Hi everybody!
Long time lurker, first time poster.
As the headline reveals, I'm from Denmark.
Like most here, I grew up with Commodore computers. I started getting into programming and graphics quite early and wrote my first crude games on the Commodore 64 in BASIC and COMAL80 around age 9. I made the jump to the Amiga when somebody brought an A500 to the rogue after-school computer club that my math teacher had set up in the school basement. Three things were shown: Another World, Shadow of the Beast and Budbrain Megademo. I was completely blown away and started doing awful demos in collaboration with a few friends before I got my own Amiga at age 13.
For half a decade, all my time was spent messing around with demoscene stuff, tracker music in ProTracker and OctaMed, as well as graphics and animation in Deluxe Paint. I loved the Amiga so much, I was one of the four people who went out and bought a CDTV, costing me every morsel of dough I'd saved up, and after the massive flop of that machine, I went ahead and bought a CD32 (Come on, ask me for stock tips!)
Due to crippling nostalgia, I have managed to keep my Amigas to this day, but after enough poor purchase decisions, I finally switched to PC in 1994, getting a 486 DX2/66Mhz.
As with the Amiga, it was the games that sold me on the PC - in this case, Day of the Tentacle and Doom. Doom and Doom II ended up consuming an endless amount of time as I started building my own WADs and finally total conversions. As Doom fell out of fashion, I carried on, but also got into more modern 3D games, which kicked off my interest in the hardware side of things. Together with a small group of friends I started tinkering with overclocking and pushing hardware as far as I could. In the mid-nineties, there were no commerically available solutions for that sort of thing, and we were learning as we went along. We started taking apart mini-fridges to harvest Peltier elements to cool down CPUs and jerry-rigged PSUs together to provide enough power for our haphazard cooling solutions. We even experimented with running systems in a fishtank filled with cooking oil as a passive coolant.
The whole thing kicked into high gear when I got my first 3D accelerator - a Matrox Mystique - which ended up getting dumped like a hot potato once a friend brought over an Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 card a few months later to show me Tomb Raider. Barely able to fathom the mipmapped goodness coming out of that card, I ended up selling my Mystique right then and there to get myself a Voodoo 1. For a few years, I ran a rigorous upgrade schedule, usually replacing major parts of my system once a year. In the mid nineties to early 2000s, even six month jumps in processing speed and graphics accelerators were -tangible-.
As I reluctantly got dragged into adulthood, I never lost the passion for hardware; it just shifted to consoles for a while due to time constraints. However, it was when I started viewing a bunch of Lazy Game Reviews episodes as comfort food around 2013 during a particularly bad year, that my heart started racing for old computer hardware once again. I started bringing my discarded boards and cards out of storage, picking up bits and pieces here and there to build myself a small, but potent arsenal of capable machines to run my favourite games of yesteryear.
...Which brings me to your doorstep, where I humbly bid you all hello and hope you'll take me into your fold.
Kind regards,
- Odin
Long time lurker, first time poster.
As the headline reveals, I'm from Denmark.
Like most here, I grew up with Commodore computers. I started getting into programming and graphics quite early and wrote my first crude games on the Commodore 64 in BASIC and COMAL80 around age 9. I made the jump to the Amiga when somebody brought an A500 to the rogue after-school computer club that my math teacher had set up in the school basement. Three things were shown: Another World, Shadow of the Beast and Budbrain Megademo. I was completely blown away and started doing awful demos in collaboration with a few friends before I got my own Amiga at age 13.
For half a decade, all my time was spent messing around with demoscene stuff, tracker music in ProTracker and OctaMed, as well as graphics and animation in Deluxe Paint. I loved the Amiga so much, I was one of the four people who went out and bought a CDTV, costing me every morsel of dough I'd saved up, and after the massive flop of that machine, I went ahead and bought a CD32 (Come on, ask me for stock tips!)
Due to crippling nostalgia, I have managed to keep my Amigas to this day, but after enough poor purchase decisions, I finally switched to PC in 1994, getting a 486 DX2/66Mhz.
As with the Amiga, it was the games that sold me on the PC - in this case, Day of the Tentacle and Doom. Doom and Doom II ended up consuming an endless amount of time as I started building my own WADs and finally total conversions. As Doom fell out of fashion, I carried on, but also got into more modern 3D games, which kicked off my interest in the hardware side of things. Together with a small group of friends I started tinkering with overclocking and pushing hardware as far as I could. In the mid-nineties, there were no commerically available solutions for that sort of thing, and we were learning as we went along. We started taking apart mini-fridges to harvest Peltier elements to cool down CPUs and jerry-rigged PSUs together to provide enough power for our haphazard cooling solutions. We even experimented with running systems in a fishtank filled with cooking oil as a passive coolant.
The whole thing kicked into high gear when I got my first 3D accelerator - a Matrox Mystique - which ended up getting dumped like a hot potato once a friend brought over an Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 card a few months later to show me Tomb Raider. Barely able to fathom the mipmapped goodness coming out of that card, I ended up selling my Mystique right then and there to get myself a Voodoo 1. For a few years, I ran a rigorous upgrade schedule, usually replacing major parts of my system once a year. In the mid nineties to early 2000s, even six month jumps in processing speed and graphics accelerators were -tangible-.
As I reluctantly got dragged into adulthood, I never lost the passion for hardware; it just shifted to consoles for a while due to time constraints. However, it was when I started viewing a bunch of Lazy Game Reviews episodes as comfort food around 2013 during a particularly bad year, that my heart started racing for old computer hardware once again. I started bringing my discarded boards and cards out of storage, picking up bits and pieces here and there to build myself a small, but potent arsenal of capable machines to run my favourite games of yesteryear.
...Which brings me to your doorstep, where I humbly bid you all hello and hope you'll take me into your fold.
Kind regards,
- Odin
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