Hi everyone,

Tonight I’m bringing you a brand new interview with Steffen Häuser a.k.a. TheMagicSN! He is responsible for the new ports of games such as Heretic II and Sin for Hyperion Entertainment. Hope you’ll enjoy this interview, which was conducted during the holidays. 🙂

Interview

Hi Steffen,

Hope you are well, and thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I know you are currently busy with several projects at the moment, which includes Heretic II and Sin for Hyperion Entertainment.

To start off, maybe you can you give us a short introduction about who you are, where you are from and live, what you work with etc.?

I am from South Germany, living in a small city around half an hour away from Stuttgart. I live there together with my wife Thi. I studied computer science in Stuttgart, and 20 years ago I worked full time for Hyperion.

Today I work for Bosch as development engineer, but they gave me the permission to work on Amiga games as a “side job” (I actually have a paper signed by one of the bosses on this).

Speaking of which, how is it going with these ports? I know from the forums that Heretic II is close to being released. Do you think we’ll see it available for purchase before the new year?

Heretic 2 won’t be available before the new year, but it is in production. So things are out of my hands there now. 

As to Sin we have a stable Beta version (timedemo does not yet work, and the Mission CD is not supported yet – the Mission CD  is a major effort still) for AmigaOS4.  

Current work is mainly in getting the Mission CD working.

There is also quite some work on the 68k versions still (68k and OS4 versions will be released independent for all games). OS4 version gets completed first as with Grim Reaper, Stacktrace and stuff everything it is easier to do.

68k H2: Soundcode still has issues, and Savegames do not work yet. On Vampire optimization needed, it does not run playable yet (on PiStorm it runs playable in 640×480).

Back to your new ports. Heretic II was available in the past from Hyperion Entertainment. What will you say are the most important differences between your new port and the old one?

First of all it is fully OS4 native, no more context switches. Also additionally to software renderer and MiniGL Renderer a GL4ES Renderer is added, so

Warp3DNova is supported (but on systems with older graphics cards you can run the MiniGL Renderer for example which uses the old Warp3D).

Multitexturing is supported which gets around 25% speedup (on a x5000 with Radeon Rx it runs on 1920×1080 in nearly 180 fps) and also looks a bit better graphically. Additionally AmigaInput is supported for Game Controllers. Also CD Music works again (the method I did replay CD Music with the WarpOS version does no longer work on modern CD Drives).

Even though I’ve never ported anything myself, I understand that it can be a very difficult process. What has been the most challenging so far in your work with Heretic II and Sin?

For Sin it is definitely the Mission CD (the Mission CD code was massively changed, it is nearly like a new gameport, and uses some C++ Libraries not available on AmigaOS, work to replace this code is in progress). Also fixing CPU alignment issues had been tricky. On an x1000 no alignment problems exist, but for example on a x5000 or Sam they do. I could not check these issues myselves but only through Betatesters. Luckily with the help of Betatesters I could fix this.

For Heretic 2 – well I got some weird crashes originally which I remembered I had back then 20 years ago too – but I couldn’t remember how I fixed it back then, and none of the others involved back then could remember this anymore either. After many hours of debugging I found it – and after I found it I remembered I had fixed it like that back then. It was basically a bug in the gcc optimizer which I had to workaround.

Will the games be available digitally and/or boxed? From where do you think one can purchase them?

It will be boxed. The box is of an extremely high quality.

It’s fantastic that we get new commercial releases for AmigaOS 4. Any plans to do more ports in the future?

I have for the future. But nothing detailed yet. Also with Sin OS 4 and the 68k versions of H2 and Sin I have some work ahead. Remember I make this as a “side job”, not fulltime.

Now, let us take focus away for the work with the ports. I’m curious to what your current development setup is like? Do you use an AmigaOne or Sam for example? Would love to hear more about this.

I use an x1000, but that’s not my development setup. I develop on a PC Laptop using cygwin as a compiler environment. And then test on the x1000, from which I download the exe from the PC using an ftp server which runs on the PC.

It just has big advantages not to compile on the same system like where you test. I can reboot my x1000 (when there is a crashed executable) without having to reboot my development system (and having to restart the editor and stuff). 

For 68k testing I got a Pistorm system (A1200 with Pi cm4, loaned by Alinea Computer) and a Vampire V4 (loaned by Apollo Computer). 

Have you tried using AmigaOS 4 with QEMU? If yes, what did you think about it? If no, are you considering giving it a go?

Yes I have. Not really for my own usage, but I wanted to ensure H2 runs on it, as people with such a setup might wish to buy H2 and I wanted to be able to give a proper answer to the question if it runs on QEmu (which is a “yes” – just the CPU Option has to be set to G3 for the video replay code to work due to some bug in QEmu, as to game performance this setting to G3 does not make any difference). 

H2 runs at around 25 fps on QEmu on my i7 2.8 GHz in 640×480. QEmu can only run Software rendering (Wazp3D is too slow to be playable). I would expect on a M1 Mac it would run noticably faster, probably the speed of the software renderer on an x1000 (while an x5000 will still be noticably faster). 3D Hardware rendering on an x1000 will already be much faster than Software rendering on a QEmu Setup, no matter what setup. Of course if 3D HW Drivers (as the thing Hans de Ruiter is working on) for QEmu arrived this could be a major change. H2 OS4 on QEmu on a i7 and H2 68k on a PiStorm Cm4 run at similar speed. The “Workbench Performance” (not gaming) of QEmu is really impressive though and definitely beats my x1000, especially loading time of big executables like the Odyssey web-browser. Though if you make a larger harddrive image file the Workbench Performance goes down considerably.

I remember reading that you’ve had a break from Amiga development for a few years. Maybe you could tell us a bit about your Amiga history from when you started to where you are now? What made you come back to the scene?

Well, I started on the Amiga at the times of the Amiga 500. Though the time were I started developing was much later (when I had the A500 and soon after the A2000 I just played games). At the time when I was studying still I tried to develop my own Dungeonmaster clone (I did the code, a friend the graphics). In my engine you could asides from N,E,S,W also go up or down. Later 45 degree angles were possible and after I stopped due to time issues my friend did a fully texturemapped version. But he left for PC around that time, and then the project sort of died. Later I ported Doom to the Amiga and a short time later I was contacted by Ben Hermans if I wanted to join a new company, Hyperion Entertainment, to bring games to the Amiga. I did (at first as a “sidejob”, later fulltime). When things did not really work out financially for me, I left. I still did some little stuff for Hyperion but not much anymore and when my AmigaOne 800 MHz broke down I sort of left Amiga completely. For some years later I tried to do a port of Return to Castle Wolfenstein together with Colin Ward (who at that time lived in Germany, not too far from me). But on our coding sessions we did more talking than coding and it never get finished – and in the meanwhile someone else did an OS4 port, I think it was HunoPPC.

That I “really” returned is to thank to Arkadiusz Hucko, who always asked me about “fixing Heretic 2 for OS4”, not knowing I did no longer work for Hyperion. When I then by chance stumbled upon my old backup harddrive, I decided to have a go on it, and Arkadiusz became my first Betatester for H2 OS4. But on that backup drive there was also the source-code for Sin for Linux and for an  unfinished WarpOS port (did not have sound and some bugs) for Sin (so yes, the rumors there was a WarpOS version of Sin were true, but only I had it). This all started in December 2022. 

Any favorite games or programs for the different Amiga platforms?

Amiga Classic: Ambermoon

OS4: Heretic 2 (not much of a surprise, right ?) though I also like Quake 2 (but I only played it with various Mods in Multiplayer)

Haven’t really used the PiStorm and Vampire systems for Gaming. I just use them for development right now.

Do you play games on modern systems as well, for example through Steam or on Playstation or Xbox? If yes, what are some of the games you enjoy playing?

I own a Nexoc M1730 Gaming laptop (sort of a cheaper Gaming laptop with i7 and 2060 graphics card). I currently play Baldur’s Gate 3 (some time since I last played, but want to do some gaming there on the Christmas holidays). I also liked “Pathfinder 2: Wrath of the Righteous” (I also played un-computered Pathfinder 2 with Dice and stuff a lot, though my group now switched to a different RPG system).

My favorite Game Genre is RPGs, preferred are non-realtime RPGs with strategic combat (like Ambermoon, or also like BG3 😉 ).

I did also some MMO Gaming in past decades (my mage in WoW got the legendary staff). But after I married 10 years ago I completely stopped MMOs.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer my questions. 🙂 I have one last question in this interview, and that is what your predictions are for the Amiga in 2024? I’m especially interested in your thoughts about where the AmigaOS 4 scene is going, of course, but also about the other flavours. 😉

I do not really have predictions there, I am too short returned to the Amiga scene. But I think and hope things will improve a lot, especially regarding Amiga OS4.

I am also watching the “68k market” with interest though. But my x1000 is definitely my “main Amiga”.

Best regards,

Steffen