Back in the Amiga days I wrote a program called tapdl to play DL animations. These were created on PCs with MS-DOS, and were in a format designed by Davide Tome' and Luca De Gregorio. This seemed like a simple project for a Java Swing application a few years ago, and so it turned out to be.

DL files are pretty rare; they aren't compressed, and work like a slide-show, so like many other antique formats it has been surpassed by modern video codecs.

The binary is here and the Java source code, organised as a Netbeans 5 project, is here.

Jiiiip! This is a plugin for the Java Image IO framework, that reads ILBM images as used on the Commodore Amiga. I had a couple of Amigas from 1988 to 1995, and built up a collection of pictures in this format. Unfortunately I haven't come across any viewer program for this framework which I can recommend, so I've also contributed a C decoder to the imlib2 library that is part of the Enlightenment window manager.

It will have a crack at decoding some of the extended colour formats like DHAM and SHAM, but my info on ILBM encoding stops at 1995 when my A4000's power supply lost its magic smoke.

The binary is here and the Java source code, organised as a Netbeans 5 project, is here.

There is a Java program called JIU, written by Marco Schmidt, which can load Amiga files, at this site.


This picture was drawn with DeluxePaint back in the day, based on an angle used by the Gunship game on the Commodore 64.

A few years ago I put together a black and yellow theme for Metacity, based on the border thickness, shading, and button shapes of an IceWM theme created by a fellow named Per Wigren. Recently I found the source graphics for the theme, and used them to make a similar theme for XFCE's window manager.

The theme archive file is here.


This picture shows the theme applied to a shell window, with an inactive window behind it.