Amiga: 30 Jahre

12 Oct 2015

Last weekend I attended the Amiga: 30 Jahre event in Neuss, Germany.

Richard Löwenstein, known to many German fans of the Amiga as one of the writers and editors of the “Amiga Joker” magazine back in the day, is working on a new bullet hell shooter for the Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 and CD32. At his table one could not only talk to him about Reshoot, as the game is called, but also watch him work on the game.

I was especially fascinated by the development environment that he set up to work on the game: he is using Xcode on MacOS X as his IDE to edit the game’s assembly code which is automagically (thanks to shared folders) executed in FS-UAE on an emulated Amiga. I need to figure out if I can get a similar environment set up under Linux.

The only presentation that I got a chance to listen to was by Jens Schönfeld, who creates new hardware for classic Amiga computers such as the ACA1233 accelerator card and the Indivision AGA MK2 flickerfixer, for instance. He is currently working on a new Amiga 1200 mainboard, the Amiga Reloaded which I plan to buy as soon as it’s available.

My highlight of the day was the dinner event where I ended up sitting at a table with RJ Mical, who helped invent the Amiga platform and Dave Haynie, who co-designed the Amiga 3000, Amiga 4000, and Amiga 1200 computers as well as the organizers of the amiga30.eu event.

I would like to use this opportunity to thank everyone involved in making this event so amazing: the organizers, the special guests, and all attendees.