@7{My Profile @3}by Craig (Hercules) Daines @5 Some of our older readership may recall some of my technical articles I have provided for@2 THE CRYPT@5.@4 The Dungeon Master@5 kindly offered if I would like to return to the team as Technical Editor and considering the great success of the relaunch of @2THE CRYPT@5 I was very happy to accept@4 The Dungeon Master's@5 invitation. @1 About Me: @5 - I graduated in Business Administration and Information Technology - I have ten years Amiga experience - I replaced Fester as Technical Editor in the more older issues of @2 THE CRYPT@5. - In the past I was a regular contributor to@1 'Amiga Formats'@5 CD-ROM and won 50 quid for best readers program of the month on Amiga Format CD-ROM 27. - I can write Amiga guide documents (and remember most of the tags from memory) - I worked as the main compiler and editor for@1 'The Ultimate UFO Disk Magazine'@5 which investigates UFO sightings. This disk magazine I had worked on was published on Amiga Format's CD-ROM. I therefore have an excellent working knowledge of Andy Gibson's Disk Magazine Creator (@2D@3M@4C)@5 - I possess a good working knowledge of solving most software problems and with customising of Amiga Workbench. I've solved many problems myself regarding OS 3.5. Chances are if you have a problem, I can fix it. I've helped Ray and others out on many an occasion. - I compiled a disk called @1'Game Help Disk'@5 containing many hints and cheats for Amiga games. 17 Bit software many moons ago included this on their CD-ROM ! - I'm fascinated by UFOlogy (UFO sightings) and related literature. - I've been playing guitar for the past 11 years @7 Favourite Music: @5 Mainly 80's electronic music (Gary Newman), modern heavy metal/rock Top 3 Favourite Songs of All Time: Cars (Gary Newman) We Are Friends Electric (Gary Newman) Run To The Hills (By Iron Maiden) @7 Essential Skills Required For Post of Technical Editor: @5 I can touch type at 72 WPM with 98 percent accuracy. The entire QWERTY keyboard layout I can recall from memory. Essential skill required if you want to learn to touch type... @2*3 (Enough, Enough .....You have the job OK? ....@4 The Dungeon Master@2) @1*1 My Main System: @5 EZ Tower Z4 Amiga 1200 EZ Key 2 PC Keyboard Adapter 1x 880k internal floppy drive 2x external 880k Cumana Floppy Drives Apollo 1240/25Mhz, 16 megabytes of Fast-Ram Zorro 4 busboard expansion system AMon Automatic Video Switch For AGA and Cybergraphics modes Cybervision 64/3D MK 2 Amiga Technologies M1438S Multi-Sync Monitor Iomega Zip Drive Cyberdrive 48x CD-ROM Memorex CDRW-2216 Seagate 4.3 gigabyte HD Maxtor DiamondMax 20.4 gigabyte HD IDE Buffered Interface Cannon BJC4300 Bubble Jet Printer (Via Turboprint 7.6) 1 Set of Screenbeat 3 Stereo Speakers Microsoft Mouse (Connected to serial port using MOUSEIT hardware and Sermouse mouse driver), Amiga Mouse Mat, Trust Windows 98 Keyboard Amiga OS 3.5, Cybergraphics v3 @1 My Second System: @5 Amiga A1200 in standard desktop case (no HD or extra memory) :-( Commodore 1083S Colour RGB Monitor Cumana External Drive 1 Commodore A500 mouse (11 years old and it hasn't packed up yet !) @1 Other Computers I Own:@5 A Commodore 6128 (It still works !) @5 A Rubber Keyed 48k Speccy (I don't use this much nowadays, I prefer running Ian Greenway's ASP Spectrum Emulator on my Amiga for playing all my old Speccy Games. I have around 3,000 spectrum games sitting on my hard drive. 1 Amiga 500+ and 2 Amiga 500's (stuffed in the loft at the moment: they still work well though). @1 How I was Introduced to the Amiga: @5 My computing history goes back some way (as far as 1986) when I obtained a Spectrum 128K. My friend Carl and I used to exchange programs we had written. Carl and I began work on a Spectrum game entitled 'The Man From NoWhere'. I wrote for Carl a UDG sprite designer program for Carl's game and we both worked on the games graphics. The project was shelved due to the graphics were terrible. Most of my Spectrum days were spent fiddling with Z80 assembler and typing in hexadecimal listing from Your Sinclair Magazine and Marshall Cavendish's Input series of magazines. Remember those?. I also wrote a menu program for +3 disks. My friend Carl wrote a Disk Manager for Spectrum +3 disks also. In 1990 I had the urge to take my interest with computers further, and left school in 1990 to study Business Administration and Information Technology at Brighton ITEC (Information Technology Centre). @5 I have ten years Amiga experience under my belt. I was first introduced to the Amiga whilst studying for my Business Administration and Information Technology course (back in 1990) at Brighton Information Technology Centre. The college used to be located at London Road (opposite to London Road car park) which was located at the back of Brighton Railway station car park. It was here I met two good friend at the time: John Humphries and Adrian Soanes. John was a talented musician who used Startrekker/Protracker for composing his own music and belonged to a group called 'Cryptic'. Adrian mainly used his Amiga for producing cartoon artwork with Deluxe Paint 3 and playing games. After popping over John's gaff after college and playing Speedball 2 and seeing my first Amiga demo which incidently was the classic Budbrain megademo programmed by Budbrain Productions. I was hooked. Since I was a student I was on crappy YTS (Youth Training Sceme) pay of a snotty 35 quid per week, but still managed to save up 300 pounds to go and buy my first Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.3 and 80 quid for an external drive. Back then that was a ALOT of money (especially if you were a poor YTS student only getting 35 quid a week such as I was). I didn't smoke or drink so saving the money up to buy my first Amiga didn't take too long.. @5 Of course, back then piracy was rife, and hundred of pirated disks use to trade hands amongst all of us at the college (which was rather naughty. I changed my ways many years ago you will be pleased to hear). Most of the computer's at the college were old 286/386/486 machines connected to a LAN using Novell network software. We would use the Novel chat software for chatting to other college students on their computers located throughout the college. Being a youngster at the time (17) there were a group of students (including myself) who were die-hard Amiga fanatics and we hated PC's. Most of our time was spent fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT files on the PC's at the college (I recall I found a program from a 5/14" PC Plus coverdisk which after a set interval would put flashy squares on the screen and lock the keyboard). We had great fun copying this program onto the hard drives and editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT files on all the PC's at the college so this program would be executed at bootup. After 2 minutes the keyboard and screen would lock up and out would come Steve the hippy (our pascal tutor) in his Jesus sandals and long scraggly beard started moaning that someone had bought some virus disks into the college and infected the machines. Rather puzzled, Steve the hippy spent about a couple of hours trying to figure out what the problem was and finally edited out the program from theAUTOEXEC.BAT file and none too amused. :-D @5 Then there was Grant Sunderland: A rather scruffy character in our college group as well. Grant's only atire used to be a red jumper and blue jeans and scruffy hair and always used to come into college unshaven. Grant's main speciality was repairing Video recorders and he hopped to start up his own video repair business. I recall one day just before our database lessons, Grant had bought some porno disks into the college but never bothered virus checking them beforehand. As a consequence he managed to infect one of the PC's with the notorious ping-pong virus (This virus puts a little ball bouncing across the screen and if not removed pronto, used to slow down PC's to a halt). Most of us would get verbal warnings from Dee (one of the head tutors who we nicknamed 'The Devil Witch') for arriving back from lunch late (we would often spent 2 hours looking around Brighton towncentre). Adrian thought he would have a laugh and compiled a floppy disk displaying an X-rated picture which displayed 'Get It All At Tandy's which mounted a RAD (Recoverable RAM drive). The picture would remain on the screen and the only way to get rid of it was to switch off the Amiga. We popped into the Tandy's store one lunchtime down at London road and whilst John distracted the sales assistant, we put the disk into an A500+ demonstration machine that was on show and then pegged it out the shop. The sales assistant wasn't very amused, but it was a laugh at the time :-D @5 At the college on a Friday we had an option as to what we wanted to do. Most students took the opportunity to join the animation classes. The college used crap 486 machines running Autodesk animator (which I thought was crap anyway: DPaint 3 at the time was much better). Mindscape (based at Haywards Heath at the time) visited our college for budding animators. (For those who have never heard of Mindscape they were responsible for producing such brilliant Amiga games such as Moonstone and Alfred Chicken for the Amiga). The PR guy from Mindscape was looking for people to go on work experience with them as animators and visited our college and did a presentation on animation and we then watched a presentation video. John Humphries (another Amiga fan and good friend of mine at the time) produced a good animation using Autodesk Animator of a worm produced using 3D spheres. The PR guy from Mindscape seem impressed and asked John if he had any other work he could submit. The following Friday, John bought in a video of animations and protracker tunes he had produced on his Amiga 500 to show the PR guy from Mindscape. But even back then Mindscape had little interest with producing software for the Amiga. As for John's video he submitted to them, he never got that back. Even back then most software companies were arrogant to the potential of the Amiga. @1 :-( @5 One good friend I met was Duncan Moss who was also in my college group. Duncan also owned an Amiga. Some mornings I would get a lift into college with Duncan rather than catch the train into college. He owned a Metro with a full racing body kit on it. It was about 45 minutes journey from where I live to Brighton (sometimes longer) depending on the morning traffic. I always remembered Duncan as being a good friend with a wacky sense of humour and an infectous laugh. Sadly, after leaving college I lost touch with all my Amiga pals. Three years after completing my college course and leaving college, I was informed by my friend Steve (who knew Duncan very well since secondary school) that Duncan had died in a car crash which came as a major shock.@7 END.