It’s six weeks into the summer holidays – although this year, the word holidays rings a bit ironic to me because I don’t remember ever being so busy during summertime. Thank goodness, my current workload is not related to my day job, so paradoxical as it may sound, I’m getting a lot of enjoyment from sweating my guts out in this hot weather. Yes yes yes, I’m finally back on track, trying to catch up with my Amiga projects!
Cieszyn is a quiet border town in Silesia, a historical region that now spans parts of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. It is in fact two towns, for fate and politics had it that after World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Cieszyn got divided between Poland and the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia.
“April is the cruelest month,” says T. S. Eliot in the opening of his most famous poem, The Waste Land. Well, I sincerely hope this year will be an exception because I’d say that March was tough enough. The Covid-19 pandemic got a little out of hand here in the Czech Republic, resulting in another hard lockdown, so I really wouldn’t like to see April compete in cruelty with its predecessor!
I had barely finished my January blog post when – THUD! – something rather heavy fell through the mail slot. I had been buying a lot of stuff online because of the Covid pandemic, so I had somewhat lost track of my orders: I knew it could be anything from frozen pizza to a framed picture of a disappointed horse. After unpacking, it turned out to be a book!
Outlining my programming activities in the previous blog post I also mentioned that I had been involved with the Amiga Developer project for quite some time. After the post went live a few people asked me whether it meant that I would work less on the project now that I develop my own software. The answer is no, not really.
I realize it’s high time I shed some light on my Amiga programming activities and on the software I’m developing at the moment. Pressed for time before Christmas I originally planned to write just a short heads-up note but because there’s a bit of a story behind it, I’ve decided to turn it into a regular blog post in the end.
Much of my creative activity in the 1990s was related to the Amiga demoscene. I was lucky to live in a city which, albeit small, concentrated enough local talent to have formed a full-fledged demo group called Vectors, which I joined in early 1993. Unlike many other demo groups, the members of which were often scattered across different cities or even countries, we could easily meet up in person to discuss things, work on our projects, or just have some serious fun with our Amigas.
Browsing through old diskmags always makes me notice how much Amiga-related writing I did in the 1990s. But of course: the Amiga was my computer of choice back then, I used it throughout the decade as my main productivity tool. I used the Digita Wordworth for all my written coursework, including the master’s thesis; I composed several dozen tunes for demoscene productions in Protracker; I took my first programming steps in GFA Basic and, later, Storm C… So there was a lot to write about, and writing about it was great fun.