Festival of Engineering
23 October, 2017 in Computers, Games
I was honored to speak at the Festival of Engineering of Lodi about the fine art (and science) of videogame programming.
It was very interesting, especially for my colleagues engineers… many people don’t know what’s behind the development of a videogame, the advanced mathematics required to build a 3d engine or the complex physics behind a modern simulation of a racecar or an aircraft. An engineer is, nowadays, an essential part of a videogame development team!
Recovering Amiga HDs
22 February, 2017 in Computers
Some time ago I had the idea to recover my old Amiga’s hard disks. I still own ALL my old Amigas, and both the A4000 and the “towerized” A1200 are still here, along with their HDs full of my hard work of the “ol’good days”. But how could it be possible to import all files on my Linux HD?
Both the A4000 and the A1200 are AGA machines and are equipped with IDE drives, so it would be possible to make them at least available to modern systems using those IDE-to-USB adapter. Unfortunately, the ones I tried were unable to correctly recognize the drives, as they are very old (circa 1992) and (probably) not compatible with the controller. The only solution would be to find a motherboard “old enough” to be compatible with them and mount them there.
Luckily, I have a Pegasos II system lying around (such a mobo was donated to me by Genesi so that I could port my F1 game “VGP2” to MorphOS); the PegII would be the ideal solution, as it is “old enough” to read those old HDs, “new enough” to support modern media (USB sticks), and – most important of all – MorphOS should immediately be able to read the Amiga file system.
Problem was: PegII didn’t turn on! Again, luckily, the problem was simply the power supply; by just replacing it with a brand new one, the old mobo turned on, kicking and alive, fully recognizing the old Amiga HDs! Throw in a USB stick, copy everything over there, WAIT a lot (PegII is just USB 1.0!), and…
…well, now I can boot my virtualized A4000 (with FS-UAE) again on my Linux workstation!