At 11:29 AM 2/5/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Just curious about what any of you have as computer-history and hardware
>now.
I was born in 1976.
Spent my time building Lego stuff until we got our first computer around 1985.
It was a Sanyo MPC 100, an MSX1 intended the UK market (it has a key with a
pound sign). Beautiful black and grey computer, 64K RAM inside.
I started programming, mainly in BASIC, sometimes in LOGO. And played
games, favorites: Chuckie Egg and Finders Keepers.
I joined the local computer club: MSX GG west brabant, which still exists
as CGG west brabant today. At first, this mainly boosted the number of
games I could play, but later I met other people who were also programming.
I was using the MSX every day and I was getting really frustrated by the
tape recorder. It was slow and I had a lot of load errors. So I was saving
my money for a diskdrive. But diskdrives were quite expensive (you needed
both an interface cartridge and the drive itself), so I decided to save
some more and buy an MSX2 with built-in diskdrive. I bought an NMS8250.
More programming, still in BASIC. And a lot of hacking too: ripping
graphics from games, finding cheat pokes etc. I experimented with assembly
from time to time, but most things I tried didn't work.
At the MSX GG, I met Jerome Borsboom and talked a lot about programming. He
already knew how to program assembly and was quite good at hacking as well.
Later I met Dennis Koller and Jos v.d. Biggelaar. That's when I finally
left BASIC and really began coding in assembly (using WBASS2). With some
very vague hints from people at fairs and a lot of experimenting we got
line interrupts working. Which, at the time, was kind of the distinction
between newbies and more experienced demo coders.
Dennis and Jos were part of UMF Zeeland. Also in that group was Richard
Cornelisse, the first non-coder in this story, he did GFX and music. Jos,
Richard and I started working on a megademo. Although we didn't want to
call it a "megademo" since the word "mega" was heavily over-used in those
days.
At a fair, we walked into Mark Zellenrath, who had some questions about
programming. What started with exchanging infos and sources resulted in a
long lasting cooperation and the foundation of Mayhem. Members: me
(Kryten), Richard (Huey), Mark (Zelly) and Jos (Yobi).
Our demo, which was called Almost Real, was never finished. We did show
parts of it at some fairs and got positive responses. By the way, some of
you might be able to see Almost Real soon, although still unfinished. But
I'm not sure whether I can give you the details, so I won't.
Although we never finished any big project, Mayhem did release a number of
small demos on the Sunrise disks: an intro/frequency selector, the
Celebration Demo, the Profile Demo and several MoonBlaster replayers. Most
of the programming was done by Mark, but I did the replayers. I especially
liked the one that could play MBMs over the MoonSound.
Later, Mayhem fell asleep because we were too busy studying and doing other
things to meet often. And without the meetings, everyone started working on
different projects or not working on MSX at all.
In 1994 I started studying at the university in Eindhoven. I wanted to
study mathematics, but because it was possible to combine mathematics and
computing science in the first year, I chose to do both. After about half a
year I decided mathematics was not what I wanted to do, but I did like
computing science so I went on studying that. And I still do at this moment.
In the summer of 1995 I was helping at the university. The International
Olympiad in Informatics was visiting, and since I was a participant some
years before, it was asked to do some things for them. But I didn't have
enough work to keep me occupied. I did have a computer and a fast internet
connection available. So I started my homepage. Back then, there were very
few MSX pages.
In January 1997 in the MSX newsgroup Takamichi Suzukawa wrote some remark
about Solid Snake being one of the few highlights in MSX gaming history
that was still not translated. I responded with an e-mail and soon I was
hacking Solid Snake, inserting English messages. The result: Solid Snake
English was released in Tilburg '97. It was the best selling release of
that fair.
My latest release is the Final Fantasy VII slideshow for the Future Disk
(released about a year ago). I ripped GFX from the PSX game and added some
animations. Most difficult part was to fit everything into 128K of RAM.
Future releases: sure, but I don't know what they will be. As you can see
in the story above, some projects went on for years and were never finished
(Almost Real), while others were done in an extremely limited time and did
make the deadline (Solid Snake). So I gave up on planning releases a long
time ahead.
Now about the equipment:
NMS8250
The one I bought many years ago. I still use it to test my programs on. I
only replaced the diskdrive, the rest is still in the original state.
NMS8250 (another one)
I built this one into a PC case. It was supposed to become a 7MHz, 512K,
DOS2 etc machine, but my hardware skills were not enough and I couldn't get
anyone else to do it for me. So today it is still a 8250 in a PC case.
HB700
Bjorn Lammers wanted to sell this machine on a fair. But it had paint all
over the top of the cover and the cover near the diskdrive was sawn off
(probably to ease replacing the diskdrive). No-one dared to buy it,
although it still worked. And Bjorn didn't want to take it back home, so he
gave it to me.
Turbo R GT
I bought this one in Zandvoort '97. Since my 8250-in-PC-case was still not
doing anything my normal 8250 couldn't, I decided it was easier to buy a
machine that had everything in it rather than building it myself.
Pentium PC (called "Starbug 2")
I use this one for MSX a lot (cross-development). For example, when
translating Solid Snake the only thing I used the MSX for was to playtest.
Extensions:
FM-PAC: real one from Panasonic
Music Module: upgraded to 256K SRAM
SCC: F1 Spirit
MoonSound
GFX9000
ESE-RAM 256K: bought it on a fair
ESE-SCC 512K: built it myself
external memory mapper 512K: oversized cartridge
mouse
IDE interface: but I never got a HD...
DOS2
Thanks for not falling asleep!
Bye,
Maarten
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