Hello from NZ

[Castellen]

Always nice to see more NZ people on the forums, I'm based in Christchurch.

The last Amiga group in NZ I was aware of, Amiga Auckland, hasn't been around since 2022, after one of the main committee members passed away.  Someone in Auckland still looks after the club software/document library, I can find contact details if interested.

Apparently there's a NZ Fascistbook group, I get contacted by them for repair jobs.  Not sure who's on there or the topics of discussion, I don't do social media.  Not aware of any physical meetups nationally either.

I tend to focus on national/international hardware repair jobs and support, contract/commercial Amiga hardware development work, and a bit of 68k software development.  I'm not particularly interested in games, the Amiga is mainly a work machine.   My website, which never gets enough attention from me, has been continuously running on an A4000T for nearly 25 years: http://amiga.serveftp.net/sysinfo.xgi

Not sure about trying to do software development on an unaccelerated A500.  While it's possible, the lack of a decent source code editor would be painful.  I use CubicIDE myself, mainly for C and ARexx, though you'd need an expanded system to run that.

[Castellen]

My friend Edwin told me about you over the weekend and sent me a link to your site. He mentioned a scan doubler in your past. 

It's great to see the site being hosted on an A4000.

Do you write software for yourself or for others too?

I don't specifically recall a scan doubler job, maybe I sold something to him?  Hard to remember everything over so many different jobs spanning decades.

Some of the Amiga software I've developed is used commercially as the interface to hardware I've designed, though I'm definitely not a software specialist; I have a software genius as a business partner who does most of that work.  The majority of my software work is for my own needs.  For example, I developed in-circuit debugger hardware/software that shows what the system ROM software is doing as an Amiga attempts to boot, which is invaluable for the complex fault finding work I often do.

More recently I did an embedded systems design (not Amiga related) that uses a new family of Microchip microcontrollers that are very low cost and feature rich.  The problem with these new devices is that most EPROM/MCU programmers don't support them, and commercial programming solutions are expensive.  I developed my own hardware and software for production programming that runs on an Amiga, which is a lot cheaper, faster and easier than the available in-circuit programming solutions.

No idea how to embed inline images here, but see attached.  I might write some user documentation and upload the entire project to Aminet one day as an open source thing, if I can find the time and motivation.

Thanks. I'd like to get in touch with groups currently running, or perhaps with people open to starting a group. Seems like low odds, but I live in hope.

Send me your Email address and I'll put you in touch with who might be still around from Auckland Amiga.

I can imagine needing a more advanced editor/IDE for C, but for assembly, I like DevPac and AsmTwo.. I'll look into Cubic if my needs get more advanced. I sort of have Visual Studio Code on my Mac, but with Microsoft adding copilot into everything including Paint and Notepad, I'm losing confidence that documents I write or load into modern software won't be injected into an LLM. :/

At least having a source editor with syntax highlighting makes everything a lot easier, many IDEs are annoying to use anyway.  There's some reasonable editor options on Aminet; I used TuiTED back in the day since I found the editor that came with SAS/C to be horrible.  And Annotate might suit your needs, though you'll need more than a stock A500 to run it.