped my Commodore 64 (which I owned prior to working for Commodore, after my Exidy Sorcerer had been stolen) for an Amiga in a heartbeat. I probably would have been one of those annoying people demanding better systems, without necessarily understanding how amazing it was that we all got what we got with the poor structure at Commodore: so little spend on engineering, so much lining the pockets of top management people. It's almost certain I would have got into Amiga software coding, at least for fun, but maybe even hardware design, as a side-project. Though I really don't know what I would have been doing other than Commodore! That was an unimaginably challenging and exciting time for a systems engineer like me, and really gave me the hardware design chops I'd use for most every job that came after. Commodore was run like a startup company, but one with an actual income and a chip fab... at least for awhile. How were the Commodore Christmas parties and social events? Oh, Commodore was a crazy place to work - good crazy. Nothing was all that formal. No one really cared about titles, and it was, for the most part, a meritocracy - if you did good work, you got to do better work. Things happened there you wouldn't expect. One of our software engineers, Bryce Nesbitt, came to his interview with bug ﬁxes for AmigaOS - actual code changes to ﬁx bugs he had found. Mike Sinz started out in CATS (tech/developer support) but made it over to Engineering as one of the main kernel and AmigaOS software architects. We had amazing and brilliant people... and you can't cage folks like that! At our peak, there was probably a Commodore party somewhere at least every-other weekend in the summer... I threw parties at my place in South Jersey that had over 150 people, and usually got a visit by the police around 10pm, asking us to quiet down - we always had a live band or two just spontaneously appear (it moved to the garage after the cops, I had plywood up on the windows to help contain the sound). In fact, on a few occasions, the party went all night and started up again the next day! Commodore did a nice job at Christmas parties, and yeah, you dressed nice for that one. Though at one of these, Bil Herd punched Marshall Smith... they could get out of control, in very good ways! Did you socialise with the team a lot then after hours? After hours.... what's that? During the

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week, not so much. Part of that was because it was mostly about work. I used to keep a sleeping bag under my desk, and pretty much kept Thursday night as a nearly-all-night thing... I'd often work until 4-5am, catch 3 hours of sleep, then get back into it. We did often take off for lunch on Friday afternoons, head to a place called Margarita's Evergreen Inn, and get Mexican food and many drinks... sometimes leaving around 2pm and not getting back. But hey, other companies have their Friday afternoon beer blasts. When you've already worked 60-70 hours in a week, cutting Friday short was no big deal. And as I mentioned, in those days folks threw summer parties all the time... and few here and there the rest of the year. Randell Jesup always threw Halloween and Super Bowl parties, and would this year if not for the coronavirus pandemic. Although you weren't involved, do you know much about the Workbench Easter egg from 1987 in Kickstart 1.2 and the reactions to it once discovered? "We made Amiga, they fucked it up" ... I always took that as meaning that Commodore wasn't doing all that well with the Amiga early on, selling it and all. And yeah, the Amiga 2000 changes were not popular. But I suspect some of it was resentment against Commodore in West Chester taking over more of the Amiga decisions. And maybe the lack of advancement and on-going work on new chips, which I could actually agree with. You can have the best software people, willing to work many hours, and get your software to advance faster than lesser developers, without spending any more money. Same to an extent with hardware people. But even the best chip designers need to make chips, test them, etc. That's big money, even when you own the chip fab. And both Commodore's advantage and their boat anchor - AmigaOS was too dependent on the chips, and the chips were too complex to advance quickly based on Commodore's budget. In the later Commodore years as things got tough, did you get any sense of just how popular Amiga computers were in Europe despite Commodore losing money in their home territory? Oh, sure, I knew all about Commodore in Europe. I had first been to a marketing event - to present the C128 - back in 1985 in the UK. I had gone to Germany for a number of shows, and you were hit with the obvious differences when you're walking through the airport and see Commodore ads on the wall. They were, in those days, the best-known brand in Germany. Commodore USA was strictly known to be a US problem. I had also been to World of Commodore in Canada in the early Amiga days: they sold as

many Amigas in Canada as they did in the whole USA in those days. Is there anything you feel was key to Commodore's downfall from your point of view? Management. When you have the bosses at Commodore paying themselves several times the salary of the head of IBM or Apple in those days, money that should have been spent on engineering new products, you can see the problem. Now, I can't say you always need some kind of visionary running your high-tech company. You can have success with just everyone working their best toward a common goal. But with Jack Tramiel at Commodore, you had a visionary. Steve Jobs at Apple, also a visionary - a different kind, but still, a guy who could be a figurehead, who could point all efforts in the same direction, etc. At the end of Commodore, we had Mehdi Ali, who had been a hatchet man and bean counter at Prudential Investments, a guy who didn't watch TV, didn't use computers, didn't understand why putting the two together was important, and most critically at all, didn't care. Ali was a guy like Trump - he didn't learn, didn't want to learn, because he already knew the answers to anything. If someone went up against him, they got fired. No-one with that kind of personality should be in charge of anything important, ever. It never ends well. After Commodore did you still work as a hardware engineer and what do you currently do for your job? Immediately after Commodore, I went to Scala. That was software work that we had hoped would become hardware, but never really did. I had this weird set of projects there. I wrote a compiler system for the Scala Multimedia Operating System, an object oriented OS written by

Devcon 1991, in Milan, Italy, with Dale Larson and Eric Lavitsky.

Mike Sinz. At Commodore we had all kind of realized that delivering TV-class multimedia on a computer, especially in those days, was an OS-level issue. This allows Scala to put their software on practically anything: set top boxes, running over MS-DOS, running in Windows. There was a system for creating pre-compiled object tokens, which required a database to be accessed by the compiler. It also wound up doing documentation, auto-docs style, with hypertext. On the other hand, I was working on various low-level software things: I wrote their modem interface, an interface to control a computer TV through Scala, etc. I was also still trying to bring Amiga back to life, but hadn't found anyone interested until Escom bought the old Commodore assets, started putting the Amiga 1200 and 4000 back into production under their Amiga Technologies division. They called and shipped me and Andy Finkel (former heard of AmigaOS development) over to Germany to talk about going forward. We worked on identifying some hardware components around PowerPC (I had a great architecture, but it would have required custom chips), committing to developing a hardware abstraction layer for PowerPC based Amigas, etc. But ESCOM made some bad decisions in the PC business, which dragged everything else down. Out of that I formed PiOS AG with Andy and two German businessmen who had worked at Amiga Technology: Stefan Domeyer and Geerd Ebeling. We tried to get AmigaOS rights. When that failed to be possible, we tried to work with BeOS, and ultimately, MacOS. I was working on a modular PPC machine, dubbed the PiOS One, which had a modular CPU+RAM board, very high quality audio (with digital audio expansion), etc... I was trying to build Amiga-like systems with

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off-the-shelf parts. It was slow going, and once we brought in MacOS support, we had to redesign things. And then, of course, SJ came back to Apple, they effectively cut off MacOS licensing (PiOS could still buy MacOS off-the-shelf, and in fact, bought so many copies we became a distributor, and got it for the same $50/ copy price that Mac cloners got. But those early systems were using Taiwanese main boards, and after cloning ended, so did our hardware supply. And the new one was cancelled. We switched to set top boxes: basically, a way to get a personal computer into the living room. These started out as essentially internet terminals (only about 15% of Germans were online in the mid 1990s), but moved to hardware capable of multimedia: audio and video playback. And finally our own custom system based on the Motorola Coldfire and an operating system written in-house called CAOS (Carsten and Andy's OS), but very, very Amiga-like. Amiga-like enough, in fact, that we had paid Amiga folks to write for us: we used MUI as the main user interface toolkit, we ran Voyager as the browser. etc. But the company made some bad business decisions. Looking back, like the things we were trying to do in hardware and software, they weren't bad ideas, just good ideas at the absolute wrong time. For example, we wanted to deliver video content. Some of this was going to be via streaming video, but the internet wasn't necessarily fast enough for most people. So we had hard drives to allow download, we had a special "TV datacasting" modem called BOT that allowed hundreds of megabytes to be sent at night over a rented analogue TV channel, and we got a patent on a way to distribute content on DVD, some free, some pay-per-view. This was before Roku, before Netflix, etc... and maybe suffering because of that. You couldn't

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

Basel Switzerland 1990 (with Joel Tesslar).

build a $50 media player if you needed a hard drive!

AMIGA INSIGHT

Some of the things the business did was, for example, they bought a TV studio. Again, at the right time, well, that's just what Netflix and Amazon did, of course. But they spent that money before our primary new set top platform was out....and things went bad for us, like everyone else, in 1999-2001. The company ultimately failed. After that, I worked with Andy again on a small startup called Fortele, working on whole home multimedia networking. Right then, mostly software, but we were hoping to deliver a "dog and pony" show using off-the-shelf hardware. The idea was to make a smart network for media playback: TV tuners, satellite, cable, DVD, DVR, etc. that worked with voice control and abstracted everything under the same interface. And would learn from the user, rather than the user learning it, so anyone could just start using it, in any room, on any networked screen or speaker. We were making good progress, but our money guy suddenly ran out of money, and that was that. While at Fortele, another company had approached me, back then called Sizig. They were working on gaming robots, and needed some help - they found me "through the grapevine" of PA/Jersey developers. I did a few little gizmos for them, and once Fortele went away, I jumped right in. I designed the robot, using a digital camera chip to power it. Unfortunately, given the need for a controller with a screen, and given that it was 2002 and everyone was gun shy about spending money after the Internet crash, this didn't fly. Everyone loved the idea, but wasn't sure they were going to fund a three-year project for us (three years because, like any game system, you need to hit the market with properlypriced hardware and at least 10 good games). So we spun off the digital radio controls system to drive, well, regular R/C cars. Only, that didn't work right... We had used Bluetooth for the robot, which was

fine for a slow indoor gaming robot, but not for an R/C car that might go 70mph (real, not scale). So I managed to find a much lower overhead radio chip that was nearly ideal for the job (funny thing: it was actually designed by a guy who brought the idea to Cypress Semiconductor as a cheap, low latency chip for mice and keyboards, but his actual goal was radio for R/C... he left Cypress after the chip was done and ultimately became our biggest competitor). The company name was ultimately changed to Nomadio, and we had two generations of digital R/C controllers out there. We started getting back into robotics looking for folks using remote control for small robots - they were all using cheap analog controllers that had issues. At some point, we hooked up with the Air Force to demonstrate our technology, show how it was far more secure than analog, and I eventually wrote a whitepaper on how to use schematics from the internet and few component tweaks to build a device that would not only jam an analog controller, but let you take over control. The Air Force's little robot had a bomb on it, so they were pretty sensitive to that sort of thing. So we built a "hard" version of our radio for the government - by then it was moved to the Navy's EOD group - to deliver the BomBot, a cheap robot for checking out and potentially blowing up IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The robot was based on an R/C car monster truck motion platform, with a screen-less version of our R/C controller, supporting 6 servo channels, in a case large enough to control with gloves on. This became the most popular robot in those places for two years... I guess they saved lives. We moved to larger robot controls with broadband, meshing radios. That was using mostly off-the-shelf components, but it was my job to "transvert" radio frequencies so that 2.4GHz wifi chips could be used at 425MHz, 900MHz, 1350MHz, 1800MHz, wherever we needed them. This was intended to deliver a better controller for big robots like the iRobot PacBot... and it did. We

A poorly merged photo of the Orlando DevCon 1993 crew... not sure where I got this one.

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

could go about 2.5x as far, but the Navy was looking for more like 10x as far. So this was developed under contract with the government, to supply light military, police/fire/emergency with a radio that could run between 50MHz and 2000MHz. Problem was, that frequency agility was expensive, and there was no-one figuring out how to sell these, so eventually the company moved on to other things. Software. So I wound up more or less being traded. I stuck around after the hardware business was shut down, helping on software, patents, photography, video and animation, music... it was a weird year. We were trying to sell the radio technology. Most companies we met wanted me, but didn't want to buy the agile radio system. And while it was clear I wasn't long with this company, I naturally couldn't just quit and go work for any of the companies we had spoken to... that was a conflict. So I was looking far and wide for other things. Eventually Nomadio orchestrated a move - like I was a sports star being traded - over to Rajant. They're a larger radio company but not a big company (about 120 people today), with their own unique mesh radio technology. Like just about everyone in this business, they were building radios using off-the-shelf parts, which only went so far. I started there working on a radio system that had to use custom processors just to be accepted (government security on this radio). A digital radio is, of course, a computer with one or more transceivers - we have up to six possible on today's systems, at different frequencies. The first ones I did were fully custom, based on the Freescale i.MX6 processor, DDR3 memory, PCI slots. The new one is actually using a CPU module, right now with an embedded x86 chip, with multiple PCI Express slots for radios, storage (edge computing), that kind of stuff. There are actually a few exCommodore folks at Rajant: Andy Finkel, Fred Bowen, Keith Sullivan, Don Gilbreath. Amiga Bill is our other feature interviewee this month. He wanted to ask you, "Was there anything you were working on at Commodore that you were really excited about, but never came to fruition due to the bankruptcy?" Absolutely. In 1991, I was designing a whole new system architecture for what might have been an Amiga 5000 some day. This was moving to make things more modular, using PCI for interconnections, etc. A bit later, Dr. Ed Hepler came to some of the same decisions in designing the Hombre architecture, the thing that would have replaced the AAA chipset at the

Commodore of Earth 2. The architecture was dubbed "Acutiator" and years ago, I put some of the material on it out.

Can you tell us about the Amiga network card project and what you were working on with daisy chain networking? I was never involved in a network card myself. The daisy chain network in the Nyx was pretty simple. An ArcNet chip was around $5.00 in those days, and it was designed for daisy-chained networks. I used an RCA jack with built-in switch. If you plugged in a cable, you unplugged the on-board termination - if you remember Ethernet 10-Base-2, you always had to put in splitters and terminators, we didn't want that. So you'd just cable a video-class RCA cable between systems, and there was your network. We had a pretty good reason to believe Amiga people could get their hands on video cables! Of the Amiga computers that did get released, which is your personal favourite ever Amiga computer and why? The Amiga 3000 is by far my favourite. Much of that's because it's a really good machine, just about right for the times, not bad looking - in fact, the PC I made for my shore house this year is in the Checkmate 1500 case, which looks like a black A3000. But it was also the team: Hedley Davis, Greg Berlin, Scott Hood, Jeff Boyer, and eventually Scott Schaeffer for '040 boards... I had been kind of driven crazy with the A2000 and being all on my own for that one. I had GRR to help out, since the A500 stuff was his architecture, but for every day to day thing, Buster chip design, getting expansion to work on a 2-layer PCB, etc. there were some lonely nights. I worked a bit with Bob Welland on the A2620, but he was heading out the door. The A2630 was just me (well, of course, the great Terry Fisher was doing the PCB design... we didn't also have to do that back in the day). So having a full team, and the kind of big changes you can make in that kind of team, lead to a much better system, and great memories.

Just the overall fact that, despite the weak resources, I helped keep it going for those nearly ten post-8-bit years at Commodore. What do you think to the Next Generation Amiga compatible computers and operating systems such as Vampire, AmigaOne, MorphOS PPC and such? I had early objections about some of the approaches, but decided over the years that's nonsense. An Amiga is a computer that runs AmigaOS, and after Commodore, we had a choice: ﬁgure out how to make new ones or forget about AmigaOS. And while I tried, it ultimately wasn't my eﬀorts that got us there. Fortunately, the advances in technology meant you didn't need a billion dollar company to make a new Amiga. And as well, we also had true madmen like Trevor Dickinson, the Apollo Team, John "Chucky" Hertell, and many others making these things to keep it going that really have no business existing... but I'm glad they do. Why do you think the Amiga community is still so passionate all these years later? I know it's weird, but there was kind of a soul in the Amiga that you didn't get in generic PCs. I mean, no-one's all that sad when a PC dies - it was just a placeholder, and you'll get another one in a week. But each Amiga was kind of unique. And it was just this kind of mix of so many things improving so far in personal computing... that never happened before the Amiga or afterwards. It was always just incremental improvements.

During my talk about Advanced Amiga Architecture and the Nyx mainboard at Devcon 1993... still kind of surprised they let me do that, it was an earlier preview of Commodore technology than had ever been done before. And yeah, you did kind of have to "dress nice" at DevCon and CES.

of computers, I was a fan of Yoshihisa Maitani since I was in High School - I still use Olympus cameras to this day, even though the digitals were mostly just inspired by his Pen and OM System ﬁlm cameras. I think I'm more inspired by people who do things I don't do as well, musicians and artists.... there's magic in that. One of the reasons the Amiga was so important to me was that it was helping to enable new forms of art and music. Finally - are there any projects you're working on, or anything else that is keeping you busy?

You are a legend to us Amiga users. Who are your own role models or heroes?

I did recently agree to work on a new Buster chip for the A3000/A4000, in FPGA, for Jens Schoenﬁeld of Individual Computers. I've been more or less thinking about doing this for about a decade, but it was always - okay, I make that, then what? So he's got the resources to actually build the thing, and this also puts one more piece of the Amiga out there in modern form that won't vanish some day. I'm just starting this, and probably will have something in early 2021. In particular, I was a little over my skis on the Amiga 3000 Buster chip. I had designed the whole Zorro III architecture for the future, going to larger, faster chips, a 68040 bus, etc. so ﬁtting it into the A3000, and the gate arrays we had to work with, was a kludge. Had I known that was the last, I would have made it simpler.

My Dad, for sure. I kind of followed the stuﬀ Steve Wozniak did at Apple, and that guy was really clever, and also did some good after Apple... though he broke my heart when he didn't take my friend request on Facebook :-) Outside

Thanks once again to Dave Haynie we're amazed he took so much time out for all of our questions. Let's hope to welcome him back to Amiga Addict again in future issues - if we haven't worn him out! Cheers Dave.

Do you still own any Amiga computers and still use them? I have a couple of dead ones... my A3000 and my Mom's old A1200. I'm sending the A1200 oﬀ to a friend who might be able to get it going again (I really am sending it some day, Alex!). I'm currently looking for a working A3000 or A4000, for a project I'm starting. I also have some new Amigas: an Amy ITX, a Vampire 4SA, and Edu Arana's UnAmiga+. I haven't had a ton of time for recreational computing lately... too many other things going on.

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AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

And of course, I was also at the same time working on a system for the AAA chips. The "Nyx" main board wasn't speciﬁcally designed to be a product, but rather, to test out concepts for the AAA product. That meant chip RAM on special memory modules (AAA supported either VRAM or regular DRAM), Kickstart on a module, with the potential to support ﬂash memory. It had built-in networking then a cheap 2.5Mb/s using ArcNet over 75 ohm CVBS cables, a self-terminating daisy-chained network. The point was just getting the network in the box.

What are you most proud of in your time working on the Amiga?

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DON'T COPY THAT FLOPPY!

was the endless array of cheap computers, software and (most importantly) games available.

Jonah recalls his own ﬁrsthand memories of Amiga piracy in the '80s - many of us stumbled naturally into buying copied software without realising the criminality. We'd love to hear of your own experiences, email: magazine@amiga-addict.com

uring childhood, there were a lot of activities I enjoyed on the weekends - making dens with my mates, watching He-Man on CITV or even playing football. But buying other people's junk from the back of their car boots whilst trudging round a ﬁeld wasn't a fun thought. It seems my parents had a diﬀerent view...

n 1986 (I was six years old), my parents caught the "second-hand" bug. I think it started with a local weekly Jumble Sale at a village hall, which happened to also have some sellers outside. I use the term “sellers” loosely, as in '80s Britain (and no doubt also internationally) there was much more of a distinction between a "proper" shop or market stall holder, and then everybody else who may occasionally sell privately. Just as families in the USA had a 'yard sale' as a one-oﬀ event, British families would sometimes want to have a "clear-out" and sell their belongings at a 'car boot sale'. Initially, the people that turned up to sell this way charged pennies for items they didn’t know the value of. Often they didn't even really care what the value was - the aim was more about giving once loved items a new home.

fter realising the bargains available such as a "new" set of curtains (the pattern had hardly faded!) or a toaster with larger capacity - my parents started to visit an increasing number of boot sales. They preferred the outdoor events, as it was nice in the summer to walk around in a ﬁeld, eat a burger, and even take along the the dog.

oon, it wasn't just one Sunday each month, but every Sunday. Somehow this progressed into them attending every Saturday and Sunday, every single week for the entire summer school holidays! My dad would drive us to various sales in the area on diﬀerent days. Myself and my older sister were dragged along begrudgingly, but Mum and Dad would tell us, "It'll do you good let's go out as a family in the fresh air you can get some new toys."

ow wrong I was to ﬁght it; by the time I was seven years old, I realised I had vastly underestimated the appeal of the humble boot sale! I started nagging my parents to go to a "booty". Why had I become so keen? The answer

AMIGA ADDICT

he computers were usually older models, but they were practically given away. And the bonus was they'd come complete with many games, books and accessories included. I acquired a TI99, a couple of ZX Spectrums and even my ﬁrst Amstrad CPC within a few years. y dad had set me up with a parttime job to pay for any of the computers I found when delving through the car boots at the weekend. These 8bit machines (and the BBC Micro we had at school) were the gateway drug to my Amiga addiction. I'd soon had a lot of computing experience on a variety of machines. And I loved these computers... until one day, after school, a friend showed me his new Amiga 500. This was, by far, the most impressive computer I'd ever seen. My parents must have witnessed how taken I was with these computers over the last few years - I was somehow lucky enough to receive a brand new Amiga 500 that Christmas.

njoying the "Batman" pack-in game titles and software that came with the A500 (such as DPaint) over the colder months, I shamefully admit I forgot about the 8-bit computers and the second-hand boot sale finds. My friend was kind enough to copy me some of his games, for which I paid him with extra blank floppies. Summer rolled in, and we finally made it back out to York Race Course to attend a huge boot sale on the surrounding fields. But things had changed now I was an Amiga owner. As the 90s began, things became bigger, grander - and as a result, more sinister. Police would be present at the sales now, and there was also an increasing number of professional traders with large vans. A lot of tax-free cash was now changing hands with professional sellers.

hings felt different - why were the crowds getting bigger and prices rising? Sunny summer days kept things feeling positive, and the sales were still fun with lots of bargains to discover. My parents had also now started to attend Rufforth Outdoor Market near the City of York. This particular boot sale had an indoor market area, with a lot of video game and computer stalls. I remember distinctly browsing one of my usual computer stalls one week (looking at what seemed like extortionate prices of big box Amiga games on display), when I noticed a few slightly older kids ducking under the counter and then exiting out the back of the stall through a fire door. I followed and I never looked back.

he red ﬁre-doors that led out into the traders' car park each had several

January 2021

large stretch vans parked in rows. The vans had blacked-out windows and foldout advertising signs, reading "£1 per disk or 6 disks for £5". My young brain nearly imploded.

ntering one of the vans, I saw long custom-made wooden sliding trays, stacked high with copied 3.5" Amiga disks. Queues of kids were pulling the trays in and out and flicking through many thousands of disks in each van, flipping out disks and counting their choices to see if they had enough money for a certain game they'd picked. The polite (myself included) struggled to even browse the games on offer, simply because each van was so crowded with kids. Blue floppies with marker pen labels were selling ten-to-the-dozen, with traders counting pound coins and giving change from their zip bum bags (or is it fanny packs for US readers?). The vans were even set up with lookouts and fold up worktops so they could be quickly packed away if the police passed by.

ou can imagine the shock I felt as it dawned on me; I could buy ﬁve games with the £5 I had stashed in my pocket, or even get a couple of titles that had multiple disks. I quickly jumped in and bought a couple of games just to test the waters - would they even be the actual games when I got back home?

s it turned out, they were "real". Not only did the games work well, but they had extras such as cracktros and trainer cheats. I proceeded to buy as many of these £1 per disk games as I could over the next four or ﬁve years! I probably owned every well-known Amiga game ever released - so many that I couldn't actually play them all. Just as my friend had educated me on the Amiga, now it was my turn to tell all of my school friends, and even bring some of them along with me to the weekly boot sales.

t was only after I'd started this copied disk collection that I would really notice the adverts and software piracy warnings in magazines and on TV. But I chose to ignore them - I never really considered the damaging impact I could be causing from buying pirated games and software. As a child, I don't think I related to the fact that people earned money from their software, and that their livelihoods depended on legitimate sales.

ne thing I did realise though, was that for the pirates it was big business. I still today wonder what happened to those dodgy van traders. Possibly they continued on later platforms with PC, Dreamcast and even Playstation piracy? I'm sure one day they were probably raided and shut down by the police. I'd love to hear from such a trader to ﬁnally ﬁnd out the answer...

The Hidden Battle Against The Amiga's Pirates

"...if you hack this game I will ﬁnd you wherever you are and break your legs and thats a promise..."

But away from the sober tut-tutting of terrestrial television, there was a more direct and often more profane dialogue going on behind the scenes between the hacking groups who filled their bulletin boards with cracked games - your Fairlights, Paradoxes, Quartexs and the like - and the folks who coded the games themselves. It all happened right there on the game's disks, hidden in code that you'd only see if you were a hacker, peering into the workings of the game out of sheer curiosity, or for the purposes of getting it out there for everyone to download. A lot of these messages make for entertaining reading, and thanks to resources such as the excellent The Cutting Room Floor, these missives from developers are now available for all to enjoy. They paint quite the interesting picture of life behind the scenes, directly from the coder's chair if you will, that may not always be highlighted in more celebratory look-backs and reminiscences. The most common type of message is, naturally, a plea, order or even a threat from the coder to not pirate the game. As much as we may look back fondly on the bulletin board days with all of their groups, raves, cracktros and sine waves, a programmer in the early '90s who's depending on the royalties from a title's sales in order to get paid may not have felt the same way about it. Those looking deep into Krisalis's 1990 puzzle platformer Mad Professor Mariarti would have found a message from legendary musician Matt Furniss that starts with "hello hacker fucker" and only gets more savage from there, with a statement that "if you hack this game I will find you wherever you are and break your legs and thats a promise". Grammatically wobbly perhaps, but the feeling is certainly well conveyed. Similarly, an uncredited message found in the Bitmap Brothers' Xenon states that "pirates are the filth of the fucking world. Three people have spent 7 months on this product, & scum bags rip it off in a couple of minutes. Yeah very funny ain't it." A harsh message that's certainly designed to shame the crackers, but did it work? Judging by the

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AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA FOCUS

As familiar as we may be with “Piracy is Theft” and “Don’t Copy That Floppy”, an altogether diﬀerent strain of messages targeting software pirates could be found in places where the majority of gamers wouldn’t have ever thought of looking. Kim Justice is here to go trawling into the code of games and uncover a secret war hidden inside the binaries...

One particular episode of the popular ITV video games programme Bad Influence features a segment highlighting the burgeoning and illicit practice of software piracy. The always-chipper Andy Crane earnestly tells people that they shouldn't do it because it's against the law and could well blow up your system, but did this have an effect? Well, probably not - the segment highlighted the almighty X-Copy specifically and in doing so essentially told people how to pirate games instead of warning them against doing it. While there obviously aren't any statistics on hand, it's probable that copy meets where folks gathered together, blanks in hand, powered up their Amigas and traded all their games with each other became even more popular.

AMIGA FOCUS

whatsoever and thus wasn't particularly worth cracking anyway. Unfortunately the likes of Paradox clearly disagreed, and Kingdom's cracktro for the game even features a somewhat blunt message of "fuck you!", front and centre. While the target of Kingdom's wrath isn't identiﬁed, one does wonder if this is a response to Melon's plea to not crack the game because they'd done so much for the scene. A dismissal of the old group as traitors, someone with a more personal axe to grind, or something completely unrelated? It's hard to really say, but it's certainly fun to wonder.

Andy Crane hosting the popular ITV gaming show, Bad Inﬂuence.

amount of cracked versions of Xenon that are available for perusal on your average TOSEC set, the answer is most certainly no. Some people took less of an aggressive approach towards the pirates in their messages, recognising that

A common theme found in a lot of the anti-piracy messages is quite a predictable one: if you're so good at hacking into these games, why don't you try and create a game yourself? There's plenty of examples of this, such as "you should be writing games and making loads of money like me (you too could aﬀord a 16V Astra GTE)" penned by the almighty Dave Jones in the code of Blood Money, or "Those who can, crack games. Those who can't, crack games. I feel sorry for you people. Maybe one day you'll get a life. Oh, but you need a personality for that...and you might have to come out of your bedroom. Till then, you'll have to get your kicks from cracking games and reading wank mags", a hit ‘em where it hurts sort of a message from

"Those who can, crack games. Those who can't, crack games. I feel sorry for you people. Maybe one day you'll get a life. Oh, but you need a personality for that...and you might have to come out of your bedroom." while cracks of the game were almost certain to come out, they hoped that the groups would have a little bit of honour and perhaps wait a little while before putting the commercial game out there. Visionary Design's port of Dragon's Lair features a message from Randy "Irwin" Linden, recognising that "there's a great competition to see which group breaks the game first", which indeed there was - for a lot of people in the scene, breaking the game was seen as something of a sport. However, the message implores crackers to not let the game out too early after release so that sales don't suffer, and that doing such things benefits "nobody; not the developers, not the users, and not the Amiga community". Did this calmer approach bear fruit? Actually, it appears so; a later message from the sequel, Dragon's Lair: Escape from Singe's Castle, thanks the pirates for delaying the release of the original game while continuing to ask them to keep their honour and even hyping up a possible future project based on The Terminator which, alas, never came out.

"Dave the Exile" in Suspicious Cargo. Some companies were a little bit more canny, and saw these messages as a means of advertisement. If you're good enough to get into this game, maybe you're good enough to come and work for us? There's no end of messages that feature a phone number and an invitation to get in touch if you know your way around the Amiga's Blitter, composed by the likes of Titus Software's Eric Caen for Fire & Forget. Of course, not every developer message is aimed squarely at the scenesters and pirates, telling them in

There's also the case of poachers turned gamekeepers - people who used to be a part of the scene and are now releasing commercial games, hoping that they've generated enough cred in their time for the pirates to go easy on them. An example of this can be found in Danish ex-scenesters Melon Dezign's Naughty Ones from 1994, saying that the group did "a lot for the scene, so please give us a break", while also highlighting that the game had no protection

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January 2021

Not exactly an oﬃcial Virgin release...

But in the world of hidden developer messages on the Amiga, there is one person who stands high and mighty over everyone else, a genius who could combine everything mentioned in this article into one long-winded, verbose and usually quite funny bit of reading - and that man was Richard Aplin. Aplin, the man who was often responsible for completing ports of games such as Final Fight and Double Dragon with little time and almost no help from the original creators, was a master of the hidden message. Final Fight, quite possibly his magnum opus, features the usual dismissal of crackers and their exploits but even better, mocking them with a ﬁll-in-the-blanks cracktro designed to highlight their "1.4 Terabytes of warez stored on Sinclair Microdrive", the "fantastically dull pseudo house music on NoiseTracker" and even an account of how the hacker in question met Andrew Braybrook of Graftgold and told him that "Rainbow Islands is crap and it should have been written using SEKA". On top of all that though, Aplin's messages are just about a full breakdown of a port's development, with so many diﬀerent details - everything from

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salty language to not copy the game, making promises related to a budding hacker's legs and the breaking of them, or hyping up the trouble the swashbucklers are going to have figuring out the game's protection system. There's a lot of happy little shoutouts to fellow employees, as well as the occasional airing of a coder's frustrations, such as Jeremy Sherlock's text in Splinter Vision's Eco Phantoms bemoaning the efforts of someone who walked out on the project, resulting in him having to "rewrite a lot of his shit and badly written, unproffesional [sic] and ridiculously longwinded code" and saying that the only thing he's going to credit the man for is "hassle, stress, late nights and his hatred for the twat!". Some others simply enjoyed being irreverent or puerile - modifying the background colour of Virgin's splash logo screen in Cannon Fodder reveals lots of crudely drawn promises of "FREE SEX!", and sticking the word "DIRTY" into Dynamite Dux's code turns the intro into an incredibly X-rated story that's all about Bin and Pin getting...well, rather intimate with each other to say the least.

Thanks Kingdom, very eloquent...

teardowns of the original arcade board to full-on developer diaries, as well as a long list of all the music that helped Aplin through a port's creation. His works for the likes of Line of Fire, or the Amstrad CPC version of Shinobi, are well worth seeking out and reading on TCRF - although some wags may well say that these messages are a fair bit better than the ports that they came from. It's pretty obvious to say that these messages had little to no eﬀect on the scene and how quickly it generated cracked versions of games - at best, they may have made a newbie feel bad for half a second or so before they went ahead and clicked the big old "EXECUTE" button that only exists in '90s computer-based TV thrillers and dramas. It's perhaps a reminder that legends of the business such as the Bitmaps, or Dave Jones, or Barry Leitch (he of the "YOU WILL NOT COPY THIS GAME" sample embedded deep into Lotus II's title screen music) may not be as nostalgic or as positive about the Amiga's scene culture as a lot of us are, even all these years later - on a personal level, the release of a game into the scene may well have left an already hard-up coder with less money than they'd hoped to receive from a title. They do however provide a bit of a time warp back to these days and into the world of programming games, as the developers lived it - whether they're vicious screeds, shoutouts to mates or even song lyrics, we can be very thankful that the people who wrote them didn't highlight all of this text and hit the delete key just before the game went gold, so that we can now enjoy them ourselves and get a look into the programmers' occasionally inscrutable minds. Many thanks to the excellent preservers of information at The Cutting Room Floor (tcrf.net) for their compilation of the aforementioned hidden messages and then some. Without their hard work and dedication, this article would have not been possible.

Richard Aplin, well-known for his cheeky hidden content.

Please check out Kim Justice's many fantastic documentary-style YouTube videos, or ﬁnd her on Twitter at: twitter.com/kimxxxjustice and her Twitch channel at: twitch.tv/kim_justice

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AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

Amiga Addict gets all "grassroots" stateside with an icon from our community.

Amiga Bill exclusive interview

Westchester Amiga User Group - I just have less hair than I did back then!" Bill laughs and continues, "I also have an Amiga YouTube channel I do with my buddy Anthony Becker (also from WAUG) called TheGuruMeditation (www.youtube.com/ thegurumeditation) and I do a weekly Amiga live stream on Twitch every Sunday (www.twitch.tv/amigabill)."

eﬀects for my videos using programs like DPaint, Imagine, and ADPro. I also used SCALA to make multimedia presentations for school. I could not have done any of this with any of my other computers."

I hope you haven't had to travel too far for us... Where did you grow up and where do you currently live?

Amiga Bill, that's just what I needed! And thank you for giving up your time for Amiga Addict today.

"I grew up in Westchester County, NY which is a suburb of New York City. I moved to New York City when I went to college at NYU Film School, then moved back up to Westchester. Currently my wife and I live in Westchester next to Sleepy Hollow on the Hudson River."

"My buddy Anthony Becker and I have always been huge fans of podcasts and independent ﬁlmmakers. We had talked about making our own podcast for years. However, since I do video for a living, YouTube seemed like a more logical platform especially since I already owned all the video equipment. Truthfully, the real purpose of the channel is just to give ourselves an excuse to get together and hang out. We are great friends. But from a thematic standpoint, the purpose of the channel is to preserve the history of the Amiga as well as introduce it to new folks who are not familiar with Amiga. We also like to provide content for more advanced Amiga users. Sometimes we demo new products, while other times we like to take a trip down memory lane and check out classic software and hardware. Some of the things we have demoed are genlocks, DCTV, the Video Toaster, and software products like ADPro and DPaint. We also enjoy making how-to videos. One of the main

"The pleasure is mine. I am honoured to be here." For readers new to Amiga or not familiar with you... Who is Amiga Bill and how did you start with Amiga? "Oh boy. Well, I have been in the Amiga community since I walked into my local Commodore Store in White Plains, NY back in 1987. My dad and I were blown away by the Amiga 500. As it turned out, the salesman, Chris James, told us that an Amiga user group meets in the store on the ﬁrst Thursday of every month. The next meeting was only a few days away, so we returned and attended the meeting. It was amazing to meet so many cool people and see how they each were using their Amiga. We got our Amiga 500 at Christmas that year and continued to attend the meetings. One day, the guys who were running the meetings decided to stop and said there would be no more user group. Nobody else was interested in taking over the club. However, I loved going to the meetings and didn’t want the club to die, so I oﬀered to run the meetings. That was back in 1988. Cut to 2020 and I am still running the

The Amiga seems very popular again at the moment, but I'm interested in your own computer history. When did you first hear of Commodore? "Well, my first computer was actually an Atari 800 - my dad bought it for my family in 1980. I loved that computer and I still do. I am a huge Atari 8-bit fan. We ended up getting into the Commodore a bit later with a Commodore 64c. It was a very nice machine, but my heart was with the Atari 800. Then when the Amiga 500 came out, we got one of those and it became my favourite computer of all time. Back then, the game boxes had screen shots from the different computer systems on the back and the Amiga version always looked the best! I wanted one so bad, but the A1000 was out of our price range. When the A500 came out, it was within our budget so we jumped on it. We got the Amiga 500 from Software Link, the store in White Plains that I mentioned earlier."

Can you let us know a bit more about your successful YouTube channel, The Guru Meditation?

Bill & Anthony, 'The Guru Meditation'.

Did the Amiga feel like an upgrade at the time over your previous machines?

Bill back in 1992 with the WAUG.

"Oh yes, the Amiga was a huge upgrade. We had the Atari 800, Commodore 64c, and an Apple II/e from my dad’s job. The graphics and sound on the Amiga was far superior to any of those machines. And most importantly the Amiga could do broadcast quality video. Making video was one of the main things I did with my Amiga. I used a genlock to create titles, animations, and special

January 2021

Let's hope it all goes back together...

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

It's a crisp and cold morning in New York City. I look out as the sun spills warmth between the endless gaps in the skyline. I'm tired and jet-lagged, yet excited and pumped with adrenaline. Who knows what to expect? I try to get comfortable, making myself at home while I wait in the hotel lobby. Suddenly I see Bill Winters (aka Amiga Bill) entering with a smile. He quickly adorns his facemask, then hands me a much-needed cup of hot black coﬀee as we sit down to begin...

AMIGA INSIGHT

"...his brother is one of the original engineers of the Video Toaster and the reason why he wears a Video Toaster t-shirt in Wayne’s World." sources of content for our channel is our yearly exhibit at the Vintage Computer Festival East. Each year, we have a different themed Amiga display and document it for our viewers. We also travel to other Amiga events around the world. This leads us into documentary-style content as well. We frequently meet interesting people at these shows and interview them. We have interviewed all types of people from Commodore legends such as David John Pleasance, Dave Haynie, Bil Herd, Glenn Keller, Greg Berlin, Trevor Dickinson, and many more. The content on our channel is very varied, but all centres on the Amiga and the Amiga community." How did you meet Anthony? "Anthony and I met at The Westchester Amiga User Group back in 1988. I was president of WAUG back in 1988 and Anthony came to one of the meetings. We hit it off really well and have been great friends ever since. When I went to college, Anthony took over WAUG, but I have been running it again for the past ten years or so." And you've done some fascinating documentaries on Commodore history through Guru Meditation too? "Yes. I make documentaries for a living. As a documentary filmmaker, I am always looking for interesting stories to tell. There are so many fascinating people and stories in the Amiga community, that I like to incorporate these mini-documentaries into our channel. The one that most people know from our channel is about a world renowned painter named Samia Halaby, who started creating art with her Amiga 1000 in 1985 and continues to do so to this day. I have also made documentaries about my trips to an Amiga show in Poland, as well as interviewing many former Commodore engineers and people in the community. Anthony and I also shot some scenes for a documentary called 'Viva Amiga' for director Zach Weddington. Currently I

Raising money for charity with Amigathon.

AMIGA ADDICT

am working as director of photography for Zach on a new documentary series called 'Arcade Dreams' about the history of arcades going all the way back to mechanical arcade machines." We'll touch more on the fantastic Arcade Dreams project further into the interview. But back to Amiga. I know you're all about the community and it is really important to you. What do you feel makes Amiga users so different from other retro computer enthusiasts? "Well, I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I think it stems from the computer itself. First, the Amiga is a computer with personality and soul. The name itself means “friend” in Spanish. The original engineers poured their hearts into the Amiga and you can feel their personalities in it. The engineers have their signatures in the top case of the Amiga 1000 and even Jay Miner's dog Mitchy has her paw print on it. The Amiga's custom chips even have human names. The Amiga is 'The Computer for the Creative Mind', so it attracts artists and creative types. It is also an alternative platform. When most of the world went Mac or PC, we went Amiga. This brings us together and forms a strong bond between people who resist the status quo." You're active both online and offline, what Amiga meetups and shows are you currently involved in? "The main show I am involved with is the Vintage Computer Festival East. It is a show that takes place in Wall Township, NJ and is run by the Vintage Computer Federation. It is a show for all vintage computers and Anthony and I are known as 'the Amiga guys'. All the exhibits there are very unique and different every year. Instead of people simply demoing a classic computer in a museum environment, everyone has a unique project and perspective that showcases the strengths of each system. It is sort of like a science fair for vintage computers."

Bill on the Viva Amiga Q&A panel.

January 2021

How did you manage to get through the harder Amiga community years, when Commodore was in decline? "Our WAUG group was the key. It was a support group for us. We would get together each month and talk about all the potential ways Amiga could survive. Sadly things didn’t go so well, but we stuck together due to our strong friendships. We never stopped meeting and enjoying our Amigas for what they are. A great game is a great game regardless of when it was made or which system it runs on. Now the Amiga is getting popular again and the community is very active. In some ways, it has never been a better time to be an Amiga user." You mentioned meeting exCommodore staﬀ members in the past. Any memorable moments? "The most memorable meeting happened at AmiExpo in Washington DC in 1990. I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with the father of the Amiga, Jay Miner. It was a day I will never forget. He spoke with me for a half hour. He was fascinated by the fact that I was so young and ran an Amiga user group. He understood the importance of the community when it came to Amiga. I still have photos my dad took of our meeting and I recently found a recording of the keynote speech he delivered that day and uploaded it to our YouTube channel. Also, Vintage Computer Festival East takes place in the shadows of Commodore’s world headquarters. Many of the engineers and employees still live in the area and come to VCF. I have met many of them there including, Dave Haynie, Bil Herd, Glenn Keller, Greg Berlin, and others." At the events you've organised or have been to, has there been a collection of Amigas that has stood out and impressed? "Not so much a collection, but speciﬁc machines. I really loved seeing the

WAUG are still meeting up to this day.

3000T and 4000T at MAGFEST in Washington DC. I also have seen cool towerised Amiga 1200s at both our WAUG parties and AmiParty in Poland. At AmiParty, there was also a cool board called the GBA 1000 which is a new motherboard PCB for the Amiga 1000. It has some improvements over the original motherboard." And did you ever get a chance to travel abroad due to your love of the Amiga for a show or event? "Yes! My wife is from Poland and her family is still there, so when we go back to visit I go to AmiParty in Chelm. It is a really great group of people and the show is half classic Amiga and half demoparty. I also plan on visiting Amiga Ireland, SWAG, and was planning to attend Amiga 35 events in the UK and Holland, but the pandemic made these plans impossible. I would also like to attend Revision Demoparty in Germany." As we are a new magazine, is there anything you'd like to see featured in Amiga Addict in the future? "I would really like to see more unique cool projects that people are working on such as DJ Nest's RaspberryPi 4 Amibian build (see page 48). New game and hardware reviews will be good too, but stories about Amiga community members doing interesting projects would be very unique and interesting." I know you don't like to blow your own trumpet, you're always very modest. However, I can't skirt around the fact that you're an Emmy Award-winning Director of Photography who has years of experience working in the TV and ﬁlm industry! Are you able to talk about any favourite projects you've worked on? "Thanks! I have been very lucky. My career has provided me with more adventures than I could have ever imagined. I have literally travelled

Bill with the legend himself, Jay Miner (sweaty palms I bet eh Bill?).

around the world many times and have gone to places I would have never had the opportunity to visit. Travelling truly is the best education and it is difficult to fully understand that until you actually do it. Some projects that stand out are creating the look of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee for Jerry Seinfeld, several Netflix documentaries including the number one Netflix show Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, videos for Apple's WWDC that Steve Jobs personally introduced, Hamilton for Disney+, frequent collaborations with Oscar nominated director Joe Berlinger such as Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Oprah Winfrey’s Oscar Special, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise awareness for clean water for Africa, Nike Battlegrounds with LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, and multitude of projects for clients such as ESPN, Microsoft, Samsung, Vanity Fair, Twitter, IBM, National Geographic, Discovery, and many more." (You can see Bill's work at www.billwinters.net) Has anyone you've worked with ever talked to you about Amiga computers? Are there any celebrities who you were surprised to hear were closet Amiga fans? "That is a great question. I worked with Tony Hawk on a show called Fast Cars and Superstars. Tony is a big Amiga fan and video game fan. He used to make music with his Amiga 2000 and also has his own line of video games. I haven’t worked with Dana Carvey, but I would love to and his brother is one of the original engineers of the Video Toaster and the reason why he wears a Video Toaster t-shirt in Wayne’s World." Have you ever pitched Netflix or any TV networks the idea to create a weekly drama series about the rise and fall of Commodore - something perhaps a bit like 'Halt and Catch Fire'? Not a bad idea right..? "Ha! That is a cool idea. I haven’t pitched

January 2021

anything like that, but Zach Weddington is hoping that Arcade Dreams documentary series will get picked up by a streaming service such as Netflix or Amazon." Recently on one of your live streams I joined, you mentioned that Amiga computers were important in helping to get you into film school? "By the time I got into the professional world, Amigas had been surpassed and more modern tools were available. But it helped me get into film school. I used DPaint and Imagine to create titles and animations for the portfolio I submitted to NYU Film School. Most importantly, I learned the basics of video production when using my Amiga and this is the foundation for my cinematography career." Any thoughts professionally on the Amiga's Video Toaster or GenLock? "One of my fondest memories is of our Westchester Amiga User Group meeting on December 9th, 1990. A representative from NewTek came to our club and demoed the Toaster when it was still in alpha. I will never forget that night. All of us watched in awe. One of our members was an editor at ABC Television in New York City and couldn’t believe that a Toaster system under $10,000 could run circles around the $100,000 switchers they had at ABC. The Toaster was out of my price range so I never got to use one, but I did have a RocGen genlock and that was the most important piece of Amiga hardware that I owned. Between the RocGen, DPaint, ADPro, Imagine, and SCALA, I was making broadcast quality content in my parent’s basement. I finally got a Video Toaster this year from my close friend and fellow WAUG member Chris Abissi. You can see the WAUG Video Toaster meeting from 1990 on TheGuruMeditation YouTube channel as well as a video I made about the Toaster that I got this year."

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

Artist Samia Halaby has been creating art on an Amiga since '85!

AMIGA INSIGHT

The entire CD32 userbase in one room.

Cleaning up after AmiParty 2019.

Enough talking shop! Another coﬀee Bill? Let's jump into gaming. You stream a lot of classic and newly released Amiga games on Twitch. Your passion for gaming is intoxicating. Have you always played computer games?

Do you have any Amiga demos you can recommend or that you love?

"I will never forget the first video game I ever played. It was the Coleco Tel-Star arcade - a home console that had three games and came out in 1977. It is a large triangular console and each face of the triangle has a different game. There was a driving game, light gun game, and Pong clone. It had proper faux wood panelling to match the style of 1970s family rooms in the USA. I will never forget the day my dad brought that home for us. We plugged it into the TV and it was magical. I can still feel myself sitting in the exact location in the family room the first time I played it." And what was the first Amiga game you ever played or bought? "The first Amiga game I ever played was Barbarian by Psygnosis. It was the first because it is what was loaded up on the Amiga 500 when I went into my local Commodore store to check out the Amiga for the first time. It is a strange game with tricky mouse controls, but there was something interesting about it and it has a very cool cut scene of the barbarian breaking a chain that really caught my attention." Did it live up to your expectations once you later owned the game? "I never got too far through the game, but I did have fun playing it and I got a kick out of the sound effects. It certainly isn’t one of my favourite Amiga games, but I have fond memories of it being my first." If you could choose your five favourite Amiga games to recommend to a nonAmiga user what would they be? "Oh boy, that is a difficult... I would say a diverse representation of Amiga would be Another World, Lemmings, Pinball Dreams, Shadow of the Beast and Speedball 2. But of course there are so many others just as good as these."

AMIGA ADDICT

"Oh yeah, I absolutely love demos. They are one of my favourite aspects of Amiga, especially these days when I don’t have a lot of time to invest in gaming. I also love the vibe and experience of going to demo parties. There are too many to list, but a few of my favourites are Human Traﬃc by Ghostown & Loonies, Eon by The Black Lotus, and Rise and Shine by Elude." Do you still own much classic Amiga hardware yourself, or do you tend to use emulation? "I am very lucky to have some great real Amiga hardware including my original Amiga 500. There ain’t nothing like the real thing baby, but I am a big fan of emulation as well. My Raspberry Pi4 with Amibian/Amiberry is the most powerful 'Amiga' that I own and I absolutely love the MiSTer as well. Of course I use WinUAE and FS-UAE too. Emulation and FPGA is the way we will preserve Amiga in the future, as our real hardware breaks down. It is also a great way to get new people interested in Amiga, especially with the prices of original Amiga hardware getting extremely expensive. But as far as real hardware goes, I own an Amiga 1000, 500, 2000 with Video Toaster, Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000, and AmigaOne X1000." So you still love classic hardware too. You show quite a lot of Amiga mods and addons to your Twitch viewers. "Well, my favourite is my Amiga 1200. I have an ACA1233n 030 in there with a 16GB CF card hard drive replacement, as well as a GoTek to replace the broken ﬂoppy drive. That is my goto machine. But when I want to play my favourite demos, I grab my Raspberry Pi4 because it can easily handle the most demanding 060 AGA demos. When I want the most cycle exact emulation, I turn to the MiSTer, and the cool thing about the MiSTer is that it has a VGA out which allows me to easily connect it to a CRT monitor. Once I have the MiSTer up and running, I usually throw on an Atari 800 or Arcade game as well." (Bill's infectious laugh gets me going too!)

January 2021

Trevor Dickinson and AmigaBill.

When streaming you have some great cameras set up, can you tell us a bit about your setup? "I am a camera guy in the TV business, so one of the most fun aspects of streaming is treating it like a multi-cam live TV show. It absolutely blows my mind that I can have a multi-camera setup in my home office and literally broadcast to the world. I would have never imagined this being possible when I was growing up. I have my main camera shooting me at 1080 60fps. That is a Canon C300. Then I have a VHS camera mounted directly on my monitor. I love feeling the texture of the VHS camera in contrast to a modern camera like the C300. Sometimes I run that VHS camera through my Video Toaster for some fun effects. I have a cheap Logitech Webcam rigged overhead so people can see my Amiga as well as any other thing I want to show them from overhead, such as an un-boxing. There is another Logitech webcam rigged above and to the side that shows me and my main desk area. Finally, there is a GoPro Hero 7 on a tripod in the back of my room giving viewers a view of the entire room. I am known to throw down some dance moves for that camera! I also have an additional input that I sometimes attach a C300 Mkii camera to for special angles, like when I play a record on my turntable or shoot directly off a CRT." You also sometimes feature Amiga productivity software such as DPaint, what software have you covered in the past? "Absolutely. Back in the day, games were probably less than 50% of what I used my Amiga for. The main thing I did with it was graphics and video. I still do a lot of graphics work with it. Every month I create original artwork for my Patrons using ADPro and Deluxe Paint V. They are my two favourite pieces of software. In addition to original artwork, my Patrons get a lot of extra goodies like Amiga news and tons of free demos." You can support Amiga Bill (and become one of his Patrons) - helping him to keep making great content at: www.patreon.com/AmigaBill

Guest interviews are also a highlight for me with Amiga Bill Twitch streams. Who are some of the guests featured so far on your channel?

Do you ever feel nervous streaming in a live environment and talking with key ﬁgures from the Amiga scene? "Great question. I don’t get nervous talking to any of my guests because they are all such nice people. But sometimes I do get nervous from a technical standpoint. I prepare the best I can, but when it comes to live streaming there are some factors out of my control like internet connection or a bug with the streaming service. I worry about issues like that. Other times I get a little nervous if I feel that I haven't put in enough preparation for the stream. I try very hard to put on the best show possible for my viewers and I put a lot of pressure on myself to deliver a great product. But the great thing is, at the end of the day, it is all just for fun, so it really isn’t that much pressure."

VCF 2017, what a deranged group...

"Oh yeah. Just a couple of months ago I was booting up an exclusive Amiga Bill demo of a new game called Wiz. (See AA review, page 27.) Suddenly I heard an extremely loud and very disturbing buzzing sound. One of my two streaming monitors shut off and the lights dimmed. It turns out my 1084s was dying a very violent death. It was producing a massive power spike and very loud buzzing noise. Fortunately, I figured out what was happening and pulled the power from the monitor. I am really lucky it didn’t start a fire or something like that." And the Amiga has even helped you raise money for charity too? "Yes! Every year I participate in Amigathon which is hosted by The Amigos Retro Gaming Podcast. It is a great event that raised over $5,000 USD for the Children’s Miracle Network this year. It is really amazing that our Amiga hobby can make a contribution like this in the real world." What have been some of your highs, or favourite moments, when streaming as Amiga Bill or creating videos for Guru Meditation? "Wow, there have been so many. As I mentioned before I really loved the Amiga Bill live stream with AshSaidHi when she powered up her dad’s Amiga 500s for the first time. As far as The Guru Meditation goes, we were shooting at Vintage Computer Festival East several years ago. Anthony was giving a presentation about what to do when you pull your Amiga out from storage for the first time in many years. Bil Herd, a regular at VCF East and designer of the Commodore 128, was in the audience. Anthony was speaking about the capacitors being installed backwards in the Amiga 4000. Bil disappeared from the room and came back with a very large man with a deep voice who said 'Who’s saying bad things about my capacitors!!!' It was Greg Berlin, designer of the Amiga 4000! Anthony got so nervous and embarrassed, he almost jumped out the window. It is a classic moment and all captured on video for our channel. Anthony and I also had an amazing time

speaking on a panel at VCF South East about Amiga and our involvement with the documentary Viva Amiga. That was a great trip and we interviewed several key people including Glenn Keller, designer of the Paula chip, and Trevor Dickinson from A-EON creators of the AmigaOne line of computers." Nevermind coffee, thanks for your time - I think I must owe you breakfast! Finally, what do you have planned for the future in regards to Amiga content? "No problem, but I am getting hungry! During 2021, I hope things start to get back to normal. I had planned to go to some Amiga events last year, but they were cancelled due to the pandemic. I am not sure if there will be any physical events in 2021, but I would love to go and make videos about them as long as it is safe. I also want to create more documentary-focussed content for The Guru Meditation YouTube channel. Making documentaries is my profession and I want to bring this sensibility to the channel. Videos of me in my office giving a demo, or Anthony and I at his place are nice, but projects where I can be behind the camera and do my thing are much more rewarding for me. Much like the Samia Halaby video. The streams will generally continue to be as they are, but I plan on adding a lot more production value and also improving my on-screen performance. I can’t wait to hold another physical meeting of the Westchester Amiga User Group. Normally we meet every month and have a large yearly party, but obviously we couldn’t do any of that this year." Thank you again Amiga Bill, I really have enjoyed your stories and appreciate your time. "Absolutely. The pleasure was mine. Thank you so much for inviting me to be in the first issue of your magazine. It is a real honour and I am very humbled. Now, where shall we grab a bite to eat. My shout..."

Amiga Bill Links

youtube.com/thegurumeditation

twitch.tv/amigabill

twitter.com/TheGuruMeditate

facebook.com/thegurumeditation

patreon.com/AmigaBill

discord.gg/rzVcNEk

youtube.com/amigabill

MagFest 2017 looked fun!

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

"I think the guest interviews are the backbone of my streams. I have been lucky to have so many great guests ranging from David John Pleasance, former managing director of Commodore UK, to my close friend and fellow streamer AshSaidHi, who recently acquired two Amiga 500s from her dad when he passed away earlier this year. She came to my office and we turned them on for the first time. She was in tears when she saw that they worked and her dad’s spirit is still alive in them. It was a special moment. For me, the most important part of Amiga isn’t the Amiga itself, it is the people in the community. So I enjoy having as many community members on as possible to show off their current projects. I've also recently had film director Zach Weddington talking about his film Viva Amiga, as well as the new Arcade Dreams documentary series he has on Kickstarter, which tells the story of 100 years of arcade history. The week before that, I had Paul 'Acil' Rezendes on to talk about the basics of Amiga hardware and repair. He is the top person to go to in the USA for Amiga repair. I have had pixel artists, musicians, and of course many game developers on as well. Anyone with a cool project or story to tell is welcome to come on."

Has anything eventful ever happened or gone wrong whilst live on air?

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

AmigaLive Q&A by Stufm

AMIGA INSIGHT

with creator John Kayanas Most fans of Amiga emulation will have heard of FS-UAE, based on the WinUAE core and widely considered the best cross-platform Amiga emulator available. Aside from supporting multiple platforms and its more user-friendly UI, one of the standout features of FS-UAE is netplay, giving users the ability to play their favourite Amiga games in online multiplayer sessions. AmigaLive acts as a separate front end for this netplay feature, creating a lobby system where players can chat and arrange games, and loading server-side roms for a simplified user experience. We caught up with AmigaLive’s creator John Kayanas, to find out how it came about and what the future holds for his software. Hi John. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, and your gaming history? Hi, I was born in Montreal in 1979, before moving to New York. In 1986, I got my first computer - a C64C. Shortly after, we moved to Athens, Greece, where I had my first encounter with an Amiga - playing Bubble Bobble and Rick Dangerous on my neighbour's A500. My brother and I saved up for years to buy a 1MB A500. Eventually, in 1992, we had the money but found that the A500 was no longer available! The salesman talked us into buying an A1200 instead, so my parents had to help out with the extra money as a Christmas gift.

An intuitive interface for live multi-player Amiga gaming.

Apple scripts so he could play on his Mac. It worked really well, and he gave me some publicity on his YouTube channel by playing The Chaos Engine online using amiga.xyz. I later met expert Sensible Soccer player Playaveli, and he urged me to convert my web project into a desktop application. I only had a basic coding background, but eventually I got it working for Windows, Mac and Linux. Playaveli also helped come up with the new name: AmigaLive. What are the most popular games played on AmigaLive?

Soon after, we bought a second floppy drive, then later a 1084S monitor, and in 1994, a 650MB hard drive. Finally, around 1995, we added an 030 28Mhz accelerator card. Not long after this though, I found myself moving into the world of PCs. I ended up selling the accelerator card, moved the hard drive onto my PC, and actually, since 1997, I haven’t used my Amiga 1200 at all. Do you have any favourite Amiga games from your time with the A1200? The first night we brought it home, we spent hours playing Pang, Parasol Stars, Body Blows, and other games which we’d collected in advance of actually owning the Amiga. I mostly enjoyed multiplayer games like Sensible Soccer, TV Sports Basketball, Dynablaster and Mortal Kombat 1 & 2. Can you tell us how AmigaLive got started? In 2014, I was speaking to an old friend who I used to play a lot of Sensible Soccer with, and we got onto discussing the netplay feature in FS-UAE. We gave it a go and - after some effort - it actually worked really well. I started to think about ideas to simplify the experience. One of the main issues at the time was with compatibility for roms across different systems, configurations, etc. I tried to find out what would be the most compatible configuration options, to try and make the process simpler. This evolved into a website, amiga.xyz, where users could download the same configurations to try and remove some of those issues. Later, I met AmigaBill on Facebook. He was really interested in my project, and I ended up writing some

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

I would say Lotus 2, Dynablaster, Moonstone and Sensible Soccer. However there are plenty of hidden gems on there, particularly in the PD games. What are some of the challenges in maintaining and improving AmigaLive? I find most Amiga fans and owners are more collectors of the hardware and games, rather than emulation fans. And non-Amiga owners can be put off by the fact there’s only one joystick button, which is a challenge for gamers from the console world. There has been lots of effort to introduce AmigaLive to the public, I have friends like AmigaBill, VincentGR, Alex76gr and Hi7ch, who do live streams on Twitch and YouTube. However, I found public interest was dwindling a little at the start of this year, so I almost abandoned the project. What does the future hold for AmigaLive? During COVID-19 lockdown, two streamers from Texas Jack and Taylor of PintzAndAmiga - organised streamed AmigaLive tournaments and it really helped with the profile of AmigaLive. To keep up the momentum, I’m doing my own weekly streams and allowing viewers to participate. As long as I’m healthy, I’ll continue to maintain AmigaLive and keep it going. If anyone is interested in playing, please check out the website and join our Discord where we organise online gaming sessions! Don’t forget to check out AmigaLive on the web and join the Discord. Visit www.amigalive.com

NITY COMMUCLE ARTI ION SS SUBMI

Wiz

- AA's James takes the recently released game Wiz for a... erm, whizz..?

• Developer: Mutation Software • Amiga platforms: AGA / CD32 • Available now from www.mutationsoftware.uk • Price from $9.99

ONSCREEN

Occasionally you can ride some wildlife but watch out for the piranhas!

It's so great to see that commercial releases such as Wiz from Mutation Software are still coming. We received the physical copy for review (including some nice "feelies" such as pin badge and stickers) in a lovely professionally printed box. I transferred Wiz over to my trusty childhood A1200, with my ﬂoppy drive having seen better days (insert “that's what she said” joke here) I installed it onto the hard disk. This was as easy as extracting the contents of the two ADFs onto the drive. Wiz is an AGA-only action platform game where you must guide the titular Wiz the Wizard across 5 worlds (or Acts as they are called in this game) on his quest to regain the Magic Lantern from Wartnose the Witch. Wiz has a distinctive bright red nose, which makes me wonder if perhaps we need to stop him drinking quite so many potions. For all we know, this whole game could just be a ﬁgment of his

Dwarf with a blade, also the name of Wiz's band.

drunken imagination - he might actually be running around the forest slurring obscenities at pigeons instead of jumping on the heads of magically possessed mushrooms. Another clue to Wiz's potential substance abuse is that he will happily pick up and eat any food he finds laying on the floor - even pre-COVID I would think twice before eating an old roast chicken I found in a forest. I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, aren't I? The potions that Wiz is a bit too fond of have powerful effects. With the pink potion he can summon a fairy, acting as a shield that kills most enemies on contact. Green heals him back to full health. Blue creates a bubble which allows him to fly a short distance to reach items he might not otherwise be able to. Yellow freezes all enemies and finally red rains down fireballs which kill or damage almost all enemy types. These potions come in handy throughout the levels, but it's worth

If only AA review scores took into account packaging... 90% perhaps?

saving a few for the boss fights. In addition to potions, Wiz has a wand which deals light damage to enemies or (with the exception of a few) he can jump on their heads. Enemies do not respawn, so once they are dealt with, you don't need to worry about them coming back unless you die and restart the level. The game is not unfairly difficult, so I would suggest starting with the default settings. If you are struggling, you can raise the number of lives you start with from three up to five. You can also increase how many potions you start with (from one of each up to three). The game is fairly generous, so if you run out of lives, unless you choose to restart from Act 1 or power off the Amiga, it will start you off again from the first level of the act where you died. Along the way there are opportunities to pick up extra lives, potions and health (in the form of the

This boss looks like Wiz feels in the morning after hitting the potions.

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AMIGA ADDICT

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aforementioned floor food). Each four level act ends with a boss fight, culminating in a showdown with the Wicked Witch at the end of Act 5. These boss fights are surprisingly easy if you have saved up some potions - so it would have been good to see a bit more challenge here, but they are a nice change of pace, featuring nice large bosses. It would have been more frustrating if they were punishingly hard, forcing you to play through the full act again and again. The main challenge of Wiz comes from the platforming, which requires some very precise jumps and some tricky elements, such as leaf platforms that flip over every so often. On the whole, it's all great fun and although there

Lovely backgrounds, tricky platforming. Wiz in a nutshell!

were some frustrating bits (mostly those f'ing leaves), they did ultimately add to the satisfaction when I beat the game. The controls are good, but I didn't really like using down to cycle through the potion types. Jumping resets the selection back to wand, forcing you to quickly cycle through to the correct potion again, then wait for it to cast, without getting hit (or jumping again). This means selecting and using the potions in the heat of a boss ﬁght or near enemies is not as quick and easy as it could be. It's minor, but I would have preferred to see the option to use button two on the joystick, so at least you could more easily keep moving. Each of the worlds looks great with light use of parallax scrolling on most levels and very nicely drawn backgrounds - World 4 is a particular highlight. The music is also very good at ﬁrst I wasn't a fan of the music on Act 1 (I actually thought it might be glitching), but after playing for a while I now love it. To summarise: I would happily recommend Wiz, but as a fairly short game the longevity will be down to what sort of gamer you are. If you just want to see the end screen and then

Fury of the Furries - Here's our James joined by John "Boat" Shawler with a quick recap. (Alright Cilla!) Like with so many Amiga games, my ﬁrst experience of Fury of The Furries was via a playable demo from a cover disk. I loved what I played of it in that form, but sadly never owned the full version. At the time, I was a young school boy and the magic (or curse depending on your view point!) of piracy had not reached my village, so the prospect of getting many full priced, non-budget releases outside of my birthday or Christmas was just a dream. Therefore this review is based on playing it properly much more recently, and my nostalgia specs are tinged only slightly rose coloured. If you have not come across this game before, you might assume that, with a name like Fury of the Furries, it might have something to do with angry men dressed as unicorns and is deﬁnitely going to have an intro animated by Eric Schwartz. You would, of course, be mistaken and while it does have a fairly nice animated intro (the whole of disk 1 is dedicated to it), it's a very familyfriendly puzzle platformer. The game is a sequel to Tiny Skweeks/The Brainies

AMIGA ADDICT

GRAPHICS 90% Beautiful backgrounds. Big sprites, although playﬁeld can feel a little cramped as a result.

SOUND 90% Nice sound eﬀects - lovely music.

GRAB FACTOR 89% Good diﬃculty level but boss ﬁghts were a little easy.

PLAYABILITY 87% Great fun platforming. Using the potions can be a bit ﬁddly.

VERDICT

89%

• Developer: Atreid Concept • Publisher: Mindscape • Amiga platforms: OCS / ECS / CD32 • Release year: 1994

(which, like me, you may well not have previously heard of) and in a similar vein to a game like The Lost Vikings, you are tasked with using a set of abilities to get to the end of the level. As with a lot of games of the time, to understand what plot there is, you need to read the manual - something I would never have even considered as a kid! To summarise: a group of Tinies (that's the race of small balls of fluff with feet you play as) return to their home planet of 'SKLUMPH', where they discover a wicked Tiny has imprisoned the King and is using a machine to turn the other inhabitants of the planet into monsters. Through some means not explained, our hero Tiny has in his possession three ancient rings to allow him to change into three additional colours, giving him a special ability for each (check out Boat's review for a rundown of those abilities). You start an area with a specific selection of the four Tiny colours which you can switch between by pressing down and then cycling through to the one you

January 2021

won't come back to it this will potentially be a fairly brief experience for you. As with a lot of games though, the true challenge isn't just beating it, but trying to rack up the highest score. For this, there are interesting possibilities such as hidden coins and score doubling magic rings. There are also certain enemies, such as the bonﬁre on Act 4, which are easily avoided to get to the end of the level, but take 100 hits to kill with your wand, meaning they can be farmed for a massive amount of points.

want. Some levels feature coloured particle walls which either add or remove the respective coloured Tiny from your line up, until you pass through another barrier of the same colour. This obviously limits your choices and how you tackle certain puzzles. There are hidden bonus sections on lots of the levels - these add interest and give you a chance to collect more coins, in order to gain extra lives which come via 100 coins or 1up eggs (why eggs? Perhaps Tinies, like duckbilled platypuses, have fur but hatch from eggs? Am I thinking about this too much?).

Great title screen, even nicer on AGA.

nostalgia, but I think if puzzle platformers are your thing you will enjoy it. The graphics are certainly nice enough although nothing fancy, the CD32 version is a missed opportunity to make the game look even better.

Green's rope - useful for puzzles & swinging.

I had lots of fun playing through this game. There are some great puzzles involving raising or lowering water (or later sand) levels for example, and pushing blocks around as well as just jumping and swinging to avoid obstacles. As with all retro games, your mileage will vary depending on your previous emotional attachment/memories/

Amigos Podcast John Shawler's Thoughts... "Fury of the Furries is a solid Amiga title that incorporates the best aspects of Lemmings, BC Kid, and Bionic Commando into one of the better games in the puzzle platform genre. The player’s job is to guide their own Tiny through eight separate stages of ten levels apiece. Your Tiny is endowed with four abilities, each of which turns it into a different colour. When you’re yellow, you can emit fireballs. When red, you develop a taste for terra firma and can eat through the scenery. When green, vines shoot forth from your body and attach to walls and ceilings, allowing you to swing like the king of the jungle. Dive into the water when you’re blue, and instead of dying a quick death, you’ll glide through the water with ease. Unlike many Amiga platformers, there are concurrent music and sound effects in Fury of the Furries, and the jazzy themes fit the game quite well. Each stage has plenty of variety - your Tiny visits deserts, lagoons, pyramids, and a factory over the course of its adventure. The controls are nice and tight, and the difficulty curve is set perfectly. The Tinies themselves are fun to watch as well. Each used ability is accompanied by amusing animations, particularly that of the red Tiny.

RECOM MENDE D

As with the best puzzle platformers on the Amiga, this received a console release, sans the Tinies themselves. Namco relicensed the game starring their famous dot muncher, and it is known on the Mega Drive as Pac-InTime. For players who like the idea of choosing between abilities to overcome obstacles as in Lemmings, but want direct character control, Fury of the Furries is an excellent game to spend the afternoon with." (Ed - "Thanks to John for being our review guest this month! We've used John's review scores for our AA verdict and sub-ratings below. For more from John and the Amigos Podcast, check out www.everytingamiga.com")

GRAPHICS 90% Graphics are very good, only hampered by the lack of backgrounds.

SOUND 95% Top notch soundtrack, though more sound eﬀects would have edged it to perfection.

GRAB FACTOR 95% Almost perfect diﬃculty curve.

PLAYABILITY 87% Switching between modes is made more complicated than it should be due to the one button stick. Adding two buttons support would have been appreciated, but that’s a common fault in Amiga games that I can’t dock this one too much for.

94%

VERDICT

Lots of movie references across the game.

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

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The game features either 50/60hz setting, which is great to see. The controls take a little getting used to, they are simple enough with everything being pretty much as you'd expect with Up to jump (which people who grew up with Amigas and joysticks will also know as the correct way to jump!), down to select your colour and fire to use your Tiny's ability. The thing that takes some getting used to and makes things a little tricky is the extreme amount of momentum your characters have - they appear to be very small, but are massively heavy and also surprisingly bouncy. That can lead to frustration on some levels, but it's manageable once you have got used to it and has its own charm. One particularly frustrating puzzle early on sees you pushing a log into flowing water and then trying to jump onto it without bouncing back off. If you do fall off you can't climb onto the log from the water, and have to do a loop around the level to try again - something I did more times than I want to admit. Flying around, linking together swings as the green Tiny never gets old though, and is definitely why anyone who says the green Tiny is not the best is just plain wrong! The enemies in the game are just a mild nuisance in the first two worlds, but start to become a much more active threat from World 3 onwards, when the difficulty really ramps up.

Speaking of the CD32 version, it sadly didn't appear to have a 60hz option but has some very minor upgrades. There appear to be no visual upgrades on the levels themselves - most other lazy CD32 ports at least added a load of parallax scrolling layers in the background to make me feel a bit better about my life choices and buying a CD32! The screens between levels and worlds have been upgraded and do look better thanks to the greater number of colours on screen. The same applies to the title screen and intro animation. Other than that though, the only other "enhancement" is related to the death and the game over screens. Being the ultimate Amiga gamer, I obviously never saw the game over

screen myself, so I invited over an Atari ST owning friend so I could get a chance to take a look at it. On the standard, non-AGA, version of the game, when you die it simply restarts the level you are on and when you eventually run out of lives, it boots you back to the title screen. On the CD32 version, you get a (skippable) animated screen, showing your beaten up Tiny when you're out of lives you get the same screen but with some text questioning whether you're a lousy player or were just unlucky, not exactly a game changing enhancement. So all in all, if you're wondering which version to play I would say that, given the very limited upgrades the CD32 version gets, I would recommend playing the standard version at 60hz.

How the Amiga Helped Kill the Arcade

Too young to be able to give a technical answer, I just shrugged. It was just accepted that games in the arcades were always going to look and sound better than the ones you played at home. Computer games at home were fun, but the really good games were in cabinets in arcades and that was just the way of things. Because of this, we’d soon get bored of playing Horace and would venture outside to do the other things young boys in small towns did. Cycled around for a bit, kicked a ball about, perhaps poked a dead mole with a stick if we happened upon one. A few years later, when Commodore 64s were common, we’d ask, “Why can’t they make the actual games look as good as the loading screens?” and then with a resigned sigh, “Why aren’t they as good as the arcade games yet?” Growing up in the UK in the 1980s, however, not every town had a full arcade and games were to be found and enjoyed all over town, their existence spread by word of mouth. In the café by the public swimming pool was a Double Dragon machine. At the local campsite, there was a TV room with a Ghosts and Goblins machine which was ridiculously diﬃcult. Just inside a pub by the bus station was a Bubble Bobble machine, and despite being underage the bar staﬀ would turn a blind eye if you came in and played. But if you had an actual arcade

AMIGA ADDICT

in your home town, it was the motherlode. Outrun, Spy Hunter, Gauntlet, Operation Wolf and the rest, all lined up in cabinets, all with graphics and sound better than you’d get anywhere else. Sure, some of these games were available for home computers but those versions were a pale facsimile. Home computers had pretty much caught up with arcade games like Space Invaders, Galaga, Defender and Donkey Kong, but the arcade machines were now more advanced. Although you could get Spy Hunter for the Commodore 64, it was simply not as good as the one in the arcade. Even fairly basic games like 1942 were noticeably better in the arcade. Just better enough to warrant parting with 10p to get three lives. There was no computer at home that could do that. Kids at school talked of the Cray Supercomputer and embellished things that it could do, (“It made graphics for the ﬁlm Tron and that’s actually a real game, but you can only get it in America”) but no normal computer could match the arcade machines. The fact that a Cray Supercomputer had less graphics power than an iPhone 5s is a moot point, because as a kid in the ‘80s you weren’t getting you hands on either. In truth, we mythologise the arcades of our British youth. We revere those noisy rooms with their sticky and threadbare-carpeted and glowing screens of pixilated escapism, but often they were also fairly grotty places with at best a lowrent charm, at worst a grimy menace. At no point did we ever hear anyone say, “if anybody wants to see, there's a Donkey Kong kill screen coming up” because nobody was really that good at any of the games. And that was an issue.

AMIGA CONVERSION CAPERS

AMIGA FOCUS

It was 1983 and I was sat on my ZX Spectrum 48k, helping Horace cross the road to a ski shop, when my friend asked me, “Why doesn’t this game look like the ones in the arcade? Why doesn’t it look… better?”

by Matt Pomroy

January 2021

Accurate apart from the 1-button controls.

The games were nearly all designed to give you a hit of noise and pixels, then beat you. The countdown and harrying of “Insert more coins to continue…” was only so much of a draw and by the time it got to the point of only having the bus fare left in your pocket, it started to feel like this was not a great return of fun for your investment. But in 1987, the year that Double Dragon came out, the Amiga 500 was also released. During the summer, in a French supermarket on holiday, I was ﬂipping though a games magazine in a language I could barely decipher, but it showed me everything I needed to know. The graphics were incredible. They were detailed and smooth and looked realistic. They looked like the games in the arcade. Later that evening, back on the campsite, while shovelling two-Franc pieces into a Bomb Jack arcade machine, I knew that day in the supermarket I’d seen the future. I could have games that looked like those in the arcade at home.

Arkanoid - Revenge of Doh

A 1987 classic arcade game, later ported to pretty much all the home computers of the late '80s. The Amiga version is simply outstanding.

COMMU NI ARTICL TY E SUBMI SSION

Others also got an Amiga 500 and we quickly learned how to copy games, so it was cheaper and easier than getting a bus to an arcade. Soon, we were just getting a bus to each other's houses instead. Consoles had already been gaining an advantage in the longer-form games with things like The Legend of Zelda on the NES - that meant adventures and not just short bursts of play - but the NES and Sega always felt separate and more of a companion to arcade games. What the Amiga 500 was doing was replicating what arcades oﬀered in 16bit bedroom-based glory.

AMIGA FOCUS

An Amiga 500 – I needed to get an Amiga 500. Of course, there was always the wealthy kid who got one ﬁrst. In my case, it was a Canadian boy in my class who lived in a big house and, legend had it, was rich because his dad made a load of money mining for gold in the wilds of Canada. It turned out this was actually true. So sat on beanbags at his house playing Cinemaware game The Three Stooges it was a world away from Horace and his skis. Then, playing Arkanoid it was clear that this was every bit as good as the machine I had to pay to use in town.

The Amiga was a massive step up from the old 8-bit arcade ports.

The idea of shovelling coins into Operation Wolf when you had a version at home that looked pretty much the same seemed a bit pointless. The same with Arkanoid. Even more so with Arkanoid because games on that bastard lasted barely any time at all, but at home on your Amiga, once you had the game you could play as much as you wanted, multi-ball be damned. Pacmania, Bubble Bobble, and the rest.

The arcade carried on of course. The pool and snooker tables still were regularly busy, but there seemed to be fewer and fewer games and more coin pushers and fruit machines. The gamers were drifting away and most of the regular faces who remained were there for the "fruities" - all believing they had a system, or knew a hack, or in the case of one lad, just put doublesided carpet tape up under where the coins dropped so it would capture a few on a payout for him to pick up when the sucker went to complain the machine had shortchanged him.

Have you tried a cereal with more ﬁbre..?

Once the 16-bit of the Amiga 500 – and to a lesser extent the Atari ST - was in full, flow arcade games rapidly lost their draw. To compensate, the arcade machines got bigger, flashier, with more sit-in booths and periscopes and guns, but they also got more expensive and more difficult. On one Star Wars game you could burn through a pound in next to no time. That pound could buy you a blank disk and a friend could copy you a new game that lasted as many goes as you wanted.

Rainbow Islands

Midnight Resistance

Dragon Breed

One of the Amiga's best arcade ports (AA's Ian thinks so!), an addictive vertical platformer with music that will stay forever in your head!

Running and gunning, whilst sidescrolling and platformer-ing!! A big hit in the arcades. The Amiga doesn't fare as well with this as some 8-bit versions.

Dragon Breed makes you stop to check if your trainers are stuck to a beer soaked carpet. I think I hear "Two Fat Ladies" being called from next door?!

January 2021

The arcade in my town eventually burned to the ground one evening, along with the chip shop next door and nearby nightclub in what was one of the biggest fires in living memory. But nobody really missed it, and tellingly, nobody opened another to fill the void – that void had been filled years earlier by the Amiga 500.

AMIGA ADDICT

Six of the Best by Stufm

- Old Style Gaming (Paul Grant)

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Each month, we’ll be catching up with a notable figure in the world of Amiga and retro gaming, and asking them to whittle down their list of favourite games to a shortlist of just six. For our inaugural issue, we’re talking to the owner of the highly popular and acclaimed YouTube channel Old Style Gaming, aka Paul Grant from Tyne & Wear, UK. Hi Paul. Can you tell us a bit about your background with the Amiga, and gaming in general? My earliest gaming memory is getting a Vic20 for Christmas. I was seven at the time, and myself and my sister loved playing games like Hunchback and Amok Attack. Later I had a C64, which eventually got sold (along with my BMX) to raise the money to buy an Amiga 500. Can you remember the first game you played on your own Amiga? The first game I played on my own A500 was Stunt Car Racer. I was blown away by how much better it was than the already great C64 version. From there I did whatever I had to do to build a really great collection of games, which I still have to this day, along with my original A500. Did you own any other computers or consoles? I went on to own a Mega Drive, SNES, PS1, PS2, etc...

but if I had to choose out of all my systems, it’s the Amiga that has astonished me more times than any other. It still does - every time I switch it on, it’s like a time machine to simpler, more fun times. The best times of my life! Ok, let’s get on to the list… Here’s the list of my six all-time favourite Amiga games. Moonstone Moonstone is a game like no other on the Amiga. It’s an epic quest with up to four players that is just awesome with your mates. But let's get down to the real reason people like it. It is one of the first games (that I can remember anyway) that really made you jump with fear when the enemies appeared from the ground. Banshee The game I never owned... I say this as I'm an Amiga 500 owner and this game doesn’t run on it. I remember going to my mates house and playing it on his 1200, then trying to get a copy off him - only to learn that it wouldn’t run. Anyway - disappointment aside - this game is as good as any top class arcade shoot 'em up. Although Banshee doesn’t have music, the sound effects are good enough to carry the game, and the gameplay makes it probably the best top-down shooter that I've played on any system.

The gods of Guru Meditation, show yourselves.

Fire enough rounds and you're bound to hit something!

I really hope those chains are stronger than they look...

American Football, Rugby, Soccer? Who knows, but it is fun.

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

COMMU NI ARTICL TY E SUBMI SSION

Argh, my stomach! Must have been a dodgy pint last night.

Stunt Car Racer I first played this game on my C64 and loved it, but always longed to play it on the Amiga. So as soon as I got one, this was the first game I loaded up, and it's totally class. To this day, I think that this is probably the best car game I've ever played and it's definitely the granddaddy to the likes of Track day etc.

has it all. The gameplay is super smooth and it's deﬁnitely the best platform shoot 'em up of its era, but what else would we expect from Manfred Trenz? Couple this with what I would say is Chris Huelsbeck's best work and you've got one brilliant game that still plays great today.

Speedball 2 Bit of a toss up between this game and SWOS, but in my memories I had more fun with this back in the day against my friends. It’s a brutal sports game that took everything from the ﬁrst Speedball to another level, giving some of the best sports gameplay ever on the Amiga.

IK+ The more I think about it, one of the most important elements to Amiga games was the multiplayer option. In this game we had (for the ﬁrst time) three ﬁghters on the screen at one time, which was not only impressive but also one of the funniest games to play in a group. This was a staple favourite when me and my mates would meet up. We never got tired of it.

Turrican 2 I couldn’t have a top 6 without having this game in, as it

Thanks Paul! Don’t forget to check out Paul’s YouTube channel Old Style Gaming.

January 2021

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Ah lovely. Fresh air, windy rock face, ﬂame thrower...

Mike Battilana - Ravi asks Amiga's current "Top Dog" the questions that we all want answered.

AMIGA INSIGHT

Do you remember the first time you saw an Amiga? "In theory, or in practice? Between 1985 and 1986 I was alternating between the two :) The first time was on the cover of the August 1985 issue of Byte Magazine. It might have hit the newsstands around July. Byte was one of the most influential and technical computer publications. Before the web, that's also how you learned about the latest developments. I was a regular in getting one of the few monthly issues that came into our small town, and I remember my surprise and excitement at seeing that Commodore had made it to the front cover with what seemed like a machine that stood out as the best hardware and the best software one could afford to dream of. Commodore was already a company I loved, as the PET/CBM and the VIC 20 had defined my early programming and computer tinkering, with occasional access to some friends' C64 and C16. I actually saw a physical machine a few months later, in a computer store in Munich, Germany. It had all the demos of the time, also featuring HAM and interlace modes. I don't think it was a PAL system yet. I had to wait until 1986 for the official imports, and by that time I

24x7 for at least 8 years. It felt like quite a quantum leap forward, relative to the previous hardware and operating system version. I still have that computer at my oﬃce." You met Jay Miner dressed as an Amiga virus (cosplay pioneer)! What was he like? "Yes, that was a carnival evening at an Amiga DevCon, and I was dressed as 'Amiga Syndrome'. I also had a loudspeaker under my shirt, with the Amiga synthesized speech repeating 'This is Amiga Speaking' and 'Amiga Syndrome'. I met Jay at a few events, and we were in touch via his BBS (Cloanto had helped write some software for it), but obviously those photos with him where I have a silver skin and green hair will haunt me forever! He was very approachable, but by the time I met him he had already retired from doing Amiga work. My feeling was that Commodore Amiga was letting him attend those developer events more as a PR person. He even told me they didn't tell him much about new developments. When I met him for the interview that was later included on Amiga Forever, he was busy designing chips for implantable deﬁbrillators. But we would also cover

Mike out doing a spot of gardening. Nice to get a break from all the screen time huh?

had studied C and the Bantam and Addison-Wesley books. On the following trip to Munich, I spent all my money on Lattice C (which then became SAS C), and a set of Fish Disks." What is your all-time favourite Amiga? "You mean after the Amiga 1000 (which was my ﬁrst Amiga)? The Amiga 3000. I got that as an early access unit from Commodore in 1990, and it ran almost

AMIGA ADDICT

topics like gardening, or 'The Mission' BBS he was running, where he was 'Padre' (father)." What's your favourite Amiga game? "I may have to disappoint you on that one: for me Amiga always was about development, creativity and productivity, less about games. Even on the Commodore 8-bit systems, I enjoyed writing games (it was easy to impress

January 2021

family and friends) more than playing them. I could mention Marble Madness for the Amiga, because I found it novel to play a game by moving the mouse around, but it wasn't even an Amiga original (it was a good port). Today I very much value how these system force developers to focus their efforts on the game dynamics, instead of spending too much time on other special effects and expensive distractions. Players obviously recognize that, even children appreciate that type of quality. In a way, you could say that Amiga as a 'metagame' is my favourite game, whether that's the events and friends, or getting the culture right, or trying to preserve and make accessible the historical heritage, or working together to move the platform forward while trying to heal the wounds inflicted by the 'vultures and vampires', as some now call them... Or 'Cosplay with Jay' ;)" You volunteer for the local ambulance service, is Cloanto your full time job? "Cloanto's B2B software and services side is what I do as a job, yes. Between 1986 and about 1997, save for some occasional consulting project, Cloanto was an Amiga-only developer. We were very successful, partly thanks to the bundles with every Amiga computer sold. But after the demise of Commodore

Andy Finkel (Commodore) with Mike, 1988.

Amiga, it became clear that the Amiga platform could no longer provide margin for quality and growth, which was also negatively aﬀecting the mood of many other players who had remained. So we chose to keep doing Amiga for passion, but to do other things to pay the bills. That remains the case today. I think if you do Amiga for money, you are doing something wrong. My ambulance and EMS involvement

by the time we speak again, they will be a thing of the past. Since the day I saw it on the cover of that issue of Byte in 1985, Amiga stood for excellence. Meeting more in person than in our modern-day online echo chambers, the community felt friendlier and less polarized. I would like to nourish more of those good feelings. Amiga always was also about beauty to me. It is in the Amiga DNA, but perhaps we need to polish it a bit. We may not be Apple or Microsoft or Linux, but we can be a beautiful bonsai if we celebrate values like friendship, quality and diversity. I also believe in a culture of inclusion, and a focus on healing some of what happened in recent years. Amiga must be able to forgive like a mother. But we need to use our moral compass. We can't stay silent when bad things happen. Some of the things that went on for years might have been avoided, if more people stood up against them, rather than accepting them as inevitable." Do you feel the Amiga's progress has been slowed with lots of legal issues? "With the beneﬁt of hindsight, I think that some mistakes were made in the early 2000s that have nothing to do with legal actions. The untimely departure of Dr. Kouri in 2009 left the company in a weak state. I was talking about open source and other possible futures with him back then, and all of this came to an abrupt end. When a void like that is left, some may take advantage. Wealthy people funding lawsuits and nourishing

A young Mike back in 1989 with Carolyn Scheppner (Commodore) at DevCon.

helped buy out the Commodore/Amiga assets from Gateway in the late 1990s. An acquisition entity was thus set up, which is the current Amiga Corporation." What situation would you ideally like for the Amiga community in the future? "I won't consider the 2019 acquisition complete until we can resolve the legal challenges that were inherited. That remains the current priority. I hope that

bad behaviours also usually doesn't help. We are a small and fragile ecosystem - it takes time to recover from massive artiﬁcial imbalances. Sure, right now we have a 'legal issue', and until that is resolved I am not even free to speak. I am a developer, not a lawyer, so it's outside my comfort zone. It is the ﬁrst lawsuit I have been involved with, and - for the sake of Amiga - I hope it will be the last. But I am also an

January 2021

optimist, and I prefer to look at the solutions, rather than the current state." What is your favourite Amiga event? "All events - the continuity of them, making new friends whilst feeling like a family with those you only see once or twice a year, yet you always feel connected to. I've been to Amiga events since the 1980s. I started Cloanto in my late teens, and met some of my early mentors at those events, making longtime friends in the process. At first, it was the official DevCons and large computer shows. These were more technical than they are now, and they were more important in a pre-web era. At CeBIT, for example, you could run across Bill Gates or Steve Jobs walking around incognito, but there was also Irving Gould upstairs at the Commodore booth, and Jack Tramiel and his sons over at Atari. They invited me to a dinner event a couple of times. It was full of developers like me, and Commodore Amiga engineers like Andy Finkel, Carolyn Scheppner, Dave Haynie and numerous others who helped make us feel appreciated and supported. There were also demoscene events where the police were filming those in attendance, and stranger things than cosplay with Jay happened. Maybe one day at least some of those stories can be revealed... I was lucky to be able to attend two Amiga events in January and February this year, before the pandemic wrought havoc. I hope that in the second half of 2021 we can resume this experience.

Mike's rock band, "The Fat Garys".

Diversity, learning, understanding and respect happen more at events than online, and the future of Amiga needs as much of those ingredients as it can get." Ed - "Thank you for your time Mike. Stay tuned for Amiga Addict's followup 'Part 2' interview with Mike, next time focussing on the new Amiga Corporation and Mike's views on Amiga's future and its current scene."

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA INSIGHT

started in 2001-2002. It became a precious experience that complemented all the time spent in front of computers. I would do it once or twice per week, but that's no longer possible since I have a family. I remain active as an instructor however." How much control has Cloanto had over the Amiga brand in the past? Or is it Amiga, Inc. in control of the brand? "Neither Cloanto nor the old Amiga, Inc. are in control of the Amiga brand. Amiga Corporation (amiga.com) is. After the demise of Commodore Amiga in 1994, Cloanto wanted to keep celebrating and supporting Amiga. This was done by the book, working with Amiga and not wanting to replace it. This changed on 1st February 2019, when I got involved in a new role with Amiga Corporation. Cloanto had good Amiga years in the 1980s and early 1990s. I am very grateful for that. For me as a teenager, it sure started as a great experience. It now feels like a good time to help start a new chapter, with the support of our community." You mentioned the Amiga, Inc. shareholders at Amiga Germany. Can you please explain how they are involved with the Amiga brand? "They are no longer involved. In 2019, they voted to sell the IP of Amiga, Inc., which was the company backed by the late investor Dr. Pentti Kouri, who had

STARSHIP

These are the voyages of the starship Amiga. Its mission to boldly go… oh damn who broke the warp engines! That's how it goes right? 3D support - allowing a whole range of new compatible screenmodes.

TESTBENCH

GENERATION Welcome to the Starship. Each issue we will discuss Next Generation Amiga - its roots and its future. You may wonder "What is Amiga NG?" and I don’t blame you! A decade ago it was huge, but things seem to have slowed down a lot recently. Amiga NG, like Commander William T. Riker, has a lot to oﬀer and explore ;) Next Generation to me is about making a better Amiga platform. Not an Amiga replacement like the FPGA boards we are getting at the moment. Not a 'new Amiga' but something diﬀerent. A mix of classic emulation and compatibility, while having a modern operating system with modern features. Amiga NG was focused on the IBM PowerPC platform (‘A logical move’ as Spock would say). Power PC boards started being manufactured by Blizzard and Phase 5. These were interesting hack togethers with PPC chips and often 68060 processors. Drivers were created and developers worked hard to implement

In space, there always has to be a battle, whether it be Borg or Hyperion. There was a split in the operating system world. Amiga OS4 went one direction (locked to certain hardware - a more traditional Amiga OS feel). MorphOS was developed to move another way, with a revamped Amiga feel (breaking with tradition). The latter was an operating system originally developed for just the PPC turbo boards. I could go into detail about Red vs Blue, but let's save that for another instalment. Like starships, many diﬀerent machines came out, and to start with they were not cross-compatible. OS4 had the Eyetech AmigaOne machines, and MorphOS the Pegasos range. Eventually OS4 grew to support stuﬀ like the SAM440ep, X1000, X5000. While MorphOS worked with the old Apple Power PC range of machines, amazingly dual booting (allowing you to run a choice of OSes!). Apple dropped the architecture and moved to x86 - in fact the last chips from Apple PA Semi were bought to be used in the AmigaOne X1000 and X5000. Trevor

Jump Besi Jump - Ian's ready to mount the Boing Ball How complex does a game need to be for it to be worth our valuable time? It's a question I've asked myself often, but I think the answer is going to be diﬀerent for every person. Jump Besi Jump is an incredibly simple prospect. If you've ever played games like the mobile classic Doodle Jump, you'll feel immediately at home here, as the mechanics are

Dickinson even wrote to Steve Jobs and got a reply in an appeal to get cheaper CPUs. But this is not the death of AmigaNG, I see a future path! IBM have made PowerPC open source, resulting in emulation getting quicker and better. MorphOS are looking at x86 and have already managed to run the OS on a Ryzen. I think Amiga NG has a lot to oﬀer - with 20 years of software development and tons of classic and modern software support, you should really try it out. How can I try out Amiga Next Generation cheaply? Amiga OS 4.1 – it can be installed on WinUAE now! This is the 'Classic' version but still functional. Unless you have a dedicated machine its quite hard to run OS4.1 or OS4.2 any other way. Visit: www.hyperion-entertainment.com MorphOS – it runs on Qemu, or any of the old Mac PPC ranges. Unregistered, it has a trial that times out after a while, but you can reset the machine to keep using it. See: www.morphos-team.net Sorry gotta go, emergency on the bridge. Data’s lost one of his nuts again.

• Developer: Cobe, Koyot 1222 & d4rk3lf • Amiga platforms: OCS / ECS / AGA (1MB) • Price: Free • Released October 2020 basically identical - jump from platform to platform and keep ahead of the constantly encroaching lower screen edge, lest it catch up with you and end your game unceremoniously. In this version, the weird alien is replaced by a cute little dog inexplicably bouncing around on... an Amiga Boing Ball. Well, what else? Each level has a subtly diﬀerent look, and each has a diﬀerent version of that classic copper background we've all come to know and love. Dotted around the levels are sparkling stars to collect - equal to the level number you are playing on - and Besi can complete the level either by collecting all the stars (frequently the easier option), or by bouncing all the way to the top of the level. This might sound straightforward, but given your only movement is in wide bouncing arcs, it can actually be quite tricky to hit a star instead of accidentally going up a platform or missing your opportunity to go up a level entirely.

Is that my Gran's "Westie" terrier on the bouncing Boing Ball!?

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

Jump Besi Jump has an interesting lineage. Developer Cobe based this game on the code for another game called Downfall by Graham Humphrey. In his game the roles are reversed and the player attempts to fall down through a constantly-scrolling level without touching the bottom of the screen. Graham in turn based his game on an Atari Jaguar homebrew title of the same name, which was itself a port of a

Dodgy Rocks - More PD from Ian, but is this a dodgy game?

• Developer: Nivrig Games • Amiga platforms: OCS / ECS / AGA (1MB) • Price: Name Your Price • Released September 2020

Sometimes a game has a title that describes it perfectly. And while Dodgy Rocks is in no way about untrustworthy geology, it certainly does have a lot of dodging and a lot of rocks.

Dodgy Rocks is a game from developer Nivrig (John Girvin to his friends), who developed the game on PC, Mac, Linux and mobile, before Rob Cranley stepped in to produce an Amiga version in Blitz Basic. It does have the feel of a mobile game, with its vertical aspect and simple controls (just left, right and fire), and indeed it started life as a Power Rangers fan-game for John’s son. Luckily for us, he decided to develop it further. Donate a little extra for the A4 poster art. Just dodge the rocks... sounds easy right? The game shares a little of its DNA with the Atari 2600 classic Kaboom!, with a similar shadowy figure looming at the top of the screen launching projectiles at you at progressively faster rates. But the genius of Dodgy Rocks comes with its scoring system. You get a point for every rock you successfully dodge, but double tap a direction and your character will dash into a rock horizontally or vertically, destroying it for 2 points. The pro Rocks player however, will attempt the ‘graze’ - moving into a rock’s lane just as it passes to gain a full 5 points. Each interaction with a rock will also homebrew title for the Atari 2600. Quite the history! tick up a multiplier which pays out at the end of each wave, and it's making use of all these advanced mechanics that will Besi has two different difficulty modes which completely dictate how high of a score you’re able to rack up. The riskchange the gameplay. Easy mode will only move the bottom reward mechanic is at the core of what makes this game as of the screen based on the apex of Besi's jump. As this is addictive as it is, and it’s not difficult to find yourself playing more forgiving, it is balanced out by only giving you one life. for a lot longer than you intended! Hard mode, however, has three lives but a constantly moving screen. Expect a much more frantic game as you scramble to Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses. While the game has ascend the level and one mistake can spell doom for your some great menu and high score music, in-game it’s largely canine companion! silent save a few cursory sound effects. The game also doesn’t have any instructions within the game itself - you The downfall (snigger) of the game is its simplicity - after all, need to read the readme to learn how to play, which seems you're only moving a character left and right and playing very like something that could have been incorporated into the similar levels over and over. This definitely isn't going to be executable. And while it definitely nails that essential ‘one something you're going to commit hours of your time to. more game’ draw, there’s not a great deal of variety here Compounding this is the music - it's good at first, but it's a once you’ve done as well as you can at the base game, short loop that plays constantly for all levels, and after a few despite a choice of difficulty levels. runs, it does start to drill into your skull somewhat. The devs kindly provided a key to turn off the music at any time, but At once a simple endless dodging game, and an adrenalinethat's a workaround rather than a solution. fuelled score attack challenge that will keep you coming back time and time again, Dodgy Rocks is smartly designed and Jump Besi Jump is a fun game with limited long-term appeal. well put together - it knows what it is and makes the most But for free you can't really argue the value proposition. Why that limited scope. If you like a good arcade challenge, you not grab it from Aminet and give it a go right now? Just try could do much worse than losing a few hours or days to this. not to feel too bad when Besi howls as she falls to her doom.

VERDICT

75%

VERDICT January 2021

85%

AMIGA ADDICT

ONSCREEN

On the surface, the game might seem simple - a bad dude is throwing rocks down the five-lane playfield, with the express intention of murdering our poor protagonist. All you need do is dodge out of the way, and this is simply achieved… at first. A single hit will kill - so there’s no room for error or hesitation - and as the waves progress, the rocks start flying faster and faster. Later waves see rocks flying diagonally to catch you out, and later still, there’s fireballs to contend with. It’s a game with a strong arcade sensibility, and it’s not long before you’re running off pure reactions and adrenaline, rather than any grand strategy.

PageStream 4.1 Pro & 5.0 - Jonah looks at why this is Amiga Addict's choice for DTP

TESTBENCH

PageStream is a legendary piece of desktop publishing software. If you ask any publishing company or commercial printers from the '80s and early '90s that used big box Amigas (and even PCs, Macs or Ataris), you'll no doubt hear its praises sung from the printing press rooftops.

RECOM MENDE D

installers for 68K, PPC and even MorphOS, so pretty much every type of Amiga is covered. Grasshopper are even kind enough to provide an MS Word text import utility.

The download comes in at around 20-30MB, plus a 5MB font pack. That's quite hefty for classic Amiga software, but thankfully no floppy disks are required. The installer is the usual Workbench GUI and takes you through automatically. We're using the older PageStream 4.1 Pro Amiga version here (as it has lower memory requirements), but there is also the newer version 5.0 with more features. There are a few bugs, so save your work! However, the features PageStream offers more than make up for occasional problems. I spoke to Deron Kazmaier, the lead developer of PageStream recently, he mentioned further Amiga updates are coming soon which may help. In fairness, Amigas can be temperamental sometimes, so the issues I sometimes have could just be down to our AA computer acting up, it is nearly 30 years old! Ok, let's take a look at some of the features on offer...

PageStream running on our (very yellowed) Amiga 4000.

What is hard to believe is that PageStream is still relevant 34 years since its original release. It is commercially available for just $99 (very good value against the likes of InDesign or Quark) and versions are supported continually by software creators GrasshopperLLC for Amiga, Linux, Mac and Windows still to this day, Amiga PageStream is competing. So where would Amiga Addict be without PageStream? Well, we wouldn't be using Amigas for any layout in the magazine without it - that's for sure! It is by far the best and most up-to-date DTP package available for the Amiga. Even though the last Amiga release came out in 2010, desktop publishing isn't something that really changes much, so the professional tools available in PageStream are just as powerful as ever... I mean laying out text and images is just that! (Deputy Ed - "Hey! Don't put yourself down there Jonah!")

Full Cross-Compatibility & Typeface Tricks PageStream manages to do something here that not much Amiga software has ever done; it oﬀers fully cross-platform compatibility. So if you design on an Amiga, the ﬁles will open on Windows, Mac or Linux and vice-versa, perfectly. Nothing moves around, nothing goes crazy. Amazing! This can also be said of font support too. PageStream supports fonts that are alien to the Amiga, 'typefaces' (as is the correct term!) are added to a folder in the PageStream directory and work independently of the OS to make sure they always display correctly and can be moved around machines with your documents.

Thanks to PageStream, us humble Amiga users can get professional work done at high quality. No one will ever even know a PC or Mac wasn't used! A 'Stream' Come True To Install As one would expect from a professional industrystandard DTP package, PageStream is quite a large ﬁle size installation for an Amiga. GrasshopperLLC provide

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

Text eﬀects are exceptional, for example see our Contents page!

• Developer GrasshopperLLC • Amiga platforms 68K / PPC / MorphOS

• Available from www.pagestream.org • Price $99.00

TESTBENCH

Sadly PageStream seems to be one of the only Amiga DTP packages that is capable enough for our needs, but we're lucky to have it.

High-End Professional Editing In my day-to-day work, I haven't always been lucky enough to use Amiga computers - back when I used to work for other professional publications, we often used QuarkXpress on Macs. Certain features are required in such expensive layout software, and PageStream gives all the usual tools you'd expect. Image file paths can be updated, images embedded or left external. Typesetting can be quickly achieved with text frames, columns, image placement, gutter (Deputy Ed - "Isn't that the gap between text columns..?"), bleeds and, of course "Collect for Output" ready for printing. PDF export, spell checking and useful scripts such as the eyedropper tool and text distortion effects are also included. Manual input boxes are key with this software and they are mighty! It is easy and quick to resize a graphic or text column to exactly how you need it. PageStream will even take care of linking text boxes across columns and pages so the paragraphs flow through your document without a need to manually align any wording. Art, Graphics & Drawing Made Simple There is a comprehensive mix of shape tools, line drawing tools, fill, stroke and vector paths in PageStream - certainly providing enough aid to get most basic layout jobs done. We should bear in mind that this isn't an art package - DTP is more about setting out a nice page of text and graphics; designing a poster for example. PageStream doesn't sweat under pressure with these sort of graphic design tasks. Version 5.0 also boasts features such as alpha blending for text and objects, picture transparency, and more shortcuts and tweaking controls. For the full

experience most Amiga users will probably choose to run PageStream on PPC or accelerated setups, but even basic 68K hardware can handle a document if there aren't too many large graphics at high resolution. What does help though, is when placing images PageStream allows you to set the display quality of each box individually so larger pictures won't burn up your RAM. The floating properties panel also has a great "Apply" button, so you can type in sizes, co-ordinates and set things up before actioning them. This also aids screen re-rendering times on classic machines. User Interface, Palettes and Getting Around Amiga Workbench was pioneering in defining how modern productivity applications layout their UI helping PageStream as a result. The floating palettes and windows make for easy navigation of the toolsets. The icons are clear and easy to understand. Everything is uniform, easy to learn and common settings can be saved for convenience.

THE GOOD It's nice to see fully-featured and professional grade software on the Amiga that can still compete with other platforms, such as Mac or PC. THE BAD You will need seriously maxed-out RAM to do anything professional like a full book, magazine or brochure.

VERDICT January 2021

94%

AMIGA ADDICT

Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer

TESTBENCH

- A useful way to backup your original ﬂoppies

Wiring diagram for Arduino Pro Mini style boards...

I owe my professional career to the creativeness of the Amiga, and at the age of 11 I was lucky enough to receive an A500+ for Christmas (the beloved Cartoon Classics pack). Like most people, all I did to start with was play games, but over time I started to investigate what else it could do, from Workbench to Deluxe Paint, until I got my hands on AMOS. Some 15 years on, and I visited my parents to collect the almost forgotten machine, with a pile of accessories and boxes of disks. Sad to say, sitting on its side, it wasn’t in a good state. The internal battery had leaked all the way down to Agnus! I set about ordering parts to repair the computer, and while waiting for them to arrive, I started to wonder if I could find another way to see what was on my old disks. I’d heard of the Catweasel, but couldn’t justify that amount of cash. Several other solutions existed, but nothing for modern computers, and as many will know, the PC floppy disk controller isn’t flexible enough to be able to read Amiga disks. Having learn about microcontrollers and recently started playing with Arduino, I wondered if it would be possible to build a floppy disk

A full hardware & software project from Rob. Here is his custom reader/writer app.

AMIGA ADDICT

by Rob Smith

...and wiring for Arduino UNO style boards too.

controller. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I had a look around numerous forums but the closest I found (ignoring the amusing Floppotron) were several posts suggesting the Arduino wouldn’t be capable. Challenge accepted. I started (like most people) with Google, to find out how disks were physically written to, what was going on at all the pins on the back of the floppy drive, and how data was suppose to be encoded onto it. My first challenge was just to be able to control the drive. This proved fairly easy, so I won’t bore you with the details. After that, it got more challenging. I tried many different techniques to access the data - sampling the data from the drive at intervals, extra buffer ICs (shift registers) etc - but to no avail. I needed more information. So I bid and won a cheap Oscilloscope from eBay to see if it could shed any light on the problem. After numerous attempts and analysis, I started to understand that not all disks would have been spun at exactly the same speed, so you couldn’t just assume the signal coming in was at an exact speed. By re-syncing my internal clock timing to each pulse, I was able to get something meaningful from the drive. Next step was to make sense of all of this noise. After reading and re-reading about MFM encoding (what the Amiga uses to encode data on a disk), I realised there were only a few sequences of patterns from the disk I needed to worry about. Anything else would be invalid, corrupt or misread. Using this knowledge, I was able to

January 2021

pack the data small enough that I could send it over a serial connection to the PC, where software I’d written could read and try to decode the MFM information. The software on the computer was where the real magic happened. Firstly, I could decode the MFM data. Then I could look for an Amiga disk track, by searching for the Amiga MFM Sync code of 4489, which I’m sure many of you have seen in X-Copy and wondered what it was. It’s a special sequence that will never be in any actual track data, so is put at the start of each sector to identify it. Once discovered, I could extract all 11 tracks, and then perform some analysis to see if it's valid AmigaDOS disk data (checksums and stuﬀ). If the checksums failed, the software would keep re-reading the disk until it was successful. Later I added some statistical analysis, which attempted to repair the data from re-reads for badly damaged disks, which helped to some degree. I also reversed the process and created an option to write disks, which I’m told helped several people who’d just purchased an Amiga, but had no disks! At last, I could read my old disks. The software I’d written would read them and convert the data into the popular ADF format. From this point on, I had a great feeling of nostalgia after reading several disks from years ago. I needed to share this - the Amiga needs to be preserved. Disks are starting to fail, some start to go mouldy, and as much as possible needs saving while we still can. So I posted everything online - diagrams of how to make your NITY own (it's very easy), COMMU

E ARTICLION SS SUBMI

the source code (on GitHub), 3D printed ﬂoppy enclosure if needed, and a full write up on my site.

TURN YOUR AMIGA BACK ON!

So, what’s next? After restoring my old Amiga 500+ to working order, I sit here writing this having found it’s stopped working again! It looks like I hadn’t addressed all the corrosion from battery leakage. If you have an A500+ please check the battery has been removed! I also have a fully working Amiga 1200 after repairing a faulty board that had been damaged from a shoddy re-cap and then used to supply parts for other repairs – components missing randomly all over. At some point I will return to this project. I have been sent lots of information about copy protection schemes and I want to have a look at backing up disks like these. It's strange in a way that because of the cracking scene back in the day, we now have such a rich library of games available that would have otherwise been lost.

Contribute to Amiga Addict - your community led Amiga magazine! Submit your news, articles, memories, readers' letters, game reviews, hardware/software and tutorials. All Amiga-related content is welcome. See your contributions printed in a future issue :)

If you want to build your own, or just want to know more, you can ﬁnd out everything you need to know at: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk

Email submissions to magazine@amiga-addict.com or join our Discord chat server to become part of the AA community.

For those that don’t want to/can’t build one, there’s now several people that have made versions of this that they sell online (Amibay).

Would you like Amiga users & retro gamers to be aware of your product or service?

The AA team misplaced the one we made now we know why Rob used green plastic!

www.amiga-addict.com/discord

...We Can Help To Give You More Exposure ADVERTISING RATES (BASED ON CURRENT 900+ READERSHIP)

GENERAL ADVERT

AMIGA-SPECIFIC AD

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Extra discounts available for repeat issue advertising. Terms apply. See website for current pricing: www.amiga-addict.com/advertising

BRITAIN'S ONLY ACTIVE AMIGA MAGAZINE! CONTACT US NOW: A useful, ﬁnished reader/writer drive.

magazine@amiga-addict.com January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

WinUAE CompactFlash Setup - (from everythingamiga.com) by Duncan Styles

TESTBENCH

The CompactFlash card makes a great alternative to the IDE hard drive. Cheap, no noise and you can quickly swap between setups by changing cards. If you have never setup a CF card for use with Workbench it might seem a little daunting.

• •

When the time came to replace the old IDE drive in an A500+, this was put together as a (hopefully) one-stop setup guide. This should also work for an SD card setup too.

• • • •

What you need

• • • • •

CF Card PC with a card reader WinUAE Workbench Install disk ADF image The complete Workbench disk set or the ADF equivalent

How to clean your CompactFlash card You should only need to do this if your CF card has been formatted by something other than Workbench.

• Connect the CF card to the PC. • Assuming you are using Windows 10, enter CMD into • •

• • •

the search box on the Windows task bar. Run the Command Prompt as an Administrator. In the Command Prompt window that opens up type “diskpart” and press return. You will see that the usual C:\ prompt has now changed to DISKPART>. Now type “list disk”. You will be presented with a list of all the drives on your system. Locate the CF drive in the list. You should know the size of the CF card which will help you. You are looking for the disk number that is listed against your CF drive. If you are unsure stop here as you could wipe the wrong drive. Now type “select disk #” and replace the # with the drive number for your CF drive. Again, make sure it is the correct one. Now type “clean”. All formatting info will be wiped from that drive. You can close the Command Prompt window at this point.

Booting WinUAE and formatting your CF card

• Go to your install of WinUAE, right click the icon and select Run as Administrator.

• If you have a conﬁguration already set up, you can

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

• •

• • •

load that into WinUAE and remove all of its floppy drives and hard drives. Or you can set up a new one from scratch by selecting your Amiga type and ROM to match the version of Workbench you will be using. Go to the Floppy drives section and add your Workbench Install ADF image to DF0. Go to the CD & Hard Drives section and click on Add Hard Drive. Make sure the CF card is connected to your reader and select the Hard Drive drop-down menu and select your CF card. Ensure that Read/write is ticked. You will notice that the device type is UAE (uaehf.device). Now click on Add hard drive. You might want to save this WinUAE configuration so you don’t have to set it up again later. Now click on Start and wait for the Workbench Install disk to boot up. Double click on the Install disk icon and then double click on HDTools. This will open another window and one of the icons will be HDToolBox. If we run HDToolBox from here, it will not be able to find your CF drive, we need to change its configuration. Double click the Ram Disk icon. Copy HDToolBox to the Ram Disk by dragging it over. Single click on the copy of HDToolBox on the Ram Disk to select it, head to the drop-down Icons menu at the top of the screen and then select Information. This should open up a configuration window.

HDToolBox in Workbench.

• Click on SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=scsi.device and change it to SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=uaehf.device and then click Save. • Double click the HDToolBox icon in Ram to run the program. • Once loaded you should see your CF card listed with a SCSI Interface and its Status is most likely listed as Unknown. It’s worth mentioning that you should

• Now press F12 to bring up the WinUAE

• •

•

• • •

properties window and click on CD & Hard Drives to see your CF drive listed. Ensure the CF drive is highlighted and click the Remove button. Now go to the Windows USB Eject icon and eject the CF card from Windows as you would do for any USB drive. Remove the CF card from the reader and then plug it back in. Windows will not know what to do with the drive and prompt you to format the card. Do not, just close any windows that pop up. Now go back into the WinUAE properties window and click on Add Hard Drive and add your CF drive back to the Amiga system. Once that is done, click on Reset to reboot your emulated Amiga. The ADF image will boot again and you should see your new CF partitions listed as NDOS disks. Single click on the drive you made bootable and select Format from the Icons menu. Give this a New Volume Name of Workbench. Untick Trashcan and click Quick Format. Repeat this for the other NDOS discs, giving each disk its own name.

Image Partitioning.

• This is where you can create and size your partitions.

•

• •

•

Choose a partition size compatible with your version of Workbench and be aware that some IDE interfaces may not be able to access over a set size (an Alfapower interface doesn’t seem to like more than 1Gb of total space). Use the slider to create your ﬁrst partition - as you move the slider and release it you will see the size in megabytes. Once the size is set, you need to give the drive a Device Name. Usual names are DH0 or HD0. Type your name and press Enter (this is important). You also need to make sure that Bootable is ticked for this partition as, Workbench will live here. If you want to create a 2nd partition click on New Partition and again move the slider to size it. Give it a Device Name such as DH1 or HD1 and press Enter to set the partition. This disk should not be set as bootable. You can go on to create further partitions if you wish. Click on OK. Back at the main menu, select Save Changes to Drive. This should take a second or so and once complete the Save Changes to Drive button should be ghosted out to prevent you clicking it again. Click Exit.

Workbench 3.1 (Nice wallpaper!).

Your CF drive is now ready to be used in your real Amiga. You’ll need to install Workbench on it, which you could do using real disks on your Amiga or using ADF images on WinUAE if you have them. Ed - "Thanks for a fantastic guide Duncan. Readers should note that Duncan has wisely played it safe, and chosen to use a reliable Amiga partitioning scheme. Smaller partitions would have traditionally been used when partitioning and formatting hard drives in AmigaOS Workbench 3.1 and below. He's allocated multiple partitions to use all of the CF card space. Later versions of Amiga OS - 3.1.4 or OS4 68K PPC for example - do support partitions over 4GB natively, so you can prepare CF cards with just one partition. Workbench versions that do not support large partitions can also be patched and used with a ﬁlesystem such as PFS3 if preferred."

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

TESTBENCH

never use the Low Level Format option presented on this menu. • Click on Change Drive Type to open the Set Drive Type window. • Click on Deﬁne New…. • You should now see a window showing info on Cylinders and Heads etc. We don’t need to set anything here. We can let it do the work for us by clicking on Read Conﬁguration and then on Continue on the small pop-up that appears. • You will see that the drive info has changed. Just click OK to return to the Select a Drive Type window. Click OK again. • You should now be back at main menu and the drive info has been updated. From here, select Partition Drive.

COMMU NI ARTICL TY E SUBMI SSION

Raspberry Pi A600 Mod

TESTBENCH

- Still an Amiga, but with a raspberry twist...

by DJ Nest

Hello Amiga Addicts, My name is Billy Nesteroulis (DJ Nest) and I am a member of the Greek retro club 'The Vintage Computers Society'. Together with other members of the group, we participate in various gaming events and exhibit our retro consoles and computers to the public. I’m also a huge Protracker fan and I produce D&B music with my Amiga. If you are a person who loves technology like me, you always try to push something over the limit. Amiga popularity has grown over the last 5 years and our club has witnessed an uprising of various hardware equipment such as the Vampires, the Warp accelerators, Terrible Fire projects (too bad we missed this side) and many other accelerators. Also gaming developers are active again with various game releases every year. But what about emulation? Are you a fan of emulation? Do you like to use your Amiga from WinUAE or are you one of those who says, "Nah, you have to ﬁre up an A500 to play Defender of the Crown with 2 drives for a genuine experience"? Well you can trust me here, emulation is almost perfect for Amiga usage and especially with the technology we have in 2020, it can be done easily with a cheap solution like the Raspberry Pi 4. I liked the idea of a full Amiga in my pocket when RPi3B was in the market, so I grabbed one and I tried the Amiberry emulator developed by Midwan (Dimitris Panokostas).

DJ Nest's children love a quick game on his Amiga 600.

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

A bit of neat cable management always impresses.

Amiberry is an optimised Amiga emulator, for ARM-based boards like the RPi, ASUS Tinker Board, Odroid XU4, etc. The core emulation comes from WinUAE, but stripped down somewhat in order to achieve good performance on underpowered boards. It includes JIT CPU and FPU support to get high-performance results on CPU-intensive emulated environments. Overall the experience is something new on those little pocket computers. Raspberry Pi 4B was released in June 2019 and by the end of the year I was hooked on the idea of buying one. So I did, and yes, this quad core 1.5ghz single board computer is capable for many things - but I was shocked when I set up my Amiga and the old relic software called ‘’Sysinfo’’ gave me a score of 500mips. This little rascal cost me around 50 pounds and it's faster than my old Blizzard 060 that cost me a ton of money! That’s not fair in my opinion, I wanted to upgrade my RPi4B to something more real, something with more "soul" as we Amiga fans say. I made a full 3D printed, full scale Amiga 600 case with a Cherry MX illuminated keyboard to house the RPi4B Amiga brains inside. Various items were sourced to make this project possible. First I needed an Amiga distro to run - I chose 'Amibian' (developed by Gunnar Kristjansson) for the RPi4b and I grabbed The Amibian Extended Edition V.1.5 for supporters. With a small donation to the developer you can have the full version image file with a very nice Linux Debian (LXDE-pi 10) environment and an AmigaOS 4 look-alike theme. Also included are various retro emulators for other systems like Mame, DosBox, C64, Mednaffe multi emulator, Atari 800 and many more. By default, the distro boots directly into the Amiberry emulator and starts to emulate your Amiga, you can exit the emulator and with a nice, menu the options allow you to choose the Amibian Desktop and configure many other

COMMU NI ARTICL TY E SUBMI SSION

TESTBENCH

One of the most stunning looking and unusual Amigas we've ever seen here at Amiga Addict, it is Issue 1, but still...

settings, reboot, shutdown etc. Amibian comes with no Kickstart files for the very obvious reasons we all know, so you have to add your own Kickstart files and Workbench environment. If you are familiar with the process you can add your .hdf image files to the HD image folder or you can boot your partitions from file folders directly.

55c, I then felt safe to continue. I was also prepared to hook up my old skool Greek Tomahawk Joystick and my brand new T.G.S joystick with my 9pin to USB adapter from Retronic Design. This adapter is awesome, I can plug it in my RPi4 so easily and can also use it on my old PowerMac G3 with 1.1 USB or my MorphOS Powerbook G4; it works like a charm.

You also need to download the 'Amiga Evolution project' 3D printer files called "project Julia" and it will cost you 20 euros to obtain them. In the Facebook page of Amiga Evolution there is a complete list of the extra parts and cable extenders you have to buy - as well as the mechanical Cherry MX Illuminated keyboard. I don’t own a 3D printer, so I gave the .stl files to a well known Amiga repair guru here in Greece who also specialises in 3D printings called MasterGR. He also modified the original Julia logo of the case from the original creator with the Amiga font logo and the Amiga checkmark. This project took several months to complete due to the COVID-19 situation, as the 3D prints took longer to complete and orders of the items sourced from China took an eternity to arrive.

For Sound I use an external source with a sound rig on my 3.5mm headphone jack with no problems. The latest ALSA chipset for sound produces better sound quality than his older brother from RPi3B. Don't expect audiophile results from a pocket computer but if you like to upgrade your sound quality, you can ﬁnd some nice sound Pi-Hats (addons) in the market with digital output to maximize your sound experience even further.

Finally it was time to complete the project. The paint job was done by a professional in a car paint shop. 3D printed parts were painted in black metallic paint with gloss varnish on top, a job that only a pro car painter can do. I was also thinking of overclocking my Raspberry Pi since the latest update for the core opened the CPU from 1.5ghz to 2.1ghz and GPU from 500mhz to 750mhz, so I ordered a silent low proﬁle heatsink with a fan from Ebay to ensure my RPi will function with no issues. After using the stress test on 4 cores on Linux for 10 minutes straight, I reached a maximum temperature of 70c with idle 36c and when the Amiberry emulator is working around 50-

What's Needed For The Build

Amiga Evolution - Project Julia 3D printer ﬁles* (https://gumroad.com/l/project_julia/)

USB to 9pin converter (https://www.retronicdesign.com/en/) Amiberry Emulator (https://blitterstudio.com/amiberry/) Amibian 1.5 extended edition - donations version link (https://gunkrist79.wixsite.com/amibian/forum/ general-discussions/amibian-1-5-extended-editionfor-pi4-1)

*List of extenders, cables, keyboard etc are included with a complete BOM list from AliXpress when you buy the project Julia 3D printer ﬁles.

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

TESTBENCH

In terms of software my Amibian setup is equipped with 3 diﬀerent Amiga OS systems. A classic WB 3.1 Full, Amiga OS 3.9 Classic WB RTG and AmigaSYS 4. I don't use .hdf images but instead I use simple folders with the Amiga ﬁles inside. I combine this with a main Games folder with all the goodies inside, Demoscene, WHDLoad complete, applications, music software and 3D games. Ohhh yes, those fancy 1st person shooters you were always wishing to play someday with your nonaccelerated Amiga but it didn't happen. Games like Quake and Doom are now reaching a whooping speed of 60fps with RTG support, I also tested the Diablo port by Arti for the Vampire accelerators and it plays great with no issues at all on gameplay. You don't have a problem now with the 68060 demoscene. All demos can perform at high speeds with AGA or RTG support. The Benchmarking software I used to measure speed was the classic SysInfo (4.3 version), SysSpeed and AIBB. Sysinfo score was 745 mips while SysSpeed results were astronomical at around 6000 mips. In AIBB the Emutest scored 419mhz of simulated speed, it was interesting. It's time to wrap things up folks, as an Amiga user from 1988 I can guarantee you - with the looks and feels of a real Amiga like this, full scale and the awesome Cherry MX mechanical keyboard (the machine I am writing this article you are reading in your fresh printed Amiga Addict magazine) - it’s an amazing experience to build an Amiga computer from scratch. With the heart of a Raspberry Pi 4, the Soul of the Amiberry Emulator and the brains of the Amibian 1.5 extended edition. You will totally love it and you will impress anyone if you attend a demo party or a game exhibition, or Amiga meetings with friends or club members. It will cost you in total, with every part included and the 3D prints around 200-250 pounds.

Plenty of ports makes for a very useful modern Amiga.

An Amiga with Lotus Esprit Turbo performance!

The ﬁnished project all tidy on the desk (a lot tidier than here in the AA oﬃce, where's James put that gamepad again!?).

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

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AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021

What?! Amiga Pie? - Amiga Addict requested Simon Butler to kindly set sail through the Amiga ocean, in a monthly column from the very depths of a pixel monkey's mind.

REGULARS

I have been asked to scribble down my thoughts, such as they are in my declining years, regarding any or all things Amiga-related from years gone by. I was directly involved in several projects on the Amiga during its hey-day, but I never actually owned one - or indeed any home computer I developed for - until my first PC. As a freelancer, I would be "loaned" the target machine and push whatever pixels were required until the project ended, whereupon said machine was returned to the client and we either went our separate ways - or agreed on another project and the process was duly repeated. While at Ocean, I would have the target machine plonked onto my desk, and would hopefully be familiar with the relevant software to enable me to start pixelating post haste. The Amiga was the first home computer that required no sprite editor designing by whatever coder I was working with at the time (as was usual in the 8-bit days) because it had DPaint. I know that DEGAS existed for the ST, and I did love it, but DPaint was hands down far superior in so many ways. I have to admit that even to this day I never mastered all of the tools and tricks available, unlike a vast array of infinitely more talented artists from back in the day and even in today’s development scene, but I knew what I felt I needed for any given task. I think, because the Amiga was so powerful and my meagre skills barely made it wake up and pay attention let alone sing and dance like some artists did - I had some kind of grudge against it. It was like having a smarter friend or relation in the room that never actively embarrassed you, but always had that smugness about them that said you were way down on the food chain. Nevertheless, we had a working relationship that didn’t last particularly long - PC's were introduced swiftly into Ocean, and my Amiga graphics were then developed on them instead. Sadly, DPaint never evolved as fantastically there as it did on the Amiga, so I just got on with things while artists elsewhere wowed all and sundry with one masterpiece after another. However, as with every machine I crafted my strange coloured squares for (or rectangles - you know I’m looking at you C64 and Amstrad CPC), I never missed an opportunity to check out as many games on that platform as possible. My usual excuse would be that it was research, but I’m a pixel artist first and a gamer very closely in second place. Scarcely a day goes by without me playing something I have yet to finish, or checking out demos for forthcoming new products. It was the same then as now, only I completed a lot less games in my formative gaming years. Maybe I’ve got better (the games certainly haven’t got any easier), or perhaps I’m less hot-headed and unforgiving. Those last two are still up for debate, depending on who you talk to. I think the request for me to contribute here was based

Simon has worked on hundreds of classic 8-bit & 16-bit games.

somewhat on my monthly RetroGamingRoundup podcast, and people might be expecting me to be outrageous, scurrilous or downright oﬀensive. I’m not saying that won’t happen. It’s never completely intentional (again a point that’s still out with the jury), but it's early days and I must rummage among the slowly fading brain cells to try and collect as many Amiga-related anecdotes as possible, and then think of something vaguely interesting to say. So, if the experts and true aﬁcionados out there can forgive the ramblings of this old pixel monkey, and the more-than-occasional faux pas when speaking without the authority of a hardened Amiga-naut, then let’s see how far this stupid column goes and how long you can tolerate the rumblings of a dusty old dinosaur. Until then, let’s enjoy the ride.

Simon Butler

January 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

Demoscene - Matt Wilsher (of Retro Asylum podcast) explores the dark subculture of Amiga Demos

REGULARS

An underground culture, tucked away from the average person's consciousness... yet full of talent, full of cool people, full of competition and maybe with just a little romance about it all. That's right, the demoscene on our beloved machine will remain an enigma to some, yet the doors were firmly blown open on the culture with the advent of the internet. The proper World Wide Web internet. Before that truly existed, the demoscene was far more underground - communicated between ‘members' using good old fashioned letters via snail mail and bulletin boards, or a hacked login account on Compuserve. I'm running before I'm walking here, you - dear reader - need to understand what the demoscene is and why it's so important to the story of computing and even more important to the story of the Amiga, which I'm sure few will disagree has the strongest history of demoscene despite it all really kicking off on its stablemate, the mighty Commodore 64. Think of the demoscene like games development. Groups of people coming together to create a demo - or rather a demonstration. But where it really differs to game development is that this is a talent competition. I'm better than you. We are better than another group of demosceners. This is what made it such a special place to be a part of. That's the romance I spoke of earlier, ingrained in this paradigm were - and continue to be - highly talented individuals ready to blow the minds of other individuals and when those demos crossed over into the mainstream, the minds of unsuspecting lads and lasses who had maybe never seen anything like this before. The demoscene grew out of the cracking scene, which in turn grew out of the early copy parties (there's the history lesson complete!) and as I eluded to above was a place to showcase talents. But it's the culture that was so endearing, so alive

State of the Art has banging music and dance moves which Matt still uses today.

AMIGA ADDICT

and so engaging. When I ﬁrst grew intrigued enough to dip my toe in the waters, I had no idea how life changing this would be. Most Amiga owners will be aware of demos through magazine reviews and public domain library adverts, no doubt owning a number of the demos themselves. The classics hold strong to this day - State of the Art by Spaceballs and its follow-up 9 Fingers, Jesus on E's by LSD to name just a mere few. Dive under the surface and you revealed a bustling world of activity. Outside of the talent making these demos, demo groups were also made up of the likes of 'swappers' who would spread around the latest productions from the scene at large via their country's postal service. Organisers holding the whole thing together, probably building up large phone bills calling up their group mates to make sure everyone was pulling their weight. And the occasional outlier, who promised much, but delivered little. More on me in another article!! Then there's the carnage of a demoscene party, where hundreds or thousands of like-minded folk would come together to celebrate everything they lived for. Eﬀorts would be ramped up as groups pulled together their latest productions to enter into competitions held at the parties, in categories such as 'best demo', 'best graphics', 'best music' and so on. All senses heightened no doubt by a number of external variables, drink, drugs and a lot of these folk weren't huge socialites normally - preferring a night in coding to a night out on the pull - so therefore the dynamic would be ever so slightly forced! But the parties meant so much to the scene that they became a mainstay, to the present day. Global pandemic aside, of course. Parties began happening throughout the year. A few key parties would rule the roost, however, and became THE place to release your demo. The rest of the scene

An all-time Amiga classic and favourite of ours here in the AA Towers oﬃce.

January 2021

would wait with baited breath as the parties took place, keeping an eye on their favourite bulletin board for the demos to be released, or expectantly waiting for a Jiffy bag of disks to drop through their letterbox the week after, as swappers got to work shifting this stuff around the globe in a display of organisation most courier companies can only dream of matching! I can't begin to tell you the impact the demoscene had on me in a couple of pages, so in this series of articles I would like to take you on a little trip down my memory lane. Describing what the demoscene is without showing that emotion and passion will only create so much of an impression for you. I'll dig out old disks that did the rounds to show you how unique a floppy disk can look, publish old letters sent to me by my contacts all while providing a history through my eyes and giving you key moments in time you should go away to have a look at. For now, I have homework for you. Knowing the basics of how this culture hung together is one thing, but seeing it in action is another. If you've never seen a demo before - welcome aboard. If you've seen these demos before, watch them again and dig deeper in the content. The graphics, the music, the hours of unpaid labour that went into them. So please get onto YouTube to watch or download these demos onto your Amiga. Arte by Sanity. Bear in mind this was a stock A500 OCS production at a time when AGA demos were taking the limelight. Notech by Bass & Drifters, which is the forebear for the likes of Jesus on E's. And why not go and watch the classics too! Until next time, may your world be filled with 3D spinning objects and flashing bitmap images! (Ed - "Check out more from Matt on Retro Asylum podcast: www.retroasylum.com")

A great mix of 3D, tunnels, artwork and psychedelic eﬀects in Arte by Sanity.

Exclusive AA interview with Lemmings creators Mike Dailly & Steve Hammond of DMA Design

Issue 2 On sale mid-January 2021 PLUS!

• The story behind our UK Amiga retail history • We remember Dave Needle in a beautiful memorial feature • AA goes big on community coverage of the once underrated Amiga CDTV & CD32 systems • The UnAmiga hardware reviewed, plus an interview with creator Edu Arana • As well as AA regulars including gaming articles, Simon Butler, Back In The Day '86, News, Keyboard Warriors & Six of the Best!

January 2021

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REGULARS

PRESENTS

AMIGA ADDICT

January 2021