About AmigaVikke

Hi,

I'm AmigaVikke, or just Vikke. At one point in time my tagname was Viking (or The Viking), that was when I started to code on the Amiga and had to have a name. I also started a group, but nothing really came out of that, as I was the only coder, so not so much about that here.

My first computer was the Commodore-64, and in the beginning I used to play on it with my friends. Every now and then I typed in Basic programs into the C64 from various magazines, and as the listings usually were quite long, you can imagine the amount of typing errors that sneaked in.
With those errors the Basic-code didn't come trough the tokenchecker, and then you had to try to get all the errors sorted out. It wasn't always that easy. So, to make it easier to find those errors I learnt Basic myself. After doing some simple programs in Basic, and finding Basic to be too slow to do anything really nice, I started to read up on Assembly on the MOS6502/MOS6510-processor.

I got quite good at C64 coding, but at that time new computers were coming along on the market. In some C64 magazines there were news regarding Commodores new Amiga 1000 computer!!! The A1000 became a dream to me, but the pricetag was too high for a teenager. But then the A500 and A2000 were released, and I just had to have the A500!

I was one of the first in Finland to get an A500, it didn't come here trough the CBM appointed importer, but through another smaller company that could deliver the computer much faster. The only problem, after having waited a long time for the computer to arrive, was that the keyboard had a German-layout. The only real difference to a Nordic-layout is that the Y- and Z-keys have swapped positions.

After getting the A500 I stopped coding on the C64, and took the same route to get into programming on the Amiga. First Basic, and after a short while assembler. The reason to this was, that it wasn't easy to find books on Amiga coding. But, then I found the Hardware Reference Manual in a computerstore in the city next to the small one I live in. I also had some kind of book regarding MC68000 assembly. From that point onward I made 2 demos that were released. But nothing more about those here. In addition to the demos I tested a lot of different things, but nothing that got released. I had wild plans for a third demo, and maybe it will yet get made. I also tried to make games, and I actually made two game-engines, but not having the right graphics for animations and also no sounds I didn't finish them.

Sadly I didn't have time to code the Amigas anymore at that time, as I went to study programming science at the Polytechnical University. I also had to attend to the Finnish army. Also a lot of other things took my time, and thus no coding was done on the Amiga.

But, the truth be told, the only computer I really loved to code on was the Amiga - the hardware was something REALLY special, and the only programminglanguage I really like is assembler. I have used a lot of different languages, but most of them are just stupid!

So, here I am, back to code on the Amiga.

AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Published on  March 11th, 2013