Contents
What, why, etc.?
Current configuration: A1200 with a faulty memory expansion: I can only use 2 of the 4 extra Megs. Harddisk of 60 Meg. The Arcade joystick. Golden Image mouse. Sega 3 button control pad. No name sound sampler. No name 28k8 modem. HP Deskjet 600 printer.
I use my Sony television as a monitor.
I bought my first Amiga in 1990. It seemed the right choice at the time for a former C64 owner. The Amiga was an A500.
I bought my current Amiga in 1994, two days before Commodore announced its filing for bankruptcy.
At the beginning of 1998 I bought a second hand Wintel-box, which I have now got running Windows 3.1 and Linux. I used my Amiga for a lot of things. I programmed it, I drew on it (even though I cannot draw), I played games on it, I used it to go on the Internet.
I even used it to write articles for a computer monthly called Amiga Magazine. You can find an example of a review by me (in English) here.
Amiga Magazine has stopped, and also my use of my Ami has almost halted. The main reason for this is that my computer use is now almost exclusively focused on the Internet. For this I use my PC, because it has a larger harddisk and better webbrowsing tools. I still think that YAM and Miami on the Amiga are the better e-mail and dial-up tools respectively.
The links below also include links that did not fit in with the special interest ones. Selecting a link will first lead to an intermediate page.
If you want, you can go to the top of the intermediate page.
General links:
It is recommended that you program the Amiga in C, and for good
reasons:
-C is portable
-C is the language used to program large parts of the OS in in the first
place
-C is well known
However, C's syntax can be extremely dense and as C is a programmer's language, there is not a lot of low level help available.
Much more friendlier is AmigaE. It has a clear and largely predictable syntax, it comes bundled with a beginner's guide and a lot of development and debugging tools, and also in its archive you will find a lot of useful sources.
Furthermore, E uses the functions of four standard libraries, and will explain some of them in its manual, so that you can start programming Intuition right away.
Advanced programmers may feel left out unnecessarily. They do not need to, as E has lots of goodies for them too. E is typeless to begin with. (Because of that?) it compiles extremely fast, even on the slowest machines. No more going out for a cup of tea at every compile time.
E also implements some LISP and Prolog like features such as cells and unification.
E has built-in exception handling, making it extremely easy to trap errors.
Although E was designed as a multi-platform language, no-one has tried to port it yet.
E apparently has a discussion list on the Internet. You could try to contact them by sending an email with 'HELP' in the body to: amigae-request@bkhouse.cts.com. However, noone has heard of the list for a long time. You might have better luck with the E newsgroup.
The author has his own homepage.
E can be found on Aminet in dev/e.
The source of a program I wrote in E can be found below.
A friend and I started a pseudo software company, to see if together we could achieve what neither of us had achieved on his own: Publish software.
The company was called Abacadabra. It didn't last, as we both landed full time jobs.
We decided our first project would be a game. And to keep it simple (after all, we are just beginning to explore our possibilities), we decided to do one of the classics. Which? Pong of course. We never got far.
"Things are moving slow, because my partner in crime has got a job at the moment and cannot spend nearly as much time on Abacadabra as he would like to. (I know I said the same thing two months ago, but that is just how slow it's moving).
As soon as things are starting to take shape, Abacadabra will get its own pages on this site."
WP converter
A project that did not die a quiet death (as my projects usually do after I lose interest), for the simple reason that I actually needed a program that converts WP documents to RTF documents.
After I had hacked a prototype and a slightly more sophisticated version, I discovered the program wp2x somewhere on the net. Wp2x allows for configuration files, so that x can be anything. I have succesfully compiled an Amiga version of wp2x and am now in the process of designing an RTF configuration file.
Wp2x will of course occur on these pages as soon as I am past beta-testing. Meanwhile...
If you are interested, you can take a look at the Amos prototype, or at the last E final version of Wp2rtf, which is divided in a converter module and a main program.
