[VZ-ALiVE] My Stories for VZ ALiVE Where people share with us their fond memories and path into the world of Computers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Name: Juergen Buchmueller Email: pullmoll@t-online.de HomePage: http://www.pullmoll.de Where are Germany you from: Comments: I like your site, and I like the VZ computers. I once had a Laser 110 'machine', which is even one order of magnitude below the VZ200 - but it was fun, though. So you could say I stumbled across the VZ by accident ;) My first Computer Uh, computer... My first personal computer (hehe, not PC, but the first machine I owned) was a EACA Video Genie 3003. It was a clone of the Tandy TRS-80 and I worked 6 weeks at a local factory where they produced PVC cans (for shampoo ect.), foils and things. It was a dirty and hard job - and the first and last time I had to work physically ;-p IIRC this was in the summer of 1979 and I earned about 1500 Deutschmarks (~800 US$) to buy that machine. It came with 16K RAM, monochrome 64x16 display and a integrated cassette recorder. I spent a lot of money buying illegally copied games from a guy. He even had a dual(!!) floppy disk drive and I was very envious. My VZ Experience Actually _none_ :) I never saw one, but I once had a Laser 110. This was the reason why I found your site and the information about the VZ machines. I was really searching for the BASIC ROM of a Laser 110 (and I still _am_ searching for it). Because the VZs are the successors of the Laser 110 and you all provided the information about memory layout etc., it was rather simple to add the driver for VZ200 and VZ300 to MESS. Other computer About one or two years after I bought the Experiences/Stories Video Genie 3003 later, the company where I bought it (Trommeschlaeger Computer Studio) started selling an all new machine, no clone this time: the EACA Colour Genie EG2002. It was also produced by EACA Computers Ltd. Hongkong, and the company asked me if I would write some games for them. They offered to give me my own machine for doing it - and you can say they used me ;) I wrote around 20 - 30 games for the Colour Genie and they always paid me with something like a pair of joysticks, a RGB Monitor and finally a dual 360K disk drive. Well, I thought I'd try to write and sell a game on my own, just to see how it would sell. It was the HIT! I accidentially put an offer in a specialized magazine for computer dealers - I thought it was for the public end-users magazine... but the same publishing house (Markt & Technik Verlag) sold various magazines, and my phone order went the wrong way. I realized this when I received the bill for the advertisment: 350 DM (100$)..phew! But it paid back. I sold about 100 tape copies of my game, maybe between 10 and 15 DM each. I could hardly get enough good (short) tapes to fullfill the requests of the computer dealers all over Germany. BTW this game was CHOPPER, and all this was in 1983. I wrote my own load protection to avoid them making 'illegal' copies from it using the tools which were available for the Colour Genie ;-) Trommeschlaeger Computer wasn't too happy about my own steps, but they saw that I'd deserve a bit more than a handful of (used) hardware as payment for the work and time I invested. Well, this didn't go for too long. I finished school and had not much time for the new machines, because I started to study computer science. About 1984 the Colour Genie was no longer sold at any rates and neither were the games. They started with the next generation of clones: IBM PC compatibles (Genie 16 was the name of the EACA clone with built in CGA graphics). During my time at the university (actually not a university but more of a technical high school, 'Fachhochschule' in Germany) I had a Schneider (=Amstrad) CPC464. The things I learned at the school weren't really new to me - the profs were talking about languages like Algol, Fortran and Cobol. The machine we had to enter our programs on was a DEC PDP-11 (we could optionally use punch cards, woah). I met my first wife during that time too - and of course we shared interests. She had a 'real' IBM PC/XT machine and I was obsessed, not only by the girl (she was my first love, BTW... blush ;) but also by her hardware ;-) During the holidays I started working for a company in Frankfurt. They produced add-on cards for the EGA to allow video overlay of a laser disc (and other video source signals). I wrote a piece of code to access the serial port of the PC and allow steering the laser disc player from their software. They paid me with a HUGE 20MB NEC hard drive ;-) During the following years I worked a lot for them - as a subcontractor, and I got good jobs (read: good payment) in various companies and federal bureaus (I live in the former captial of Germany, Bonn, so I was close to those federal institutions). I could afford different machines (eg. an Archimedes ARM Risc machine, which I thought would be the hit) and I learned a lot more about programming techniques than I probably would ever have learned at the university. When I got my own PC AT/286 (12MHz at that time I think) I also wanted to play those games from the TRS-80 again, which I loved and really missed ;) So I wrote my first emulation for that machine. I did it in x86 assembly language and had a hard time to get it anywhere near the speed of a real TRS-80. This was before I heard about the internet, so the program never made it farther than a local mailbox (probably one or two people elsewhere in germany used it ;) At that time also heard about a european videotext system (CEPT) and started writing a decoder for the almost proprietary format they used. It's similiar to you may know from other countries - it was before the internet rush began. That's where I got my nickname frome too: pullmoll. I used this to login to one of the chat systems. I first gave my CEPT decoder program away for free (XBTX) and - dunno if lead by fortune or beelzebub ;) - included my address and phone number in the main screen. Late I created a better, shareware version and sold it for 50DM (25 US$), and it sold very well over years. The 'competitors' were companies who had to take a lot more money for their software, so my program was the first choice for everybody who wanted to give the system a first try. The rest of the story is pretty confusing. I used all variants of machines, played around with Linux since 0.9x something, learned to write programs for (and started to hate the dependecies of) Windows... In my spare time I'm still addicted to emulation and emulators, and I think preserving how it all began is worth the effort. December 13, 99 22:51:17 (GMT Time) [Back to VZ ALiVE]