Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

AmigaGuide Reference Library

Updated:

As I slowly but surely work towards the next release of my setcmd project for the Amiga (see the 68k branch for the gory details and my total noob-like C flailing around), I’ve made heavy use of documentation in the AmigaGuide format. Despite it’s age, it’s a great Amiga-native format and there’s a wealth of great information out there for things like the C API, as well as language guides and tutorials for tools like the Installer utility - and the AmigaGuide markup syntax itself.

The only snag is, I had to have access to an Amiga (real or emulated), or install one of the various viewer programs on my laptops. Because like many, I spend a lot of time in a web browser and occasionally want to check something on my mobile phone, this is less than convenient.

Fortunately, there’s a great AmigaGuideJS online viewer which renders AmigaGuide format documents using Javascript. I’ve started building up a collection of useful developer guides and other files in my own reference library so that I can access this documentation whenever I’m not at my Amiga or am coding in my “modern” dev environment.

It’s really just for my own personal use, but I’ll be adding to it whenever I come across a useful piece of documentation so I hope it’s of some use to others as well!

And on a related note, I now have a “unified” code-base so that SetCmd now builds and runs on 68k-based OS 3.x systems as well as OS 4.x PPC systems like my X5000. I need to:

  • Tidy up my code and fix all the “TODO” stuff
  • Update the Installer to run on OS 3.x systems
  • Update the documentation
  • Build a new package and upload to Aminet/OS4Depot

Hopefully I’ll get that done in the next month or so. With the pressures of work and family life (and my other hobbies), progress has been a lot slower these last few years but I’m still really enjoying working on Amiga code and it’s great to have a fun personal project that’s there for me whenever I want to hack away at something for the sheer hell of it. I’ve learned a lot along the way and the AmigaOS is still an absolute joy to develop for.

I even brought my X5000 to the most recent Kickstart Amiga User Group BBQ/meetup and had a fun day working on the code with fellow Amigans and enjoying some classic gaming & demos - there was also a MorphOS machine there, which I think will be my next target as the codebase is slowly becoming more portable. Just got to find some room in the “retro cave” now… This stuff is addictive :)

You May Also Enjoy

Disqus - An Apology

Earlier today, I got an email alerting me to an angrier than usual comment on this website. It was a proper keyboard warrior rant accusing me of all sorts of misdeads revolving around “forcing ads down people’s throats”. I replied saying that there had never been any ads on this site, never will be and I detest the enshitification trend of the modern Internet too. I also have found much of today’s web unbearable without tools such as Pi-Hole and a VPN; I use Firefox with...

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023

If you ever get a chance to look through the classic Amiga OS source-code still floating around some murky corners of the internet, it is a thing of beauty and astonishing capabilities. It’s an inspirational piece of computing history with unmatched capabilities for the time. Remember, this was all on a computer released in the 1980s with 512Kb memory, a 7Mhz 68000 16-bit CPU, and a single floppy drive with 880Kb storage. On these limited specs, AmigaOS provided a pre-empt...

Haiku Package Management

I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool.

A Splinter In Your Mind

Earlier this year, I finally discovered as an adult that I am “on the spectrum” with what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome. The diagnosis helped make sense of a lot things and has given me a greater insight into my “way of being in the world”. Whilst there are times I struggle with things that neuro-typical people usually find easy, or I find some situations draining, the condition has also brought me many positives which often get overlooked when talking about Autis...