Steffest Digitale Pulptuur

New project!

Turn an old iMac into the Ultimate Amiga Game Experience


More info, images and downloads @ https://www.amigaclub.be/projects/arcade

I picked up one of my old projects again: BassoonTracker!

BassoonTracker is some sort of music sequencer in the "tracker" tradition.

Very retro, very geeky - I love it :-)

Most people - including me - use it more to listen to other peoples' songs than to create their own, so I polished the "playing experience" a bit and added playlists, amongst others.
Above is a small video of the new stuff on version 0.5.
Check out the full changelist of this release at the history page.

Underneath the surface, the code also got a mayor and long overdue overhaul: I moved to ES modules, making the code much easier to maintain and much easier to expand.
As a result, the initial footprint is much smaller - coming in at 97kb compressed - which is quite nice for an app that

• has a complete custom graphical UI rendering engine
• has a complete custom audio engine
• can read and write various old and weird binary file formats

For the past months, tracked music is more or less on non-stop repeat when I'm working as - for me - it's the perfect coding music. (After all; it's code itself !)
I like the fact that tracked songs are by nature open source: playback is in real time generated from the source samples, the musical notes and the effects.
If you hear an interesting part, you can instantly investigate how it was done.

Because tracked music comes from a time where diskspace was limited, the files are usually very small and don't contain long samples or lyrics, making them even more perfect as coding backgroiund.

I must say it makes me surprisingly happy that the BassoonTracker source code repository jumped the 1000-star marker recently.


Yay! I'm glad people still like tracked music.
(Check out this playlist with "demoscene releases" of this year - it really is a vibrant scene ! )

The BassoonTracker app can be found here - source code is here.

I participated in another Commodore Amiga demo, released at the "Gerp" demoparty this weekend.

Happy to say it took 1st place in the Amiga 40k compo.

I provided some graphics (logos, sprites) and some overall design.

All credits to GigaBates, though ... quite amazing what he manages to squeeze out of a humble Amiga 500 (and squeeze in only 40 kb!)
And mA2E provided an excellent groovy chiptune for the demo.
Well done, team! 🙂

Actually: most of the graphics I made got scrapped due to size constraints, but this means I already have some material for future releases.

So: On to the next one!

Downloads on https://demozoo.org/productions/336657/ if you want ot run it yourself on your Amiga.
Assembly source at https://github.com/grahambates/desire-fm
(oh man ... that code ... 🤯 💥 )

And also: probably the only time in my life I have 2 productions on the "monthly top 10" on Pouet.
Not too bad! :-)

I went to my first "demoparty" this weekend.
RSYNC in Leuven , hosted by some random scrubby guy called fRAnKY.
It's super amazing how many super amazing people can be at the same place at the same time!

Of course a demoparty is only a demoparty if you release a demo, and I didn't want to show up empty handed.
I made "Ordo", a visual story about the endless cycle of ORDER and CHAOS.

The first demo out of my own kitchen.
Mostly a glorified slideshow, though ...
I had the naïve idea to write it in system friendly C code and compile it on the amiga itself.
I know nothing about c and still don't - but it was a fun exercise.
In the end I only figured out how to do 2 things without crashing: how to blit pieces of bitmaps on the screen and how to change colours, so that's what I went with.
No sprites, no bobs, no copper, that's for the next one!

Downloads on https://demozoo.org/productions/335741/

Here's the video

Should run on any Amiga with at least 1MB of chip ram.
(That's because I'm lame and don't know yet how to do proper memory management or compression on Amiga)

And there seem to be some severe audio/video sync issues on some systems 😕
(That's because I'm lame and I have no idea how to keep 2 seperate processes in sync on Amiga)

Just scratching the surface and so much still to learn, but boy, what an interesting machine, that Amiga ... right ?

The trend of enhancing retrocomputers with new hardware expansions is still going strong.

Nowadays we can "implement" hardware designs in software and use FPGAs and raspberry PIs to replace and improve old and aging components.
The newest star is the PiStorm32: a bridge between the expansion port of the Amiga 1200 and a raspberry PI.
This means you can use the modern features and speed of a raspberry PI to "emulate" all sorts of Amiga hardware.
The piStorm32 supports the rasberry PI 3A, 3B and 4. PiStorm is an open source project by Claude Schwarz.

I got mine from Cédric who was kind enough to produce a first batch of the PiStorm32-lite




(note: the "lite" in the name doesn't mean there's a "full" version somewhere, it means the original hardware design was updated to work around the world-wide component shortage)
Note that there are 2 main ways you can use the PI in the piStorm:
One way is to run linux on it, and configure your Amiga emulation from the linux side. This feels a bit ... yuck and is a few bridges too far for me: when you switch on the Amiga, you have to wait untl the Linux side has booted for it to provide emulation services. The benefit is that you can use this linux bridge also for things like networking etc, but I feel: if you want to go that route, why not just install a dedicated emulation package like Pimiga or AmyBerry on the PI and be done with it.

The other way - much more exciting - is Emu68 - this is a bare metal 68k emulator for ARM devices. Ok, it still has to boot, but as it's bare metal, it boots in milliseconds and it's WAY faster to emulate the 68k CPU.
Emu68 is a project of Michal Schulz. 

I already got a PI3A+ running in a Amiga 500 and 2000, so I mostly was interested in the potential speed increase of using a PI4. Boy ... Is was not disappointed!



This ... thing ... flies!
Ok Ok, I know the Sysinfo benchmarks mean doodly squat whern JIT emulation is enabled but still: it does show the shear horsepower: 2333 MIPS / 2235226 dhrystones ... I've never ever ever seen such numbers.
And it's noticeable: everything seems zippy zippy fast.
It also seems the slow CHIP ram access mostly has been solved.
The fast ram is configurable and by default set to 2GB. 2GB Ram in an Amiga .... that's insane.

I really like that you can access all the settings and configuration of the PI from inside the Amiga.
From the Amiga side you also get all the tools to monitor the PI.



By default the PI4 runs at 1.5GHz but there's a setting to make that 2.2Ghz. (That's how I got those 2333 MIPS)
The PI runs at 70°C then - compared to 50°C cliocked at 1.5GHz. Still well within limits.
The configuration files are stored on a FAT32 partition on the SD card that you can access from the Amiga side.
This also means you can use this partition to quickly share files between the Amiga and your PC/Mac. Super handy.

One of the nice things of the piStorm, is that it acts as any other accelerator card: you can still use all the native Amiga hardware.
For example, you can still boot from your internal IDE interface, or floppy disk even. It then just provides the ROM, RAM and CPU. 
If you really want to go "stock" again, you can completely disable the piStorm by holding down the reset keys while booting. Nice.



But you don't put in a piStorm in your 1200 if you want stock, of course ... you want SPEED!
Did I already mention it's fast?
MPEG and AVI video plays smoothly, decoding mp3 is hardly noticeable (in contrast to a main task that drains even a 060 CPU).
Obviously the software that gains the most of the CPU and RAM boost is the software that plays nice with the system and avoids direct hardware banging. Emulating other systems for example: these run mostly on the CPU and require some ram.
Here's the Classic MacOS 8 being emulated on the Amiga, running PhotoShop 4.





Faster then it ever was, including on the original mac hardware.

Is it all good?
No.
As with all "super accelerator cards", compatibility with hardware banging software like games and demos is not super great.
WHDLoad goes a long way of ironing out the kinks, but still I experienced frequent crashes running some games and demos.
So if you're main interest is playing classic Amiga games or watching demos, the piStorm is not your best friend.
But then again: with the kind of performance the PI delivers, it might even make more sense to run these things in an "emulated Amiga" on top the real Amiga. perfectly doable and about the only way to ensure the "hardware" is exactly era-correct and what the software expects.

Another annoying part is the cable clutter the PI introduces, especially if you want to extend the SD cards to be accessible from outside the case.
Of course, this is no different then with other cards for the Amiga 1200, but the PI can be more extreme if you want to access the regular PI ports like USB and Ethernet too. I guess it will be another round of extension cables and 3D-printing to make it all fit nicely.
About 3D printing: the PI3 has plenty of space, but the PI4 pushes a bit against the trapdoor it 's closed.

I guess designing and printing a trapdoor that gives a bit more space and ventilation for the PI is a good idea. 

Likewise, the PI GPIO pins are VERY close to the metal of the Amiga keyboard. For that reason it's really recommended to put some extra insulation between the metal keyboard plate and the PI.

Verdict:
I love it.
It's clear that this is THE future of Amiga accelerator cards.
Yes, it still has it's flaws, but things are progressing rapidly and everything is open source.
What a big contrast with those other fast Amiga Accelerator cards ... 
I must say one of the first thoughts in my head when testing the piStorm was "Ouch ... this means game over for Apollo"
with the PIStorm delivering 4 times the performance at a quarter of the price of those other cards, it pretty hard to justify getting an IceDrake or a TF1260 ...




What I like:

• Insane performance, especially at that price point. At this moment it's simply THE fastest classic Amiga ever.
• Can be easily disabled to revert to stock hardware
• It's still "just a PI": pop in another SD card and you boot directly into the PI to do non-Amiga stuff
• easy file transfer between Amiga and PC/Mac using the SD card.
• All configuration and monitoring available from the Amiga side.

What could be better:

• Switching between RTG and Classic display modes is still a pain
• the ususal cable/port extension issues if you want to access the PI ports from outside the case
• Still some compatibility issues with older "hardware banging" software

Excellent excellent work by Cédric, Claude, Michal and many others.
If you like the project, please consider becoming a Patreon of Michal and/or voicing your support on the PiStorm Discord channel 

Aan de ene kant heb je de tirannieke dictator.
Op papier leidt hij een democratie, maar hij weet wel beter.
Hij is een narcist die niet maalt over "de waarheid", die de media manipuleert en uit is om zelf aan de macht te blijven.
Of misschien vooral nog om zijn persoonlijke rijkdom uit te bouwen.

Hij overtuigt zijn land om - met hulp van de bondgenoten - andere landen binnen te vallen als hij denkt dat dat winst gaat opleveren, uiteraard allemaal met een goed verhaal.
Er is immers een bepaalde "dreiging" die moet worden afgewend.
De waarden en normen zijn in gevaar en moeten worden verdedigd.
Niet altijd is dat binnenvallen fysiek: de belofte van financiële en militaire steun werkt soms evengoed. 

---

Aan de andere kant heb je de populist. Hij opereert in een democratie, maar hij speelt het spel beter dan wie ook.
Hij is een narcist die niet maalt over "de waarheid", die de media manipuleert en uit is om zelf aan de macht te blijven.
Of misschien vooral nog om zijn persoonlijke rijkdom uit te bouwen.

Hij overtuigt zijn land om - met hulp van de bondgenoten - andere landen binnen te vallen als hij denkt dat dat winst gaat opleveren, uiteraard allemaal met een goed verhaal.
Er is immers een bepaalde "dreiging" die moet worden afgewend.
De waarden en normen zijn in gevaar en moeten worden verdedigd.
Niet altijd is dat binnenvallen fysiek: de belofte van financiële en militaire steun werkt soms evengoed. 

---

En ertussen zit het plebs. Niet denigrerend bedoeld want ook ik hoor erbij.
Het plebs kiest partij, roept hoe slecht die andere wel niet is en trekt ten strijde.
Digitaal uiteraard, op social media met vlaggetjes en slogans, met steunbetuigingen aan de goeden, met aanvallen op de slechten.
Ze worden aangespoord en vooruit gestuwd, gevoed door welgemikte beelden, video’s, verhalen en grapjes.
Maar pas op voor die verhalen van de andere kant, want die zijn niet echt, dat is propaganda en niet te vertrouwen. 

En de nuance, de rede, de menselijkheid? Sorry, daar is geen plaats voor.
Je bent voor of tegen, wit of zwart. 

Ik voel mij precies niet meer thuis in deze wereld.
Waar zit toch die poort naar dat parallelle universum, waar misschien wèl iedereen naar het midden vloeit, in plaats van naar de buitenkant.
Waar onvermijdelijke verschillen en conflicten worden bekeken als interessante nieuwe invalshoeken in plaats van als dreiging.
Waar misschien elke man of vrouw juist dat is: mens tussen andere mensen.

Ondertussen zet ik beter "het nieuws" af, en focus mij op mijn kleine wereld waar ik wel invloed op heb. Op de mensen die ik graag zie, en zij mij.
Ik weet dat het een bubbel is, maar het is een bubbel waar ik mij gelukkig wel thuis voel.

 

I did a new "paint job" on an Amiga case. (Normally they are white)



I am totally in love :-)

The case is one from a1200.net in "CD32 grey".
I also pre-ordered the matching keycaps like 2 lifetimes ago - but they still have to deliver, always a lurking issue with these kickstarters.
Anyway - I decided to do a DIY.
I posted it on some forums and got surprisingly many reactions asking how I did the keycaps.
Super easy actually, but here it goes.
I used iDye Poly. It's a dye that bonds with most plastics but - luckily - it doesn't bond with the little protective cover that is on the letter of the keycaps on Amiga 1200 models.
This result in the original key-color shining through as a small border around the lettering, making sure the letter is still readable.
Rather a funky effect!
Before dying, make sure you're keys are super clean and evenly coloured. I even brighted mine a bit with hydrogen peroxide.
The instructions that come with iDye Poly are meant for dying fabrics. They tell you to use boiling water, but whatever you do: DO NOT BOIL YOUR KEYCAPS!
They will warp and bend, making them unusable. (believe me, I know from experience :-/ )
I used water of about 50 °C.
Add the dye, add the color intensifier that comes with the dye.
Stir, pop in keys.
I use a 1 liter transparent plastic bottle with a wide opening. That way you can close it and give it a good shake, making sure all keys are subdued in the dye.
I used the "silver gray" color for the gray keys. The dye works pretty fast and I only left them in for about 2 minutes.
The black keys I left soaking for a few hours (in the color "black") and that was a mistake.
After some time, the dye builds up to a sticky goo, making the keys a bit smudgy.
I evened them out with some acetone rubbing but still they are not a sharp as they should be.
I finished them of with a few layers of matte varnish for the gray keys and high-gloss for the blacks.
I knew upfront this would make them dust-magnets but hey ... looking as cool as that is hard work!

then the finishing touch: I designed a custom badge with the vampire logo in CD32 theme and asked the "BadgeMan" to print it.
Cherry on the pie! 

I did one before - a 600 model.
There I did the complete case and painted the keys black.
I applied some Amiga-specific keyboard stickers made by iComp.

Also nice!

Presenting a new (small) project.

Kiss-Catalog!

 

It's an insanely simple Catalog System to keep track of your collections.

Some context

People who know me know I'm a bit of a collector.
Ok, some call it "hoarder" but I call it collector.
The difference between a collector and a hoarder is that the former knows what he has and keeps everything in good shape.
Still ... my retro computer collection is growing towards a point where I don't know exactly what I have anymore, or - more frequently - where I put it.
Questions like "I know I have this Amiga accelerator card, but ... where the heck is it?" need answers.

There's a ton of software already out there to help with that but I wanted something super-super-simple and with some very specific features.
As experience taught me: If it's too hard to maintain, it won't be.

Goals

• Simple simple simple to maintain
• Accessible from anywhere (which in my case always translates to "web based")
• Everything should be searchable/browsable to quickly locate an item or to quickly show some overviews

When you start googling or asking around you get responses like. "Oh, an SQL database is what you need" or "There's an app for that, I use Collectorz or Numento"
No, no, no, nonono - been there done that. This is not my first attempt at cataloguing.
All other attempts stranded in

• OR complex systems that took forever to maintain 
• OR external platforms that ceased to exist...  

Did I mention it should be simple?
So: no database, no third party software, no fancy stuff.
Plain files and folders, plain JPG and .TXT files.

The concept:

You structure your collection in folders. Each folder can contain files and subfolders that further describe your item. Info is stored in plain text files. Images are stored in .jpg or .png. Any other file you add is just regarded as "file".
Then, a script is run that pulls all these files into data-structure.
This .json file is used to display a webinterface with browse and search features.
When you edit/add content from the webinterface, the local files are changed.
The "database" is always being generated from the local files. This means your data is your data: it lives in your folder as plain text files, completely outside Kiss-catalog.
If you stop using Kiss-catalog and delete it from your system, your hard cataloguing-work is not lost.

The main info file is called "info.txt"
The main image of an item is called "main.jpg"

If you want to display your collection on the web, simply put all your static files on a webhost.
No database or serverside processing needed.

That's it!

Everything runs

• BOTH locally and remote 
• BOTH as a static website and a somewhat full-featured dynamic Content-Management System.

There's a small demo collection at http://www.stef.be/collector/amiga/  (read only)
Still starting to populate it, first I have to FIND all stuff :-) 

And of course: Open Source and everything.
It's made for personal use, but you're free to give it a go. Feature requests are welcome.
It runs one Node but if that doesn't ring any bells there are also pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux

Drawbacks

These "design" decisions have some drawbacks:

 

• Flat file "databases" only go that far, if your collections is reaching like a 100.000 items, Kiss-catalog is not for you
• Because everything is generated from your local files, this might get slow with large collections. Also there's no image processing (yet) so all images are displayed "as is" : if you fill everything with 4K images, loading will be slow.
• If I ever want to add features like "private files or folders" or whatever - I will probably have to settle for some naming scheme.
• Likewise for "calculated" fields like prices etc. some convention will be necessary. 

 

The Philosophy

I've been pondering the last few months (years?) over something I call "sustainable software"
It's probably not a new concept but that's what I call it in my head. 
Basically it means that a developer should write software that is as simple as possible for the job.
Not because simplicity is a goal in itself, but because simple software lasts longer.
It's easier to maintain, consumes less resources, runs faster, ...

Developers should write software to last.
It's all too easy to quickly throw something together using the funky libraries and frameworks that today are considered "modern". Before you know it you're lugging along a staggering dependency tree and rely on a multitude of online services to get your thing built/compiled/deployed.

Yes, you're the cool kid on the block, but how will it look in a few years? Will it still build/compile/deploy?
If it's a fairly simple web-app, do you really need that 2 MB javascript package, 7000 lines of CSS and 4MB initial page load? Maybe ...

In this project "sustainable software" means:

• no exotic or platform dependent file formats. plain text RULEZ
• no external (web)platforms: it's the only way to make sure your data is still there in a few years time.
• no code dependencies. again: it's the only way to make sure your system still runs in a few years time.
• platform independent. everything should run on - and be maintainable from - whatever device you use. 

 Anyway - that's food for maybe another blog post - don't get me started on frontend builds that pull in ONE MILLION packages and takes 20 minutes and 8gig to build ... 

For now: Happy Cataloguing!

 

 

The past years I have been slowly tinkering on various Amiga Projects.
Mostly in JavaScript, mostly to unlock various parts of the huge Amiga ecosystem: parsing ancient filesystems and fileformats, reading and writing Amiga files with new tools, ...

Slowly all these various tidbits are coming together in the big plan: to break the Amiga out of it's emulated container and to seamlessly integrate in a modern OS.

That modern OS is platform independent. It runs on everything and it is accessible from everywhere.
For me, this translated to an OS that is web based. It runs in your browser and it lives in the cloud.

There have been many approaches to such an OS, some of them - like FriendUP - clearly have their roots in the Amiga system.
One of the most interesting ones is Amibian.js. It's also inspired by the Amiga and it runs in javaScript: Node.js on the backend, browser in front.

I've been talking with Jon - the creator of Amibian.js.
It's a HUGELY ambitious project, ranging from custom compilers in various programming languages to a recreation of an Amiga-like OS, complete with compatible system library calls and more.

When doing a modern Amiga inspired OS, one of the big questions is how you handle legacy software.
The Amiga has an old but super mature ecosystem of programs but sadly all that software doesn't run anymore on modern systems.
The solution is to emulate that old hardware so you can still run all that old software.
The most used Amiga Emulator is WinUAE, a glorious and ultra-advanced piece of code.
Rupert Hausberger did the daunting task of porting it to javascript.

The drawback of emulating an Amiga is that it is a contained black-box system that has no knowledge of the larger system it's running on. WinUAE handles this quite elegantly by allowing a shared filesystem, but in your browser there's no such thing.

This is where I stepped in: an emulated boxed Amiga running in your browser is cool, but wouldn't it be even cooler to break it open?
You could use Amiga software to seamless edit/play your local files,
or launch modern non-Amiga tools from within the Amiga,
or compile a program for Amiga with today's tools and launch it directly on an emulated 68k CPU
or ....

All this directly available on whatever system you use and wherever you are.

In the end, the underlying technicalities shouldn't matter.
It shouldn't matter what OS a program was written for, or where your files are exactly, or even who's physical machine you are using. Just launch your space and mold it to your liking.

Amibian.js already tries to break the barriers between the browser and your local system.
Browser or native? It shouldn't matter.

I will gladly help and try to break the barriers between the emulated environments and the native ones:
Emulated or native? It shouldn't matter.
 
The top video is a first demo of the progress. It shows various aspects of building such a system.
Most notably a shared filesytem so both systems (emulated and native) can access the same files.

Everything you see is running in the browser.
The (emulated) Amiga is on the right, the host system is on the left.
We're still doing babysteps: trying out stuff and laying the foundation for the bigger plan.

The concept is always the same: a seamless integration where it doesn't matter anymore where your files are or on what platform your program is running on.