On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 06:42:49PM +0100, Miriam Ruiz wrote: > I also want to encourage everyone in the Team to post a brief intro on > themselves, and also (if they want) other people in the mailing list > that might be interested in the project. Hi, It's quite some time ago that this thread started, and I really should add my introduction to it. So here it is. :-) I'm 31 years old, and I live and studied physics in the Netherlands. I have been programming since I was about 7, when my father bought a commodore 64 for his work (well, I think it was really for fun, but he also did some work things with it, probably for tax reasons). A few years later we got an MSX computer, and that's where I really started programming. First in basic, later in assembly. I started playing and making games, and later tools which allow making games. Later still, I got also interested in electronics, and nowadays I also like to combine software and hardware. I really like it when I make something and it does what I wanted it to do. This is even better when it's about a physical thing. On the other hand, electronics can break in ways that I'm very happy software can't (overheating, vibrations, interference, ...) so I'm really "a software guy who does hardware", not the other way around. I'm also interested in security, and therefore in the Hurd: the idea of the Hurd is to allow the user to do things without needing to get a sysadmin (assuming he should have the permission, of course). That is good from a security point of view (because root is hardly ever logged in). The current Hurd is based on the Mach microkernel, but we're thinking of changing that into a capability-based microkernel (which is extremely good from a security point of view). To get a feeling for this, and to play with it, I made my own microkernel. It's more or less finished, but not very usable: it can only play nethack. :-) If you're interested in details (or helping with the design and/or code), please contact me privately, since it's very off-topic for this list. :-) Games I really liked (and partly for nostalgic reasons still like) are most of the games Konami made for the MSX. If you want to try, you can use the openmsx emulator and get the rom images somewhere from internet (officially illegal, but well, IMO after 20 years copyright should long have expired... See the link below or search the web if you want to try) One of the really good games from them is "Metal Gear" (which became a series, the last versions of which are for playstation). The reason I like that, is that it's not about shooting everything in sight, but instead about sneaking around and stealing things from an enemy base without being seen. In 1987 that was a very new concept. :-) They also made some cooperative multiplayer games, such as Salamander, Quarth and Twinbee, which I also really like. Games I play are solitaire (actually, mostly spider and seahaven) and other "simple" games (samegnome, glines, gfingerpoken), wesnoth, cuyo, nethack, monsterz, and probably some I forget. I often play games quite intensively for a while, and then not at all for a long time. In the team, I'm maintaining GFingerPoken (gfpoken) and gnujump, and looking at anything I play (and sometimes things I don't play). However, due to other interests, I'm not extremely active in the team. As a DD, I also do some sponsoring, although I want to do more of that as well (which doesn't automatically mean I'm going to; it takes a lot of time :-( ). Finally, I'd like to make a request: I would like to create some new games with a group of people. My idea is to think of game concepts together and implement them. They must of course be licensed under a free license, I'm thinking of GNU AGPL 3, but we can discuss that. Since there're a lot of different things to do, I think any language, library and toolkit can be used. Personally, I have a preference for C++ with gtkmm, or as a second option C or C++ with SDL. As an initial project, I'd like to create a clone of "Crazy Train" by Sony, for MSX. If you want to know what it is, you can get it (which, AFAIK, is not illegal, although their putting it there probably is) from http://www.rom-world.com/dl.php?name=MSX_1&letter=C The idea of the game is that you are a train on a sliding puzzle (like the "15" game). All the sliders have tracks on them, and your train follows them. On the sides are stations which you have to pass. If you reach the end of a track, your train breaks. The controls are simple: you can slide the puzzle pieces, thereby rearranging the tracks (or moving the train). To make it harder, there are also ghost trains coming from stations which you don't pass in time. Hitting them also costs you your train (but making them hit each other destroys them). For a better idea, you should just play it. :-) If anyone is interested in making new games together, or in making this clone in particular, please let me know. If things work out, we should probably register a new alioth project for it, because it's not what this team was set up for. :-) I hope that if you didn't know me yet, you have a bit of an idea who I am now. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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