Why I Program

Someone once asked me, why the obsession with computers and programming ? And - I feel I can actually answer them today. (more)

PRESS CTRL = (EQUALS) TO INCREASE THE PAGE SIZE AND CTRL 0 (ZERO) TO RESET THE PAGE SIZE Want to read this in a different language ? Change the TO field to your own country after going HERE    WHY I PROGRAM       WHY I PROGRAM A brief biography into my obsession w calculators and computers ... © January 2016 Written by David Wicker Please do not reprint without permission * * * This story is rated: EVERYONE Someone once asked me, why the obsession with computers and programming ? And - I feel I can actually answer them today. It all started out at Miss Stoke's house. She was a strict babysitter that Dad dropped me and my older sister off to be babysat. Well the babysitter had some broken down toys but one of which I especially liked had pegs in it. They weren't LEGOS, those weren't around yet, no they were some type of silly pegs that you could push into this wooden board and make pictures. The main difference between them and LEGOs was the TOP was perfectly smooth, no buttons or ridges. This I think is what made the difference between me becoming a programmer today. So I was back at Miss Stokes house, she tossed me the peg puzzle as she knew it kept my perfectly quiet, and then I had the situation where I was trying to finish a yellow line for a face and a peg fell out of my fingers upside-down onto the board. Well I went to pick it back up when I noticed it was upside-down. Being a little kid I was curious. I took the tip of my index finger and scooted it a little forward. As I had pegs put in right-side-up to the left and the right of it, I could indeed slide the peg, but only up and down. This fascinated me. I took ALL the pegs out then and made my first maze. I had MANY pegs now that were deliberately upside-down, some 2-across so they could slide. In my juvenile brain I was seeing a cartoon of a secret agent trying to get out and the WALLS were moving around preventing him. It was then I made my first AND and OR gates, all on a little pegboard made for children. I was 6-years old at the time I believe. I didn't even think about binary until I was 7-years old. I was in the bathtub one time drawing on the tiled wall of the tub with my fingers which I did when I was bored. I drew some numbers then started thinking - thinking - thinking ! Finally I called really loud DADDY DADDY !! He came running in the bathroom, what's wrong ?? Then I said if I had a circle and I drew numbers on it, 1, 2, and 4 I could count to 7, right ? Dad tilted his head for a second realizing there was no actual emergency, then smiled and said yes, we'll talk about when you're out, dried, and dressed in your pajamas. So I quickly finished my bath and got dressed in these 'tiger' pajamas Dad got me. Dad was already at the dining room table and had drawn a large circle on a piece of paper. Inside the circle he drew 3 empty boxes. To the side he had placed 3 pennies and a pencil. I pulled up a chair next to Dad and he handed me the pennies and wanted me to show him how I could count to 7 with them. And I had to stand in the chair to reach the table, I wrote 1, 2, 4 in each of the squares. Then counting on my fingers, I put 3-pennies down on the numbers. [1X] [2X] [4X] Dad nodded seeing the 7. Then he asked me, how to represent one ? I took 2 back leaving a penny on one. [1X] [2 ] [4 ] Dad nodded. He could see I understood. How about 6 ? I took back the single penny from the page and put two on the 2 and 4. [1 ] [2X] [4X] Dad was really impressed I could see ! Then he said, zero, how do I represent that with my pennies ? For a moment I couldn't think ! I wasn't counting on zero. I had all the pennies back in my hand flipping them over in my fingers in deep concentration - but the answer just wouldn't come to me. [1 ] [2 ] [4 ] Dad then pointed to the page absent of pennies and said, THAT is how you represent zero, with no pennies at all. And it was that very day I understood binary without even reading it in a book. I think about that today and I have to give credit to NECESSITY. I just wanted SOME way of learning new stuff. I was really excited now, I was saying, "DADDY ! I can count to 7 by 3 ! It's my idea ! I thought it ! MINE ! I wanna copyright it right now ! It's my idea !" Dad smiled again, then told me yes what I made was a great discovery, but it was made many MANY years before I did. He still congratulated me for finding it on my own and he cut a slice of spice cake out of the fridge for me as a late night reward. Then we stayed up 2-hours past my bedtime as I nibbled on my cake so he could show me a BYTE comprised of 8-bits. I wanted more ! I said, "What comes next ? 512 ? Next ! 1024 ! More, what's next, 2048 !" Dad was laughing at my enthusiasm. No, I wasn't interested in action figures, board games, or even B&W television at the time, not at all. I was keenly interested in PROGRAMMING and computers. And I guess it all came down from being at Miss Stoke's house with that peg board. I once asked myself how much I would've been interested in computers if I hadn't come across that peg board, and I tell myself, you would STILL be just as interested and just as obsessed. You would've found SOMETHING to kick start you on computers even if not for the pegs. Later I got interested in numbers, all ten digits, but I asked Dad aren't there anymore ? He said nope, that's all there is and almost where you couldn't see it, he winked at me. I said REEEALLY ?? He smiled, then sat down with paper and taught me, no, there were more digits, it was called Hexadecimal. And he showed me that you could indeed go beyond 10 and instead call it A, 11 B, 12 C, and so forth. I later learned these to be great friends in programming in Turbo Pascal, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Later Dad bought a calculator which I had to play with all the time and I was dividing one big number by another and watching the unpredictable decimal values play out. Essentially my first random number generator. I later decided that I can use the hour of the day, the minutes, and the seconds and divide by the LAST number that I entered when I played a game (which I kept on a notepad), and that would generate at least 2-digits for a random number for me. I think I was 9-years old at the time. I made games like Baseball and Alien Shoot and a weird little adventure game where you had to match a weapon (1-digit) with a monster (1-digit), and the number would get higher and higher until you finally reached the 10th room. I was also blessed to find at the library an amazing book years later: I don't entirely remember how to do the games I made with a calculator today, but I =DO= have the code to play these games with a deck of cards now, which are truly random, and you can make an array as well by laying out the cards face down in a 5x4 grid for a simple DIM DOWN(5,4) storage. In any case, personal computers were right around the corner. I would abandon the calculator and playing cards to see and work on this new and amazing machine. The very first PC I started out in programming on was when I was 11-years old. It came with this LONG TRS 80 book to get you started. I remember reading the words on the 3rd page (back left) and it said you better enjoy the birds and the sky and everything because once you get started on the TRS 80, you'll lose track of everything else. At the time I thought it was pretty silly to say. Today, not so much. In the long book was a program to type out called, "Fire When Ready Gridley." It took me 3-tries to get it correct as I didn't even know how to type back then. Finally I ran it, and was utterly amazed and astounded to see a white pixel arc down to hit the building. It was the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my life ! I showed Dad as he was reading a book in the other room. It wasn't until a year later that both Dad and me typed out a program which wrote the words of Robert Frost on the screen alongside pixellated snow. I have called this my happiest memory and you can find the tribute here in memory of my now deceased Dad. http://www.writerscafe.org/writing/dw817/1260511/ After this I started to learn how to program on this machine. I learned that it allowed 26-letters of the alphabet for 2-byte integer values and also had two strings, A$ and B$ to contain text, I think up to 16-characters. Numbered Arrays I don't think those were available then. Because it had such little memory, you could only have two error messages appear when you made a mistake. WHAT? and HOW? It was 4k and files were loaded and saved off of audio-cassette. Now while it was never said in a manual, I learned rather quickly that when you saved your code, you ALSO saved your variables ! And no, I don't know of any language today that could do this (but I was thinking of writing a game making language sometime in the future that did this automatically). Anyways, despite these limitations I really did get pretty far into the TRS 80. Some of the games Dad and me bought for me were Flying Saucers, Haunted House, and Chess. Flying saucers was your basic shooter where you rotated your cannon left and right. Hitting certain ships would benefit or harm your score. You had to be careful what you shot. Haunted House was my first introduction into TEXT ADVENTURES. It would stay well in my mind and in fact encouraged me to make my own type of adventure game for the same computer later. Chess was fascinating despite how slow it was, and it was my favorite game of the bunch. I would bring one of my thick comic books and play chess with the computer for 4-5 hour stretches, glancing in my comic book until the slow TRS 80 made its moves. And I learned a lot about how to play chess back then. I also managed to write a few games myself, but didn't market them, I was still pretty young. (Trying to remember). One was a game like that old arcade Western where you had one cowpoke try and shoot the other, but I changed the western dudes into narrow spaceships ">=-" and when they fired their laser, "-----" it was immediate, just a blip, so the game was more luck than anything else to try and hit the automated opponent. One of the first games I wrote was called, "Space Raiders" and it used text characters. You hit the UP arrow key and a bunch of up arrows would shoot up to the -=- and turn it into - = -. Yeah, that was my big explosion, by adding spaces between the 'alien' ship. But I was still learning to code efficiently nonetheless. Having played and won Haunted House, I went back to play it again and this time I did some exploring, to get the 'feel' of rooms done by text. It was at that point I was ready to build my own dungeon game maker, on the TRS 80 Model 2. At that point I could have real integer arrays ! Amazing boxes that stored numbers. I took immediate advantage of this and wrote an adventure game even though I didn't have any models or other code to go after or by. It was primitive, the entire game was played on an 8x8 field and using RND() I would make stuff appear in each room, and you could fight monsters with weapons (no armor). If you CLEARED all rooms of monsters (they were all hollow), you won the game. And yes, I know hollow is not really the correct word to use in my game at the time, but hey, I was just a kid learning new stuff. Some of the things you could find in a room were: (1) better weapon (critical to find, and I only placed 4 in there !) (2) trap, hurts player (they didn't go away either, you could hit them again and again) (3) monsters - gotta whack 'em all. I did simple math based on your weapon power (4) treasure chest w gold in them (really served no purpose at the time) (5) WALL, because the map was so small, these were a pain to walk around and remember It was all text at the time, no graphics, and you remember everything was uppercase. No potions, no INN, or anything like that. This was my first adventure game. You started out with 20 power(s) and attack(s) number(s) 1 and began at a random location on the map. Also if you tried to go beyond the map size, it said it too was a WALL (to keep the code so it would fit in memory) YOU ARE IN ROOM 3,6. YOU HAVE 14 POWERS. YOUR ATTACKS NUMBERS IS 3. IT IS HOLLOW HERE. 1=N, 2=S, 3=E, 4=W >1 THERE IS WALL THERE. CHOOSE OTHER GO. >2 YOU ARE IN ROOM 3,7. YOU HAVE 14 POWERS. YOUR ATTACKS NUMBERS IS 3. THERE IS BAD MONSTER HERE ! MONSTER HAS 4 POWERS. 1=ATTACK, 2=GO AWAY And so it went. Until you won. And of course there was no option to save game or anything.   Later came the Apple ][ computer and it spouted two languages I could work in, both Floating Point Basic, so named because you could do real (pun intended) math in it, and it also had Integer Basic, a faster leaner cousin but not equipped to handle HIRES graphics without machine-language assistance. The first Apple program I ever saw was called LEMONADE. And I was at once enchanted by the ability to see 16-beautiful different colors in a field of 40x40 wide pixels. At the ripe old age of 12 though, I was already selling games and my creations to Call A.P.P.L.E. Amongst these I wrote were Game Package #1 (Wickerware #1), Game Package #2, Adventure Maker - an early RPG Maker, and I did several pixeled fonts for Robert C. Clardy's HIRES Character Generator, and curiously these also sold - I guess they were really desired back then. It's funny, I wrote Adventure Maker years ago and the team at Call A.P.P.L.E. wrote me a letter saying that my program was ahead of its time, they were going to hang on to it for a year or so and then release it. I asked Dad what that meant ? He said, you outdid yourself and tousled my hair. And then he wanted to see what I wrote that had them so amazed - and I showed it to him. To me it wasn't anything amazing. It was a SUPER SIMPLE programming language within a programming language (Floating Point BASIC) geared entirely for text adventures. Unlike the VERB NOUN method that was popular though with Scott Adams' adventures, instead I made mine based on digits and the description of what each digit did - and that would change from room to room. It was really quite easy to write games in it, and boy did I ! [7] 1. T:"YOU ARE IN THE AIRLOCK." 2. I:(S=0)"YOU DON'T FEEL SAFE HERE." 3. O:1 "RETURN TO THE CORRIDOR",6 4. O:2 "OPEN THE AIRLOCK AND EXIT OUTSIDE",8 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. [6] 1. T:"YOU ARE IN THE MAIN CORRIDOR." 2. T:"THERE IS A LOCKER HERE." 3: I:(S=1) "YOU ARE WEARING THE SPACESUIT." 4. O:1 "OPEN THE LOCKER",9 5. O:2 "RETURN TO THE FLIGHT DECK",5 6. O:3 "GO TO THE AIRLOCK",7 7. 8. 9. [9] 1. I:(K=0) "THE LOCKER IS LOCKED !" 2. I:(K=0) "YOU WILL NEED A KEY TO GET IN IT." 3. I:(K=0) (R) 4. I:(S=1) "IT IS EMPTY." 5. I:(S=1) (R) 6. "THERE IS A SPACE SUIT IN HERE !" 7. "YOU PUT IT ON." 8. L:(S=1) 9: (R) As you can see, there were 9-lines per page per room. The rooms would appear like this: YOU ARE IN THE MAIN CORRIDOR THERE IS A LOCKER HERE. YOU ARE WEARING THE SPACESUIT. [1] OPEN THE LOCKER [2] RETURN TO THE FLIGHT DECK [3] GO TO THE AIRLOCK WHAT SHOULD I DO ? _ In my RPG Maker you could have variables A-Z and they could contain a value from 0-9. You could display a text line in a room, have it displayed if a variable is < = > another variable or a # from 0-9, you could generate a random # from 0-9, and you could GOTO or GOSUB other pages based on your variables < = >, and that was it ! There wasn't anything more to the language, and yet that was powerful enough to write some rather advanced text RPGs in. I thought what I wrote was pretty neat at the time and it did inspire me to write 5-full games in it, each a little over 40-rooms. The one I remember most I tell myself I'm going to rewrite some time is Dracula's Castle - and I included all 5-games in the submission to Call A.P.P.L.E. While I wanted to write articles for call A.P.P.L.E. regarding programming and graphics, and I did a little, the team at Call A.P.P.L.E. was more interested in silly little programs I sent in at random one time called 1-liners. They were crazy 239-character programs that ran in one line of Floating Point BASIC code. So I made a BUNCH and even sold a disk package that spouted 101 of them. Years later though, I was working on serious stuff, Orbs of Ankhar, a full-fledged RPG in competition with Richard Garriott's immensely popular Ultima series. And I did it with all my own original graphics and music - until Dad left the Apple behind to get a Commodore Amiga computer. I think he was initially impressed by the DEMO he saw which showed a series of animations taking place in 3D graphics and plonked out money to buy it right then. Amongst these was a block-type robot walking an equally blocky dog. While it was tricky to get even 4-colors out of Apple in HIRES, the Commodore Amiga was built for ARTISTS, and it showed. No longer restricted to even 16-colors, I could have a whopping 256-colors per 320x200 pixeled screen. Wow ! This was totally amazing to me at the time. And if you did a flicker-technique you could get what was called INTERLACE GRAPHICS which allowed you millions of colors in a higher pixel range, 640x480 but it was hard on the eyes as it flickered terribly. I went on to write many games in this new computer, the first of which was Dragonrider based on Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider series. It was a simple game but with cool graphics. And remember, back then you had to provide all your own art, graphics, music, and sound effects. I wrote it in AmigaBASIC. You had wavery shimmery threads come down and using your mouse, you flip-flapped your dragon over to shoot fire at them. The more you played the faster they came. I got interested in vectors when I had the VideoTEL system years ago and I made a vectored Space Invaders also in AmigaBASIC. Oh yes, it is from VideoTEL that I met Rose - and we're still dating today. Anyways, I wanted something better, something faster, and then Delphi Noetic appeared with F-Basic. Now while it was REALLY fast running for it's time period, you could only load and have 20-images in memory at one time. Despite these limitations I made a really neat TYT (take-your-time) RPG called Dragonhunt, and back then I was composing my own original music too in a program called SONIX. I will tell you, that SONIX has got to be the BEST program for writing music in I had ever used - although I did go on later to write my own music editor for Commodore Amiga, but that was years later. Well, Dad then got an IBM-pc. It had a LOT more memory than the Commodore Amiga did and it was then I was introduced to GWBasic. While I did make a few games in it like Niagara Falls, Professor Twist's Tome (first serious text adventure), it was Dad who got Turbo Pascal. Dad opened up his pocketbook and bought ALL and everything he could related to Turbo Pascal. Back then I could have a resolution of 512x384 B&W pixels and I sketched all kinds of things, the least of which were BIG figures of karate guys I wanted to make a game with. I did go on to make a few games in Turbo Pascal, Kingdom Of Templar (Atari 2600 Adventure-like), Doctor Who (I based it on David H Ahl's game where you had to avoid getting hit by a killer robot in an area). I improvised the code, added companions you had to rescue, you could use your sonic screwdriver and annihilate all Daleks that were one-space from you. I thought it was all pretty neat stuff at the time. Well, the IBM went on and on. BBSs showed up, Telegard, later Tritel, Professor Plum's BBS, and - you betcha, I finally got my hot little hands on QBasic. I abandoned Turbo Pascal and went on to write my first BBS from scratch out of QBasic 1.0, called Doomsday BBS. I called it that cause I was running Scenario BBS at the time from an apartment I had and it was using Telegard, one of the best BBS software programs for its time. Well I got in from work and my air-conditioner had burned up, my computer had burned up too ! The hard-drive was fried ! And my phone was ringing off the hook from my 100+ caller accounts trying to get in my board ! So, right then and right there I sat down in QBasic and wrote from scratch, the ground up, a complete BBS with chat, messaging ability, binary downloads, and even a few Online games you could play, all in the span of 13-hours from 6:00pm to 7am the next day. I was beat and bushed but I did it ! I later found out that only 2-other people in Texas had made custom BBSs, that's what I was told anyways, so I felt pretty special for it. Later I was going to make this 'amazing' system called Anonymouse which used special characters from a graphic table: But about at that point, the Internet showed up. Things went quickly here. I was hired to write business software for companies, one figured prominently, the American Church Lists. They had source code from me from the other programmer (who left for reasons they wouldn't tell me), and I could see right away as a programmer that the source he left them with C would only read in the results and do nothing with them. He had deliberately left out the code to calculate the data. That should've been a warning sign to me. Anyways, I didn't mind. I told them I'll write a new program for them from scratch. They agreed to hire me on that basis. It was then I was writing everything and Gramma's Kitchen Sink in QBasic. I dearly loved that language. So - I wrote what they wanted. It also had bells, whistles, lights, and a cool colorful screen saver. They were impressed. They titled me "senior programmer" even though I was in my 20s. Then something happened. A meeting took place. Everyone was invited except me. I was supposed to go home early and get paid for it. I didn't - I stayed and listened at the door. There was talk, as I had apparently SAVED the whole company, I was to receive a $1000 bonus, then the speaker asked where I was ? At that point I should've just stepped right in to claim my prize, but I didn't, I was scared. Then the woman who hired me, she spoke. "He had to go home early. Instead of doling out all this money to just him, why don't we distribute it evenly amongst everyone who showed up for this meeting ?" And apparently that motion was carried. I was furious, I went home, stamped my feet, bit my pillow, the works. I went in the next day and spoke with my supervisor. I told her I heard the WHOLE thing I would sure like my $1000 now. She said come with me. It was out in the hall. And then she started yelling at me ! Do you like your job !? Do you !? You listen to me, you were SUPPOSED to go home ! It's a wonder I don't fire you on the spot for disobeying me ! Now you GET back in there and I don't want to hear a word about that meeting that you had no business listening in on ! I quit a few days later and it was well-received, almost as if they knew it would happen. I told them I'll be taking my code with me too. They said no, that won't happen. I got mad and said I WROTE IT ! YOU DIDN'T ! They were very calm and smiled slyly saying, David, you wrote that program on our computer on our time. I think you will see that gives us full ownership over it to use it any way we want. I said well let me take a copy then. They said no, that won't happen either. What I wrote is copyrighted commercial software and it just so happens - it's not for sale. ... .. . Gimme a sec. Very bad, I wanted to kill myself right then. Suicidal, I finally went to mental wards to get 'straightened' out, well, you can read about that in Nancy Principle, another story I wrote about another job I had where I lost it. NANCY PRINCIPLE Anyways ... I don't like to think of American Church lists taking my software like that. I couldn't even bring a copy home for myself ! They said it was copyrighted software, it was not for sale, and they owned the full rights to it. Yah so maybe THINK about that before you work for a company when they want you to write software for them. Okay, happier times. I retired at 30. I had more than enough to keep me going in life and didn't need to work any more jobs. It was then I got out of programming, out of depression and started playing with the NES emulator called NESTICLE for IBM DOS. Silly name but powerful program. You could actually play Nintendo games on your pc ! It went further, ZSNES for DOS showed up, letting you play Super Nintendo games. ROMs started flying on the Internet and you could download pretty well any game you wanted from any website for FREE. I was especially interested in the Japanese carts and ROMs as I had never seen them before. Finally I came across a program called Dante for the SNES. It was Japanese translated at the time, 70% to English by hackers. What was it ? The most beautiful and incredible serious RPG Maker of all time - and it was for the Super Nintendo ! Now I got hungry again. I picked back up my mantle of programming and went hard and heavy into it. I was working on Scenario I RPGMaker in QBasic on Windows 95 when a fellow came to me. Russell Hayward, he said I was a great programmer in QBasic having seen my programs Online and he wanted me to start coding in a new language called GFA-Basic. I was SO comfortable in QBasic and I was making such nice progress that I really didn't want to. I told him it has to be able to do a few things before I'll accept. 1. It can lock pixels on the screen. That is if I hit ALT-TAB to go somewhere and then come back, the screen won't be black. He said it would do that. 2. It needs to let me create variables on the fly. Not that silly nonsense like C where I have to define everything. He said it would do that. 3. It needs to be able to play MIDI and WAV on the fly. Not that nonsense where I have to type MASSIVE code like in C or Pascal. He said it would do that. 4. It needs to let me plot a single pixel with true R G B values from 0-255 for each. Not where I'm limited to 256-colors with changeable palettes. He said yes, this language will do all that. 5. I bit my lip, maybe I was asking for too much ? I said it needs to be able to compile to a true single EXE not requiring any other libraries to run. He nodded, yes, this language will do that too, but I have to purchase the compiler myself. Well I was out of conditions. He knew I was licked, so he sent me a copy of the language to get started in. And the first thing I wrote to test the plotter out was a program called Rainbow Waves, where I was literally plotting every single pixel on the screen to create this incredible glass-tube rainbow effect. Anyone who was using GFA at the time was from Germany. They later came to call me the Rainbow Kid cause I was always making graphic programs that did lots of stuff, and it usually involved colors. Strangely enough there were very few examples of how to do graphics in GFA. No, the guys I spoke with were twice my age and they only used GFA to keep track of water pressure for dams, business software, and stuff like that. No games. I only found ONE game from GFA not written by myself, and it was a card game. A pretty good one actually. But nothing else ! It was up to me to start adding files that did graphics and games, and I did, quite a few in fact. Today I have written a little over 700 programs in the language. One thing I did to help me with my graphics was to take my original Tilemaster code from the Commodore Amiga and ported it to GFABasic. Today I've doodled a little over 2900 BMP images for GFA with all kinds of squirrely things in them, sprites for graphics, fonts, and ideas. Lots of idea pages saved as BMPs. Dad later helped me purchase the GFA-Basic compiler - all the way from Germany ! It was 75 dollars converted to Deutsche Marks and - sure enough on a 3 & 1/2 inch floppy, was the real GFA-Basic compiler ! Now even though I'm working on BlitzMAX today I would =CONTINUE= to work in GFA if I could. But alas, GFA-Basic is actually a Windows 3.1 programming language. It was a blessing that it worked perfectly in Windows XP, but not at all in Vista, 7, 8, and I'm very certain it won't work in the mysterious 10. It was not till years later when I looked at RPG 95 and how complex it was, I decided right then and there to write my own RPG Maker, and make it WORLDS easier than theirs. Someone warned me in a message, "Beware David ! Writing a RPG Maker is almost if not more complex than writing your own entire operating system for a computer ! If you make a good and effective one, it will take many years to write ! SCENARIO 2 And so it did, 10-years of my life in fact. And BOY is it busy ! Lots of neat things to do in it and it's really easy to build in, but once again, it won't run on any PC platform except XP and lower. I did take a look at what was out there starting with RPG Makers, then Game Makers, then game programming languages. I dabbled a bit in DarkBASIC but I didn't like what appeared to be the fact you could not write a game in it that didn't force a hardware resolution. Then there was B4GL. Really a marvelous programming language today, but a little simple and not designed for truly amazing video games like you see Online today. After that I graduated to BlitzMAX. It was slow going, unlike GFABasic which had an entire working example program for EVERY single command, Blitz did not do that and often just gave you the arguments you needed to invoke the function or program with no additional help. So today I am still putting together the pieces of not-so undocumented commands, looking high and low Online trying to glean their secrets, often helped by other fellow programmings. And, yes, I am definitely coding every day, always exploring new territory and new horizons. And in truth I really haven't accepted the future. Not yet. I still force my wide-screen monitor to work with a resolution of 1024x768 pixels whereas the norm today is 1920x1080. I still do listen to MIDI music, and I still do play a lot of DOS games using DOS BOX - always getting new ideas with each new game I play. Hopefully eventually I'll attain my goal and get back to working on S3, the new RPG Maker. And with hard work and determination I think it'll be better than any game maker out there today. Return back HOME   You are Earth Visitor #

Reviews

[Cactus Jed]

Great memories and what an adventure from your youth. I didn't truly get into programming until I was 16, although dabbled on the BBC machines at school and then as a kid on my C64 copying out programs from magazines until I got the hang of it.
Now? I lay down my programming fingers as it hurt my head to work in that environment.
But as a hobby, I'd love to one day get back into it.
But your heritage goes back far before me and you as we came to meet via S2 have proven to be very knowledgable and a great designer, too!
Nice reading.

[dw817]

Hi Jed. Long time no speak ! Yep, I think it was truly written in the stars that I would be a programmer. Perhaps a musician too, but I think I had to choose one or the other.

Writing ? That just comes naturally. I only wish I could type as fast as I think or I'd have been done writing the 4 books of Future Barrier by now.

I am still trying out modern video games and - unfortunately it seems - many of my good ideas going to other programs.

I know my Dad told me great minds run in the same channel, but does my brain have to be an expressway for other game writers ? :)

Anyways, glad you liked it. I am and always will be interested in programming, especially of the RPG Maker genre.

[Cactus Jed]

It's great that you were able to follow your destined skillset. Many go a lifetime not realising what they are capable of.

[dw817]

I don't know ... you, I know you found your calling. Rose decided she was a gardener, my Dad, a doctor, my sister, a farmer. Me ? A video game writer of sorts. I think it's very rare that we are put into circumstances that do not suit us.

As my Dad told me years ago, anything you want, anything at all, whatever it might be, however it might be done, be aware that it also wants you in return - that it also wants to be completed.

As Grandpa Joe told Charlie regarding his chances of winning the Golden Ticket in Willy Wonka:

CHARLIE: "I've got the same chance as anybody else, haven't I ?"

GRANDPA JOE: "You've got more, Charlie, because you want it more !"