The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2023
  Encounter and unfinished projects
Mon 14th August 2023   
When I started working on the Encounter upgrade project, I received equal parts of interest and also deep interrogations. With this article I hope giving some context and make my motivations clearer!

2019
  The Oriclopedia
Tue 3rd December 2019   
This is now December, and I decided to take a break with the Oriclopedia videos, so this is a small summary of what was published this year.

  The Oric Tape Nightmare
Sat 23rd November 2019   
Let's talk about tapes, more specifically "Oric Computer Programs Stored on Tapes".

If you follow my Youtube channel, you know that I do have a significant amount of original Oric software on tapes, and that I've been buying tape players.

  Modern Retro Software
Sat 29th June 2019   
If you visit the Oric.org software page, you will quickly notice that the top 10 is mostly filled by software written after the commercial life of the Oric company.

Unfortunately, these high quality pieces of software have never been released in physical form - they only existed as digital files usable on emulators -, something I really was not happy about.

  Power Brexit
Sun 6th January 2019   
A few months ago, when I started collecting Oric software, I realized that my old tape deck was starting to be very tired and unreliable. Then I spotted an auction for a "Binatone Data Recorder", which apparently had been recently serviced with new belts and power cable.

The form factor also seemed ideal to fit on my desk without taking too much room... the only problem was that it had one of the annoying UK plugs that require an adapter to fit in EU mains.

Time to fix that.

2018
  Tape Storage Hacking
Thu 1st November 2018   
I recently started collecting some specific pieces of Oric software for some future projects of mine, and obviously when you have to pay the "eBay Collector Premium Tax"(tm) you would rather not have all your tapes get crushed, broken, or fade out because of the sun.

The solution is simply to invest in some adequate storage systems, which ideally would also pass the "partner test".

  A Beginner's Guide To The Oric Atmos
Sat 13th October 2018   
Sometimes you buy stuff on eBay and you get disappointed (broken or incomplete things, ...) but sometimes you discover some little gems you did not even know existed.

A few weeks ago I bought some Oric games, and on a whim asked the seller if he had some other Oric related stuff around. All he had was the Oric Special Autumn 1984 issue of Personal Software, but that seemed interesting enough for me to buy it as well.

  The hidden cost of making videos
Tue 4th September 2018   
Earlier this year, I was told that it would be "kind of cool" if I did some videos to show how I developed my Oric and Atari projects, instead of just writing blog posts and forum updates.

The first real test was in February when I did a few hours of live streaming during the Global Game Jam 2018.

2016
  Global Game Jam 2016
Sat 6th February 2016   
Like last year I spent the last weekend of January at the Global Game Jam.

In total, about 6800 games have been worked on by more than 36000 persons across 93 countries.



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 :)

  Global Game Jam 2015
Mon 26th January 2015   
Last weekend, January 23 - 25 2015, more than 25000 persons and 78 countries spread over 518 locations created games simultaneously. I was one of them.

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.

2010
  Random notes about Community Management
Thu 14th October 2010   

Foreword

I was really not planning to write anything about Community Management, mostly because I did not consider myself as a Manager, and certainly not a Manager of a Community.

I more or less revised this position few weeks ago when after having released 1337 and posted messages on the various relevant message boards and forums we then started to receive messages and comments asking how Defence Force was working, how such a small community managed to release such large and polished games (compared to for example the Thomson and Amstrad communities), and if we could help them by making games on their own machines!