Who is Gaz?
Gareth Murfin is a self taught computer user from Newcastle, UK. He established Alpha Software in 1995 and since then has produced many quality (and crap!) freeware & commercial Amiga titles. He is one of the biggest Amiga fans around and has the 37th ever A1200 'Power Up' Board and he also has the 5th ever Amiga 'Chronograph' watch costing £170 (argh!), there are only 55 in the world! He is currently studying Computer Science at Stirling University. Programming languages he uses include Blitz Basic, Arexx and other Amiga specific languages (Installer, AmigaGuide etc) aswell as Java/JavaScript and OPL/16 (Psion Palmtop programming language). From time to time Gaz also freelances for Amiga Format magazine, the worlds biggest selling Amiga magazine. Gaz will continue to support the Amiga for as long as he thinks it is the best computer platform, and lets face it with the current competition, that's going to be a l-o-n-g time! (Click here to read Gazs 'Why Amiga?' speech)
Things he's done you 'might' have seen/heard of :
Software : Gloom 3 - Ultimate Gloom, Zombie Massacre, DWaRFx & various Amiga Freeware titles
Articles : series of Quake articles in Amiga Format, IRC special in Amiga Format & various reviews & features.
Click here for a picture of Gaz (coming soon)
Click here for Gaz's Curriculum Vitae
Gaz's Amiga Setup:
A1200Tg Power Amiga with BlizzardPPC 603e+ 240 Mhz & 68060 50 Mhz
with MMU & 50 Mhz FPU. 48 Meg Fast Ram, 2 Meg AGA Chip Ram and
8 Meg BVisionPPC with 3D Permedia2 Gfx Chip.
PPC SCSI-II expansion - Flatbed Mustek 6000SP Scanner / Ricoh MP
6200S CD-ReWriter, 4.3gig Samsung HD, Epson Stylus 400 Printer,
17" SVGA Digital Belinea Monitor, Mustek VDC Digital Camera,
33.6k External Trust Modem.
CPU Spec : 603e @ 240Mhz is 338.4 MIPS & 68060 @ 50Mhz is 82.5 MIPS,
so Total MIPS is 421
GFX Card Spec : 1 Million Polygons/Sec or 80 Million 3D-Pixel/Sec,
Max Resolution : 1600 x 1200 & 8 MByte SGRAM at 230MHz
ouch! :-)
Other computers owned :
Between me and my 2 brother's we've had every computer under the sun (heh!) including numerous Spectrums, PC's. Amiga's & Atari's. My Dad even talks of the days when he had a Vic20 and Zx81 :). In the house at the moment we have 3 PC's & 5 Amiga's. I prefer my 'Power' Amiga which I have upgraded beyond belief, it really is a dream machine now. The PC's sit in the corner gathering dust.. (actually my bro's and dad use them quite a bit). Ive also got a Psion Siena Palmtop which is really cool, its got proper pre-emptive 16 bit multitasking similar to the Amiga's. It can even run Word / Excell in its 512k memory and still have RAM left over to do many other things, obviously its not running WindowsCE then :-)
My fave console's have to be the Atari Lynx which was easily the best hand held ever, the Amiga CD32 - the ground breaking worlds first 32 bit CD console, The Phillips CDi - The most amazing graphical RPG's in the world, and finally the SNES which in my opinion was the most playable thing ever, far more playable than psx, saturn or N64. Oh yeah I always wanted a NeoGeo and never got one, its still got its pride of place in my mind :-)..
Gaz's favourite software packages:
Amiga Software : Amiga Workbench v3.1, Diskmaster 2.1c (before it was ruined by someone else!), Launchpad, Fkeys, PPaint, Dpaint, Miami, AmIRC (& DWaRFx of course :]), iBrowse, Yam, GoldED, Blitz Basic, Elastic Dreams, OptyCDplayer, KillClick, CacheFont, MUI (its good with a GFX card and crap with AGA). AmigaAMP (it rocks with the Ferrari Skin!), Play16, PowerSnap, ClickToFront, Cyber/OxyPatcher, Wblogo, AmiGreet (is it wrong to love your own software? :-D)
Games: Gloom Deluxe (my fave doom game ever!), Quake, Settlers I, ThemePark, SuperCars II and plenty more!
PC Software : Although obviously very little software on the PC is even worth using I have seen a few which stood out, such as : Kai's PowerGoo, Word7 (yes I actually love it!) and Quake2 (grr!).
Screen grab of Gaz's OS
The first grab is of my Workbench after booting up, this is before I run any software. The backdrop is pretty cool, as its a mixture of real photo's and 3D art, no I didnt draw it, some pro artist guy did. The second grab is of my OS in full swing with loads of programs running smoothly and Multitasking nicely, show me a PC which can do this! :-)
