Fishys AROS Projects

For the last 6 months or so Ive been quietly working away on updating my old Velocity distro. It's in a fairly usable state already, but I have no immediate plans to rush it out. Firstly as I have some nice "exclusives" software Im working on Id like to polish up before I release anything, but also because the core of AROS is somewhat liquid at the moment, with some interesting things being worked on and changes made. I'd like to release the 1st version of Velocity2 when these things are implemented as some of the software I'll be including will benefit greatly from these changes and I dont want to show V2 in anything but its best light. However I will shortly be releasing what Im calling "Velocity: Super Slims", which is a very light and sleek distro while still providing reasonable functionality. Im quite proud of some of my recent AROS work, I look forward to be able to share it with others.

A W.I.P guide to porting open source software to AROS

From my earliest memories I was always interested in animation. As a very young child (6 or 7 maybe?) I would make "flick" animations where I'd draw a sequence of pictures on the edges of my books and flick them, resulting in some crude, but fun animation. Around the same time my older brother was given a tandy trs80 coco1 computer by one of his primary school teachers who I guess saw potential for Troy (my brother) with computers (what I always in hindsight consider a very generous thing to do, 64KB computers weren't cheap back in the very early 80's, although almost 30 years later it's something that paid off(sidebar, but Mr.Wood was a nice man, I wonder how he's doing these days)). Ever since I saw my brother programing and being in control of the animation I was obsessed. Although I rarely made any full games, I would constantly be doing something with computer graphics from then on end. Making gfx with the various keyboard characters on the c64 and then learning how to redefine those graphics (my thing at this time was to do my own versions of Last Ninja graphics) and then drawing sprites in shoot em up construction kit and with deluxe paint on the Amiga (another obsession Ive maintained from my youth). I was always also a big fan of Disney animated films, and then Dreamworks, when they arose.

     Anyway, enter modern times. These days the vast majority of visual media is done on computers, and most animation with assorted 3d graphics programs (3ds Max probably being most prominant at the moment). One of the things that always attracted me to the Amiga is that the operating system doesnt get in the way. When interested in creative computing this is a big plus, and being that amiga os based systems are still the only systems Ive used that this is true for Id like to do my part to help bring software to AROS to utilise that. Blender is on both MOS and AmigaOS4 and does appear to be well regarded (I must admit my usage with it is limited compared to some other packages), so with some incentive from a few fellow AROS-ians I decided Blender was one of the better options at the moment.

     It wont be an easy job, and may take quite some time, but Im determined to get the job done...... could be an interesting ride 

http://www.blender.org/

Well here we are then. My first ever entry. It's 6AM here and I've not had much sleep so I'll keep this brief. Basically this site will be a way for both me to journal my AROS projects, and a way for anyone interested to follow what I get up to with AROS. For those unfamilar with AROS it is basically an open source re-implementation of Amiga OS3.x for standard x86 hardware, as well as other architectures (ppc and m68k being the main 2 besides x86/x86-64).