stephena

I'm basically an 'old' fogey interested in older console and computer systems, particularly ones I owned as a child, but could never afford to upgrade. The systems I've owned are as follows (oldest to newest):

- Atari 2600: My first love, I guess. Really the first time I ever used any type of electronic gaming system.

- C64: First with tape drive, then a 1541-II floppy drive (it was like getting a new computer, it loaded programs so much faster)

- Amiga 500: My first real taste of programming, where I basically self-taught myself the C programming language.

- Amiga 3000/4000: As I started to become more of a 'power user', I upgraded to the big-box Amigas. Terribly expensive, $300 video cards (S3 Trio64), $150 NICs, etc.

- PC clone: AMD PR-166, I believe, running Redhat 4.something with 2.0.34 kernel.

- Various other PCs, running Win98 and WinXP for a time, but never really satisfied with it. The dark years of computing, where Amigas were dying/dead and too expensive to own, but PCs with Windows were crap.

- P3 1Ghz running Mandrake Linux. Finally, using computers started to be fun again (but still not reaching the enjoyment of using an Amiga).

So, fast forward many years, and my main system(s) are now Linux based. Commodity PC hardware has become faster, and Linux has sufficiently advanced that it's starting to approach how I felt using the older Amiga.

I'm also experimenting with an iMac at work, and enjoy OSX so far, but I'm still not ready to move from Linux.

My latest 'toy' is an Amiga 1200, which I'm playing with purely for nostalgia. Now that I'm able to afford Amiga hardware, I'm building the lower-end system that I always wanted back in the day. Of course, it will have many modern features too (such as solid state compact flash drive and upgraded Indivision 1200 flixerfixer), but it's still essentially an Amiga.

I Just recently bought an Amiga 4000 for a really good price, as it ended up costing less to do that than to upgrade the A1200 to the same level of functionality. So now I have two Amigas, and I'm not sure which one to sell!


On the software side, I also enjoy working on emulation software. I've been involved with Stella, the cross-platform Atari 2600 emulator since 2001 or so. At first, I starting working on it due to an extended illness in which I pretty much couldn't leave my house for about 6 months. Originally, I just wanted to clean up the Linux port, as Stella hadn't been really maintained for about a year or so at that point. I submitted a patch to the maintainer, and things went from there.

Now here it is 8 years later, and I'm basically maintaining the entire codebase. I've added more features than I can even remember, and I've personally rewritten perhaps 10000 lines of code or so. I'm responsible for Linux. OSX and Windows releases, and making sure that Stella remains cross-platform. I never know for sure what platform I'll be using in the future, but one thing is certain; whatever it is, Stella will be running on it.

Anyway, that's enough about me. Have a look at my web pages, and take Stella for a test drive. I welcome any feedback, especially if it's about older computer/console systems.