Interview: Madija Al-Husyni

Generation Amiga: Hello Madija Can you introduce yourself to our readers? How did you discover the Amiga platform?

Madija Al-Husyni: I’m Madeeha or Maddi/Ms Mad Lemon on youtube and i’m a photographer based in Europe. For me the Amiga platform goes back to my childhood. I was around six years old when we got an Amiga 500 and have early vivid memories of the first game I played, Pacmania and later, Crazy Sue, Jumping Jack son and more, not to mention the hours spent on Deluxe Paint. I got an Amiga 1200 in my early teens, where I started making music on Soundtracker Pro 2. This A1200 slowly expanded eventually ending up in a tower with Hard drives, Zip and CD drives and later on a Blizzard PPC 68040 with Bvision running OS3.9. How I miss my original system!

Generation Amiga: When did you started working on Miss Mad Lemon and what motivated you?

Madija Al-Husyni: Actually it wasn’t a planned or a conscious decision to make videos, I just randomly started uploading Minecraft gameplays in the beginning because my niece, cousin and I were into it at the time, I loved it’s retro appeal. Soon after that bought computer parts and built a hackintosh computer, which for some reason I decided to document. It then moved onto vintage Hi-Fi equipment when I needed my amp repairing. Vintage audio is something i’m fascinated with also. The main theme of the channel is creativity which is driven by the feeling of nostalgia. Once I got my Nikon D7200 DSLR with video recording capabilities, I then continued filming due to my love for photography, I wanted to create videos in the same manner. Which is a lot of the motivation for the videos not to mention the various projects i’ve done. Then the Amiga videos began eventually when I decided to do my first ever Raspberry Pi project of building a emulated Amiga.

Generation Amiga: What is your favorite programming language and why?

Madija Al-Husyni: I don’t have any programming background at all. I’m more visual minded that way.

Generation Amiga: What are your views on Emulation?

Madija Al-Husyni:I know people who are both strongly against it and also strongly for it and see it as the future. For me personally, I havent gone either direction, of course for me nothing beats the original hardware, I lived with Emulation for around a decade emulating Amiga on winUAE, FS-UAE and the original PSP even. It’s great in the sense of you can play games add hard drives etc. it can function and things like winUAE and FS-UAE if set right, can be quite accurate. However in this decade of being Miss Practical and getting rid of all the original hardware, something always felt missing. The tangible feeling, the same feeling I missed out when I was listening to mp3s and flac only after getting rid of my vinyl records, minidiscs, audio cassettes etc. You miss that tangible part of it, things become too practical. If you had asked me even a year ago “Would you expect yourself to buy an Amiga again?” My answer would be a firm no, I wouldn’t expect, I even sometimes use floppy disks alongside using WHDload, why? I dont know, but something within me longs to experience hearing those sounds again first hand. Sometimes I feel we need to step back in order move forward. Just before buying my A1200 recently, I built a Raspberry Pi Based Amiga system. I go into detail on my series here on Youtube: Just as I completed the hardware side of it and was wondering about software. a couple of the makers of Amibian, (an Amiga operating system for the Raspberry Pi) including the coder Gunnar Kristjansson approached me and I ended up making a couple of videos for the team. Amibian, after configuring boots directly into workbench just like a real Amiga, All this dabbling with my project and Amibian made me actually buy an A1200. I’m the best of both worlds kinda person, emulation actually aided me greatly in the installation of my new Amiga 1200.

amiga-aca-1233n-unboxing-and-configuration — Amiga – ACA 1233n Unboxing and configuration (click picture to play video)

Generation Amiga: Can you tell us more about future Amiga projects, video content?

Madija Al-Husyni: With my channel I tend to go with the flow, as being about creativity, it can go into many directions. However, as i’m building up my A1200 and getting into real Amiga, projects are appearing, I will be working on a PSU conversion using the PICO ATX PSU. I plan to hopefully mod my Amiga with a laptop DVD drive built in along with the buffered interface. At some point I will be doing an electronics project and building a stereo separation adjuster for the Amiga sound output as well as it being a passive audio mixer, allowing me to add more inputs, such as for example a C64 also. Of course my gaming series ‘Nostalgia Time’ looks like it will be ongoing, as I play Amiga games from my childhood and also I request from subscribers to list games which make them feel nostalgic and I would consider playing them in the following Nostalgia Time video, which is a good way to discover those I may not have known out of the vast Amiga games library.

Generation Amiga: What are your Amiga configurations?

Madija Al-Husyni: At the moment, I have an Amiga 1200 desktop. which is quickly expanding. It now has an ACA 1233n in it making it a 68030 running at 40Mhz and 128MB of fast ram. 3.1 Kickstart ROMs, Midi Interface, internal 8gb CF card running os3.9 classic workbench. Now with a scart to HDMI upscaler. I’m eagerly awaiting the vampire 1200. I refuse to tower it like I had done in the past, it’s funny how in the past I wanted to make my Amiga be more modern PC-like as that was “the future”. Where as now I desire to keep it in it’s original form. At some point you realise that you actually create “the future” rather than following trends :o)

Generation Amiga: What is your opinion about upcoming Amiga systems ? (X5000, A1222)

Madija Al-Husyni: In all honesty I do like the look of those but I dont know them well, i’ve been out of the Amiga scene a while only returning to it in the past half year with full force and no breaks. I don’t feel anything can replace the classic 68k systems. However I am curious about the Amiga One systems as i’ve never experienced. I do remember being excited about them back in the day, not to mention my curiosity about AmigaOS4. I would love to experience using the X5000, it looks great!

Generation Amiga: What are your prefered Commodore AmigaOS, AmigaOS4 games and programs?

Madija Al-Husyni: Well so far the best OS i’ve used is AmigaOS3.9, even though I do love the classic look of WB1.3. The programs I like using, firstly would have to be Soundtracker Pro II by Marco Nelissen, yes I still use it to this day to create and play music mods, i’m using it right now as it plays mods :o). I like Deluxe Paint V, Diskmaster Gold (Diskmaster 2 with a script add on) for file management, for some reason I never got into Directory opus. Someone recently recommended one to me called ‘DosControl’ which i’m yet to try. AudioMaster IV I used for sampling as i’ve still got the classic Techno Sound Turbo sampling cartridge. I’ve used both FinalWriter and WordWorth for word processing and kinda torn between the two. Games, aah this is tricky, there are so many good ones. Jumping Jack son, Another World, Superfrog, Prince of Persia, Rick Dangerous, Switchblade 2, Pinball Dreams and Fantasies, Gunbee F-99, Aladdin AGA, .. aah I could go on.

Generation Amiga: Thanks for the interview Madija and good luck with future Amiga projects

Madija Al-Husyni: Thank you!

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