AmigaDE Development
By John Harris

Hello Club Amiga members! I've been given an opportunity to introduce myself and what I've been working on. My name is John Harris, with a company that is struggling to come up with a name for itself. Funny how when the available choices are almost anything, I find decisions so much harder to make. In any case, I've been programming games for almost 25 years, and had the pleasure of working with all of Jay Miner's designs from the Atari 2600, through the Atari 8-bit computers and the classic Amiga. My best-known work was Atari Frogger, and I still come across people that say, "Hey, I used to play that!"

I enjoy working with unique technology, and the AmigaDE is what has brought me back into the Amiga circles. I've had a wonderful time over the past two years, despite still waiting for the success of the platform. The community is terrific, the technology cool, and the friendships being made will last a lifetime. After seeing this industry evolve into a world that can't help but be ridiculed in Dilbert comic strips, it is a wonderful opportunity to be back on my own with no concerns other than to try and make cool stuff.

I've written several titles for the AmigaDE so far, as well as utilities and starter code libraries to help others who wish to join our efforts to make this platform successful. Solitaire was my first commercial title, which is a collection of 10 different variations. It recently got revisited for a face-lift as well as being upgraded to run on cell phones with a keypad interface. This is still the game I am the most proud of, with a great deal of work having gone into the user interface design and its many features to make it a joy to play. Simply tap a card, and it moves to the most likely destination. If that wasn't where you wanted to put it, just tap it again to cycle through the remaining possibilities. If you prefer dragging cards, this works too, and doesn't require accurate positioning on the destination. Drag a card in the general direction of where you want it to go, and the program figures out the closest spot in that direction. Solitaire also supports multiple layer undo, optional auto-play cards to foundations, statistics tracking, saving your progress on all the games, and the easiest to read cards I've seen in a PDA solitaire game. Below are the first published screen shots of the new look.

Solitaire makes a great demo of the AmigaDE platform-independent technology, since you can play a game part way through, and then pull out the game card and insert it into another device with a different CPU, OS, and even screen resolution, and the game comes up right where it left off!

The second program was Gobbler, a variation on the classic '80s Snake game that Nokia has made so popular recently. With 10 different worlds featuring bridges, tunnels, and other obstacles, it expands on the classic game play with additional elements of strategy and planning ahead. It also adds cartoon-style animations to give the simple game a little more character. Gobbler was the second evolutionary stage for me in AmigaDE programming, with the ability to dynamically adapt to different screen resolutions (utilizing Amiga's Ami2D scaling library). As the screen shots show, this can involve some significant modifications to the screen layout to support odd shapes and sizes, in addition to just scaling the graphics up and down.

Most recently completed, is a version of the classic Word Search puzzles. Again the main focus was on user interface design, and this version is really nice to play on PDAs. A quick flick of the pen from the starting or ending letter in the general direction of the word is all that it takes to mark them. Cell phone marking with either the dpad or number keys is also streamlined as well as it can be. Word Search marked my entry into programming in VP, the Virtual Processor Assembly language that is at the heart of the AmigaDE technology. (Both Solitaire and Gobbler were written in C). Now that I've had a taste of VP, I won't be going back! I've heard it described as "a better C than C", and other labels that denote fondness. Being essentially an Assembly language programmer at heart, my own description of VP usually goes like, "Most of the advantages of Assembly with almost none of the weaknesses." I have found that I can express my thoughts easier and with less work-arounds than what I find when programming in C. And I don't have to worry so much about how the compiler is going to translate my code.

So, on to the product that those of you with limited interest in the AmigaDE have probably still heard about. I'm the author of the now sort of infamous Calculator program. This has been an interesting project, with the original goal being to see how much I can cram into a ridiculously short amount of time to meet a marketing deadline, and ultimately (once that deadline was relaxed) expanding into how far we can push the boundaries of visual presentation and usability for such a product. The calculator has a traditional front panel display, but with jewel-toned keys and other artistic touches. Operation here is pretty standard, except for an enhanced backspace key that functions more like "undo". In addition to correcting number entry, you can also back up to correct mistakes in operators. Also notable is that the top two rows of function keys are programmable and expandable. Change modes, and a different key panel slides into place with new functionality.

The real advancements happen on additional screens for equation entry and graphing thereof. Equations are composed and edited on this screen, which supports variables, constants, mathematical functions, programmable functions, and calling other stored equations. The equation editor features auto-balance parentheses, which really help out complex expression entry. For each open parenthesis, you'll see a ghosted close parenthesis on the right side. This functions both as a reminder for how many levels deep you are, as well as an entry aide since all ghosted parentheses are replaced with real ones when the equation is saved. Once your equation(s) are entered, you can graph up to six of them in color-coded lines in the graphing module.

The graphing module allows you to view your equations in many ways, including zooming, panning, square-aspect or scale-to-fit, x/y point display, custom axis settings, and more. The touch of a button can display representations for the integral or differential of the equation. And for one step further, it can also display animations to show how the graph varies with changing variables.

Contrary to traditional graphing calculators, which can often display nothing but a blank screen when the graph values go out of range, this program will always display "something". The scale-to-fit mode will always show you the big picture, and even in the normal aspect mode the program's algorithms initially position the display to show the most significant portion of the image. Pan around with the stylus or scroll buttons, and the display always adapts to show you the relevant details. It turned out really cool. :)

Although I briefly considered porting this design to OS4, it looks to be too much work right now to do so, and Amiga users will sadly have to wait until the integration of the AmigaDE and AmigaOS. At that point, the calculator and all the other AmigaDE programs will run on AmigaOS machines with no additional efforts, and so it just doesn't make sense to invest the programming time to make it happen earlier when it will eventually happen "for free". I know patience is one of those volatile words that some Amiga supporters seem to have a near-infinite supply of, while many others are near or past the breaking point. I can only hope that everyone just hangs in there a little longer, with that light at the end of the tunnel seemingly visible from where we are now.

I hope for some real excitement, announcements, surprises, OS4!, and much more to happen at AmiWest. I'll be attending, and bringing all my products to show those of you who haven't yet seen them, and I can answer any questions (at least the ones I'm allowed to talk about!) about programming for the AmigaDE. If there's interest, formal and/or informal programming sessions can also be arranged. Hope to see you there.