Amiga 1200 picture taken by Dan Counsell under the unsplash license.. Introduction and questions by Ghandy.
Before we’re having our chat with Henrik aka Photon, here are some pieces out of the history of this software. Its predecessor, the ASM-One, was created in 1990. It was developed by Rune-Gram Madsen. Madsen is said to have taken only about four weeks (700 working hours) to finish the first prototype. The ASM-One combined a lot of parts. A source code editor, the 68000 assembler, a disassembler, a debugger, a monitor and a hex/ASCII/binary display. Initially, the software was sold commercially by the DMV-Verlag for 130 DM, which is equivalent to around 65 euros nowadays.
The concept was ideal for demo and game programmers, which is why it has been an essential tool ever since its release. The software has been freeware since early 2003, following the release of version 1.48. Photon from Scoopex released the first version of AsmTwo in July this year. We recently had an in-depth conversation with him about it.
Photon is a real enthusiast when it comes to the Amiga
Ghandy: Could you please introduce yourself to our readers with name, age, job, married + childen, hobbies ect.? Thanks!
Photon/Scoopex: Hey Ghandy! I’m Henrik, 50+, a Systems Developer who likes writing, drawing, composing, and programming in many languages and Assembly on various CPUs. I also like “mossy” subjects like programming language history, software architectures, paradigms, patterns, and papers. Recently, I’ve restored my arcade collection and have 5 cabinets and about 30 PCBs so far. But the biggest interest is (still) all things Amiga.
Ghandy: How came the idea to continue the development of the most wellknown Amiga assembler?
Photon/Scoopex: I was in contact with Rune aka Promax after I bought AsmOne 1.01, and he was very courteous. I pointed out a small improvement I needed and he told me how to change it. These didn’t become newly printed disk versions, only I had my “1.02+” from 1990 until I preserved it in 2005.
Then I used later AsmOne versions and also AsmPro, but some would crash on startup or in the debugger depending on the accelerator/memory expansion/motherboard revision, and in some AmigaOS versions it couldn’t clear the screen in the IDE.
So it started as something that fixed those things for all Amigas and for a laugh I named it AsmTwo. 😀 I chose to start from 1.02; it was small so that all you would need is a 1MB Amiga and a floppy.
“It’s fun to be able to add and fix things like that for a tool you use every day”
Ghandy: Btw. Rune (Promax) is nowadays working for Apple. He’s a software engineering manager at Apple TV. Photon, sorry if I ask, but isn’t it boring to develop an Assembler?
Photon/Scoopex: Well… I think it’s much more fun to explore the hardware with code than writing utilities, where (mostly) the feature to add is known beforehand, and it’s just implementation and testing – not creative. But it’s fun to be able to add and fix things like that for a tool you use every day.
With these big sources though, for every thing you have to search for exactly the right change and place to change it – even a small change must be done with care so it doesn’t break something you use less often – because you are supposed to improve someone else’s idea, not just go mad and just change everything. At least with me, this care is high priority.
Ghandy: What motivates you to work on it?
Photon/Scoopex: Mostly finding a bug or improvement I want to try out. It was nice to add the recent “literal macro parameter” feature, it unlocked many things from just changing 5 lines of code!
Ghandy: How long is it ago since the official development did stop? I have found an update in the year 2000, was that the last one until now?
Photon/Scoopex: I think this depends on your definition of Offical. I think there are very large parts from Seka in AsmOne 1.01. TFA ignored all the variants from many groups and started over from 1.02 and added 68020+ support etc. The latest is 1.49RC2 from 2008. TFA has a homepage which tells the history.
Photon about AsmTwo: “I wanted to have something small and stable”
Ghandy: Did you try to contact anybody of the coders of the previous version? Was that possible? If yes, how did they react?
Photon/Scoopex: No, I started my project quite a bit after TFA finished the work, and it’s not based on their versions, so… AsmTwo really is just a focused tool I wanted to make for me, to have something small and stable. It takes a parallel path in the AsmOne/Pro tree, starting close to the root of the tree.
Ghandy: Did you disassemble the old version in order to realize your updates?
Photon/Scoopex: No, I just searched for sources. It was difficult, since I didn’t want to fix AsmPro – but I found 1.02 which was perfect for me! Perhaps I felt daunted by the task at the time and wanted the older and simpler version. But I had that program version back in the day and knew it well.
In recent years, AsmPro is being actively worked on by a/b, and we exchange messages if we find something to fix in common between these oldest and newest version of the Assembler. So a shoutout to him!
Ghandy: I saw you have fixed a lot of previous known bugs. What else to you plan for the future?
Photon/Scoopex: The upcoming and last planned 2 features are: “AnalyzeLine” which gives the cycles and bytes consumed by a selected block of code (on 68000), and “PC Mode” which remaps all key binds to more modern counterparts, shift or mouse drag to select text, etc. Both are in “almost finished” state right now, and I will find time to release something to iterate on together with others in Amiga Scene. Then it would be nice to see in which direction others take AsmTwo!
Ghandy: Do you hope that this development will have an effect on the Amiga demo scene?
Photon/Scoopex: I hope that it makes it not feel impossible to get an IDE running on people’s real Amigas and provides a little bit of competition with other Assemblers and IDEs, for those who like to code on Amiga for Amiga like me.
Scoopex has a lot productions in progress
Ghandy: What else can we expect from Scoopex in the future? Are you working on some productions? If yes, can you tell us more? 😉
Photon/Scoopex: Yes, we have a couple Amiga demos in progress for release at upcoming demoparties, and regularly our crackers collaborate with game coders on getting unreleased games out for the Amiga.
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