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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
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Our longtime 2nd chairman Alfons Klüpfel left this planet on 2021-06-03 and went to other dimensions. We don't know if he will travel first to Terry Pratchett's Discworld or planet "IRATA", but he will be missed. As a haven of tranquility, an open ear and advisor at our meetings, an initiator and drive of projects, and a tireless translator and author for the ABBUC magazine. We will not forget Alfons. His work is visible in all areas of ABBUC and will remain so. Here is his advice for us:
"When you think of me, don't be sad. Rather tell about me and dare to laugh. Leave me a place between you, as I had it in life."
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Today I found a funny picture taken at the A.B.B.U.C. annual meeting on October 26, 2019. I wore my 1980s CASIO CA-851, as one should at a retro event. At some point, I was wondering about the date and pushed the date button, and I was surprised. It was the "THE DATE" when Doc Emmett Brown and Marty McFly went back in time on 1985-10-26 in Back to the Future. So why was my watch doing that: Well, when the clock was created in 1980, nobody thought it would be used after 1999. So they only used two digits for the year; hence, 1999 is the last year you can set the clock date to. My solution to the problem is to use the perpetual calendar. I put the clock every new year to that year between 1980 and 1999, using the same weekday sequence. And for 2019, that was 1985. So I went "back in time" myself that day to the year when the future was about to begin. Because in 1985 I bought my first computer :-)
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- The new section hardware has been added to the Atari 800 category, and my scan of ezcontents' excellent Atari 800 XL PCB remake is the first entry. It helps a lot in finding the correct component on a populated board.
- All "capped.tv" links have been removed from productions since the corresponding website is down. In the future, I'll try to provide youtube videos where they are missing.
- FAQ, Bad Apple HD, and other articles with been enhanced with more details, better wording, and fixed links.
- AtariROMChecker has been enhanced with the "Atari ROM Patcher" tool to display, compute and fix OS checks sums for Atari XL/XE computers. Also, typos and swapped columns in the documentation have been fixed. Also, the disk images are now single-density, so they also work on Atari 810.
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This release aimed to get back on the latest Java and Eclipse versions. There are no functional changes.
Java and Eclipse
- Java 11 is now the minimum requirement. Tests have also been conducted with Java 16.
- Eclipse 2021-03 (4.19) is now the minimum requirement. Things will likely also work with versions 4.12 to 4.18 but have not been tested explicitly.
Compilers
FAQ
- New answers to recurring questions regarding the installation of Java were added.
Fixes:
- Many typos were fixed on the features page and the installation page.
- Copyright, features, and GPL were updated to 2021.
- If you see error messages and missing icons on the tabs in Eclipse upon start, your workspace needs to be refreshed. To this end, the ".metadata" folder inside the workspace folder must be deleted. This will also reset all your preferences, so export them before using "File / Export / Preferences / Assembler Preferences". When Eclipse is started again, you can import the projects and preferences again into the workspace. Yes, because the structure of the preferences section has changed to now support Pascal in addition to 6502 assembly language, not all values can be imported again,
Request for Help
It's been 11 years now since I started with the plugin. Some significant things have changed in Eclipse, and I'd need help replacing the deprecated action/actionSets extension point. So if anybody reading this has experience with PDE development in the recent Eclipse builds, please get in touch with me.