The History Of Huckstepp Software

       Programmer : Paul Huckstepp        Playtester : Friends

The beginning

It  all started when I had a Spectrum 48K, most of the time I would
program   little  things  that  didn't  do  much  exciting  things,
eventually  I  managed  to buy a 128K +2 and also an Opus Discovery
3.5"  disk drive for it, I continued to program in the excellent at
the  time Spectrum 128K Basic, after a while I got bored of that so
I  moved  to the amazing Laser Basic from Ocean which gave the home
user  the  abilty  to  use  sprites very easily, I programmed a few
games  none of which were released mainly because you couldn't send
them anywhere.

A new start

One  day  I said to my dad that it was about time we caught up with
the  rest  of the world and upgraded, and I didn't mean a +3.  This
about  the  time  I was half way through my secondary school years,
and  I  had  a friend that had a 386PC and another that had an A500
AMIGA, I didn't really like the PC because of its business look and
crap  desktop,  the Amiga however had multitasking and looked good,
so thats what we got.  Naturally we kept the speccy so that I could
continue  programming,  but  for some strange reason once I had got
the Amiga and started using that I gave it up, so we sold it.

The  Amiga  now  took precidence.  I started looking at Amiga Basic
but  that is seriously Sh** to say the least so I wanted to find an
alternative,  AMOS  was  to  be that alternative.  I went to see my
cousin  how  had  been  using an Amiga for several years and he had
AMOS  v1.2 and so I convinced to let me borrow it and I had a look.
Strangely  enough  I got on with it really well and discovered that
the  language  was  not disimilar to speccy basic but naturally was
thousands  of  times better.  After using it for a bit, i found out
that  512K was not enough so I got a 2Meg upgrade, that at the time
was plenty.

Oh  and  did  you know that the cheese rangers database on Whats Up
Doc was programmed by my cousin using AMOS, no, well you do now.

It  was  from  here that Huckstepp Software was born.  I designed a
logo,  a  basic  radial fill in Dpaint inorder to make a planet and
then  the  company  name  running  around a ring.  Its nothing like
todays HAM8 logo but I was still learning.

I  wanted to start programming properly so I started off basic with
a  trivia  quiz, and released it as PD through the execellent 17Bit
Software.  (Disk 2659)

I then tried a fruitmachine, but it didn't get anywhere.

The A1200 was shortly released by the late Commordore (who now have
their logo on Escom printers)

I  kept a close eye on the Amiga market and discovered that the new
A1200  was the place to be, the A500 was dieing.  Then came the big
upgrade.

Today  I have what I like to think of as the professional users set
up and there is only a few more upgrades that I would like to have.

My current set up is:

        Amiga A1200 with 6Mb of RAM and a 177MB Hard Drive
        A Zappo CDROM at V11.2 and a Goliath Power Pack
        A 14inch Moniter, two 25Watt speakers, a 9-pin dot
        matrix printer, a stereo master cartridge, a hand
        scanner, one extra disk drive and a FPU.

        Amiga A600 with 2Mb of RAM for use when Im at College
        and for Serial games

I hope to be changing my printer shortly for Ink Jet Colour.

And  I am now programming bigger and better games all the time, and
the  Total  Domination  series  is  just  the start, I also hope to
program    an   AGA   version   of   either   TotalDomination2   or
TotalDomination3, but I just have to see.