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!

  Time Commando - The Saturn version
Tue 7th March 2023   
When Time Commando is mentioned, the PC and PlayStation versions are the first that comes to mind. These two were built internally at Adeline Software and where released around the same time.

But this is not the only version: There is a Saturn version of the game, published by Acclaim for the Japanese market.

2021
  Adeline's LibMenu
Fri 21st May 2021   

At Adeline Software it was easy to jump from one project to another, start helping, or even take over a tool because things were standardized.

  Starting at Adeline Software
Fri 14th May 2021   
Adeline Software was my first video game employer: I guess I could have started in a much worse place!

  Pitching Riders
Tue 11th May 2021   
After years of working on racing games, some people at Eden Studios wanted to do something "more creative", so some designers and artists worked on some pitchs for new games.

  Time Commando Marketing
Sat 1st May 2021   
Time Commando was released in July 1996, and since my old Time Commando web page only had small resolution pictures, I decided to make some new scans on fan's requests on my Youtube channel, a bit in advanced for the 25 years anniversary of the game release.

2020
  Half a Life in Video Games
Sat 4th January 2020   
Time flies.

We just entered 2020, and since I started working at Adeline Software in January 1995, it means I've been working in the Video Game Industry for 25 years, without a single interruption... and since I'll be celebrating my 50th birthday this year, it also means I've spent half of my life doing it.

2019
  Shadow of the Beast
Sat 12th October 2019   
Now and then somebody speaks of the "game" Shadow of the Beast and uses it as an example of something the Amiga range of computers could do but the Atari ST could never dream to achieve.

This is totally true: Even with all the time and talent of the universe, there is no way a standard Atari 520 ST could compete, in what is after all mostly a technical demo designed to exploit every single feature the Amiga had.

The actual point of contention is regarding if the Atari ST port of Shadow of the Beast was as good as it could possibly have been considering the usual constraints of time, budget, etc...

  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.

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.

  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
  Meet the Carputer
Sun 25th September 2016   
If during your childhood you dreamt of having a car that could talk like in Knight Rider, you may soon be satisfied.

Considering how fast the technology improves, fully autonomous cars are not far ahead, but that's not going to magically transform a 50 years old car into a talkative friend!

  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.


  STNICCC 2015
Sun 17th April 2016   
In December last year, the little city of Gouda became once again the home of some very strange people celebrating the 25th anniversary of an event almost nobody ever heard of.


  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
  Blogging about the blog
Sun 27th April 2014   

The new blog engine is alive!

It took quite some time, and probably has some bugs, but I guess it has reached a good enough maturity level.

Hopefully I will now be able to finish the last part of My Software History without feeling like punching through my monitor!

  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.

  Time Commando The Storyboard
Thu 13th March 2014   
And without further comments, here is the storyboard for the intro sequence.

  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
  Are Cheap Androids An Electric Dream
Mon 16th May 2011   
Last Christmas was tough on my netbook. The travelling around, the trains and planes being cancelled or delayed, the packing and unpacking, the plugging and unplugging, and the occasional knocks finally killed my good old and trusty Asus eeePC 901.

More exactly, the screen decided to die.

  Simple C++ threading
Sun 20th February 2011   
For some reason, people tend to think that creating multi-threaded applications in C++ is a very difficult thing to do.

It is in fact not that difficult, but there are basically two main issues to consider: How to make the code correct (it should not crash, deadlock, corrupt data, etc...) and how to make it efficiently use as many cores as possible.

2010
  The cooking process theory
Wed 15th December 2010   
These few last weeks I've been doing a number of unrelated things: I watched Master Chef on BBC LifeStyle, finished Fallout: New Vegas then started to play Titan Quest, finished a book from 37signals and another from Microsoft Press about project management, and finally spent time reading blog posts on some various famous IT heroes.

In some perverted way it all makes sense.

So, what's the common idea between these seemingly unrelated elements? Well, the common element is the notion of recipe.

  Hacking confessions (part 3)
Sun 5th September 2010   

First a disclaimer: What I'm writing here now is related to events that happened a long time ago, at a period of time when it was relatively safe to do it, the worse that could happen would have been the expulsion from the school. 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.

The beginning of the end

If I'm not mistaken, this article will be the last in the confessions category. After that I stopped experimenting, mostly because I had no good reason for doing them anymore.

  Hacking confessions (part 2)
Wed 25th August 2010   

First a disclaimer: What I'm writing here now is related to events that happened a long time ago, at a period of time when it was relatively safe to do it, the worse that could happen would have been the expulsion from the school. 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.

Up the ante

I wrote in the previous part there would be two parts, but considering that I miserably failed at writing, reviewing and publishing some of my longer essays, I decided that writing instead few short ones each dedicated to a particular issue would be more manageable. So here we are, expect at least a third one :)

The previous episode happened during the last year I spent in High School, this one happened three years later when I moved to Laval for my BTS Informatique de Gestion. The year is 1991, the place is the Lycée Douanier-Rousseau, a pretty Ok place to be considering how boring Laval can be.

  Hacking confessions (part 1)
Sun 22nd August 2010   

First a disclaimer: What I'm writing here now is related to events that happened a long time ago, at a period of time when it was relatively safe to do it, the worse that could happen would have been the expulsion from the school. 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.

Self made man

I'm one of these people who learnt by themselves most of what they knew about programming before working as a professional programmer. Sure I learnt a lot after I started work, but before that I did university mostly to get a diploma: Except methodology, and formal methods, I can't say I learnt much.

  I can see the wall out there
Sat 23rd January 2010   
... yes, there is a wall.

We've been told for a while that the wall was here, and that we should prepare for it. Get the equipment ready, get the bodies and mind in good shape, this kind of thing. But well, you know how it works, we tend to wait until the very last moment before we change our habits.

But sometimes changing the habits is not enough. Sometimes you need more than that, you need to find alternatives that works... assuming they actually exist.