After a quick flashback to a pre-internet 1990s, I recovered enough to reply "Yes"! As it turns out, Andreas runs an online magazine at http://www.amigafuture.de/ servicing what appears to be a thriving Amiga community. TextEngine was a hobby of mine during my younger years. As an owner of an Amiga A500, and later an A1200, I decided to programme my own simple word processor just for my own use. By today's standards it's no better than Windows Notepad, with a couple of additional features. But for me it did the job. For fun I submitted version 1.0 to Amiga Format Magazine who very kindly included it on their cover disc (issue 25, August 1991 to be precise). From there I released it into the Public Domain as a fully functional shareware product (via 17 Bit Software in the UK - now Team 17 - if I remember rightly), and was very lucky to receive some donations from generous users all over the world.
Even though back then the Internet as we currently know it didn't exist, there was a growing FTP site called Aminet, the de facto repository for Amiga Public Domain software. TextEngine has resided there in good company for many years, and looking back it feels like that was in some way one of the places today's open source community has grown from. I hope it was.
Anyway, getting back to Andreas - he suggested I re-release TextEngine as a freeware product. Once he convinced me there would be a demand (I was rather sceptical) I fired up Devpac (within the incredible WinUAE emulator running on my PC) and was quickly making changes to my 15 year old 68000 source code. The result?
http://aminet.net/package/text/edit/TextEngine
And Andreas was right about the demand - it's been online for 2 days and has so far had over 100 downloads. So many thanks to everyone who has downloaded the 144kb file and still find it useful. Also an especial thanks to everyone who sent in money during the Shareware days - your names all still appear in the Amiga Guide file which accompanies the programme. And a final thanks to Andreas for giving me a brief opportunity to return to the good old days. TextEngine was a real pain to programme - I wouldn't do it again, and have no plans to return to it, but seeing it on-line, on magazine cover discs, and in magazine reviews (even the bad ones!) was very satisfying indeed.
And for those young kids amongst you who never enjoyed owning an old 16 / 32 bit computer such as the Amiga, here are some screenshots...
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| TextEngine's icon on a sparse desktop |
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| TextEngine, editing its own source code |
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| A very basic spell checker, but better than nothing |
Thanks for reading,
Nick
