Amiga Source Preservation

We have lately been focusing on finding and asking permissions for Amiga-related books, to be released under various Creative Commons licenses. For those who don’t know, Creative Commons is a standard license for releasing items that is not source code, for free usage, as long as any changes also are shared, and the original work is attributed. There are a few different variants, from a Public Domain variant to others. [Read More]

It was with great preservation joy I received 16 old disks in the mail the other day, Containing some rare stuff regarding Modula-2, more precisely the Benchmark Modula-2 compiler environment, with updates and extras. As preservation if very much a detective work, it is always very rewarding when something interesting and concrete is found and preserved. So this little adventure all started when I got permission from Michal Todorovic and Kailash Ambwani to relase the former Gold Disk applications File and Pro Calc as Public Domain (CC0). [Read More]

Another day, another book permission given. Conrad Bessant wrote “Computers and Chaos” back in 93 for the Amiga and Atari ST, and has given us the permission to release it under Creative Commons. The book is about writing fractals and fractal landscapes on the amiga and atari. We are so very glad for that, and look forward to giving it the PDF and Asciidoc treatment. However, our work queue is already filled for a while, as we plan to finish two of Overaas books, with some more source code releases in between, but hopefully it will be available after the summer. [Read More]

There were many books released for the Amiga during its peak. If one searches around, most of them can be found on the internet, in various scanned formats. Even if most of their original authors or copyright owners would give their permission to release them under something like Creative Commons or even Public Domain if just asked, they most likely, have not been asked. And we like legally correct things and to have the authors permission for projects released on this site. [Read More]

I had a few manual files in an unknown format, and without any extensions that I wanted to read and convert. I was given some hints to as what they were by looking at them in a hexeditor - PM 4.2 it said. Hmmm - a discussion with a fellow retro interested contact gave that he thought they were in PageMaker format. But he had been unsuccessful in opening them. As I never, ever, had used an Apple OS from before maybe 2006, (and still don’t do if I can avoid it), I had some read up to do. [Read More]

The released mentioned in the longer last post, the code for a batch of classics like Quarterback and DesignWorks, have now been released under GPL. Find them in our Git-repos, and soon on aminet. Enjoy!

The other day a package arrived at my home. It was quite heavy, and inside it was a box of old floppy disks that had been lying in storage for many years. Half of the disks were marked with source, and they were supposed to contain the collected backups of Central Coast Software, New Horizons and finally Wci. By the current copyright owner I had been given the permission to release the code as open source - if I could manage to read the disks and find the source code. [Read More]