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My Google+ tagline is; I do public speaking and low level coding equally well. Really. While the media & appearances page links lots of proof of the former, there’s been a lack of the latter published here.

As with most others of the early home computer generation I simply cannot stay away from producing code and gadgets whenever I have a spare moment. I’ve thus recently decided to start listing some – it’s so far very incomplete.

{Closure} – the culmination of my retro computing revival that began a few years ago. A cooperation between three of the members of our old Atari ST crew, myself, BlueSTar and 7an. A demo of the old-school kind, that took part in the demo competition at STNICCC 2015. The demo used some new hardware trickery effects and did not run in any existing emulator when it was released.

Courier – A Minecraft Bukkit plugin first released 2011-12-23 and currently in bugfix maintenance mode. The project is run completely open source on GitHub with bug tracking on the Curse Bukkit site. At its peak the plugin was installed by tens of thousands of Minecraft server admins with an estimated user base of somewhere around a hundred thousand players.

Atari ST new video modes – a hardware plus software hack extending the video modes of 30 year old tech in what I believe to be a first.

Atari ST wakestate nudger – a circuit to change wakestate of an Atari ST predictably at reset instead of through cold boot.

LoSTE – a demo menu screen for the Atari ST brand of computers. The platform I grew up with, and the first such 68000 assembler coded showcase I’ve done in over 20 years. This is “bare metal coding” and very very tricky. If you don’t happen to have an Atari ST laying around a video is available from DHS.

Dallas RTC – a very optimised piece of software, less than 480 bytes in size to make it fit into a boot sector, that synchronises an Atari ST operating system clock to a modern RTC as well as adds a resident Y2K fix.

Atari ST picoPSU replacement – one way of taking care of 25 year old computers is to replace the original PSU with something a bit more modern.

[to be continued]