About me
Tratax is a nickname for Henk-Jan Ober, the origin of the nickname is unknown
I was born in Leiden, Holland, at 6 July 1976, my current residence is
Uithoorn, a small town near Amsterdam.
I made first contact with programming at the age of 8, when I got a
MSX1 computer, which had a very good build in basic. After using only
the basic 'bload "cas:",r' command, I begun developing my own little
loader programs, and ended up writing a 6000 line program that asked
10 multiple choice questions. I guess I did not hear about the 'DATA'
statement, subprocedures or code re-use then. At the age of 12, the MSX
was put away to make room for an amazing Amiga 500 computer. There using
amos basic, I finished a little tank game, that I had started on the
MSX.
After starting in 68K assembler, and writing simple demos, using the
graphics made by a very good friend, I switched to Amiga 1200, and
later a PC. 68K Assembly got traded in for 80x86 assembly, and I then
quickly switched to C, after the first few weeks of C courses at
my computer science study. I wrote a BBS program for the amiga, since
I didnt like the existing ones. It actually ran quite well for a while,
until the harddrive crashed, taking the one and only source away.
After my traineeship at Planet Internet Holding, I decided to keep working
at the research and development part of the company, while trying to
finish my computer science study.
I have developed an addiction to the power of Internet, but still, developing
Internet applications is not like writing entertainment products. I my little
spare time, I worked on a 2D racing game on the PC for DOS. Most developers
were starting with games under windows, using DirectX. After the horror of
having to support multiple videocards and multiple soundcards, I can
understand them. But then, Windows '95 crashes on my system. Something to
do with my videocard, scsi card, and network card all on the same IRQ.
So I just worked on application programming, and started using Linux.
Then I heard about Net Yaroze. Good old memories of the Amiga came alive.
Not just one big CPU, and support for multiple graphics devices, but
dedicated hardware ... ... dedicated for running GAMES.
Looks like I have some catching up to do in the game programming field!