Comment by david-given
11 years ago
Oh! Oh! I totally forgot about this!
I have an actual program for intent. It's crap, but: http://cowlark.com/foo-fighter/index.html
It's in C, unfortunately, so there's nothing there of very much technological interest, but you can look at the APIs and marvel at my 13-year old code. I appear to have left a compiled binary with debugging information in it. It may even run on the Amiga Anywhere runtime or the intent ADK, if you can find one.
Update: Here's a screenshot of an editor with some VP2 assembly in it: http://mobile.osnews.com/img/vp.jpg
This is part of a program which displays images on the GUI. It's VP2 using partially-typed assembly (we went through several iterations). 'tool' defines a loadable module. qcall calls another loadable module, which is loaded dynamically or statically depending on flags. ncall makes a method call on an object (using a blisteringly fast hash table lookup, so you get dynamic method resolution in about four instructions). Calls can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs; registers are saved for you automatically. gp is a special register pointing at the app's globals.
Update update: And here's the GUI in action (it was called the AVE). http://mobile.osnews.com/img/quake.jpg It's running hosted on Windows. It's all composited --- note the transparent windows (unheard of in those days)! The viewflm window in the background is running an animation, which you can see through the transparent overlays while two Quake games run.
This is all done in software, using simple but very, very careful code written by Chris Hinsley. It was amazingly fast.
That's really cool. I can see why C wasn't a high priority - it just doesn't map that well to object-oriented assembly...
Maybe I'm crazy, but this level of abstraction is somehow to my taste, and it looks like Tao would be fun to program in. Shame that it didn't make any impact. Had it been open sourced in 1998, things might had been quite different...
What happened to the Amiga deal? You alluded to it in another post. That sounds like another really interesting story.
I wasn't really involved in that, being a mere foot soldier, but --- from memory --- we licensed intent to them and then they rebranded and extended it to become Amiga Anywhere. The idea was that AA games could be written using our tooling and run on a runtime based on intent. So, they'd run anywhere with our runtime. I think they were trying to exploit the Amiga brand to leverage synergies, or something.
I don't know why it failed; we didn't have anything to do with Amiga's operations, apart from offering support. (I don't think any of us were Amiga people.) My impression was that the general feeling inside Tao was that the Amiga of the time was cursed, and we didn't want anything to do with it. Tao itself wasn't doing well then and we were all a bit superstitious. It didn't help that the main person we dealt with was called Fleecy Moss.
I did get one perk out of it: I own a copy of the Amiga comeback album. Lucky me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szMGxqwfxiI
Here's a terrible video of someone from Amiga demoing it. God, those iPaqs. I had one on my desk with a PCMCIA hard drive in it for doing the ARM Linux port. Horrible, horrible things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfHcwpzxSdk
I'd be interested in playing with a copy of AA if I could get my hands on a version which would run on a modern machine.
> I don't know why it failed
At the time, the Amiga name didn't have a lot of mainstream recognition anymore. And the people who still cared about Amiga slammed AA every chance they got on amiga.org & amigaworld.net because it wasn't classic AmigaOS running on a cell phone. There was a lot of resentment that the Amiga name & logos were being slapped on something completely unrelated.
Wow. I remember Amiga Anywhere. I was a big Amiga fan back in the day, and that was their big hope to be able to maintain relevance. Alas, it seems to be the way of all cool tech to eventually get discarded in favor of the less capable mainstream.