Picture this: you are taking part in a team offsite. You know the drill—you are part of an ad-hoc team, jumping from wall to wall placing sticky cards on them — just another day at work. Suddenly, my phone pings, signaling a message. I glance at the screen—an unknown number. Obviously, I expected another one-in-a-lifetime offer from my lost relative from Nigeria. Not this time. The inherited box of gold will have to wait…
The message I read on my phone, loosely transcribed, sounded like: ‘Are you the guy who created the game Puzzland for Amiga?’ In that moment, I felt like:
Quick explainer for the kids: What is Amiga?
It so happens that Amiga was the first computer that allowed me to earn money working as a programmer. In those days, parents used to worry when kids spent all day in front of a computer instead of doing something that could help them in grown-up life. I bet all of us have heard, “You won’t make a living from that.” On the other hand, is it really that different from nowadays? But I digress… Looking at this message, I felt strange for one more reason. A few months back, while cleaning my old stuff, I somehow couldn’t throw away a box full of my old floppy disks.
Quick explainer for the kids: What is a floppy disk?
I skillfully put them in the storage behind other important stuff like unused tiles and paint cans from the last renovation to not look too sentimental. To be honest, I was totally sure that those plastic squares were unreadable after, well, 30+ years in the basement…
I was totally wrong.
The guy who contacted me showed me a dedicated hardware project that, when connected to the floppy disk, allowed me to read MOST of my old disks, including my first commercial product — Puzzland.
That was a blast, honestly, what I remember the most was the process of compilation. Puzzland was written in C (Lattice C to be precise), and I remember the dexterity needed to build the game using only two floppy disks and my A500 (no, no hard disk kids). One of the skills I acquired as a side effect back then was becoming highly skilled at playing Snake on my Amiga. That was how I passed the time while waiting for the compilation to complete (plus since AmigaOS allowed multitasking it was doable at all). But I digress again. Suffice to say that I found a “master” version of the disk with a compiled game and the source code (sic!). No, no I wont share the screenshot. Puzzland disk image is here, and the sources are on my GitHub. Go, download emulator and see for yourself :)
Before I end this story, I must admit, I diligently browsed through my old Amiga floppies in search of something that I remembered planned to be my magnum opus—an RPG game similar to Ishar… and I found it…
Yep, that’s it — though it’s not quite in the state I remembered before I abandoned it, sidetracked by other youthful endeavors…
Reflecting on this unexpected trip down memory lane, I’m reminded of how far technology has come (two floppy disks? rly) and how the passion for building software has always been a part of me. Reconnecting with Puzzland and my old Amiga projects not only brought back fond memories but also reaffirmed my love for programming. Looking at my old C code is priceless, but I am too afraid to try to make a code review on it :)
