PrologueI wanted to write something in this thread since weeks. That's a very nice theme. Sometimes, I feel good when remembering the old times of coding. Especially when I am unmotivated for coding and want to grasp some mood for it. Sometimes I get into my old archive and watch all my demos from the oldest to the newest one to see my progress or wonder how did I finished that thing in a short deadline and why the other thing didn't went as good as I want. I even remember my anxiety/frustration connected to each of my work. Sometimes I read my old codes to laugh with my mistakes. It's a great thing to remember my past. Each demo remind me mistakes to avoid. Nostalgy of things I was doing another way. My lost enthousiasm..
Early daysI have few memories from my little grasp of basic in Amstrad CPC 6128. My first computer. It was 8bit and at that time (10-14 years back?) I was playing a bit of games and rarely tried to do my own game in basic. Un(?)fortunatelly the computer use was very restricted (we were three brothers with one computer and too hysterical parents who wanted to protect as from becoming geeks
) so I wasn't much into it to get bored after hours of gameplaying so that I learn assembly and stuff. I only remember oneday when the disk drive was corrupt (a usual problem of CPCs) and so we couldn't load any game. But the basic of most 8bit computers was always in ROM, heh it was there each time I opened the computer! So, I remember the summer of 1995 (I was 15 years old) when me and my brother started coding demos and games. Yep! One of our dream was to code a game, but we couldn't understand several concepts (How the hell do I have collision with enemies, labyrinth walls, etc. Also I was so stupid I didn't knew about DIM then and if I had 10 enemies I should make lot's of variables x0, y0, x1, y1,..,x10, y10. So I made a karate game like street fighter with two players and each player was one 8*8 pixel char and if one char was near the other, a punch/kick would loose some energy. And the other char was dancing like crazy and hitting on the air with RND, hahaha
. And demos, even several years before I even knew there is a thing called demoscene, my love was mirrored there. I mostly did some graphical demonstrations in that basic by designing chars (SYMBOL and SYMBOL AFTER where you put binaries, that's a basic function in Amstrad to design your own characters. I remember some data with binary, SYMBOL %00011000, %00111100, %0111..... that my father showed. Then in other listing there were either &HC0, &H9F or regular numbers. I remember my father told me "Forget these, it's too hard to explain to you.." but later (that's the most surprising), I got the connection between the numbers and the binary! Maybe I read it in a basic manual? I don't remember. I got it myself? Or did we learn it on school? Maybe, maybe not. I remember that I decoded the logic between binary and decimal, but it seems strange to me to do this alone. Surprising now I try to remember. There I learned converting from decimal to binary and back! And so I wrote my chars in decimal and the lines were smaller. I don't remember if I also understood hex then. So, except from the karate game (which listing I coppied in an old textbook (I still keep them!) because there was no disk to save!) I also made graphical demos with drawing lines and fade out pallete, characters, slow circle drawing, simple stuff in basic preety slow and unattractive but fun. One of my best programms of that era was the circle drawer! There is were I read a circle drawing example using polar coordinates in a source code. I think I understood alone the logic and coded the programm where you move a pointer that draws a straight line except if you press two other keys to curve left or right. And two other keys increase/decrease the curving speed, so I could draw spirals, wild curves with high diferrentiation, and so on. Ahh.. before even meeting the demoscene or any other computer freak who can code. I guess my past showed my future. I am a visual mathematician, especially liked graphics and algorithms, maybe I wanted to code a game but this have changed (Surprisingly that I never coded a simple game yet because I was always occupied by demos to try something diferrent ;P)
Continued tomorrow..
