Floppyshop 2/Floppyshop - 2.zip/Floppyshop - 2.iso/diskmags/0022-3.564/dmg-3420/articles/home_boy.txt

Text File | 1989-04-05 | 22KB | 402 lines

HOMEBOY'S STORY

HOW ATARI CAME INTO MY LIFE
---------------------------
a short autobiography by Homeboy from the DDC



Beep!!!   Beep!!!   Beep!!!  Beep!!!   Beep!!!   Beep!!!
The alarm clock is beeping in my ear, it must be 7:00 AM, time
to go to school. Aaargh!  what's this, I'm still wearing all
my clothes! With my eyes half opened I take a better look at the
display of my alarm clock, it's not 7:00 AM at all, I must have
fallen asleep after supper again! With one leg out of my bed I
try to regain consciousness. A few seconds later I'm able to
open my eyes but a thoughtless hit on the light switch makes me
close them immediately. Beep!!!   Beep!!!   Beep!!!  while I'm
trying to cross my room to reach the SENSOR SNOOZE button on my
alarm clock I hit my big toe against the wooden leg of my desk.
A loud Aaargh! again fills my room! Hopping on one leg I finally
manage to kill that awful Beeping sound. Silence at last....

With my toe hurt like it is broken I grab the REMOTE CONTROL of
my TV set to see what's on... PRESET 1: Boggle, PRESET 2: Lingo
PRESET 3: Sesamstraat PRESET 4: Rad van fortuin, Why are those
stupid gameshows so popular? Only people with shit for brains
will enjoy TV programmes like that! Well, if the TV can't
entertain me tonight I'd better switch on my ATARI MEGA STe
because the guys from DBA asked me to write an article for their
disk magazine a long time ago.

Staring at the start-up screen of FIRST WORD PLUS I ask myself
what the hell I should write about. As a member of the DOUBLE
DUTCH CREW it is likely that they expect me to write something
about OMIKRON BASIC. But what is there to write about that
stupid programming language? If we can write an excellent demo
like the TEA PARTY DEMO in OMIKRON does not mean that the
language itself is worth to write an article about! If my
SC1224 hadn't turned black all of a sudden I would have fallen
asleep again. A quick move with the mouse deactivates the
screensaver. Five minutes had gone by and I still did not know
what to write about. Then an idea struck my head, I could write
something about how ATARI came into my life, yeah that is a
great subject to write about. Without even knowing it my
fingers started pressing the keys on my keyboard to transfer
my memories about the good old days to ASCII.


HOW IT ALL STARTED...

It must have been 1984 when I borrowed my first computer from
my science teacher. It was a ZX 81 with 1024 bytes of free
memory. It also was my first confrontation with the programming
language BASIC. It was great fun writing short programs that you
had to type in each time you wanted to show them to somebody
because I did not know how to connect a tape recorder to the
ZX 81 so I could not save my programs. The machine was too hot
to handle and I mean this literally because it really overheated
after a few hours of work, so just to be sure I switched it off
now and then.

I became one of the first computer addicts and because I had to
return the ZX 81 after a few weeks I started to bother my
parents about buying me a computer which I needed 'so badly' for
school. I also became an often seen (but never buying) customer
at the local computer store. I spend many hours playing on
machines like the VIC 20, AMSTRAD, AQUARIUS (only a few people
know about this ugly computer with it's blue rubber keyboard)
and last but not least the ATARI 600XL. When my birthday finally
had arrived I went, together with my dad to the local computer
store. I was happy that they let me in because a few days before
I had annoyed some other customers when I was fooling around
with the 600XL soundchip. I'm not sure if they let me in because
of my nice face or because my dad had his hands full of money.
Anyway that day was a turning point in my life, I bought
my first ATARI computer, it was an ATARI 600XL together with a
64K memory expansion, 1010 datarecorder, a joystick and the game
PITFALL II by David Crane. Without reading any manual I
connected the equipment to my black and white TV set and started
loading PITFALL II. The game took 7 minutes to load but it was
worth waiting. Wow! great graphics and great 4 channel sound!
I got some more money for my birthday from family and friends so
the next day I bought the game CAVERNS OF KHAFKA which I didn't
like as much as I liked PITFALL but it used some nice RASTERS so
the total of colours on the screen was 256 (remember 1985!)
After I had played games for a week or so I started programming
in BASIC. First some simple routines I converted from the ZX 81
to the 600XL but after a few weeks I wrote my first simple game
which I called COMPUTER WAR.

One day I met a guy at the computer store who also had an ATARI
and a lot of games on tape. I asked him if I could borrow some
of the games but he told me he couldn't miss them for a minute.
We went to his house and after playing FORT APOCALYPSE for a
few hours I wanted only one thing: have the game! But what to
do if you just spend all of your money on a computer? Maybe we
could make a copy of the tape? After we had connected two tape
decks we made our first attempt. Great excitement when the
loading countdown of FORT APOCALYPSE appeared on the TV screen.
But after a few loading beeps the system crashed, damn! The new
copy we made at a higher recording level worked like hell. So I
went home with FORT APOCALYPSE and many other games.

Besides playing games my programming skills got better and
better. I programmed an adventure and a graphics demo for the
shop window of the local computer store. You think I must have
been very happy with my ATARI but I was not! The guy I copied
FORT APOCALYPSE from was the only ATARI owner I knew, all my
other friends had VIC 20 and CBM 64 computers. At school people
called me names and they did not want to play with me any more
because I thought that ATARI was much better than COMMODORE! So
there was only one thing left to do: invite some of those CBM
freaks to my home and show them the power of ATARI. By that
time I had a demo from the computer store which was called the
WALKING ROBOT DEMO. It showed a walking robot and a flying
spacecraft in GTIA mode (16 levels of grey) together with some
PLAYER/MISSILE graphics (sprites) and a 4 channel soundtrack.
This was the demo that convinced all COMMODORE owners that
ATARI was a competitive machine! Within a few days I had more
friends than ever before, they all wanted to see my ATARI!

Time went by and I got bored of the PLEASE WAIT... message on
my screen when the data-recorder was loading and above all I
only had a few keys left on my data-recorder because the
function keys on the 1010 model were not very solid! I had
saved some money so why not buy a disk-drive? Sixhundred and
seventyfive guilders was the price I paid for the 1050 disk
drive but it was worth every cent! No more waiting, no more
LOAD ERRORs just insert a disk and type L for BINARY LOAD in
DOS 2.5. In the meanwhile I had met some other ATARI owners
who also were the happy owners of a 1050 drive so I could swap
a lot of new games like BOULDER DASH, SPY vs SPY, MONTEZUMA,
THE LAST STARFIGHTER, BOUNTY BOB, RAINBOW WALKER, OILSWELL,
BRUCE LEE, HACKER and don't forget my favourite, the LUCASFILM
games like BALLBLAZER, RESCUE ON FRACTALUS, THE EIDOLON and
KORONIS RIFT. There also was a lot of good application software
I used like the PD wordprocessor SPEEDSCRIPT, the paintprograms
MICRO ILLUSTRATOR (KOALA PAD) and DESIGN MASTER.

I am sure that I was the first one in the Netherlands who got
a working copy of TURBO-BASIC XL. This was a new and fast BASIC
interpreter plus compiler for the ATARI XL which appeared as
a type-it-yourself listing in the German magazine HAPPY
COMPUTER. I was too lazy to type in the 8 pages of code so I
wrote to the magazine to ask if they could sent me a copy... and
so they did, within a week I was able to test TURBO BASIC, and
I discovered that this was the best thing that had happened to
me since I bought an ATARI computer. Until this very day I am
grateful to the author of TURBO BASIC, Frank Ostrowski (thanx
many times my friend!!!) Using TURBO BASIC I wrote my best
software like the ART DISK (first graphics demo disk ever made
on ATARI computers) GTIA MASTER (paintprogram in the GTIA mode)
TNT TERROR (great action game) and a lot more.

Together with a friend who loved to make music on his ATARI I
ordered the REPLAY sound-sample package in the UK. Now it was
possible to include sampled sounds into my own software so I
created some new programs in TURBO BASIC like REPLAY IN BASIC
which sold very well at a computer fair in Amsterdam. Together
with REPLAY came DIGIDRUM and DIGISYNTH which you could use
to create simple sequences of high quality digital sounds.

In the meanwhile I sold my 600XL and bought a 130XE in return
with a total of 128K RAM (handy those RAMDISKS) I also bought
the 1020 plotter which could plot very small characters so I
used it to make cribs for my Dutch Literature exams. I also
upgraded my 1050 drive with SUPERMAX which supported real
DOUBLE DENSITY and loaded much much much faster.

I managed to make contact with a lot of national and
international user-groups. There is one user-group I would like
to mention here and that's the ATARI BIT BYTER USER CLUB e.v.
from Germany, especially Wolfgang Burger (Hi there!) They have
a great disk magazine and one of the biggest PD libraries I have
ever seen. They were also the creators of the TURBO BASIC ROM
cartridge which I bought for myself and some of my friends. When
all other user-groups started supporting the ATARI ST they still
supported the 8-BIT machines and nothing else. I'm sure that
if they still exist they are using  ATARI 8-BIT machines with
4MB of RAM memory, 16Mhz processors, MATRIX graphics boards and
harddisk drives!!!


HOW IT CONTINUED...

By now we have reached the year 1987, at the age of 19 (Ni Ni Ni
Ni Ni Nineteen) I had to go in the army. I had a great time and
I earned some money as well so finally I could buy that great
computer that was released 2 years ago, the ATARI ST. I remember
it very well, it was a rainy afternoon while I was reading the
newspaper. Suddenly a small advertisement caught my eye: FOR SALE
ATARI 1040ST with SH204 harddisk and SM125 monitor, dustcover and
some software, price 2100 guilders. Before I even knew it I sat
on my bike on my way to an address about 20Km from my house.
Completely soaked by the rain I reached the house and there it
stood, as good as new, I didn't need much time to make up my mind
and the guy who sold his ST (some people are just so stupid) was
willing to drive me and the computer to my home with his car.

Still wearing my (very wet) coat and shoes, I plugged in my ATARI
and booted it with a game called STARGLIDER in the drive. After I
had listened to the high quality digital soundtrack during the
titlescreen for a couple of hours I pressed a key to enter the
amazing world of 3D vector graphix! Although the controls of the
game are very shitty I liked it a lot. Also with my 'new' ATARI
came a paintprogram called DEGAS ELITE. The mouse made freehand
drawing easier than ever before. This may sound weird to the new
generation of computer users but I grew up when the joystick was
the only user-interface available for drawing. After testing all
the software on floppy-disk it was now time to see what's on
the SH204 harddisk. Of course I found FIRST WORD PLUS but I also
found GFA BASIC. Now this was interesting, it had about the same
syntax as TURBO BASIC on the 8-bit but it worked much faster!
Within a few weeks I had made my first program in GFA BASIC, a
paintprogram I named ABC DESIGN.

A few weeks after I had bought my ST computer, REPLAY 4 came out
and because I liked it so much on the 8-bit I decided to pay the
279,- guilders for a copy of the program. Again I have to say
(getting boring?) that it a great piece of software, 50Khz
sample frequency, 1MB of memory free for sampling and ofcourse I
could include the samples in my own GFA BASIC programs!

While browsing through an ATARI magazine I noticed a story about
the poor ATARI BASIC which came together with any ATARI ST.
Because ATARI got so many complaints about ATARI BASIC they had
decided to replace it with OMIKRON BASIC. People who had already
bought an ATARI could get a copy of OMIKRON BASIC for only 25,-
guilders. I thought that these few guilders for a programming
language could not do any harm to my budget so I decided to buy
OMIKRON BASIC. Compared to the version of GFA BASIC I owned at
that time OMIKRON BASIC was very fast! After doing some
experiments I managed to display a scroller and some bouncing
sprites on my screen. I went to a local computer club and
showed my creations to some people. Nobody liked it because what
I showed them was not a wordprocessor nor a database so it was
completely useless to them. One guy however was interested and
that guy was FLYGUY.

Together with him I created the OMIKRON SLIDER which was a mono-
chrome slideshow with a scroller, a talking and bouncing ball
and a nice soundtrack (which played too fast on 70Hz). I think
that the OMIKRON SLIDER is the best spreaded monochrome demo
next to the CALIFORNIA BEACH GIRLS demo from the DENISE TEAM.
As all other demo crews (actually there were only a few) we
needed a name, we come from Holland and we are a two man crew
so why not use the name DOUBLE DUTCH CREW???

Until then I only had a monochrome monitor at my disposal and I
thought that I did not need a colour monitor because the SM125
had a much better picture. After FLYGUY showed me some colour
software I changed my mind, especially the B.I.G. DEMO by TEX
had a B.I.G. impact on me. It not only displayed more then 16
colours but also contained some digital tunes which I thought
were only possible on the Amiga. The STf I owned did not have
a build-in modulator so I had to buy one. Now I could play
GOLDRUNNER, CAPTAIN BLOOD, IMPOSSIBLE MISSION, BUGGY BOY, XENON,
ARKANOID and a lot more stunning games.

After playing games for a while we felt the need to create
a demo but this time in colour. We wanted to use some sampled
sound but the replay routine we had only worked in GFA BASIC so
FLYGUY and I decided to code the demo in GFA. A few weeks work
and ready it was, the FASTER THAN LIGHT DEMO with digital sound,
a big scroller and some nice distort and scroll effects. We
were very proud of our creation but as soon as we tried to
spread it we noticed that nobody liked it (sob! sob!) only some
MS-DOS users were impressed but it is damn easy to impress a
MS-DOS user so tough luck for us we just had to do better!

Our next demo we made using OMIKRON BASIC, it featured an even
bigger scroller, some faster distorters, better graphix, a 16
colour sprite and a SOUNDMACHINE ST digital drumtrack! The name
of the demo was the IN FULL EFFECT DEMO and the release place
was the ATARI MESSE in DÜsseldorf that year. The day before
the MESSE we were invited to the HILTON HOTEL to witness the
presentation of some new ATARI products: the LYNX, the STe and
the TT. After the presentation we had a private chat with the
big boss himself SAM TRAMIEL. SAM showed us the a prototype of
the LYNX with the game BLUE LIGHTNING and we were the first to
play with it for a while! FLYGUY did not want to return the
LYNX to SAM so the police had to arrest him. When everybody
looked in the other direction at FLYGUY being carried away I
attempted to steal the STe but an invisible wire triggered the
alarm and I was arrested as well. After a night in a police cell
we went to the ATARI MESSE to see what's new and to spread our
IN FULL EFFECT DEMO. This time it was a big success, everybody
liked it but they did not believe that it was written in BASIC.
At the MESSE we also got a copy of the brand new CUDDLY DEMOs
by TCB, which were in one word MEGAHYPERGIGISUPERULTRAFANTASTIC!
Programming the IN FULL EFFECT DEMO had drained a lot of our
energy and because at that time many hard to beat demo's were
released we did nothing for a while.

To complete my collection of hardware I bought a SC1224 colour
monitor (the best there is!) and a STAR NX-1000 matrix printer
which performed great when using SIGNUM and CALAMUS. In the
magazine ST WORLD I read an article about the CYBER animation
software for the ST. I got very excited, was it really possible
to make 3D animations on the ATARI ST? As computer graphix is
one of my hobbies I went to the computershop to buy CYBERPAINT.
It took me a while to work trough the huge manual but it was
worth the afford! CYBERPAINT is just a 2D animation program so
again I went to the computershop to buy CAD3D. It took me a
while to work trough the huge manual but is was worth the
afford! CAD3D is just a 3D modelling program so again I went to
the computershop to buy CYBER CONTROL. It took me  while to work
trough the huge manual etc. etc. Moral of this story: If you
want to make some animations on your ST it's better to buy the
complete CYBER SERIES! Now that I finally have all the software
I needed I could make some stunning animations. First create a
3D object, write an animation script in CYBER CONTROL, include a
background using CYBERPAINT and finally... action!

During the summer of 1990 we were invited at a coding party of
TVI in Germany. We wanted to show them something new so we made
some demo screens in OMIKRON BASIC. When they saw the screens
they were surprised about the things we could do in BASIC and
they asked if we had thought about releasing a mega demo. Our
answer was NO! but later on our way home we thought YES! why not
make a mega demo. A few days later we started coding a title
screen and a selector screen and the following period we
finished one or two screens a month. There was only one small
problem, we did not know how to include music in our demo so it
had to be a demo without music. During X-MAS that year there was
a coding party in Oss organized by the ST-NEWS team and the
DOUBLE DUTCH CREW was invited! We showed them our TEA PARTY DEMO
(yes, that's the demo we are talking about here!) and one of the
viewers asked us why the hell there was no music. This guy
happened to be DARYL from TEX and we explained him that we did
not know how to play MAD MAX tunes within OMIKRON BASIC.
As DARYL liked our demo he decided to help us and after a few
minutes of trail and error he managed to include a tune. We were
so happy that we did not release our demo until every screen was
accompanied by a def soundtrack this meant reprogramming all
screens because the tunes used extra processor time. Two months
later, february 1991 the TEA PARTY DEMO was ready so we could
start spreading it. The demo became a big success, we got
positive reactions from all over Europe, England, France,
Germany and also one from Russia!


HOW IT ENDED...

A few months later FLYGUY bought an ARCHIMEDES 3000, one of the
best machines available today. He liked it so much that he sold
his ATARI ST and started coding on his new machine. I was very
impressed by the things that were possible on this fast RISC
machine so I decided to buy one too. After selling my ATARI a
period of serious doubt followed because there was not much
software available for the ARCHIMEDES by then and the MEGA STe
hit the market I did not know what to buy. August 1991 I started
to study INTERACTION DESIGN at the school of arts Utrecht and I
needed a computer badly. I thought it was best to buy a MEGA STe
because I could make it MS-DOS or APPLE compatible (two machines
we use a lot at school) and because I already had some software.

I must say that I liked it a lot at first, the new TOS version
is just great and 3D calculations with CAD3D are executed twice
as fast on 16Mhz. Now, about six months later I am not sure if I
bought the right machine, there is still no software available
that makes full use of the MEGA STe capabilities. It is so
stupid to use a machine like the MEGA STe to run software that
works exactly the same on an 260 ST!

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ATARI!!! They release a new machine
every year so the software developers don't know what is going
to happen next. Why take the trouble to design an ATARI 260ST,
520STm, 1040STf, 1040STfm, MEGA ST1, MEGA ST2, MEGAST4, 1040STe,
and MEGASTe when the differences are so small? What will be the
follow up of TOS 1.0, TOS 1.2, TOS 1.4, TOS 1.6, TOS 2.05 and
TOS 2.06? Why do ATARI computers have such low resolution colour
modes when even simple game consoles have high resolution colour
graphics? Why is NINTENDO the most popular game computer anyway,
it was ATARI who invented the videogame! Why is ATARI still
working alone when even companies like APPLE and IBM are working
together? Why is ATARI not busy developing a MULTI MEDIA computer,
people don't use a computer for DTP only you know. What's up next?
Oh yeah it's the FALCON! That's nice, now we can use an even more
powerful machine to run DEGAS ELITE, STARGLIDER! or FIRST WORD +
if they will operate on the new TOS version!) Something has to
change or ATARI will lose the good name it built up with great
afford! If ATARI thinks just a little bit before they release a
new machine there would be fewer models with small differences and
the software developers can be sure that the software they develop
will not be outdated within a few months.

Don't understand me wrong, I enjoyed using ATARI for the last
couple of years but at this very moment I am not sure if my
next computer will be an ATARI. For six or seven years ago
ATARI was something special, at this moment however there are
some better machines available from other manufacturers.

Okay, that's the end of my story, I know that this is not a
very happy ending but it just had to be this way. If you have
the same or maybe another opinion about this subject please
write to this DBA magazine and let me know about it.


HOMEBOY (20/04/92)