What is that? A person hanging from a rope? A rune for “WTF”?

It’s neither of those, but it has been appearing in the memory of millions of Amiga computers since the dawn of time, right below the visible screen.

You might have seen it before if you were a very bored teenager in 1992 and used your cool new Action Replay freezer cartridge to inspect the memory contents of a freshly powered-on Amiga 500. That’s a contrived example, of course, and totally not a core memory of mine.

Coppenheimer will show you the same thing in the memory inspector when you load up a Kickstart 1.3 ROM and set the width to 40 bytes:

The location might give you a hint already: That shape is a leftover of the Kickstart hand drawing process! To be precise, it’s the result of the last “fill” command. Here is what the Kickstart ROM is drawing in slow motion:

In the video, all blitter activities are highlighted, i. e. whenever a line is drawn or a a block of data is copied, filled, or inverted. The drawing process is really slow and takes its sweet time to complete: 40 frames in real time, 0.8 seconds! In fact, when I hacked up a modified Kickstart that replaced the slow drawing code, that changed the familiar disk-clicking rhythm as well! It went from click (blank screen) – nothing (still a blank screen while you go get a coffee) – click (Kickstart hand appears) to click-click, with a barely noticeable blank screen between the clicks.

So there you have it. The answer to a mystery that nobody asked for, and a really niche and nerdy T-shirt idea. But it was a welcome opportunity to squeeze a little blog post out of the ongoing Coppenheimer update; “slow-mo” mode while you see what the chips are doing will be one of the features.

Cool stuff to stumble upon, new and old.
What’s Cool? · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX

• Second Nature
  Gigabates and h0ffman write about the concept, the code, the music, the tech, and the tricks behind “Second Nature” (YouTube) by Desire and TTE. A real treat – both the demo and this write-up!
• 3D Demo 3 - Technical Deep Dive
  Another huge write-up for a huge Amiga production, 3D Demo 3 by Lemon.! I love the mood boards, the technical sketches, and the sheer amount of stuff.
• The magic of typing terminal commands
  An ode to the terminal. Beatiful. Recently, I have come to enjoy that terminal-anticipation a lot on my Amiga 500 as well, whenever I need to lha x (unpack) a file, or httpresume (download) something, and see that trusty old computer do its thing. There’s even terminal-pre-anticipation: Pressung Right-Amiga and E and typing in newcli to launch a new shell window in the first place…
  
  
• Playing ATARI music on Amiga for free!
  A new level of No-CPU madness, a genius way to make use of an obscure feature of the audio hardware, or an oldschool “one better than you” response to the dots part of “3D Demo 3” – which one is it, Leonard? It’s all of that, of course, and a lovingly detailled post about it on top.
• A memory heatmap to analyse BBCMicro code
  More inspiration for new Coppenheimer features (link goes to the old version) snatched off Bluesky. I always liked WinUAE’s heatmap-like visual memory map which looks a lot like this. So far, I’ve only got the buttons for it, and a proof-of-concept blitter visualization. And a 13×10 pixel icon, which is of course the most important bit!
  
  

A nice slogan for a t-shirt! Bit long, maybe…

Not so long is the list of new pointers I’ve added to the Amiga Pointer Archive. It’s just these four guys:

One of them is a blog reader submission, taken from a 1992 utility disk (thanks, LocalH!), and another one was a sketch by myself to test the social media sharing feature of the minisite. The other two appeared after the big update – I did a fresh scan of pouët links and went foraging at some FTP sites. And fixed some bugs while I was at it!

In the end, about a thousand new disk images showed up, but after filtering, nearly all the pointers on them were already in the database. That’s disappointing (in numbers), but also cool: I wasn’t missing a ton of pointers as I feared. I did try my best, though:

• RAR files weren’t processed at all (many pouët prod links have them)
• Neither were LHA archives
• Buried in the code was a val limit = 100000 from debugging, and the number of ADF files was of course just above that
• Upper-case file extensions like were ignored

Most of all I’m glad I resisted the temptation of passing arbitrary condiments, i. e. clean up the code and do a “proper” rewrite, with a nice interface and configurable pipelines. It was tempting because the pointer-file collecting process had become a convoluted mix of self-written programs, external tools, and manual steps.

Painful, but with a rewrite and a cool new über-tool I would still be in the stage of building an ivory tower of code without anything to show for it.

One thing I might add in the future is a method to submit hand-drawn pointers directly to the archive – people are drawing not nearly enough Amiga mouse cursors nowadays! :)

Go visit the archive, see if you can spot the four new additions, and have fun exploring! Maybe even start pixelling a new pointer and save a handy URL for later, using the “export” button…

Months ago, I spotted a cool camera at the local Ramsch-, erm, “antique store”. Last week, I finally gave in and bought it – a nice little Game Boy Camera!

I’m still impressed with the picture quality coming out of the 128×128 pixel sensor.

Photo of me taking a photo of me taking…

Naturally, two new questions emerged:

• What is the best way to transfer the photos off the device in 2026, and why is it so complicated?
• What is the legislation on posting old photos you find on a camera you bought if the resolution is only 0.014 megapixels?

The last question might be a non-issue. Everything around the Game Boy Camera is about fun and playfulness. It’s packed with mini-games and whimsical features – which the previous owners wisely used to protect their anonymity… :)

Have you seen this… entity?

I was staying at a… mature hotel this week. Look at those comfy stairs! Don’t you want to take a nap on them right there and now?

This aged stairwell, to be exact

As a bonus, the room had a TV that was not built into the wall or otherwise obstructed. The HDMI port was accessible, and I could connect my mini PC to the TV. All of a sudden, a magic moment emerged:

You had to be there

Together with the retro furniture, and feeling clever for bringing the cable, and seeing my stuff appear on the hotel’s TV screen that was showing a soap opera moments before – I felt like I was eight again: We were visiting grandma and granddad; my brother and I had brought our exciting new Commodore Plus/4 so we could hook it up to the black-and-white TV in the tiny playroom upstairs. The feeling of accomplishment we had after all the fiddling to get it to display the computer’s picture – our picture, the one that we controlled! Back then it was figuring out how to adjust the channel frequencies on the TV, scanning through endless static until the BASIC prompt began to form; now, it was finding a picture mode that doesn’t chop off the borders and doesn’t apply a horrible sharpening filter.

Sadly, the image above cannot fully capture that emotion. Was it because “hijacking” the TV programme felt similar? Or because the mini PC doesn’t have its own display and needs the TV, just like the old Plus/4 did? That it only needs to work at all, and the resolution or colors don’t matter?

Or maybe the smell is just missing. :)