Some of our (mainly Nick's) Amiga A500 programs from donkeys years ago

Most of these programs were rattled off in a few days (each) in about 1993. We only got an Amiga in late 1992 (when we were 16) and never got stuff like the Midi equipment, so we were a bit late for the A500 demo scene.
Nick ( nojameson.net, matemonster.net, www.youtube.com/nojameson ) had cut his teeth on the 6502 at the age of about 10, with his batter and ball game ending up in Electron User.
I learnt virtually all I know to this day about the 68000 in about 3 days by writing Mandelbrot calculators (same story with the 6809).
Tim soon spent most of his time on the Amiga doing experiments relating to numerical analysis and analytic number theory (projects which mainly still haven't been seen through to their full conclusion - well I get FAR LESS than zero support!) and getting bogged down re-writing the (pathetically slow and inaccurate) floating point library that came with the Amiga (my exponential function is TWENTY times faster for example -and who's the idiot who messed it up on the BEEB?! it does it for the restricted range using a the proper continued fraction, but if you ask it for e to the power of N it will do it with N-1 multiplications!!!)
At least we got paid a token amount for our animated Mandelbrot zoom (see more recent videos - it was used at an University open day) and some of my Amiga BASIC programs which did zeta function calculations later got cross-DOSSED, translated to C and ended up being used for a book.
Come the summer of '97 I (Tim) finally got round to learning the COPPER and BLITTER stuff Nick knew all about and wrote a load of stuff like (the beginnings of) a BEEB emulator and a mini-C compiler - but then I got distracted by (amongst other things) a rather ridiculous Maths PhD attempt!
What have we been doing since? Wouldn't you like to know. There's usually some dickhead in your face trying to put you down. The world won't know what hit it if we really get our stuff together!

Category:

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• A500
• demo
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• sprite enlargement
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• tpjameson
• sieve of Eratosthenes
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• ortega24024
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• MonAm

[vjouppi]

1992 late? That was when the Amiga OCS scene was just about peaking 1994 would have been late.

Midi equipment? What do you need those for, musicians make the music, graphicians draw the pictures, you guys do the awesome code. :-)

It's a pity you guys didn't seek out any demo groups, I'm sure you'd have had many wins at demo compos and you'd have placed well in the coder charts.

It's not too late, just find some gfx and music men and start making productions. The demoscene never went away..

[valliko]

don't mention it! i wouldn't watch if i didn't like them :)

[ortega24024]

Has anyone seen Gourdon recently btw? He seems to have done a vanishing act:

I tried sending him my shortened version of his multiprecision e-calculator a while ago:

main(){int N=9009,n,a[9009]={-1,1},x;

for(;N>9;printf("%d",x))for(n=­N--;--n;a[n]=x%n-1,x=10+10*a[n­-1]+x/n);}

for his website, but he'd disappeared off the face of the planet.

[ortega24024]

A few years after programming that I read Lagarias, Miller and Odlyzko's papers on the Meissel-Lehmer algorithm for calculating the number, pi(x), of primes up to x (it is related to Eratoshene's sieve).

Using this, people like Xavier Gourdon calculated values like pi(10^22).

A modified version calculates something called M(x). Last I looked, it seems like I may be able to break some records with M(x) calculations.

[ortega24024]

Try "Microchip mathematics" by Keith Devlin (which is kind of a watered-down version of Knuth's classic "The art of computer programming, vol. 2: seminumerical algorithms").

Then (if you want to be a keeno) something like "A first course on number theory and cryptography" by Neal Koblitz (who invented ECC with Vic Miller).

[ortega24024]

...after toying with idea of getting more involved, went off to pursue an academic career instead (see "Perturbed cubic Gauss..." and "Scrolling graph of..."). We and our next-door neighbours were like 1 family: I'm in a band with 1 of them now, and 2 of his brothers are in the games industry (see "Michael's (mpj500) Intel assembler version of..." and related vids).

Of course the scene never went away. Amiga stuff will live forever!!!

Just wait 'til you see what we can make BEEBS do!

[ortega24024]

We have every intention of putting a load of Amiga stuff together more carefully... sometime. If we'd had a Midi keyboard and stuff, sure we'd've made a load of crappy music (we weren't playing guitar back then and had smashed up all the cornets) and sound-effects for it. We were living in total isolation and distracted by other pursuits. I think by the time Nick was sorting out disk-loaders he was sick of it. By '95 I'd got myself a list of games-programming groups, but...

[ortega24024]

Ta for botheromg to ponder and give feedback on these vids, valliko. There's bags more where they came from, so have been frantically putting them together. Am creating more slick-looking ones related to my math research: sometimes my twin (nojameson) takes some of my hastily made old-skool graphics things and beefs them up to look better on modern platforms. I've made much more dosh out of a tiny spot of gardening than out of this computer stuff (which has take up years of my life).

[valliko]

ok yeah.. i don't know a lot of math but it sure is interesting. so far i've only been factorizing using bruteforce methods... i'll try to implement a simple sieve someday thou :P

[ortega24024]

It's just a bog-standard sieve of Eratosthenes, so of course it speeds up: at the beginning it spends ages knocking out all multiples of 2 (all even numbers), then all multiples of 3, etc. By the time you get to (for example) 997, you're knocking out multiples of 997 997/2 times faster than when you were knocking out multiples of 2.