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The Amiga Future 167 was released on the March 5th.

The Amiga Future 167 was released on the March 5th.
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Interview Jean-Francois Fabre

Description: 27.5.2005 from Andreas Stürmer

Categories: [EN] Eng_Interviews

Link to this article: Select all

[url=https://amigafuture.de/app.php/kb/viewarticle?a=300&sid=5ec0759a12b490ddbc95c2ff819ec305]Artikeldatenbank - Interview Jean-Francois Fabre[/url]

Hello Jean-Francois. Can you tell us, who you are and where you come from?

Hello, I'm from south of france, I'm 33 years old and I'm currently working as a software engineer in a big company. I like running, mountain climbing and playing the piano (besides coding on the amiga of course).

As many of our readers and WHDLoad users know, you're coding many WHDLoad-Installs and Slaves for classic Amiga games. What is the biggest challenge, when creating such installer?

James Pond took me a long time because of blitter bugs, Magic Pockets resisted because of the protection, Agony was tough because every level had different codes, Archon & Seven Cities Of Gold were hard because not even working with kickstart 1.3...

How long does it take you to code an installer, correct bugs the programmers of the game have made and make the whole Slave compatible to newer OS'es like 3.1 or better?

It depends. Easy DOS installs may take less than 30 minutes, including Install script & readme. But that's not the majority of the cases! Roadkill first took me 1 evening, but then users reported bugs and also I decided to enhance it a little bit, and it took me 2 more evenings to finalize it. I had several failures with Archon until I find the reason why it didn't work. Sometimes the install remains halted for several months until I'm given a break because of some similar problem appearing somewhere else and fixed, or WHDLoad or Kickstart emulation has improved, and I can complete the install.

How many installers and slaves are "yours" when looking on www.whdload.de ?

Check there: http://www.whdload.de/tops.html for detailed statistics of all patchers. I've got 231 "personal" installs, and 261 "co-authored or personal" installs. Of course, old JST installs are not considered here.

I remember many classic games for my old A500 I owned many years ago. Do you think, Bert Jahn - the coder of WHDLoad itself - and the whole WHDL-team are able to make installers and slaves for each classic game, available for the Amiga?

You may have noticed that most of well-known games already have a patch. I think we would be able to process every game, but some CD32 games like Microcosm which are too big for the WHDLoad system, and cd.device emulation is not working yet. I think all floppy games can be processed, but some patches would have less interest than the others (workbench compliant games).

What to do, if an user owns an old Amiga classic game and there's no slave available? ...or an user owns a game which has been published by more than one company and his one isn't supported by the installer? Is it possible to contact the WHDL-team?

There are many ways to contact the WHDload team.

1) by their addresses (but they're not directly on the whdload page because of the spam)
2) by bugreport form on the whdload page (if a version seems unsupported)
3) on English Amiga Boards, project WHDLoad - WHDload coders often read the boards.
4) on the WHDLoad page guestbook. Messages are forwarded to the WHDLoad mailing list
5) by registering WHDLoad, which grants membership to WHDLoad mailing list


Since when are you an Amiga-owner?

I've bought my first Amiga (A500) in 1991, so that's a long time ago. I started hacking on the Action Replay MKIII in 1992 (by cracking Flashback), and I bought an A1200/030 Tower in 1995. I started patching floppy games a few months later (Cadaver, Laser Squad...) and then released a few HD patches (Qwak, Alien Breed II cracked, Lotus II cracked). I upgraded to a 68060 board in 1996 and I bought an Amiga CD32 in 1997. I've also got an extra desktop A1200.

Own a PC or Mac too? :)

Actually I own 2 PCs, 1 is a laptop where WinUAE is installed. I mount my Amiga HD drive using a IDE extractible drawer and I can continue working on patches on holiday.

What do you think about the Amiga's future? I mean AmigaONE, OS4 and other types...

I think I'll stick with classic Amiga. I'm mostly interested in Amiga games, although I had coded a few other programs (Oric emulator). I think the future belongs to Linux & Windows. It's better to have a PPC for the amiga, but that's too expensive. And the OS cannot be better than Windows or Linux in terms of peripherals, drivers and performance.

Thank you very much Jean for the interview. Greetings from our readers and myself :)

My pleasure. I hope I was not too long...