the dynablaster clone that you can play (only) on AMIGA

- First of all, thank you very much for taking the time for this interview.Please tell us how you met and which are your previous experience on Amiga before starting to work on dynAMIte.

_UltraGelb: We first met a couple of years ago, during the BBS era on an IRC like chat which was ran by a few sysops who had their BBSs connected together by this chat. We all had in common the so called love for the amiga and we were all using the BBS system for which I wrote some tools and online games. Ingo still has his BBS running and took over development of the BBS software a couple of month ago.

_Ingo: Yeah, you can find it at http://night.2y.net Development of the BBS-System is still in progress.

_UltraGelb: ToDi was a cosysop of a BBS back in the days (correct me if I'm wrong).

_ToDi: Oh no, I was an user of the famous NOTRE DAME BBS and later ran for a short time my own BBS. So I was first user and later sysop but never ever cosysop although I was once asked to become cosysop :)

_UltraGelb: Then, as you all may know, the internet became more known and available for normal users and the BBS scene slowly started to disappear. This was the time where I stopped developing for this specific BBS software and moved on to write some small tools and utilities for the AmigaOS itself.
To confuse you all a bit, the name of the BBS software is Prometheus, and has been around a "few" years longer than the PCI-extension by Matay =)


- How did you come to make a game such as dynAMite and who's idea has it been?

_UltraGelb: The first idea for dynAMIte was somewhen during summer 2000, a few days before my actual vacation begun. Actually I really longed for something different to code than ATC and so I just started to write some lines and continued until now :)


- dynAMIte is an Amiga-only freeware project, for which you release updates after updates.
What are the reasons that keep you go on updating this program so often and so assiduously?

-UltraGelb: Well, formerly reasons were to have again some fun by coding something complete different than the stuff I did until then. Then of course the high interest of people in the game after we released the first public preview on the WOA2000 show in cologne. Then there are the people you meet when playing dynAMIte and the nice little chats you have with them which gives again a feeling of a real community in contrast to the cold, dark and depressing talks you have to read everyday on certain news sites and that are totally missing this special feeling.

But there are also some downsides on the success of dynAMIte. As you may have read, I decided to stop further development of dynAMIte on the 11.12.2001, because I really got fed up with betatesting or the actual lack of it. But don't panic! Serious betatesting has started again and so has the development of dynAMIte and the release of v1.9 is imminent.


- are you interested to find some "serious" betatester among the Bitplane readers?

_ToDi: Every betatester is always welcome!


- dynAMIte is gaining more and more approval from amiga users and there are many enthusiastic people who have contributed producing maps, styles and other stuffs. How could you explain this big success?
What's the magic behind dynAMIte?

_Ingo: Superb marketing and well written press-releases ;^)

_UltraGelb: Honestly, I have no idea at all. Maybe it's because it brought people and amiga users together who would have never met and talked to each other without the game. Also, as I wrote earlier, there is something special about playing and chatting which is hard to grasp. You know what I mean if you played once :)


- On your website we can see a project named "dynAMIte Special CD", Can you satisfy our curiosity by revealing some details about it?

_UltraGelb: As sad as it may sound, the CD project is dead. The idea for the CD was brought up by Sebel who did many parts of the dynAMIte graphics and also contributed some styles completely done by himself. We thought it would be a nice special to have the game on CD with some extras, so we started a survey to see how big the interest in the CD actually was. To justify the actual production of the CD we needed at least 100 "preorders" but we never reached this number.


- How can our readers get hold of it?

_UltraGelb: It is too late. [Editors note: things have changed a bit since we took the interview. The cd project has been resurrected and it looks like the cd will come nevertheless]


- Is it'll be however possible to find (or if you'll make available) the material that you has produced for the CD version of the game?

_ToDi: Something already made it to the release and the other may follow...


- What about your future projects? Do you plan to release other games like dynAMIte?
Do you have other ideas? Will you continue to support dynAMIte and other projects for the Amiga?

_UltraGelb: As long as there is interest by me and of course the users I will continue to support dynAMIte. As for other projects, I started a few smaller things, but nothing as big as dynAMIte. With a bit of luck, the future may reveal some of them :)


- Do you plan to port dynAMIte to the AmigaONE/PegasOS or other machines on which AmigaOS4 will run?
And what about Morphos?

_UltraGelb: Direct support for MorphOS and OS4 is not possible. The only way to run dynAMIte on these OSes is by running it on an 68k emulator. This is because dynAMIte is entirely written in AmigaE and thus can't be ported that easily to any of these OSes because the lack of an E compiler which is able to produce appropriate code (read: PPC code).


- Thank you for the interview. now is the time where you can write some last words to our readers.


_UltraGelb: Keep the faith. Keep the spirit. Don't act like M$



Thanks to Matthias Böcker (UltraGelb), Torsten Ketelsen (ToDi) and Ingo Musquinier (Ingo) for the interview.

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The interview was done by Antonio Giorgio Urru (Disney), translation was done by Stefano Guidetti