Interviews - Laszlo Torok
DAD: Could you please introduce yourself briefly? What are your spare time interests beside computing?
LT: As you can see I'm 26 years old, I study informatics and I work at the local H-Bone center (H-Bone is the base (bone) of the Hungarian internet network) as a system administrator. In my spare time I read books (I have a big book collection) and listen music.
DAD: Developing software for Amiga is probably only your hobby. What is your formal education and what do you do for living?
LT: Oh, I already answered some parts above. Right, it is my hobby, but (as I wrote) I study informatics and I work at a computer related place.
DAD: When was your first contact with Amiga? When did you start using it and developing for it?
LT: Hmmm... I saw the first Amiga (an A500) at my friend's place in 1990 and I was really amazed. I bought my first A500 in 1992 (09.09.), and I wrote my first program 1 or 2 days later (of course I had programming experience because I coded since 1984/85 on C16 and later on C64).
DAD: By looking at your website everybody can see that you have a really big collection of Amigas. When did you start collecting them? Which Amiga are you most proud of? Do you have any plans to further expand this collection?
LT: I buy every Amiga that I see and has a suitable price. I never thought about collecting Amigas, I just bought one and another one and so on. So nowadays I have a relatively big collection. Hmmm... I'm proud of my A4000, because it is a bit special (it has an 030 CPU on the motherboard), but I like the good old A1000's (I have 2 Amigas 1000) and the others, too. And I plan to expand my collection with an A3000 soon. (I hope so ;)
DAD: What is the configuration of the Amiga you are using for your work? Do you have any plans upgrading it in the near future?
LT: At the moment my main Amiga is an A4000 with CyberStorm MKII (060/50) SCSI and a PicassoIV (with all add-on's), with a CD-R, 21" monitor and a 386 bridgeboard with an ISA ethernet card. I am thinking about buying a PPC board, but I'm not really sure about that.
DAD: Your programs are all related to low-level graphics and video. Where did you get the knowledge necessary for writting such software?
LT: Good question... It is just a result of some years of trying. I never studied it, so it was mostly a result of trying. And I was always interested in digital graphics, I think it is the most impressive part of the computer technology. It is really amazing to dig out the images and animations from an encoded file, I think.
DAD: A special version of your video player MooVId is now a part of AmigaOS 3.9. How did it come to this agreement? Who did the first step: you or Haage & Partner?
LT: It was a step from Haage & Partner, they contacted my distributor (Epic Marketing, German division), and after I prepared the OS version I dealed directly with Haage & Partner.
DAD: There are 3 versions of MooVId available: the OS 3.9 one, the PIV one and the ordinary one. What are their features and differences between them?
LT: The differences are minimal. Let's compare them to the ordinary version: the OS3.9 is a cut down version of the ordinary one: i removed the PPC and the Indeo support, and the video overlay (PIP) window is not resizable. The PIV-MooVId is a special version, but this one supports only the PicassoIV's overlay under p96. I did it for Village Tronic, because they supported me some years ago. So the ordinary one called 'MooVId' is the 'full' one, the others are limited somehow.
DAD: You probably have to fight 2 problems while developing MooVId: low processing power of Amigas and expensive licences for movie format information. How do you cope with them? Which of the two is a bigger problem?
LT: The biggest problem are the licence fees and the limited information. That is the main reason why MooVId does not support the new QuickTime codec 'Sorenson', however the QT3/4/5 fileformat (including QT streaming video files) is supported. The low processing power is not a big problem, because you can optimize the codecs, I think the main problem is the relatively slow CPU->Video bus. (10-15 MB/s is maximum on Amiga at the moment, and it is not that much)
DAD: What are your plans for further development of MooVId?
LT: More codecs support and some new features. First I would like to add mp3 audio support (because it is the audio format of the new codecs, like OpenDivx and Thrivx).
DAD: Could you please describe shortly your other programs and tell us what is the status of their development?
LT: My first programs were the Savage drivers for ShapeShifter emulator. I do not develop them futher (I think I can't make them faster). And I have some programs for Paloma (Paloma is the Video-in module of PicassoIV). I want to update them (add AHI audio support for PalomAVI), and do a PPC version of my PalomaPEG realtime MPEG1 video capture program. And I'm the co- author of the RiVA MPEG1 player and I would like to update its system parser to support MPEG2 videos. That is the current line of my programs.
DAD: What are you plans for the future? Are you going to develop any new programs? What about development for other computer platforms?
LT: We plan to write an mp2/mp3 audio decoder for RiVA, because mpega is not fast enough. I'm not really interested in other platforms, but maybe I will write some stuff for Palm. (Currently I own 2 Palms and I like them, but the PalmOS is sadly too MacOS like, a Palm with AmigaOS would be far better ;)
DAD: What's you opinion on other computer platforms? Which of them do you also use or plan to use?
LT: I'm using PC's (at my workplace) mostly with Linux, and some also with Windows, and I have some Dec Alphas here with OSF/1 (Digital's Unix) and some Motorola powered Cisco routers with IOS. I never wrote programs for them (except some small ones), because I'm not really interested in that. I'm an Amiga fan, and when I use other computers, I realise what I miss at them :)
DAD: What do you think about the latest announcements from Amiga, Inc.?
LT: I'm sceptic (as always). But when there'll be somemething real, I'll say more. (I'm a bit sad due to lots of never released hard- and software.)
DAD: Which computer do you think will be the next one you are going to buy?
LT: It will be a good old Amiga 3000, for sure ;) And maybe AmigaOne?
:)DAD: Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us in the end?
LT: Nothing special, I just wish happy computing to all Amiga lovers all around the World ;) (And I hope there will be something new at the hardware side of Amiga, too.)
