WarlordQ Computers
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In my child hood
Early computer days
Born in Melbourne, Australia... Started programming in BASIC at the age of 8 ( 1979 ), back then most people didnt have computers, yet alone program them.. warlordQ spent most lunch hours typing in BASIC programs on the schools computers... Later on started to progress in learning CP/MWiki Explanation ( Control Programming for Micro-computers )... In those days hard disks were in huge boxes which were located in another room, crazy stuff!!! Hard drives have certainly changed over the years....
Later on warlordQ started learning 8 bit Assembly... Wow!!! what a speed boost!!! Wheres the slow down button??
- LDA, INC, BNE, JSR, BEQ, <<--- what are these??
Sounds more like cryptic code, than anything else i can imagine... if you think that couldnt get any worse, think again... an insane amount of time was spent typing in opcodes from code listings found in numerous computer magazines, and not one of them was less than 10 pages, all hex numbers.. Ohh yeah there were a tone of spelling mistakes, and not one of them could be located, its was like trying to find a needle in a hay stack!! what was i thinking???
The Amiga A500 era
It wasnt long before i got my hands on a Amiga A500, things changed for the better, and i started getting into C programming... Now my programs were doing cool stuff... it was my first introduction into the joys of 3D programming... my dev kit had a cool set of 3D libaries that somebody created which was also a part of a language called Amiga E... i was completely blown out... The Amiga was way ahead of its time, it was fully multitasking, had a math co-processor to take the strain off the main CPU... Lightwave 3D started to appear on the Amiga with a price tag of $2000... Back then it took days to render 1 scene, it was mad stuff!! i never got into "Lightwave", but my freind created a lot of stuff in it...
My first PC
I couldnt wait any longer, i was just drooling at what the PC was doing.. Multimedia with a higher graphics resolution and Soundcards, CD roms... My appetite was wet with anticipation.. I played Doom Shareware at a freinds place and was blown out!! At that time i had computer technicians reference manual ( 1,000++ pages - this book is way outdated now ), and knew a lot of the hardware back then.. anyway after reading the manual thoroughly, i didnt want to buy a normal PC, instead i lashed out a got the most expensive motherboard money could buy, as i only knew too well, that the motherboard is important to the overal speed of the system... If you compare a cheap motherboard to an expensive motherboard using the same CPU, Ram, Hard drive, etc.. the difference in speed is quite amazing... my computer was able to run programs smoothly, while my freinds faster computer struggled to run the same programs... my computer lasted a very long time before an upgrade was warrented...
When i got my computer home, i was pissed off at the technicians who installed windows... it took 10 minutes to boot my computer everytime.. it was a hardware conflicting problem, i couldnt believe that the computer technicians had let a computer out of their shop in this poor condition... also they installed a lot of junk that i didnt need, and my hard drive was in 1 partion... My computer was using windows 95 in which the CD drive was unbootable...
My first time Installing Windows 95
After 1 day of usage i couldnt take it anymore, i decided that i will re-partion my hard drive and re-install windows myself.. it was my first time and there was nobody around that could help me should anything go wrong... my first step was to re-partion my hardrive in 5 partions, re-boot so the new partions could be detected, and reformat all partions and make drive C: bootable...
So far so good... then i copied all CD-Rom drivers, from the "CD-Rom drivers floppy disk" over to my C: partion.. that was the good news... Now all i needed was a proper config.sys file and an autoexec.bat file and all will be good... I couldnt find any dos editors ( i wasnt looking hard - and i didnt know too much about windows )... I had a Big problem!!! no editors that i could find, and a bad Autoexec.bat and config.sys file i copied from the Windows 95 CD-Rom... my computer was just a black dos screen and nothing else... What did i do?? I kept on thinking i should not have re-installed windows, i almost cried... I asked a few freinds, how can i get my computer going?? Everbody i spoke to, didnt know anything... I was stuck!!! Then i rembered a freind of mine he had a computer, he was using windows 3.1 on and old 386.. i asked him about dos editors, and he copied one onto a floppy for me... cool!!! i rushed home and fired up the dos editor and changed the autoexec.bat and config.sys files...
Now it was time to see if my computer was working since i destroyed it in the morning... I tookout the floppy disk, and rebooted from the hard drive... Awesome stuff!! It booted into dos and my CD-Rom was accessable... This brang a smile to my face, as i knew from this point on its going to be smooth sailing... I installed windows 95, and did a few hacks to speed up the settings...
the hacks i did are: ( right click my computer: properties - click on performance )
- click on File-system - typical role of system - select "Network Server"
- CD-ROM - Cache size = ZERO... select "No-Read ahead optimization"
- Virtual Memory fixed size - min and max both = 600MB
Explaination of the hacks:
The server filesystem caches everything, and this speeds up your file read/writes when accessing anything on your drives as they are cached in ram... The speed of the CD-Rom drive are a lot faster than the cache, so i basically disabled the cache and read directly from the CD-Rom, the speed difference is amazing... The virtual memory is a lot faster if its a fixed size... Reboot and enjoy a faster system....
Programming in C++
The only C++Compiler the local computer shop had was C++Builder 1.0, which was an integrated RAD C++ Compiler that used the VCL Framework... I bought the last copy they had, and played around with it... shortly after that, i did a "masters in Programming in C" course and learnt quite a bit about the PC...
It wasnt too long before i created a lot of software for the PC, and started to create developer libraries... In one of my libraries, i created was a Jpeg library that i built for the VCL Framework in C++Builder... Part of the abstract requirements of a graphics class in the VCL is that the descendant graphics class has to create a palette, this is needed for file conversions in another format... i couldnt get away with just the jpeg stuff, i had to build a quantantization helper routines in the jpeg library, for it to seemingly blend into the VCL nicely... i was so immediately spellbound by the jaw dropping dithering capabilities of my Jpeg Library... that i decided to create Dither...
Download Dither... See if you can spot the difference from the original and the dithered one...
Screen Babe 95 - version 2.0, was the very first program to use my jpeg library.. it used special library files which contained over 100 images in them... it took me days to scan these images in!!! what an insane idea!!! the library files can be chained together, and also contained a compressed scratch pad for storing user data...
Screen Maker builds the special library files used in Screen Babe 2.0... Screen Maker used the plug-in code from Screen Babe, to read and write Library files
Screen Babe - 3.0.. was my latest incarnation, it used my best ever dithering libarary, which could dither an image down to one color... If you dithered an image down to just 16 colors, it would still look awsome!!!
