For the German Amiga user in the 1980s and 90s, few computer periodicals could top the Amiga Magazin, published by the company Markt & Technik. The mag was so big in its day that it ran for an impressive twenty-two years before it ceased publication in 2009. Sadly, I don’t speak or read German myself, so the only issue of the magazine I’ve ever owned is the complimentary copy I got when I bought my Amiga 500.
If there ever was an annus horribilis in my life, it was 2023 – and the year had started so well! I had updated the Rave audio editor to version 1.6 in February, and began planning new features soon after the release. But unpredictable as it can be, life decided otherwise. In the summer my marriage suddenly collapsed for reasons I’m still trying to fathom, and all of my Amiga activities went on the back burner.
Computer programming came into my life by pure accident. In fact, as a 14-year-old that had just finished primary school, I didn’t plan to have anything to do with computers: I wanted to study agriculture. The actual reason escapes me now; was it because I’d been in the Scouts and wanted to work close to nature? I no longer remember. Anyway, for my next round of education I chose a local secondary, which at that time was a catch-all type of school offering specializations as disparate as Agriculture, Physics, and Information Technology.
When you develop software, more often than not you face what is called an “implementation dilemma”: a crossroads type of situation where you have to decide which way to go next. What makes the situation tricky is that, unlike Dean and Sal from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, you’re not free to make an arbitrary choice. Bad design decisions always have consequences, often unforeseen and usually bigger than smaller. Take a wrong step, and you end up in a lot of rewriting!
In September, having made three public releases of the Rave audio editor within three months, I felt I needed a little break from programming. I used the self-imposed leisure time to catch up with my reading, and so I finally managed to get through the latest issues of Amiga Future and Amiga Addict, which had piled up in my room since earlier this year.
I’m not a frequent Amiga party-goer. I had my fair share when I was younger, but I no longer see much point in going to far-away places only to find, typically, a dozen tables with old machines running old games. So the Amiga37 party announcement in April left me somewhat indifferent, all the more so when I realized that the venue was located over a thousand kilometres from my hometown.
When Hyperion Entertainment announced in a 2014 blog article that AmigaOS4 was going to get support for accessing memory beyond the 2 GB limit, the reactions were mixed. Predictably, the most abrasive comments came from people who had never owned an OS4 system; but the camp of supporters didn’t seem over the moon, either.
In project management circles, there is a running joke that the last five per cent of a project takes 95 per cent of the entire completion time. If you’re a software developer, this funny paradox may ring some bells because it is in fact well rooted in experience. Your project proceeds quickly until it reaches a point where it is almost finished, save for a few little things that make it unsuitable for release. These “few little things” can turn the final phase of the project into a nightmare that will drag for months, if not years.
Christmas 2021 was approaching fast and it was clear to me that I’d miss the magic release date again. Sigh. I had been working on the Rave audio editor for well over two years, and you can imagine how frustrated I was that I still wasn’t ready to put out a working version, with all the features I had envisioned for the initial public release. Worse: I began to fear that – despite documenting the development process on this blog and posting screenshots on Facebook – some of my followers might have got sceptical enough to believe that the program is nothing but vaporware!
Sitting at my old demo group’s 30th anniversary party (which I mentioned in this blog post), I had no inkling that we were in fact reviving a tradition. I’m happy to say that since that first reunion, we’ve been meeting on a fairly regular basis to compare notes, play with our machines and discuss all things Amiga. We’re now a mixed bunch consisting of retro hardware collectors, next-gen enthusiasts (yes, me) and occasional emulation users, but the meetings are always great fun!