January 2008 – Page 3 – Something Odd!

I used to go by the handle, “Xeer”. It’s under that name that I coded Commodore 64 demos many years ago. There’s even an entry for me on the C64 Scene Database! Exciting times then, but I’ve often been asked where the name Xeer came from. Now I can reveal it’s very obscure origins.

You may have heard of a space trading game called Elite that was released in 1985. If you haven’t, then don’t worry. You’re a youngster aren’t you? It made serious waves in the games scene for many years and even spawned an awful sequel on the PC a couple of years ago.
Anyway, I came across the game a few years after, probably in 1988 or ’89 and was hooked! I have to be honest, I preferred the shoot-em-up parts to the dry and boring trading bits. Games never lasted very long but it made a lasting impression on me.

One thing led to another, and I became interested in the C64 demo scene, but I needed a handle. Luckily I came across a few cheats for Elite that gave me infinite fuel or some such other nonsense and went looking around the galaxy. Here’s what the galaxy looked like back in the late 80’s.

While exploring, I came across the little planet under the cursor above. Can you guess what it’s called? Yup, Xeer. Here’s the info sheet on it.

I haven’t seen any large yellow bug-eyed frogs about anywhere but I expect they’ll show up sooner or later.

More Xeer trivia: The traditional Somali Constitution is called Xeer, although the linked page on combackalive.com makes little sense to me. Anyone from that region know more?
For the Elite fans: The Zzap64! review.

I’ve been writing online for 10 years. Well, strictly speaking it’s longer than that because my Geocities site was last modified in 1997 and it’s still alive. I might yet import that site into this blog at some stage. Thankfully I had enough of HTML frames after that. I created a simple site on indigo.ie in late 1997 but then moved everything to http://members.xoom.com/xeer/ which later became members.nbci.com and is now long gone. xoom.com is now quite a different site!

I called the site DemoNix. It never had permalinks, but I did update it with a Perl script that built static html pages with a basic theme and then FTPed them to xoom.com. That script and the build files are long gone but thanks to the Wayback Machine I recovered a fair portion of it. All the original content I could scrape together is now in the Demonix category on this blog. I generally wrote about Linux demoscene news, code tutorials, gossip and my first 2 GPLed projects: “Time Sheets for Networks” and “Install Sendmail”. TSN as I fondly called it doesn’t exist any more but it was my 4th year college project. It was terrible. Buy me a pint some day and I’ll reveal just how bad it was. I wrote Install Sendmail because Sendmail was such a bitch to configure in those days. It was wildly popular, even being linked from the Fetchmail homepage. It still exists although the download link is now broken. It’s a sign of the times that nobody has complained about that.

Dave Polaschek recently reminded me that the web was a much smaller place back then. It was much easier to be noticed and get to the top of the pile if you posted consistently and well. My DemoNix site was read by many and even linked from a Slashdot story about Bladeenc in 1998. I’m sure it’s a simple coincidence that members.xoom.com went offline around the same time for a day or so ..

I could write more, but it’s all contained in the archives of this site. Everything from enthusiastic exclamations about the latest demos or code snippets to the short announcement of my mother’s death in December 1998. I still remember the email Mark sent me after I made that post. There were no comments in those days.

As this is a self indulgent look into the past, grab a Commodore 64 emulator and download donnchac64.zip. It’s a collection of demos and bits and bobs I wrote (or co-wrote) on that machine from early 1992 to late 1993.
Emulating a Commodore 64 is not without it’s problems. “Awareness of Reality” doesn’t seem to load properly in Vice. The speed loader I used doesn’t like the emulator and I have yet to figure out what the “left arrow key” is on a PC keyboard. That key is used in AOR and “Ionsai on Gealach”, my award winning Galaxians mod! It’s great to hear those old tunes again though.

10 years down, many more to come I hope. I’m now a dad, married to my beautiful Jacinta and work at the cutting edge of blogging with the WordPress folks. Great times.