About Me
Recycling is good so I will use an old post of mine for this:

On Age

My Age Equation from the recent post your age thread:



Ill note that it took ~10mins to formulate and type that equation, most of the time went to typing it...

On Programming Experience

I suppose I really should not be able to relate to DOS programming considering my age in years (20) and when I started programming (1999). I was lucky in that my parents did not want me programming on the modern machine and so I was relegated to using old 386s, 486s and Pentium 133s. I did DOS programming for about 3 years and got to use Qbasic 4.5 & 7.1, Turbo C 2.0, Turbo C++ 3.0, VB 3.0 and DJGPP.

I got to mess with EMS, XMS and 32 bit protected memory [in dos DPMI, I believe],attempted sound using DMA channels [failed] write interrupt Handlers in 16bit asm for pixel plotting and resolution changing and keyboard and mouse handling. It was extremely fun working completely from scratch in ModeX, doing things like hacking into the BIOS to display text, hacking video to plotpixels, page flip [if not enough memory then backbuffering] and having a functional GUI with spinning cubes in a resolution that was not supported in anyway shape of form by the video card and drivers. Also did some win 3.1 GDI programming with vb 3.0. I found this to be an incredibly valuable experience and am quite appreciative my parents thought I would destroy their machine with my programming. I did do some stuff in 32 bit Windows using DirectDraw 4 and Visual C++ 5 [this proved too hard so I switched to VB 6 and GDI32 when I finally got to use the Pentium 166], but only in school and could not do it often because I got in trouble for staying too late there.

I am completely self learned in that I had no teacher. I learned mostly from tutorials, I actually have 4 boxes (3'x 2'x 2') filled with printouts [many from this here Gamedev, which i found in dec 99, didnt register till i felt I knew enough to post sensibly [smile]]. I had only 4 books, Teach your self C++ in 12 Minutes, A Book on C, Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus and a Visual C++ 6 reference guide. Books are expensive and I could not justify the expense to my parents for a hobby that was ruining my performance in school...I have always really liked books though, and have since acquired many books on numerous subjects.

So I got a whirlwind tour of everything I missed [by being born so late (1985)], DOS programming and all its intricracies (XMS and Bios Interrupts), win16 and GDI16, win32 and GDI32, DirectDraw and now Direct3D. Yayy!!![grin]