A few days ago, I saw on Twitter an interesting link to an article from Mark Wrobel explaining how the classic horizontal distortion effect was done on the Amiga computer using the copper, complete with some source code and pictures to explain it all.

Size coding is an interesting challenge: After spending a day at work using a computer that counts memory in gigabytes and storage in terabytes, it's refreshing to go back to basics.

Back in the days, people HAD to write compact and efficient code, simply because the hardware would not allow for anything else.

These days it's more like an intellectual puzzle game, which I find deeply satisfying.

Thanks to a correct alignment of planets I ended up with a four days long weekend.

I had plenty of things to do, but I decided instead to spend the time looking at how one of my favorite Atari demo screens was done.

In December last year, the little city of Gouda became once again the home of some very strange people celebrating the 25th anniversary of an event almost nobody ever heard of.

Like last year I spent the last weekend of January at the Global Game Jam.

In total, about 6800 games have been worked on by more than 36000 persons across 93 countries.

Welcome to the fourth (and last) part of this series of articles.

The previous part was about Eden Games, this new one covers the period from when I moved from France to Norway in 2005 to join Funcom.

This article is a bit different from the others, because I am still working at Funcom. All the content of course represents my personal views, other people may disagree :)

Last weekend, January 23 - 25 2015, more than 25000 persons and 78 countries spread over 518 locations created games simultaneously. I was one of them.

The new blog engine is alive!

It took quite some time, and probably has some bugs, but I guess it has reached a good enough maturity level.

Hopefully I will now be able to finish the last part of My Software History without feeling like punching through my monitor!

Welcome to the third part of this series of articles.

The second part was about my time at Adeline Software and Héliovisions Productions, now this entire article will cover the 1998-2005 period at Eden Studios (aka Eden Games).

Help wanted

I joined Eden Studios in October 1998 and immediately started to play with the Dreamcast development kit.

Soon I had my old ZBuffer house moving smoothly on the screen.

And without further comments, here is the storyboard for the intro sequence.

Welcome to the second part of this series of articles.

The first part was basically about what I did before working in videogames for a living.

This one was supposed to cover my first 10 years working in video games, , but I realized that already covering both Adeline and Héliovision was more than enough for one article.

That's a shame because I love round numbers and symbolic dates!

Sometimes on IRC you find people you've not met in many, many years. Inevitably at some point the discussion have to go round what you've been doing all these years, if you are still a programmer, where you are working, etc.. etc... and then of course younger participants start asking questions about our older stuff, probably because they are not used to interact with dinosaurs who actually programmed in COBOL, used black and white terminals, and even touched punch cards.

These few last weeks I've been doing a number of unrelated things: I watched Master Chef on BBC LifeStyle, finished Fallout: New Vegas then started to play Titan Quest, finished a book from 37signals and another from Microsoft Press about project management, and finally spent time reading blog posts on some various famous IT heroes.

In some perverted way it all makes sense.

So, what's the common idea between these seemingly unrelated elements? Well, the common element is the notion of recipe.