Debut!
Posted by Manuel, |
personal
|
So here we are.
The first time I came in contact with computers was over 20 years ago. I was around 11 years old when I got an Spectravideo 328 from my grandmother, who bought it to learn how to use computers but gave it to me when she realized they were nothing for her.
I got some games with this computer, but since it was not fully compatible with the MSX standard, I soon got bored, and started to learn to code in basic. I never really coded anything usefull, but I was able to understand what the programming was all about.
From that time until today I have more or less sitted in front of some computer daily. In my younger years I spent endless hours playing games, but it was always fun to try to make games by myself. I made several attempts to make a full game, and as soon as the biggest chanlenges were achived, I lost the interest on it and moved forward to new things.
In my early twenties I became very interested in the demo scene. I suppose that, as all of my contemporary fellows, I was specially interested in the innerworkings of a computer, we were attracted to this community of people trying to make things with a computer that were seemingly impossible given the constrainted hardware. I loved to see people say "wow, how is that possible?" when I showed them some cool demo. And of course I was very keen in mastering all the tricks and tools required to make all this happen.
That is how I came in contact with assembly. It was quite stablished that a high-level language compiler was incapable to match a human being when optimizing code, and in fact it was true. Coding in asm made possible many optimizing tricks that made the magic happen. I became so obsessed with assembly that I made it my main development language, used when it was clearly not needed.
While my friends used to have commodore amiga as their computer, I had just a x86 PC. Which was laughable at the time by demo coders. It will never be possible to create good demos for the PC people used to say. There are indeed demos for the Amiga such as State Of The Art, that are, in my opinion, better than the best PC demos ever.
All this changed of course, because the Amiga was slowly dying ( so slow indeed that it is still dying today ), and because some really talented people started to show what was possible to do with the rather crappy design of the PC video hardware ( VGA at the time ). Future Crew showed to the world with their Second Reality demo that the PC was going to be the next demo scene platform.
At that time I was starting my studies in Málaga university ( in the south of Spain ). I really never enjoyed being there ( well, I loved to be in Málaga, just not the university ). Their rather conservative teaching methods were not suited for me ( and not for anybody else for that matter, considering the high amount of student failures, which was at the time over 90% ).
So I spent most of the time having fun with my friends, and skiping lessons in order to be able to code demo effects. I think that the only think I liked of the university was that there was free access to the internet. Internet was back then an unknown thing for the masses, it took several years before I could enjoy it at home. Internet was a source of demos, and also the place to get in contact with all my demo scene idols. So I started to hang around at #coders on IRC, and spent endless days chatting with my new virtual friends.
Soon I joined a demo group, called Mistery, were we attempted to make some demos, and although we produced some cool effects, we never really finished a full demo. I also made contributions to other demo groups such as the spanish K5, with similar degree of success. ( take a look to some ASM code that I produced at the time ).
After a few years in Málagas university I realized that I was not going to be able to finish my studies in an acceptable amount of time, so I decided to move to Sweden, where my mother is originally from, and make a fresh start in Lunds university. Everything went as a charm and I graduated after 3 and a half years.
After my studies I was lucky enough to find the job I actually have at Scalado, were I could use some of my knowledge of demo coding in developing technologies for fast access and processing of images in mobile phones. Mobile phones have today a simimar processing power as the computers of the nineties, and therefore besides giving me a nostalgy kick they became a new challenge when re-solving problems that were of no interest anymore in the PC world.
Today of course I do not code in asm anymore, since compilers have made giant improvements in optimizing code. I essentially use C, which is the master language for mobile phone development, as well as python, which is the scripting languange a I feel more confortable with, and the one I used to developed this website... I guess reinventing the wheel is the story of my life.
See you in my next post.
