Bigmac

BigMac Interview by Souri/CYDoNiA       
                                                                                
    HANDLE: Bigmac                                                              
     GROUP: Decay                                                               
       AGE: 25                                                                  
      ROLE: Code & general shifter of bull
                                                                                
 INTERVIEWER: Souri                                                             

WHEN DID YOU START CODING ON THE AMIGA AND WHY ?                                
                                                                                
I started in year 11 at high school which was in 1987
I had programmed a few routines on the C64 a few years earlier but nothing special
After I'd had my amiga 500 for a few months I tried plugging my c64 modem into the serial port, and it worked!
I called around a few boards and downloaded the DOC demo from Pursuit BBS
This demo got me hooked and I started coding becuase of that demo

WHAT ASSEMBLER DO/DID YOU USE MOSTLY AND WHY ?                                  

I started out with Seka, progressed to Asmone and then added devpac to my collection
I still used Asmone as a debugging tool until recently when I found it wouldn't mode promote to work with cybergfx and my EGS spectrum
       
So goodbye asmone I fiddled with Macro68 for a while and was quite impressed
It was a lot simpler for system programming and many times faster than devpac

DID YOU MAKE THE AMIGA , and WHY/WHY NOT ?                                      
                                                                                
I don't realy understand the question
Are you asking whether I have an ego so big that I think I carried the amiga along on my back all these years?
      
hahah, I wish
Nah, I might have had a small affect here in Australia, but I don't thnk I ever recieved aclaim overseas
Though it was nice to get the Hinch demo on national tv and see the simpons demo getting good reviews in some Brittish magazines
                                                        
[ Souri: Whoops =]

Something must've went wrong when I sent the interview sheet, the question was supposed to read : "DID YOU MAKE THE AMIGA->PC        
SWITCH , and WHY/WHY NOT ?"

all apologies =] ]

WHAT DEMO/PROGRAM ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF ?                                       
                                                                                
The Hinch demo was my first decent demo but I'd have to include the Simpsons demo as equal favourite too
Both were good becuase they were topical for the time
                                                           
WHAT GROUPS WERE YOU IN ?                                                       
                                                                                
My first group consisted of me (Bigmac) and a school friend (Blitta)
The group was called interactive and we released 1 demo
It was basic but included a right to left scroller, copper bars bouncing to gravity on top of the scroller, a few words filling the top of the screen being waved about left and right
                                                                                
Anyway, we went nowhere fast and my friend really didn't write any music, so I got him to digitise a whole lot of frames from the Hinch current affairs show while I joined another group called Freedom Force
I basically did bugger all in Freedom Force and still didnt't do much when we joined forces with another group and became Freedom Force & Amiga Industries
But I did release at least one demo, this being my second demo
The second demo was called Megaball and it consisted of yet another scroller except this time   
I had a screen sized ball being moved around by using the playfield scrolling registers etc
                                                                                
My next and favourite group was called Decay and it was also my last group
     
We were quite active and were having a great time
We released about 10 intros, and the demos included                                                  
                                                                                
Hinch                                                                           
Vizard                                                                          
Tweety                                                                          
Simpsons                                                                        
RoadRunner                                                                      

Frog Demo                                                                       
Sweet Revenge (not released, maybe soon
It's a sequel to RoadRunner)           
                                                                                
I developed and released a program called DKAnimator which made it really simple change animations into a format ready for demo use
I also wrote a sound routine which plays sound in the background from fast ram which made the developement of the Frog demo and Sweet Revenge since they are multi-megabyte demos

WRITE ABOUT THE SCENE AND WHAT IT WAS LIKE BACK THEN 
                                                                                
It was very friendly, swapping was mostly done by mail and only the 'Elite' traded using modems, and then only HST's
I made quite a few contacts thru the Hinch demo both here and overseas, my best being Tal/Majic 12 here in Oz
I could only take about a year of mail swapping as it took up too much of my time so that slowly died away
Lots of disk mags started and died, ours (Blipverts by Decay) among them
I had just finished coding a system friendly text/gfx editor for it when we canned it :(
                                                                                
I had a great time, and when the WOC (World of Commodore) came things got even better
I actually met most of the members of Decay and we drooled over the software and hardware on show
I definately won't be forgetting my days in Decay

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE CODERS AND DEMOS IN AUSTRALIA TODAY ?                  
                                                                                
I can't really say
I have a gfx board and a monitor which won't display less than 31Khz, so demos are a no show here
It's a shame, but I did start getting sick of all the coders who would either make trackdemo's which couldn't be installed in the harddisk, or standalone demos which couldn't exit back to workbench etc
After this I'd not look at a demo unless someone recommended it or it was an lha file which could be easily unpacked and tried

WHAT DO YOU MAINLY DO NOW ?                                                     
                                                                                
I'm a Civil Engineer ( BE Hons MIEA Grad to be exact) specialising in underpinnings, ground anchors, shoring, and propping etc
I've written a nice program (with GUI) to handle the results of ground anchor stressing and it produces nice graphs for me
So never let it be said that Amigas aren't good at work
I also use Final Writer and CED for writing letters/quotes etc
                                                                                
But I also run a bbs called Enconn
Enconn original stood for The Engineering Connection
But it seems I started it too early, maybe if I'd started it 2 years later when the Internet became all the rage then more Engineers would have had modems :)
Anyway, now I'm just a standard amiga/ibm bbs but help my users with programing problems when they ask
                                                                                
But I do program a lot for Xenolink BBS
Currently I am writing a CD door to replace one which is a little buggy and unsupported now (Access)
Also, I'm in the middle of a game which allows multiple users to play against each other in a hack&slash/Pit type game
But this one has a difference in that everything is real time
Everyone can shoot/move/die at once, there are no such things as turns etc
It's basically an arcade version of the        
Pit I'd say designed to run on Ansi screens
Utils that I'm neglecting at the moment or Xenolink are a half finished message editor, a bulletin door, a general CDRom door which treats the CD like you were accessing it from the shell
Also  a door for the Fish & More disk which I was suckered into buying which lets a user choose the disk number and it then crunches the disk with the archiver that the user chooses and then uploads it to them
       
Just looking at my src: partition I see that I have yet to finish and release the coyote demo
I think I should convert this to cybergfx before I release it
But apart from that there isn't much except for 6 of the 80% finished demos sitting on my harddrive
I'm sure I'm not the only coder who is this lazy
Among them are 10 small demos for the Decalogy demo we were going to release, the Lemmings demo and a Comic program which basically displayed curnched comic pages while playing music in the background

AS A CODER , WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ESCOM'S PLAN FOR A RISC POWER-AMIGA ?         
                                                                                
Well, I've invested 9 years in programming the amiga (now that is scary) and I don't want to see it thrown away by Escom going for a risc chip that doesn't fully emulate the 68040 or 060
But, things might not be as bad as I think
With RISC, ASM may get tagged as a high level language and then be compiled into Risc code
Then I can still programming without learning again
Hopefully the risc instructions are 90% the same as the common 68040 ones anyway and so there won't be much of a learning curve involved
Does anyone have a listing of a Power PC chip?
                                      
                                                                                
What I'd like to see is a modular approach to cpu design by Escom
Choose a ship to be the CPU, but then allow the architechure to handle addition chips easily and cheaply
Becuase many of us coders have experience with programming a mulitple processor system already (ie using the blitter/copper/audio) we could easily adapt to multiple cpu usage and bring true multitasking to the Amiga & speed things up somewhat

OK, DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADD BEFORE WE END ?                  
                                                                                
Ok, call my BBS to say hi or just send insults to                               
                                                                                
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                    Catering for ALL Amiga Programmers                          
                                                                                
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Netmail me at                                                                   

Greg MacDonald                                                                  
41:200/584
Fidonet                                                          
3:712/613
Amiganet                                                         

Or email me at                                                                  
                                                                                
[email protected]                                                               

Send Money too                                                                  

Greg MacDonald                                                                  
23 Koonya Circuit                                                               
Taren Pt NSW 2229                                                               
Australia                                                                       

THANKS FOR YOUR TIME BIGMAC !                                                   

Thank you Souri, is 88Kb enough?
I'll keep the article myself for a diary for my kids to have a laugh in 20 years time :)