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Hello Pavel, thank you for doing an interview for the AROS Show.

Hello. Nice to talk to you.

Could you tell us a little about yourself and how you became interested in Amiga's and AROS?

I always liked alternative systems. Since 90s I worked on ZX-Spectrum. Then in 1999 I've got my Amiga 1200. A long time passed since that, now I have a Pegasos-2 and also an old PC laptop. I learned about AROS somewhere near 2004. I liked an ability to turn any machine into Amiga-compatible system. Especially this relates to laptops.

How long have you been coding for AROS?

For AROS - not really long.

What work have you completed for AROS up to this point?

My AROS equipment is rather old so first thing I do is making the OS compatible with my equipment. Previously I've implemented PCI configuration mechanism 2 support (this was needed for an old Dell Pentium-1 desktop PC I had before the laptop), several months ago I've fixed a drive detection delay in ata.device - now it works on my laptop without problems.
However, the recent work is a major thing - I've implemented VESA v1 support in the VESA graphics driver.

What AROS specific projects are you working on now?

Currently I am completing my VESA v1 work by adding a support for 256 colour mode (my laptop's screen doesn't allow more). Also I am rewriting AmiCDROM filesystem in order to add Joliet support with complete localization. This is almost done.

Were you working on other programming projects before you found AROS?

I've tried to do something for Amiga but this was mainly educational stuff. I wanted to complete two large projects - an audio player and an upgrade for Multiuser filesystem on Amiga. However that stuff was never finished.
I've also made several GeekGadgets ports like Joe text editor and a new version of Midnight Commander. Both of them are availible for AmigaOS and MorphOS.
Near 2003 i went into OpenSource community and there I've discovered that I can do more. Joining an existing project is much better than starting my own one from scratch. I was able to add a functionality into well known large programs. So I've added character sets support into NewsCoaster newsreader and AWeb web browser - the first Amiga web browser which was able to correctly show all russian text.
My current large projects are MOSNet - a TCP/IP stack, and Fireworks - an IEEE1394 stack. Both of them are currently developed on MorphOS however when AROS is running well on my laptop I'll port them to AROS too. MOSNet is a stable working project, Fireworks is in the beginning stage.
One more piece of my work which is going to AROS is trackdisk.device for MorphOS. In fact it's a heavily bugfixed and advanced port from AROS and now i'm going to backport it because I don't know how long I will stand those drive clicks.

Can you explain more about your Extended parallel.device API?

This API actually allows to use the parallel port as a general-purpose I/O port. Every signal can be controlled separately. Parallel port is very popular in electronics world for connecting JTAG adapters, EPROM programmers, various controllers, relays, etc. I am currently developing a driver for MorphOS which uses this API and a PIC programming suite using this driver. In fact the driver is finished, the PIC programmer too, they just need testing before the release. In future I plan to add a support for PCI add-on I/O cards to the driver for those who are afraid to destroy an onboard port during some experiment. Of course this work will be availible for AROS too.

Could you tell us more about the VESA v1 Support you recently released for AROS?

After an attempt to write S3 video driver I realized that I don't have enough time to do it. In addition there was a possibility to change the hardware and actually throw this work away (this is what happened when I moved to a laptop). Also there were some other people with old equipment. That time I already worked on porting BootX - a MacOS X bootloader to a Pegasos platform. The problem was that Pegasos firmware works in text mode and the MacOS X kernel expects graphical one. So I had to learn more about VESA and VGA graphics internals. After learning all this and inventing several tricks to make graphical mode working, I came to an idea that I can implement support for PCI video cards with VESA v1 in AROS and this will be even more useful than a specific driver for a specific chip at the moment.

There hasn't been much talk about the shell environment for AROS. You performed some necessary fixes to the shell commands for a bounty. What are your thoughts about the shell in AROS? Do you think it needs any other improvements?

First it needs bugfixes I beleive. During porting I noticed comments here and there about problems with softlinks. When I'll port my stuff I'll perform builds on AROS natively. And of course I'll fix all bugs I find.

You are the author of MOSNET, a TCP/IP stack for MorphOS. Have you worked with the TCP/IP stack in AROS? Do you plan to do any work in this area for AROS?

MOSNet is based on AROSTCP. Of course I have plans to build MOSNet for AROS. v1.4 waits until AROS works on my machine, it will be released for both platforms. Also it will contain a native inetd (too many requests) and miami.library will have more functions implemented.

Are there any other future projects you plan to develop for AROS?

IEEE1394 stack and complete support for my laptop's hardware. This will involve ess1688 audio card AHI driver and PCMCIA support. However it's far future for now, I'm rather busy.

Are you planning other projects for MorphOS?

Not yet. I'm busy with current ones.

In what way is programming for MorphOS different than programming for AROS?

Very little.

What other non-AROS projects are you currently working on, if any?

I am going to boot up MacOS X PowerPC on the Pegasos natively. Don't have time to give a large progress right now, however. A bootloader, BootX, is done and works. However the kernel hangs after startup and says nothing. I beleive i've messed up something with memory relocation in BootX.

In your opinion, what feature could greatly improve AROS at this point?

A fully functional desktop with integrated file management, like Directory Opus 5. I really miss it. Even at work on PC I've installed Opus v6, anything else seems very limited and disfunctional to me.

What applications would you like to see available for AROS?

A web browser and an office suite compatible with MS Office.

Do you use any other operating system? If so, what type?

Debian Linux Sarge Stable v3.1r00 on both PowerPC and x86. This is what I'm compiling AROS under.

How did you initially develop your programming skills?

Bought a ZX-Spectrum in ~1997.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?

My favorite is C. Also I know PHP, C++ of course, a bit of Perl, m68k assembler, Z80 assembler (from the past). A bit of PPC and x86 asm (can read the code).

Do you plan to learn other languages? If so, which ones?

C#. This is needed at my work.

How many Amiga's have you owned and what models?

I owned an A1200 and it passed a long way until 2004 when it was replaced by Pegasos. I started from a plain A1200 without a hard drive and finished with 1200+BlizzardPPC+64 RAM + IDEFix97 in a self-modified PC bigtower. Then I migrated to a Pegasos-II with G3 CPU. After a year it was upgraded to G4 - this was a support from BBRV, thanks to them.

Do you currently own any Amiga's?

A classic Amiga - no. My space at home doesn't allow me to hold many machines.

Are you interested in Amiga OS4 at all?

Don't know what to tell here, my opinion is split up. At the one hand it's nice to see that someone develops something, and it's just interesting by itself. At the other hand their politics seems very aggressive to me, they tend to "close up" their community and ditch everyone else. This is not a good approach in non-Windows world In my honest opinion, such a things live only until they are as free as possible. And what do we have there? I remember a story with OS4Emul by Ilkka Lehtoranta. Instead of saying "Wow, they need our apps, it's good", they started to implement anti-os4emu protection. The project was closed under these conditions. All of my development is OS4-friendly, all source codes are open and OS4 world is free to adopt any of them. However there's no interest yet.