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 provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Back to the floppy: A musing on the passing of a once-common physical storage medium

Review of the Apollo Vampire 1200 v2 accelerator add-on card for the classic Amiga 1200 computer

Recent Posts

Monitor upgrade for the A1200

When the Amiga was introduced in the mid 80s, pretty much all displays available to consumers were 4:3 ratio TVs, and you plugged your computer into your TV via a RF modulator box. Later, dedicated monitors like the Phillips 8833 Mk2 (which I originally had as a teenager in the 90s) became available and these offered a much improved, sharper image but were still in the 4:3 ratio as this is what the native Amiga, PC and gaming console screenmodes had been designed around.

My OS4 Development Environment

It’s been a busy few months here, but I’ve still found time to enjoy my Amiga systems. I’ve been grabbing the odd hour here and there to continue my efforts setting up an Amiga development environment and “dip my toe in the water” again. My setcmd utility is progressing nicely and I’ve learned a lot about the tools like AmigaGuide and the Installer that I used on my A1200 back in the day. I thought since it’s been a while, I’d write a quick “brain dump” post and cover two ...

SetCmd Amiga Development part 2

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been developing a new “SetCmd” tool for my Amiga systems, both for my own practical usage and also to serve as a re-introduction to the Amiga developer environment. This series of blog posts will cover the progress of this tool, as well as explore the challenges and technologies from my perspective of a returning AmigaOS fan.

Amiga project in progress - setcmd

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my X5000 over the past few weeks (more blog posts to come!) but I’ve been working on something recently that I wanted to share. I’ve been enjoying re-learning AmigaDOS and as an exercise for myself, set about building a tool I plan on releasing in the near future. Inspired by some Linux distributions’ “alternatives” system, It’s called setcmd (short for “Set Command”) and lets you easily and quickly switch between different versions of a ...