Intro

I still remember seeing the intro to Microprose Soccer way back in 1989. I can’t even remember who coded the crack intro now, but it and the other intros I saw that year and later gave me the inspiration to try my hand at the amazing graphical effects that were being done. The irony is that a lot of the intros were techologicaly more advanced and better looking than many of the games at the time.

About two and a half years ago I first stumbled across a free version of Unix called Linux. At the time I installed it, a friend of mine installed it to do some mud coding, but we were working on limited hardware. I had a 2 speed CDROM which wasn’t supported (Win95 didn’t either, so naaahhh! 🙂
It didn’t last long on my system but then RedHat 4.1 was given away on a magazine cover and I installed it on my new P133 and I haven’t looked back since. I’m downloading
Star Office in college right now and it’ll hopefully be finished by the time I get into college on Monday. Once that’s installed the only reason I’ll have to run Win95 is Quake2, and once a bug fixed version of that game is released for Linux.. the sky’s the limit 🙂

The attitude in the Linux community is to share and spread your source code so others can contribute and help make your programs better. It works too. Take a look at The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an insight into this mindset and a different way of developing software.

Unfortunetly the demo scene is nothing like this. Although there’s a huge amount of documentation on demo effects, with plenty of source code, it’s a much more competitive environment to be active in. Source code for demos is rarely released, and coders jealously guard their work. The demo scene of course doesn’t lend itself easily to the Linux/Free Software philosophy, but it could.

This site is going to be all about code, algorithms, tools, compilers & cross-compilers, innovative ideas, and more.

Initially I’ll give you links to my favourite sites on the ‘net for coding and most of them will be directed more towards Linux/Unix than DOS/Windows. Thankfully there has been a major effort on the part of Linux coders to create portable code and apps so there should be something for everyone here.