When I started working on the Encounter upgrade project, I received equal parts of interest and also deep interrogations. With this article I hope giving some context and make my motivations clearer!

Now and then somebody speaks of the "game" Shadow of the Beast and uses it as an example of something the Amiga range of computers could do but the Atari ST could never dream to achieve.

This is totally true: Even with all the time and talent of the universe, there is no way a standard Atari 520 ST could compete, in what is after all mostly a technical demo designed to exploit every single feature the Amiga had.

The actual point of contention is regarding if the Atari ST port of Shadow of the Beast was as good as it could possibly have been considering the usual constraints of time, budget, etc...

When I moved to Norway in 2005, I kept some of my most precious Oric and Atari hardware, but I left the rest to some of the Oric and Atari people I trusted to put them to good use.

Some of our unreleased demos have since appeared in various compilations after they were found in the old stack of floppies, but now and then they have found some old forgotten treasures.

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.

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.

In 2005 I participated to the online demo competition organized by the group DHS (Dead Hackers Society). With other members of the group Creators we made the Conflict of Interest demo screen, and reached the 3rd position in the compo.

We are now in 2009, and yes 20 years ago - 1989 - this was the unveiling of the Atari STe. Time to do a new demo !