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What's your story or How did you get here?
RmBeer2
Member #16,660
April 2017
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Start my first experience with QBasic. A free version from DOS that was accompanied by 4 or 5 demos. I found it quite intuitive. Then I've gotten to understand DEBUG.COM, C64 BASIC, and the Assembler for both architectures.
It wasn't until 2004 that I got the Djgpp with Allegro.
I learned Turbo Borland C/C++ for DOS in 2001 or thereabouts, which I haven't found any difference to QBasic.
More or less around that time was when I was able to connect to the internet using a very expensive telephone modem, I have gotten many versions of BASIC such as GW-BASIC, QBasic 7.1, and many others, also many examples and/or games of QBasic and C/C++ . As well as several manuals that make use of Allegro with Assembler for many screen and audio tricks.
I have also got from the internet a complete manual on all interrupts and I/O ports. Which played with screens and audio to learn all its effects.
With Commodore 64 I have learned a lot since about 1993 or maybe much earlier.

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William Labbett
Member #4,486
March 2004
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I started programming by learning BASIC for the ZXSpectrum 48K, in the eighties.

Bought a PC circa 1999. Got internet circa 2001. Found allegro.

Learnt some C from K&R The C Programming Language and the allegro mailing list. Eventually learnt some C++.

Given up programming and started again many times.

Onewing
Member #6,152
August 2005
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First, this thread gives me all the feels. 8-)

Like many, my first intro to programming was QBasic. And it was glorious. Gosh, I remember geeking out to it. This was early high school days. I then learned about Visual Basic. I remember making a game where these hat-like cars (cus programmer graphics) that went around a path. They would change speeds randomly. It turned into a weird gambling thing where other students started betting who would finish first.

Programming was always about game development. When college time came, I wanted to go to Full Sail University in Florida. It looked like the right school for flexing game dev skills and it was an adventure from home. Parents talked me into going to the local university and getting a computer science degree because it was more practical. /shrugs

During college, I sought anything related to game development I could and my passion for programming grew. I joined the competitive programming team on the B-team and we got to compete in Hollywood. I was never good enough to make the A-team, but I did make the relationship which led to an opportunity. The coach of the competitive programming team recommended me (because of my passion) to the business college when they competed in some kind of new product pitch thing. I think it was called the governor's cup or something (it was a long time ago). Anyway, they had created a board game (that the designer was planning to sell in stores afterward) and I was tasked with digitizing it!

As college wrapped up, a game dev course was added, so I took it. That's when I discovered Allegro and fell in love. It brought me back to my QBasic days. I didn't find this community for a couple years after that.

After college, about 6 months after officially graduating, I chased a dream and joined Iron Lore Entertainment. I was a designer and scripted the cinematic sequences between missions and when finishing a race's campaign. Childhood dream, check! And it truly was everything I had hoped it would be. I fit in with the people, which felt like the first time in my life.

That feels like several lives ago. Shortly after my job with Iron Lore ended, life threw a series of punches that took years to recover from. I'm a product owner now in the Engineering and Technology building of a major trucking company. I enjoy being a decision-maker on what the product should be. Haven't programmed professionally in like 10 years, but work with devs all day every day.

I'm still making games though on the side. Hoping to throw a mobile game on the app store in the next year or two. :)

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Solo-Games.org | My Tech Blog: The Digital Helm

dthompson
Member #5,749
April 2005
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Ha, so funny seeing QBasic mentioned so much here. That was my first brush with programming, but I only used it to do a hello world before leaving it alone.

After that, I can't remember the exact order in which these things happened, but:

  • A friend of my family recommended I learn C.

  • I noticed alleg40.dll being included with a bunch of the games I played at the time.

After that, it was only a matter of time before I created an account here and started embarrassing myself.

Later down the line, I studied Computer Science at uni and left games alone for ages whilst discovered how utterly depraved web programming is.

I finally picked game dev back up in 2017, made a small space shooter, and then finally resolved to give it a serious go in 2020, and against all the odds (inflicted by my laziness), Feral Flowers now exists. 8-)

______________________________________________________
Website. It was freakdesign.bafsoft.net.
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Elias
Member #358
May 2000

I started programming with "Locomotive-BASIC" on a Schneider CPC sometime in the 1980s. Then eventually switched to an Amiga 500 and Amiga-BASIC, and then soon to C (North-C compiler I believe) because it was much faster.

When I first got a PC I did use QBasic for a bit until I found a C compiler again (Turbo-C I believe), finding free stuff was much harder before the internet and involved trading/borrowing floppy disks at school. When internet finally came along I found this djgpp compiler which was much better in many ways and came with a library called Allegro 3.12 preinstalled...

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

Joel Pettersson
Member #4,187
January 2004

I haven't been active here since the mid-00s, but when I found my way here, it was after finding Allegro (around 2004?) and using it for a few hobby games and other things, which never developed beyond something for me to play around with. And basically, I become engrossed in trying out ideas for the engine of a simple game I made and making a little scripting language for it, to the point where I stopped making something to play using it. I got the simple things I tried to do working but they were messy.

A few years earlier, I'd first experimented with programming and begun to learn it in 2001, playing around with BASIC on an old Amstrad computer that used to belong to my grandmother, getting QBASIC from a friend and using it on my PC, and also trying out some command-line C++ programming.

My interests changed and I drifted away from here after 2007, though, becoming focused on making some hobby audio effect plugins in C++ (and later mainly programming in C), while abandoning my old few ideas for games. In 2011, I began a different kind of hobby project, basically a scripting language of my own for (initially) mainly FM synthesis. I returned to that and have been working on newer versions of it since late 2017.

Once in a rare while over the past year or two (I don't remember exactly), I've had quick looks at this place, mostly out of curiosity. I've thought about adding something to say "hello", and this thread now seems the place.

Currently, I'm quite literally gearing up to make some noise, using a simple and fast way of my own to create something close to proper white noise, but with random access to positions in a noise stream without needing to stuff random values into any array. While I have audio in mind, I think maybe people who play with graphics or adding noisy variation to some types of generated structures may find it useful for that.

My programmer story is the story of my hobbies, because those are all I've done. Sometimes I wonder whether I'll find some related job eventually, but I'm also thinking of returning to and finishing my unfinished undergraduate computer science and engineering studies, which I left behind some years ago. I find some areas of math challenging to study, it's been a stumbling block for me, but I also want to learn more of it, it seems more interesting than working on problems for some company simply to help that company make more money.

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