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  • Computer interests

  • Computers?

    My interest in Computers goes way back in time to about 1979, when I first played - as a Kid on vacation in Rennes/France - Space Invaders. Yes, Space Invaders! It's been reported that I knew right from that time on, this is what I'm interested in! Unfortunately my parents didn't agree to buy me a Space Invaders Arcade machine... During 1982 I received as a birthday present a Atari 2600 video game console, which immediately took over my not school life... This machine lastet for about a year until a CBS Coleco Vision game console was again given to me for my birthday (BTW: Anybody remember this machine ?). Shortly after I became somewhat more interested in the actual programming of computers. This is mainly because I once read an article about David Crane - Programmer of Pitfall! - in which he was described as a person, who gets up late, programms when he's in mood for it, wears jeans and like to eat hambugers. So that sounded sort of cool to me at 13 years old. So in order to do the same as David Crane I learned the basic commands of Basic before I even had a "real computer" just by looking at listings in computer magazines. I went to electronic shops where computers like the C64, the Atari 800XL, the Dragon 32K or the Sinclair Spektrum were presented to hack in programs like:

    10 PRINT "ZAXXON "
    20 GOTO 10

    and was amazed...
    My first "serious" computer turned out to be a Commodore 64. I extended my Basic knowledge step by step until I had to admit that it had it's limitations and somehow I noticed that everybody who was "cool" was programming in Assembler anyway. Learning Assembler was more difficult for me at the time. Thankfully the C64 was soon replaced - we are talking summer 1986 now - by a new, highly acclaimed Commodore Amiga 1000 machine - being those days current dream machine. Indeed it was. Nice graphical possibilities, good sound (I mean don't compare it to a nowadays state of the art 256 voice sound card for $9.95 in your local discounter), i.E. the perfect for me and my pitfall dreams! Learning the 68000 Instruction Code was easier than learning the C64 6502 processor, as it contained 32 Bit data and address registers, something others companies don't seem to really like... The Amiga Fever extended into my first "serious" project, which turned to be a computer game called "Think!" which was a BoulderDash inspired game. "Think!" which was eventually released europe-wide by Digital Integration as "Supaplex" and was written 100% in Assembler and featured many nice programming tricks and high speed graphics. Digital Integration (Robin Heydon) also ported the game to MS-DOS, but I still prefer the Amiga Version, as its controls are better. As a requirement set by Digital Integration "Supaplex" had to run on any 512KB RAM Amiga machine, which turned out to be a serious problem, which only could be solved by writing own direct floppy disk read/write code (MFM coding was quite quite difficult as there was hardly any documentation available at all). I also had to setup my own stack management, because as the boot code of the floppy got loaded, no "official" stack was created by the operating system, which in any case got completely wiped out anyway by "Supaplex". Hence no Harddisk Version was ever released, although nowadays in would be no problem no all, as everybody today seems to have gigabytes of RAM (well, maybe a bit or two less)...
    By logging onto the Internet I discovered that there seems to be a small dedicated Supaplex community out there, what is - of course - great! Check out these sites:
    Hilde's Supaplex page in Norway

    or for a very good macintosh version called "Infotron" (hint hint) on
    Q Software's Infotron Homepage

    After the release of Supaplex I had to notice that it's very hard to make a living by writing computer games, so I started working on PC's (since about May 1990) and started writing other - often less exciting - computer programs. It turned out to be somewhat more difficult to write Applications under Windows 3.0 in Assembler (and the Intel architecture I must say...) so C was the logical choice to use. I started programming C a couple of years earlier on the Amiga. The next step was to jump from C to C++ which was very interessting. Until these days I had to pleasure to program in several other languages, most currently I started some commercial work using Delphi which is a really great environment created by Borland! I also did some work in Modula-2, Clipper, Rexx, Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications but nothing really serious or worth mentioning on these pages because they're all specific solutions. More on the newer commercial projects can be also found on this server...

    Ride this horse back one page...