The story of Ziggy
RECOLLECTION issue 3
The Beginning
It was a scorching hot summer holiday. Six weeks off school and nothing to do but spend time. January 1985 was a turning point for me.
The year before had been my last year in primary school and my next door neighbour had gotten a Commodore 64. We spent sweltering days on the carpet of his living room playing Hot Wheels, Lode Runner, BC, Archon and a host of other games. It was magic what this computer could do and the sound from this thing was amazing - I would just listen to the sounds sometimes.
I had been lucky enough in the previous two years to have some exposure to computers at school and at my father's job at the university. I also learnt to write BASIC on the Apple II at some summer courses over the previous two years. Computers were the only thing which managed to keep my attention for more than 5 seconds as my hyperactivity (ADHD) caused constant trouble for me at school and home.
Because I responded so well to computers, my mum thought that I should get one and after that summer with the neighbour's 64. She thought that the latest model would be a good investment and on the 21st of November 1985 I got my first computer; the Commodore 128D.
December 1985
I bombed my end of year exams in the first year of high school. The week I got my computer was two weeks before those exams and I remember playing Commando over and over. Soon enough though, the summer break came around again and another year had gone. It was January 1986 and it was another scorcher of a summer.
I had started my software collection by borrowing some disks from my neighbour. Not much time went by before I wanted to do more with my computer than play those familiar disks. I happened to discover that Ken, my neighbours Dad, was a member of the local computer club. I thought it would be a good chance to try new things and use their software library to see some new things on my computer.
I met Nick at the first Commodore Club meeting I ever went to. It was a friendship that was to shape the better part of my life and one which I never fully appreciated until it was gone. Nick was about four years older than me and he was a great 'people person'. He was very social and loved the Commodore. His openness and social nature meant that he was always meeting different people interested in computers. Some of them he started swapping Commodore disks with.
Nick and I would pour over all the disks he got looking at each game and utility with awe. One of the things which set our imaginations alight was the intros on some of these games with great designs and effects. Then one day we got our first demo disk. 'Last Title' by the Electronic Cracking Association was the first real demo I remember seeing and that was around the end of 1986.
Up until the end of 1986 I had relied on using BASIC as my programming language and using mysterious PEEKs and POKEs to manipulate graphics and sound and I really didn't know what it was all doing inside the computer. The 21st of November rolled around again and that year my Mom bought me a KCS Power Cartridge. This device changed everything. All of a sudden I could see this thing called Machine Language through a ML-Monitor but I did not understand all these numbers and letters. It was not until two months later I stumbled upon the Commodore 64 Reference Guide that it all finally fell in to place. That book was the bible for the Commodore - everything from the BASIC I knew to machine language, op-codes, memory maps, bit masks even chip cycle timing and schematics. Literally everything. I spent weeks on end in my room writing assembly code directly in to the monitor trying to understand how these special effects I kept seeing in demos were made. In February 1987 The Excellence Crew was born. I called myself Ziggy Stardust and Nick called himself Da Grim Reaper.
Around about a month later a guy called Ian moved in around the corner from my place. We started out swapping disks but then one day I saw Ian drawing on his 64. It was the most stunning pic I had ever seen. I asked Ian to join TEC and he was a member for about a year until his father had to move to Newcastle but to be honest he was not really interested so much in making demos, he was just a good friend and a great influence. He was a very focussed guy who would completely dedicate to whatever he did. That kind of focus was a dream of mine since even though the computer had seemingly stopped my hyperactivity it had not changed my inability to focus. Coding anything took me a long time.
Nick met more and more people further afield through his disk swapping. During this time I met three highly influential early Australian Commodore programmers; now to be honest I have forgotten the real names of these guys, but that doesn't have much bearing on this story so I will use their old nicknames. The first guy that started showing me good assembly techniques was Ramjet. He also introduced me to Turbo Assembler. The assembler was different to the monitor because it would allow for labels, start points and a whole array of other features which directly hacking the memory of the computer would not give me.
The second guy who was not only influential to me but a whole generation of Australian programmers was Deviet. He was a train driver who didn't seem to want much out of life but he was gifted. He really understood the hardware of the Commodore and could do amazing things which seemed technically impossible from everything I had read in the Commodore reference guide. He was also very generous and spent a lot of time on the phone with me teaching me how many techniques were achieved. I finally started to understand.
1987 Demo of the Year
Deviet also did something which changed the Australian underground programming scene fundamentally. Around the middle of 1987 he started the Demo of the Year project. A demo disk which would have demos from all the Australian groups. I got the completed disk a few months after I had sent in our entry and found out about a whole new world. All over Australia there were guys just like me and unlike the underground scenes in Europe and Scandinavia, we had no idea about each other. We were all isolated by distance, but this project had brought us all together. The Queensland Copy Federation, Tour De Future, Reflex, Warriors of Time, The Inner Circle, The Force to name a few. All different places with one crazy passion.
There were only a few really stand out performances on that Demo of the Year disk. The isolation most of us suffered had apparently inhibited the collective quality of our work. The two guys who really made something special were Matt from Tour De Future and Deviet from Warriors of Time. I think that my demo may have been the worst.
1988 BIG Changes
When I turned 15 there was a big change in my life. My hyperactivity and single minded focus on computers had seen my grades free-fall at school. My parents didn't know what else to do but send me to boarding school to live away from home for years 10, 11 and 12. I hated this idea as I would no longer have access to my computer. Up to this point it had been turned on EVERY DAY at least for a few minutes and sometimes days at a time - since 1985 without missing one day ever! This was a big change.
My friend Nick also sold his Commodore and got an Amiga 500. It was great checking out what was happening on the Amiga scene having come from the C64. There was also a great connection for me personally; Remember the first demo I saw was ECA's Last Title? Ever wonder why it was their last title? They moved to the Amiga and one of the first intros I ever saw on the Amiga was an ECA intro. It felt like seeing an old friend... Anyway, me and Nick were still best friends but I was going to be seeing him less and less.
I got shipped to school in Sydney and hated it. People didn't like me at all because I was not like them at all. I did no sport and I was bad at school too. I couldn't even fit in with the nerds! But as usual the nerdy people are usually the most kind too and they accepted me as being a crazy computer guy. I missed Nick but barely saw him. I could only come home one day every two weeks.
Now, by the time 1988 had come around I was trading with many people in Europe. When I say trading - I mean we would trade 5"25? disks. It is hard to remember the days before the internet but the postal system was the only way to trade software other than the BBSes run by many groups... I still think there was something amazing about packing up disks for people you didn't know only to have them send you things back. Like having a birthday every week with surprises.
Whilst there were always games and cracks on these disks that were swapped - the thing which motivated the swapping was trading demos. I would still pour over every demo on every disk trying to figure out how they did what they did. I had a passion for animation and code systems and seeing each demo with different techniques for creating real-time special effects had me captivated. Boarding school put a big dent in this - trading once every two weeks when I happened to be home was pretty lame.
Towards the end of 1988 I got glandular fever and had to stay home at the end of the year and miss my exams. I could not have been happier! I started making up for lost time - I didn't care if I was sick. It was so good. Trading every day, time to code, time to read issues of Zzap! Compute! and ACM... - (hello to Andrew Farrell; thankyou for such a great mag) - life was good.
Illegal '89
After reading about the parties which were bringing the European cracking groups together in the hundreds I thought that we should have a "copy party" in Australia. I was hugely inspired by these stories at the time.
For the uninitiated, a "copy party" used to be an event where everyone would swap or copy software with all the cracking groups. They were really starting to evolve around the end of the 80s and become less about copying disks and more about programming. Writing "demos" or demonstrations of what you could do on a computer. This was the "demo scene"...
There was already a long established history in the European "demo scene" of having programming competitions at their copy-parties by the time we organised our party in 1989. These 'compos' are now the central aspect of the modern-day parties where over 10000 people come together every year at events like Assembly and Breakpoint to compete with each other writing demonstrations of visual effects engines and music which push the limits of today's hardware. Today's events are a far cry from the copy-party influenced by the cracking scene of the 80s. They are commercial events where hardware manufacturers like nVidia, ATI and Intel sponsor competitions which show off the power and feature sets of their products. There is also a huge crossover between the modern demo scene and the game developer community where demos translate to show reels for software developers.
But I digress... Since I was in Sydney most of my week back then (boarding school), I went looking for somewhere to host our party. I found a great boy-scout hall in Lane Cove which was far enough away from neighbours to not disturb them. It was perfect...
I made an invitation demo with Nick and sent it to all my contacts to spread. The word got out and we started coding our demo for the party...
Party Demos
I then started writing the TEC party demo. The role of the "party demo" is to compete with others as I mentioned earlier - but generally the idea is to complete writing the demo from pieces of code at the party event itself and just make the deadline in time for judging. All demos in that era were in a scene based format; that is - imagine each scene of the demonstration is one or two special effects running in a loop. Multiple scenes are put together in a specific sequence - but the computer just sits waiting for the user before progressing. Once the user was ready they would hit space and go to the next scene. This format leant itself to the idea of a scrolling message - a lot of the time the special effect would be applied to the scrolling message itself - as the effect would be simple and looping there needed to be something to engage the viewer. The scroller was a source of information between authors and a way of providing recognition amongst groups with a list of greetings at the end of these messages to other groups authors knew. The great thing about writing a scroller at a party was that everyone would come along and have a say. It made them very entertaining reading and a central piece to documenting the crazy events which happen at a party.
Let me digress further just one more time to explain the evolution of the modern demo. Within a year after our party in 1989, the 'trackmo' concept evolved on the Amiga demos in 1990 where the tracks would be loading off the disk whilst the computer ran the special effects on screen at the same time. Due to the careful timing required, the interactivity was removed and the scrolling message format largely dropped from demo design. Within a year or so the IRQ loader became the norm on Commodore 64 demos too which facilitated a similar outcome to the design strategy on Commodore 64 as had happened to the Amiga demos. Scene based demos with scrollers were seen less and less. Today demos are generally written using timeline based engines which treat the demo more like a film. The scroller is a thing of the past unless someone is trying to make a throwback reference to the old-school demo scene. Now, back to our party preparations...
We had great responses from a lot of groups and found out about a bunch of guys living in Sydney we never knew about who were coming along to the party. Of course the Australian geography did get in the way of the event being as big as it could have. Many people from Queensland and South Australia could not come.
The party finally came around. Nick and I set up the location with tables and power and people started arriving. As I was only 15, I needed to have my father chaperone the event and, of course it was non alcoholic. The problem of course is that when you put twenty or so teenagers in a hall for a 24 hour party things are bound to go crazy no matter how nerdy you all are.
The party was off to a great start as Nick and I began meeting all these guys. Things went a little crazy around the middle of the day when a bunch of guys from The Inner Circle based in Canberra turned up pissed as farts. They were so drunk and rowdy they got kicked out and caused a hell of a stir. At this point my dad was starting to have some concerns about my big idea.
Once the sun went down the coding got serious. Matt from Tour De Future was totally focussed and most other 'coders' (aka programmers) were doing their thing. The guys from TSS went out and we had no idea where they went - they were gone for ages. My father went to sleep in another room and we tried not to wake him up as best we could but we had to have music and everyone was still joking around so he was up and down out of bed like a yo-yo. Luckily he fell asleep around 2am when the police turned up with the boys from TSS. They had been out on a late night tagging spree and got busted. The guys stayed with the officers whilst they waited for their parents to turn up. Then they were gone...
The funny thing about the guys in the Sydney demo and cracking groups is that all of them were getting in to hip-hop and graffitti culture at the same time. Matt and the other guys from TSS and Delta Cracking Crew had already established solid tagging styles. Tagging is where you write your name or tag on walls or trains or other property which is not yours with markers or spray paint. It seems like a cool thing to a teen but its something I find more and more disgraceful the older I get.
My tag styles were like most other things my ADHD little brain tried to do ... dreadful, but about a year earlier I had started getting in to DJing too and I was passionate about the whole hip-hop culture like the way the demo scene excited me. Needless to say I was impressed by these guys tagging skills. I loved the letter form of tagging and proper graffitti art, the cartoon styles with crazy perspective views and the use of colour. Even though I was not immediately good at graffitti style art I kept on it for years until I was. I still find I tag on paper when I am on the phone and most other people would draw doodles. Damn, I'm digressing a lot...
Dawn came and none of us slept for more than a couple of hours including my father. I learned on that day that my father was just not made for partying - but luckily he missed the 'deal breaker' of the cops turning up so things were still going. That next day was a great networking day where we had well and truly broken the ice between us all. We had all spent a crazy night together - the cops came, the music played and we had shared coding, demos and games. It was a great buzz even though everyone was absolutely exhausted. One key person I spoke with was Paul aka Colwyn from The Force. We got on really well and I was impressed at his ability to globally network for software trading; he was the sort of guy who seemed to know and have everything a month before it was released. More on The Force later...
The demo competition was great - Tour De Future won first place, The Force got second and The Excellence Crew came third. The truth of it was that Matt from TDF had excelled way beyond the calibre of the other demos at the event and had firmly set a benchmark in design, code and overall aesthetic approach which would remain for the following five years. There were certainly better separate artists, coders and designers in one way or another but Matt managed to keep it consistent and all in one aesthetic package. Tour De Future later joined with Reflex and shortly after became Tera - the group under which Matt released his best work.
I think that if nothing else, Illegal 89 was an event which was a milestone for me in taking a risk with a community of people I didn't know and I am glad I did. I have many wonderful memories of that weekend - none more so than the fun Nick and I had as mates mucking around and unashamedly being nerds! I miss him.
Off The Rails
Teen years are a funny thing. It seems like anything is possible and nothing can hurt you. It's a heady daze with hormones racing and the new world of the opposite sex opening up for the first time. It's funny because with all that potential and adventure ahead of us is usually where we make our biggest blunders. I think in my case I went about proving this with a vengeance.
I met a guy called Danny through Nick and he was much older than me. He was a local DJ in Wollongong and when he first met me he seemed nice enough. I was blown away by this guy's studio - I had never seen so much sound gear. He had great musical knowledge to back it up and up to that time I had never done music training of any kind. I was already in love with my idea of the night club scene with electronic music I started finding. It was a whole new world - a world where a DJ gets a lot more social acceptance than the recluse programmer.
I had grown up listening to Commodore 64 and Amiga music which had hard electro sound with influences coming from the new romantic pop of the 80s. In retrospect, the sounds of industrial bands like Nitzer Ebb and Severed Heads combined with the 303 laden sounds of Acid House made for a very familiar feeling to the SID sounds of the Commodore.
At that point in time, Danny was nice enough to teach me how to DJ using vinyl records at the local nightclub called Underground. He would let me in the staff entrance before the club would open and I would use that time to learn a bit before he started work. Today, Underground has been closed down after multiple problems with violence - but back then it seemed safe and friendly. I still have a comfortable feeling whenever I am at a closed nightclub with the stale smells of smoke, booze and paraffin from the smoke machine. It seems like another world away from everything.
I met so many crazy people at that time in my life and I started focussing more on music and less on the Commodore. I also finally aroused enough intestinal fortitude to ask the girl around the corner to be my girlfriend; Jeanette.
These interests of mine - combined with still going to boarding school meant it was hard to get time to swap and code on the Commodore - but I was still persistent about trying to swap, learn to code better and keep in the scene. After the Illegal '89 party I started swapping disks with Colwyn and after a couple of months he asked me to join The Force. At that time The Excellence Crew was pretty dormant and Nick was not too involved on C64 things after having his Amiga for a while. I joined.
My Commodore saw less action as I spent my weekends with my girlfriend and DJing. The rest of 1989 saw hardly any coding done by me. Over the school break at the start of 1990 I wrote a demo called Gittin Funky and a few other releases like a note maker. The art in the demo was heavily influenced by graffitti art and whilst it was simple it was a demo all the same.
One of the first European groups I swapped with was Maniax. They broke up in '89 and members joined a French group called Atom. Gogol of Atom had written all the music for the Illegal '89 party demo. During 1990 I wrote my first program that was sold for money (It took a looooong time for me to become business minded, I wrote an intro for Atom for a grand total of US$20... even though I spent about 2 weeks getting it just right.) It had a great tune by Mixer of Albion and all visuals were synchronized to the music routine. The swinging logo was a sort of graffitti style thing, it had multi-speed multi-direction scroll message using a FLD (flexible line distancing) bounce effect and with the exception of the music speed it even worked on NTSC and PAL. I was very pleased with the outcome. I even wrote an editor and linker package so they could set up intros for releases without knowing any code.
At the end of 1989 I was allowed to bring my computer to school and at the start of 1990 - what was meant to be my final year at school - I got to have my computer in my own room. I think I have never ever done that bad at school ever before. I just did not care about it at all and my half yearly physics exam saw me get 4%! Chemistry was about 10%... Nobody did as bad as me. Meanwhile I was writing Animated Artistry, a mega demo. Each scene would have effects that pushed the limits of the '64 (for me anyway) like huge sideborder scroller effects, interlaced colour animations, IRQ loader... I even relocated an entire song using Reyn Ouwehand player by hand using a hex monitor. I was doing the best my hyperactive, hormone laden little brain had ever done.
I was still crazy about DJing, trying to collect records, drawing lots of graffitti outlines and tagging and still seeing Jeanette. It was all a bit of a blur - it got totally out of hand when I decided to try finding somewhere to practise DJing in Sydney. I found the dinky little club at 77 William Street called the All Night Boogie. I started practising there some weekends and the two barmaids that ran this place were nice to me.
I was still friends with Nick - at this point I was really caught up in DJing and trying to be cool and had lost sight of what his friendship really meant; like I said - things were becoming a blur. I also met Larissa around this time. That's when things turned in to a train wreck... Nick and I did a party at All Night Boogie and we even had his Amiga doing video effects on the screens, it was huge...and I thought I was much better than I really was. My DJing skills were good - not great - and I was very, very naive. I left Jeanette for Larissa soon after this and I dropped out of boarding school and got kicked out of home.
I actually believe I had a guardian angel with me for the next months as I met some crazy people, lived from house to house and somehow survived without ending up dead or in jail. I met street life; as green as I was - and survived. I was robbed at one point but thankfully never had any harm come to me. I also DJed at all sorts of clubs like Dome, Kinsellas and the Freezer.
Eventually I ended up coming back to Wollongong and staying at Nick's parents' house. He looked after me until I could reconcile with my parents and even helped get me my first job working as a sign writer when vinyl lettering systems just came out. Nick did so much for me and I don't think I ever thanked him properly for the huge help he gave.
After a short period I got sent to a partner company of the vinyl signage business which was a neon company in Redfern; my job was to get them set up with new generation vinyl systems for their light box work. For those that don't know Sydney, Redfern was the roughest worst part of the city when this story takes place 16 years ago.
I was saving up to get DJ record players - Technics SL1200's; so I would sleep at the warehouse I worked in and clock up some overtime. I was used to late nights programming so would work at the factory and just heat up tinned food over a candle for dinner. I would sleep on the light table where we did the neon tracing (back in the days when you would do a neon layout using paper). There were a few more times I gave my guardian angel a good workout whilst working at that place - especially walking from the train station at night...
On the days I went home after work, I would stay up finishing my demo at night. It was tough since my work was 80km from where I lived and I had to catch the train so I would leave home at 5am and return at 8pm. It was nice working on the demo and was what still inspired me at a more intellectual level than DJing.
Around this time I finally released my demo called Animated Artistry for the Commodore as well as a few utilities. Unfortunately at this time I was going to rave parties waaay too much and Larissa was the worst influence on me. I was lost and really had no purpose. In the midst of this chaos my performance at work fell through the floor too. Eventually I got fired for my stupidity and finally had an epiphany. I realised how much time I had wasted doing what was just not me. It was time to get my life back on track.
I enrolled myself in the local high school near where I lived about a year after I dropped out from boarding school. I used my DJ skills to run parties in my local town to pay my way through this second chance. I was finally home and things seemed more normal. I had all but lost touch with the demo scene and Nick through this whole ordeal and missed them both.
It would be another two years before I had enough strength in myself to get rid of Larissa from my life but in the mean time I started my journey to adulthood by taking responsibility for the first time. I had taken positive steps to get my education complete and make something of the gifts I had been given.
I started writing my last demo for the Commodore called Digital Psychosis whilst I was at school the second time. This was by far the best demo I had ever written as my ability to concentrate had improved a little and I understood more code techniques than before. The only thing I regret about this demo was that I released a version with Vorpal file system. To this day I cannot remember how I got the Vorpal developers disk but somehow I did and I released my demo to all the contacts I had left as a Vorpal disk. Vorpal is a fast loader system created by the game company called EPYX which can load from disk over 20 times faster than normal 1541 disk without extra hardware. Its amazing technology but I did not realise it's also a form of copy protection. Only certain nibbler copy programs could duplicate the disk. Fast Copy would not work and as a result this demo was never widely spread.
Time went on and eventually I passed my high school matriculation exams and started my computer science degree at university. I had become much more social since I had gone to school and there were many new challenges in my life. I also finally figured out that Larissa was no good for me at all and got rid of her the first year I was at uni. She had managed to sleep with many people I knew as friends, Danny included - even Rock from The Sharks! I felt like an idiot... University was time for a new chapter in my life, but for this new chapter the Commodore sat quietly in the corner of my room. It would be five years before a renaissance.
Regards,
Ziggy/The Force.
