Memories

Bonz

First of all, let me introduce myself. My handle is Bonz and it is the first time I write for this or any other diskmag. I am 21 years old, which makes me a bit older than the average scener. And I am Italian, which makes me some 1500 km far from the barycenter of the scene.

My first computers were a VIC-20, then an 8088 PC and an 80286. Some cracked games introduced me to intros -- nobody is without sin -- and it was love at first sight. Yes, they were not so interesting compared to 2nd Reality or Unreal, which were being released in the "real" scene those years, but yet they were a nice eye candy for a 12-year old guy who dreamt about becoming a "computer programmer" just like Dad.

Here in Italy modems were not popular until five/six years ago because the Italian telephone society imposed exaggerate taxes on the users, so I barely knew what a BBS was and had no way to look at real intros and demos. I could only imagine what they could have been, I imagined those marvelous textured rotating polygons and lightning effects and scrolling landscapes and warbling vortices and some real good music in the background... and also imagined the day I would have done something like that too.

I had no tutor because the scene was virtually absent here, and no modem also meant no tutorials, but I went on. I learnt assembly language and started coding some scrollers in Turbo Pascal + assembly. When I wrote some other program it was cool to put one of them in it and say "look at this thingy, it is assembly language". Too bad I was eons behind the scene else; at school we did little more than quadratics, and you know, at that level the math behind demos is pretty hard to discover. So I gave up demo coding -- but that was not going to be farewell, I promised to myself...

...two years later. The Italian laws for modems have changed and good old Bonz has an Internet connection. He eagerly looks for tutorials and collects a good number of that. At 18 he knows how to do a fire, a plasma, even how to texture polygons and do Phong mapping, all in assembly language; he codes a polygon filler that screams: he has a Pentium II and a 386 at home and his little programs are equally smooth on both. But everybody else now has OpenGL and Direct3D, who will care about some spinning Gouraud-shaded cubes? And his copper bars flicker too much under Windows. :-(

Nobody. So he gets a C compiler and try to code something that does make sense in 1998. But it is not as fun. He is deeply sad, but his moral goes up when he looks for the first time at Mesha, by Picard. So he's not the only one who thinks the old way is more fun than DirectEverything -- it plainly looks like there are some other crazy people around. A quick search for "Picard" on Google brings up past results for the Hugi size-coding competition series. Huh, finding the 1,000,000th prime number? Looks interesting. In an hour he has a 107 byte program -- a far cry from Picard's 80 bytes (yes, he is taking part in the compo too) but he has finally found home.

Now, the moral. Some years ago it was plain that the real juice of coding is in taking a computer to the extreme -- no matter if it is its graphics hardware, its microprocessor's speed, or its instruction set. In my most humble opinion, if the scene is going a bit loose it is because current computers don't encourage you enough to find these extremes. The next time you want to find a great idea for your production, try to challenge yourself, like you simply had to do a few years ago. It will be fun.

Bonz