Words cannot express my sadness since I've read the incredible news. I was hoping Jason could return home for some time, at least. After all his braveness and hard fight against this horrible disease, he was the one who deserved that.
As a tribute, I have created a mini-mirror of his "formatwar.net" website, which he ran between 2009 and 2017. The last snapshot available on the Wayback Machine is from July 2019, and I've used it to create a live mirror of the three main pages and the Edge Grinder project, which was my first touchpoint with Jason. I loved the idea of having a dedicated site for coders where they and discuss hardware platforms and coding on a friendly and, at the same time, competitive level. He brought people from all platforms together, and instead of starting flame wars, they all discussed and learned from each other. And Jason was always there in the middle as a calm and mindful moderator. Unfortunately, the forum's content was lost in a disc crash in 2017. Back then, I didn't think Edge Grinder was possible for the Atari 8-bit, and Jason proved me wrong when he released Callisto in 2012. It is not Edge Grinder, but it is built on the same foundation and concept, and I consider it one of the technically best shot them ups for the Atari 8-bit. Again, he approached things from different angles than Atari coders usually do, and the result was just outstanding.
Many people are paying tribute to Jason on their way out on the internet now. Here's a collection of related links if you want to know more about Jason, his work, and his contributions to the retro and demo scenes.
- Interview by Homebrew Heroes (2018)
- Obituary at Legends of the Commodore 64
- Scener Profile on CSDB with all his C64 releases
- Fandal's Site with all his Atari 8-bit releases
- Cosine releases on Pouet.net
- His long fight against Covid-19
