Cool stuff to stumble upon, new and old.
What’s Cool? · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX

• Second Nature
  Gigabates and h0ffman write about the concept, the code, the music, the tech, and the tricks behind “Second Nature” (YouTube) by Desire and TTE. A real treat – both the demo and this write-up!
• 3D Demo 3 - Technical Deep Dive
  Another huge write-up for a huge Amiga production, 3D Demo 3 by Lemon.! I love the mood boards, the technical sketches, and the sheer amount of stuff.
• The magic of typing terminal commands
  An ode to the terminal. Beatiful. Recently, I have come to enjoy that terminal-anticipation a lot on my Amiga 500 as well, whenever I need to lha x (unpack) a file, or httpresume (download) something, and see that trusty old computer do its thing. There’s even terminal-pre-anticipation: Pressung Right-Amiga and E and typing in newcli to launch a new shell window in the first place…
  
  
• Playing ATARI music on Amiga for free!
  A new level of No-CPU madness, a genius way to make use of an obscure feature of the audio hardware, or an oldschool “one better than you” response to the dots part of “3D Demo 3” – which one is it, Leonard? It’s all of that, of course, and a lovingly detailled post about it on top.
• A memory heatmap to analyse BBCMicro code
  More inspiration for new Coppenheimer features (link goes to the old version) snatched off Bluesky. I always liked WinUAE’s heatmap-like visual memory map which looks a lot like this. So far, I’ve only got the buttons for it, and a proof-of-concept blitter visualization. And a 13×10 pixel icon, which is of course the most important bit!
  
  

A nice slogan for a t-shirt! Bit long, maybe…

Not so long is the list of new pointers I’ve added to the Amiga Pointer Archive. It’s just these four guys:

One of them is a blog reader submission, taken from a 1992 utility disk (thanks, LocalH!), and another one was a sketch by myself to test the social media sharing feature of the minisite. The other two appeared after the big update – I did a fresh scan of pouët links and went foraging at some FTP sites. And fixed some bugs while I was at it!

In the end, about a thousand new disk images showed up, but after filtering, nearly all the pointers on them were already in the database. That’s disappointing (in numbers), but also cool: I wasn’t missing a ton of pointers as I feared. I did try my best, though:

• RAR files weren’t processed at all (many pouët prod links have them)
• Neither were LHA archives
• Buried in the code was a val limit = 100000 from debugging, and the number of ADF files was of course just above that
• Upper-case file extensions like were ignored

Most of all I’m glad I resisted the temptation of passing arbitrary condiments, i. e. clean up the code and do a “proper” rewrite, with a nice interface and configurable pipelines. It was tempting because the pointer-file collecting process had become a convoluted mix of self-written programs, external tools, and manual steps.

Painful, but with a rewrite and a cool new über-tool I would still be in the stage of building an ivory tower of code without anything to show for it.

One thing I might add in the future is a method to submit hand-drawn pointers directly to the archive – people are drawing not nearly enough Amiga mouse cursors nowadays! :)

Go visit the archive, see if you can spot the four new additions, and have fun exploring! Maybe even start pixelling a new pointer and save a handy URL for later, using the “export” button…

Months ago, I spotted a cool camera at the local Ramsch-, erm, “antique store”. Last week, I finally gave in and bought it – a nice little Game Boy Camera!

I’m still impressed with the picture quality coming out of the 128×128 pixel sensor.

Photo of me taking a photo of me taking…

Naturally, two new questions emerged:

• What is the best way to transfer the photos off the device in 2026, and why is it so complicated?
• What is the legislation on posting old photos you find on a camera you bought if the resolution is only 0.014 megapixels?

The last question might be a non-issue. Everything around the Game Boy Camera is about fun and playfulness. It’s packed with mini-games and whimsical features – which the previous owners wisely used to protect their anonymity… :)

Have you seen this… entity?