Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: Ed Federmeyer Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk Subject: Re: How did you get started??? Date: Sat, 02 May 1998 11:39:39 -0500 Organization: (no organization) Lines: 38 Message-ID: <354B4C4B.31F2@charlie.cns.iit.edu> References: <354a636a.1323252@news.scea.sony.com> Reply-To: fedeedw@charlie.cns.iit.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: charlie.cns.iit.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0C-GZone (Win95; I) Michael Klucher wrote: > What's your story??? :) For years I got my hands on all the old console "grey area" development info I could: Atari 2600, ColecoVision, NES, SNES, Genesis, etc. Developing for these systems was a hacking dream come true, but a software engineering nightmare! You litterally need to do stuff like desolder ROMS from old game carts, and replace them with sockets and EPROMs, etc. You needed to find cross assemblers and cross compilers (only ever got a C compiler for the Genesis, everything else was assembly!), and get it all working yourself. You even needed to write all your own graphics converters, music routines, etc. The technical challange was awesome! By day I was a mild-mannered software engineer, following ISO 9000 process, doing functional specs, design docs, code reviews, etc. But by night, my dual personality split into a mad hacker, following nothing but his whims and his insane quest for knowledge! Bwa-ha-ha-hahaha!!!! Ahem, sorry, got carried away there. :-) Shocking, yes, but programming the old consoles was a hobby I really enjoyed, just so I could say "I know how they did that". I think I first heard about Yarouze (the olde spelling) in Next Generation magazine, and they even featured a cover story on Net Yaroze a few months before it was available. I signed up on the web the day it was announced, and sent off my money the very day I got the sign-up kit in the mail! I was not about to let an opportunity like this slip by! Now I know how they make Playstation games! :-) EdF