Would you please tell us about yourself and how you became interested in computers?I'm 28 years old and I live in Poland. I started my adventure with computers when I was around 8 years old. I saw a C64 at my cousin's house and played
Flimbo's Quest there. From that moment I knew I wanted a computer too, but it was too expensive back then for my family. A couple of years later I finally received my C64. I mainly used it for playing games, but when I ran out of fresh games I started some coding in BASIC and later some simple animations in assembler. When I was around 13, I switched to Amiga 500. Again I used it mostly for games but did some
Amos programming as well. The funny thing is that I almost never used 'Workbench' so I understood how powerful AmigaOS was only when I started working on AROS. In the middle of secondary school I switched to PCs and wasn't following the Amiga world anymore from that point (around 1996 I guess).
How did you become interested in AROS?I first found out about AROS in 2004 while browsing for some Amiga news. I downloaded the ISO and gave it a try (I still have this ISO). It was nice to see Amiga like windows gadgets and the global menu and it brought back some memories of my Amiga times, but AROS somehow did not capture me for long at that time. I also had my last year of studies on my head so I was fairly busy. I returned to AROS in January 2008, seen the progress that has been made in those 4 years and decided to contribute something to the project.
What are you currently working on for AROS?Mostly I'm maintaining the AROS status information keeping it up-to-date and facilitate AROS 1.0 Roadmap Reviews. Apart from that I do some AROS coding when I feel inclined too. Currently I'm working together with Kalamatee on bringing the
Mesa 3D library to AROS. I'm also interested in updating our now-old
SDL port. From time to time I return and do some minor changes to
Murks. Apart from this, I also plan to finish the Zune review by the time of next Roadmap Review (in December).
What projects have you worked on in the past for AROS?I started doing AROS coding with Murks. I added some features but mostly I used Murks to learn about AROS API - this was all new to me as during Amiga times I only programmed in Amos. So far I did a few ports, including
Eternal Lands client and
MPlayer, however I consider review of completeness AROS API as my biggest achievement so far.
Can you tell us more about what you have been doing with Mesa recently?I'm continuing work started by Kalamatee. My personal goal is to deliver a shared library compatible with GL API so that people could compile GL applications for AROS. This will be only in software rendering mode, but Mesa itself has already an infrastructure for hardware acceleration (
Gallium3D). I hope somebody can take up the task of making those drivers run under AROS. Once this is done, all existing applications will automatically switch from software mode to hardware mode.
Do you have any future plans on helping Heinz add some other features to Murks IDE?Murks IDE was a good way to be introduced into AROS API and I would certainly like to see it being developed further. I think it is important to have at least a basic development environment, especially for people not familiar with command line compiling. In the near future however, I don't see time to work on it further - but the code is open and available and if anyone wishes to continue my and Heinz' work, I would be happy to introduce them into the application. Lately I've seen a bit more new programming-oriented people posting on Aros-Exec - maybe one of them would like to develop Murks IDE further.
How do you feel about the Poseidon USB stack, since you were instrumental in pushing the donations to the $4000 mark?
Are you happy with it now that it is implemented?I'm very happy with the way Poseidon works on AROS. There were some problems but we had a large team of testers and finally got Poseidon running on an impressive number of hardware configurations. It will never be 100% but the current levels satisfy me. Poseidon itself is also a very mature product and I'm happy it is now part of AROS.
I consider it a platform that we can extend in the future to get better hardware support. I would also like to see Poseidon ported to AmigaOS 4.x so that there would be a common USB system between all Amiga-like systems. I see this as an encouraging factor for USB driver developers - now they will not only have access to Poseidon source codes, but by writing the driver once, they will be able to distribute or sell it to users of all Amiga-like platforms.
What can you tell us about your involvement in bringing the game Eternal Lands to AROS?With Eternal Lands I had two goals. The first obvious one was for AROS to be the first Amiga-like system to have a 3D MMORPG game available. The second goal was to see how hard it would be to port an application that had a lot of dependencies on libraries, most of them not yet ported for AROS. During doing the port of the game I had to compile those libraries for AROS. Also I had to revive the old Mesa port and make a new one as well as build true cross compilers for C++. Once all of those pieces were in place it turned out that the game was extremely slow due to software rendering and I had to improve the old codes. I managed to get some decent speed but at the expense of quality. I'm pleased with the Eternal Lands client, apart from the game for the users, it brought some improvements to AROS (which were later used by Stanislaw in OWB).
Since you are the one that is keeping track of the status of AROS implementation, how do you feel about the state of AROS at this time?The overall AmigaOS layer score is about 80% now and the Zune review is not yet done. The 80% however shows the status from programmer's perspective. From a user perspective I would say the score is closer to 90%. There are still obvious missing parts like cursor handling, printing, AppWindow, etc - but the system is already usable and thanks to
Icaros this usability is visible to everyone.
Status of AROS ImplementationAre you still working with Staf Verhaegen, Markus Weiss and others on AROS ABI v1?
For those who don't know, can you describe what AROS ABI v1 is?In short the ABI is a definition on how different code works with each other on a level lower than source code - for example ABI defines which CPU registers are used for what purpose on a said system. The AROS ABI v1 is developed only by Staf, while Markus works more on improving our C library and also on some PPC specific parts. I did not work on ABI v1 as a coder - I only facilitated the review of plans so that it is known what the scope of ABI v1 actually is. Since it's only Staf who is working on this topic the work goes slowly. If anyone however is interested in helping Staf, please do contact him.
Do you plan to do anything else with MPlayer for AROS?I would like to do the port once again from the latest MorphOS codes and this time do it cleanly. To be honest the first port was meant to be a quick win for AROS. It was around the time that Stanislaw started working on OWB and seeing that most of the work on MPlayer in already done by MorphOS developers, I wanted to deliver a fully featured and up-to-date multimedia player to AROS users and do two little steps at the same time in bringing 'modern features'.
Are there any AROS projects that you are planning to do in the future?I want to finish the Zune review by the time of the next roadmap review. Apart from that I would like to deliver an updated and working GL and SDL layers so that more and bigger games can be ported to AROS. Once these things are done, I think looking into Gallium3d could be interesting, but I'm not decided on this yet.
In your opinion, are there any features that could greatly improve AROS at this point?On the system side, I would like to see overlay/cgxvideo support added for at least one driver and also Wanderer bugfixed/improved. On the applications side, I would be happy to see work continued on OWB, especially in topic of rendering speed. Those improvements would be nice, but I no longer see a candidate for a 'great' improvement. The last candidate vanished with Poseidon being ported to AROS. I feel that the majority of work needed for AROS is now about bug fixing, improving performance and stability and adding smaller missing parts.
Is there any particular software that you would like to see available in AROS?First of all I would like to see Amiga-like software on AROS. I consider ports of GUI applications from Linux world as a last resort. Right now I would be happy to have Cinnamon Writer with support for Word/OpenOffice formats and Ignition with support for Excel/OpenOffice formats. Apart from that I would like to see Murks IDE continued to be developed. I'm also looking forward to the UAE integration bounty being finalized. The screen shots posted on
o1i's blog sure look interesting!
How do you use AROS right now, virtual environment or native? Can you describe your setup?This depends on the goal. For normal user activities (IRC, www) I use Icaros under VirtualBox. The speed is great and sound and network work. I also have a dedicated AROS box (IBM T42) but currently the network driver is not working so it is waiting for better times. For development activities I prefer using hosted AROS. It has the major advantage of catching segmentation faults and allowing debugging with gdb. It's really a faster and easier way to debug than 'printf-debugging'.
What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?In my job I mostly code in C#, while on AROS is mostly C. I consider a programming language simply a tool for implementing a solution. Having the solution to the problem is what counts. Then you just select the language that suits the needs of the solution. For example I would not use C to code a tool for text parsing - there are some scripting languages that are ideal for this task. On the other hand I would not use these languages to build any bigger system - I would use C#. In general terms I strongly prefer object oriented approach and I'm quite happy that parts of AROS API are object oriented.
I notice you have the knowledge to discuss projects with developers as well as help non-developers. What are your thoughts on the AROS community as a whole?I like the enthusiasm and openness of the community. I can see that people with more experience are always trying to help those new to AROS to overcome their problems. I'm also very happy with the trend that has been seen for some time now - people from the wider Amiga-like community trying AROS for the first time. I've also seen some application developers joining the community, which hopefully will mean more original applications or at least some new ports.
One disappointing thing I noticed a few times is that people new to AROS expect that since AROS is x86, it will run on their very own x86 and will support all their current hardware like network, video, sound cards. Once it does not, they tend to judge the whole system from this perspective which is not correct. Hopefully this does not happen too often.
Do you have any thoughts on Amiga OS4 or Morph OS?I have no user experience with either Amiga OS4 or Morph OS - so there is little for me to comment on. By looking at the screen shots / videos both systems are quite polished and useful. What I have thoughts on, is how some of the users of those systems react to the competing system. The Amiga OS 4 and Morph OS are more or less competitors and it would make sense from a commercial point of view for development teams or manufacturers behind the projects to distinguish one from another. What I observe however, is that it's not the development teams, but users who 'wage wars' - and this really makes me sad as the 'Amiga-like' community should at least accept one another - the community is not going to grow anytime soon, so any wars just make it weaker.
Is there anything at all you would like to add?Sometimes I see people saying that they 'wish they could help but they are not programmers'. AROS is not only about programmers - even if you don't know how to code, there are many places where you can help out. The first thing you can do is test the nightly builds for regressions - that's what the nightly builds are for actually. If you are not interested in testing, there are still alternatives left. We are in need of creation or updating user manuals. Translations of said manuals or localizations of applications are also much desired. If you prefer working with graphics, create decorations or desktop wallpapers. What AROS also needs is spreading the word, not only to the Amiga-like community but wider, so that we may attract new users.
There are many areas in which a non-programmer can help - just look at Paolo - if not for Icaros, AROS would still be seen as 'nice effort but not really useful at the moment'.
