The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2020
  Shifter Distortions
Sun 18th October 2020   
A few days ago, I saw on Twitter an interesting link to an article from Mark Wrobel explaining how the classic horizontal distortion effect was done on the Amiga computer using the copper, complete with some source code and pictures to explain it all.

  Mind Bender
Sat 15th August 2020   
Size coding is an interesting challenge: After spending a day at work using a computer that counts memory in gigabytes and storage in terabytes, it's refreshing to go back to basics.

Back in the days, people HAD to write compact and efficient code, simply because the hardware would not allow for anything else.

These days it's more like an intellectual puzzle game, which I find deeply satisfying.

  Optimizing Buggy Boy (2)
Wed 13th May 2020   
Now that the final scroller is finally running at an acceptable speed, the second most pressing issue is the Mandelbrot fractal part.

Optimizing a scroller is just a matter of finding a fast way to copy things around, but optimizing a fractal is much more complicated due to the limitations of the 6502 processor regarding doing mathematics.

2018
  Optimizing Buggy Boy (1)
Thu 15th November 2018   
On the weekend of 2-3 November 2018 the Demosplash party was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

There are not many demo parties in the USA, and even less of these showing Oric demos running on the actual Oric hardware specially with a Cumulus device!

  Job Application
Mon 10th September 2018   
When I moved to Norway in 2005, I kept some of my most precious Oric and Atari hardware, but I left the rest to some of the Oric and Atari people I trusted to put them to good use.

Some of our unreleased demos have since appeared in various compilations after they were found in the old stack of floppies, but now and then they have found some old forgotten treasures.

2016
  Reverse engineering
Tue 17th May 2016   
Thanks to a correct alignment of planets I ended up with a four days long weekend.

I had plenty of things to do, but I decided instead to spend the time looking at how one of my favorite Atari demo screens was done.


2015
  My software history (part 4)
Wed 29th April 2015   

Welcome to the fourth (and last) part of this series of articles.

The previous part was about Eden Games, this new one covers the period from when I moved from France to Norway in 2005 to join Funcom.

This article is a bit different from the others, because I am still working at Funcom. All the content of course represents my personal views, other people may disagree :)

2014
  My software history (part 3)
Sun 16th March 2014   

Welcome to the third part of this series of articles.

The second part was about my time at Adeline Software and Héliovisions Productions, now this entire article will cover the 1998-2005 period at Eden Studios (aka Eden Games).

Help wanted

I joined Eden Studios in October 1998 and immediately started to play with the Dreamcast development kit.

Soon I had my old ZBuffer house moving smoothly on the screen.

  My software history (part 2)
Sun 9th March 2014   

Welcome to the second part of this series of articles.

The first part was basically about what I did before working in videogames for a living.

This one was supposed to cover my first 10 years working in video games, , but I realized that already covering both Adeline and Héliovision was more than enough for one article.

That's a shame because I love round numbers and symbolic dates!

  My software history (part 1)
Sun 2nd March 2014   
Sometimes on IRC you find people you've not met in many, many years. Inevitably at some point the discussion have to go round what you've been doing all these years, if you are still a programmer, where you are working, etc.. etc... and then of course younger participants start asking questions about our older stuff, probably because they are not used to interact with dinosaurs who actually programmed in COBOL, used black and white terminals, and even touched punch cards.

2011
  Communication protocol exploits
Sun 27th February 2011   
If you found this page using a search engine with the hope of finding any relevant information about exploiting things on the Internet, you are going to be disappointed. What I'm going to write about now was relevant only in a now semi-distant past.

I have to start first with a disclaimer: What you will read is related to events that happened a long time ago, when we were young, stupid and lucky. If you try to do this kind of thing now, you may very well do some jail time and have heavy fines to pay as well.

2009
  Atari STe 20th anniversary
Wed 25th November 2009   


In 2005 I participated to the online demo competition organized by the group DHS (Dead Hackers Society). With other members of the group Creators we made the Conflict of Interest demo screen, and reached the 3rd position in the compo.

We are now in 2009, and yes 20 years ago - 1989 - this was the unveiling of the Atari STe. Time to do a new demo !