Inteview with Chaos
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Chaos Mega Interview - page 1/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT I've found another interview victim! This time it's Chaos/Rebels(ex.Sanity)! He coded the famous 'Elysium' demo and is on the second place in the coder charts of Eurocharts. These are reasons enough to make an little interview with him. But the thing became bigger and bigger and now it's a mega interview! I hope you'll like it!Š (BTW: Some questions were done by Agent of D-TECT, too!) ?: Yoho Chaos! You're one of the shoot- ing stars in the German demo scene. Please introduce yourself and tell us something about your beginning in the computer scene. !: Hello, I'm Chaos of Rebels, 20 years old and I am one of the rebelous coders who didn't gave up coding useless demos. I began (like most of us) as a lamer, and the C64 was my toy. It must have been 1984! I coded a lot of useless things and had absolutely no contact to the scene. I should have managed to join a group because I had my first, simple Hubbard-like replay long before Hülsbeck released his SidMon, but I was too lame to even want to join a group. Then I bought my Amiga from my first apprentice-pays, and I continued to lame around. Later I met Carsten (not you, McDeal, another Carsten) (McDeal: My name is written with 'K': Karsten), he was another lamer, but he did some SWAP- PING! Yeaa! Soon we joined the fantastic forces of AXENON. My first real group! I must have been pretty important to them, because they did not even told me when Axenon died, so I continued to code a demo for them. When I finally found out that I have no group I renamed myself to Chaos Mega Interview - page 2/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT Chaos and joined the Undertakers. So the Axenon-Demo was released for them: The Benderlyser. Ok, it was a bit lame but at least it was some- thing special with a new idea. I continued to code lame stuff but I never released something. It made no sense to me to show all the others how bad I was. It must have been around spring 1990 when I produced my first useable parts, and I pre- pared to release a big multipart- demo for the Undertakers. But the Undertakers died (because I and Shadow were the last remaining mem- bers...), and we both joined Sanity in Winter 1990. I have been in good contact with Panther for some time, and so it was no problem. The parts for the Undertakers-Demo became the basics for Elysium: The zoom, the starwars-scroll, the vectorcubes and a vector routine comparable to Panthers DeeGroove-Demo. We added some parts, kicked the vectors and released the Undertakers-demo as Elysium for Sanity. I started working on my next demo after we released Elysium, but Sanity died (I began to get the pattern...) and now it seems that the Sanity-Demo will be released for Rebels. (Bad prospects for Rebels, all groups that I joined died very soon) ?: The Elysium demo was in my opinion one of the best Amiga demos ever and the best German demo at all. How long did you worked on it? !: I don't see myself as a shooting star. I'm in the business for 8 years now, but I haven't coded demos all the time. Most of the time I had simply no contact to the scene. I think I have coded everything that can be coded on Amiga. From C to Chaos Mega Interview - page 3/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT Assembler, from the stranged part of the operating-system to the deepest corner of the hardware. I'm trying to code demos for 2 years, and it might seem that I am a shooting star because I didn't release every shit I produced. The oldest part of Elysium is the starwars-scroll,later I coded the Zoom and the Vectorcubes (100 of them), and then I coded a lot of other things for myself. During the easter-holidays I and Panther made together most of the rest of the demo. I was busy for one more month doing the slave-work (a little bug here, a copperbar there) and then we went to party where we finished some minor problems. If you take the hole time it took 1 year. But most of the hard work was done in a 2 weeks session. ?: Why do you code demos? There are many other things you could code and you would even get money for it! !: Why does anybody code demos? Because only demo coding is fun-coding! Write a game and you're tired of coding. Write a utillity and you are nerved by bugs. I coded everything and I can only say: Code demos or coding is no hobby anymore. ?: It's no secret that Sanity was in big trouble and so you have joined 'The forces of Rebels'. Why have you decided to join exactly this group? And please judge Rebels! !: Good question. I don't know. Some time after Sanity broke down Jester rang me up and said: "If we want we can join Rebels." and I said: "OK, if we've no chance to continue with Sanity, then we can join them, but first try to rescue Sanity". Next day Jester called me again and said: Chaos Mega Interview - page 4/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT "Hi. We are now in Rebels". Arrrg, I did not join Rebels, I have been joined Rebels. But it's no bad choice. I think the most popular and best demo groups are Phenomena, Anarchy, Silents and Rebels, perhaps Scoopex if they release something soon. Phenomena is a bit too good for us, Silents is defenitly not as good as the others, that leaves Rebels and Anarchy. I think we made a good decision. How shall I judge Rebels. Their next demos (no dentros or things like that) should be fantastic. I haven't seen anything of them yet, but they are pretty confident. And there will be something unexpected from me, too. But the organisation is poor. Nobody from us has a memberlist! I hear a rumour about us all being kicked every two weeks! (Till now they are all wrong). There is ab- solutely no contact between us and the other sections in Rebels. I would prefer a German demo group but THERE IS NO GERMAN DEMOGROUP! ?: You reached the third place at the demo competition with your demo. Weren't your disapointed? !: When we were going to the party we knew that we'll win the competition. How could we loose with a demo like that? When have you seen so many new and good effects in one demo? Was it the Dexion Mega Demo 1? The audience is boored by all this vectorshit, and they will vote for us! OK, we lost against a second class vector demo from Quartex (compare it to the 6 month older Hunt-demo and you see that it's second class) and two Ray- tracing-Animations from Silents, but I was able to stop Panther from jumping off the ferry. Chaos Mega Interview - page 5/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT ?: Are you already working one a new one? Can you give us a little idea of what you are planning to do? (Please don't say: 'TOP SECRET!') !: Yes, I'm working on a new demo and it will not contain the usual vector shit (perhaps a little cube, only one tiny cube), it will feature some new (impossible) effects and some nice ideas that are not that hard to code, and if you are lucky it will be well designed, too. I can't say something about the code because the most important thing is the idea. Most coders have forgotten this, some say that it is impossible to create a new effect, it is only pos- sible to combine and enhace the old ones, and that the design will be better. They are absolutely wrong! If they would stop coding vectors they could see that there are other things that haven't been done before ?: In which situations do you have ideas for new effects? On the toilet or in school??? Or are you lying onto your bed and start thinking for one hour? What's your strategy? !: You can't lay on your bed and think. I need an idea. idea. come, idea. What can I do... We did this in the final phase of Elysium and the result is the Paralax and the tunnel perhaps the least spectacular parts of the demo. Good ideas simply come, or they don't come. I get most ideas when I'm biking around. Biking is the only real sport that I do (Sport ist Mord. Mannschaftssport ist Massenmord), and when my arms are steering, my legs are pedaling, my eyes are watching, my ears are listening and my sense for balance is keeping the balance, I can think about everything totally uncontroled Chaos Mega Interview - page 6/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT and sometimes I get an idea. Cycling as kind of meditation? Ok, Ok, but most demo-ideas come from it. And most accidents... There are three major parts of an idea. 1) What to do. 2) How to do it 3) Do it. Most coders forget the first two parts of this and the re- sult is yet another piece of cool vectorshit. The first part is ab- solutely useless without the second part, and some coder will never finish the third part although they are able to do it. (McDeal: Are you talking about me??? Hehe) Most don't even try to solve the first two pro- blems, vectors are in, everyone likes it, and a good design will pull it high in the charts, especially if my group is called Silents or Anarchy (or Rebels). My biggest problem is staring the third part. You have nothing on the screen and your source contains only the copperlist. How to start? ?: Yeah, I know that feeling.... I know that you're using the Devpac to- gether with the CygnusEd (ARexx rulez, doesn't it?). Please tell me the reasons why you've chosen this combination! !: Well, I coded my first assembler routines using CLI-ED and Metacomco- Macroassembler (Yeaa)! Best example is the 300k source of my selfmade monitor-program. OK, Assem is about 30 times slower than Seka, but at least it is a real assembler. I've seen one of the early patched Seka- versions that time, but it was use- less. This assembler would assemble everything, even movem.l d0-d2,(a0)+ No includes, no macros, no linking, nothing. Seka is no assembler, Seka is a tool that sometimes converts Chaos Mega Interview - page 7/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT your source into something execut- able, and sometimes not. I didn't want to search two days for an error that was generated by the assembler or wrong spelling. But after years of pain and slow assembling I got the fabulous »»Devpac««. I saw only two words: Local Labels. I'll never ever use an assembler without local labels. I simply can't live without them. There are some other features like RS.BWL, REPT/ENDR and of course the full linker support that are important for me. Till now I tried several other assemblers but they're all making error. Some simply generate false code (like ASMone), some don't accept a source that run's perfectly on Devpac (like Macro68 and ArgASM) although I con- verted all parts of the source that use special commands. Sometimes I test out another assembler for some time, but it doesn't take long till I go back to Devpac. Then, another bright day, I got CygnusEd. Can there be a better text editor than Ced? I don't think so. The filerequester is almost perfect, by far the best on Amiga. The rest is of the same quality. I can only imagine a few points that could be upgraded. I won't edit a source without it. I woun't even use the TurboAss (an absolutely fantastic Assembler on the Atari-ST that lets all Sekas and ASMone, two or three's look like Metacomco-Assem with CLI- Ed) if it would run on Amiga, 'cause I can't live anymore without these Macros, columnar blocks or simply Amiga-G. The best thing is, that I can combine CEd and Devpac with ARexx, and when the system crashes, I can rescue the source with Recover CEdFiles (works really always!). Chaos Mega Interview - page 8/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT ?: I won't ask you whether you have the originals of both programs... Another thing: Do you hear to any kind of music while programming? If yes, which group do you prefer? !: I normally listen to the Radio when I code, always Radio Bremen 4, the only station that brings you the right music,of course non-comercial. Especially after 19:00. They really play every kind of music, even the music I like, but I have to switch to cassete or CD often because they also play the other extremes. Then I listen to the Pixies, New Model Army or Metal tunes like Faith no More or the usual Metal stuff. I also like groups like R.E.M. or Fury in the Slaughterhouse. My music-taste is very similar to my demo-taste:I hate the ordinary, it must be something special! Sometimes I have to con- centrate harder and then I switch the music off, and when I code some- thing that doesn't cut of the inter- rupts I start Protracker in the background and listen to the latest, unreleased Jester-tunes. I can't stand Acid, HipHopp, Pop Rap and Techno-Music, but we didn't kicked 4 members out of Sanity because they were Techno-Freaks... ?: How does your dream computer look like? !: You just told me about the latest plans from Commodore before the interview (McDeal: I've told him a rumour which you'll find in the News Corner, too!), and it looks as if my dream-computer will be reality very soon. Of course I could wish me a mega-computer with 4Gigabyte Ram and 8 100Mhz Risc-Chips, but we'll have to wait very long for such a machine So my realistic dream computer is a Chaos Mega Interview - page 9/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT normal Amiga with 2Meg Chip, 2Meg Fast, 68020 or 68030 on 25Mhz and a 25Mhz blitter! 50Mhz would be better but we want to be able to pay for it! If the blitter gets optimised (HalftoneMem and NoLastWord-Option like on the ST and faster Linedraw, perhaps some additional tricks like having the last output-word as a source, BLTBF/LWM and filling with a source instead of filling with a destination. Ofcourse 32-Bit bus support, internally with 16 Bit, but double speed) and if you can rely of having real Fast-Mem,then everything should run up to ten times faster. The important thing is that the computer must be cheap, so that everybody can afford one (Imagine it as an A500-2). If I code some- thing, there must be someone who can see it (and who votes for me). Just imagine such a computer for 2000DM, that lets a 30MHz 386'er look a bit outdated, even the Quartex-Demo would run with an acceptable speed on such a machine! ?: It seems that you don't like Corto's work... But do you like the Euro- charts? Did you ever vote? Do you think they are expressive? !: I never voted for anything. Nobody can say who is the best. I'm only interested in the coding, the others may know nothing about coding and only want to see good design. So everybody must make his own charts. In my charts all demos without spectacular coding are simply missing, that includes many of the top-positions in the EC. But the Eurocharts are very important to see how successful you are. Right now I am in position 2 with the Elysium- demo, but you have to be able to Chaos Mega Interview - page 10/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT read the charts. Sounds good, doesn't it? But who is next? Except for Vector Exterminator(that I don't like at all) only half a year old stuff and older things follow in the charts. So second of two makes the last. (The same as in the demo competition. Third of three real demos). They should mix FileDemos and megademos, because there are so few good filedemos (OK, next EC will be more exiting, because of some silly vector productions like Intro- Dentro or Joyride. I'm sure that Elysium will be number 4, but there is still hope). (Puhh, I just got a big shock because of a very short powerfailure, but RecoverCedFiles was able to rescue the interview that hasn't been saved at all till now...) I will continue to use the EC to find out how popular my demos are, but I don't know whether I should continue to care about that. The most important thing is that I like my own demos, and that it is fun for me to code demos. It is fun to create new effects, but it is no fun to do the design, to combine parts to a demo, to move copperbars and to exchange logos, this is slave work (is there anybody who wants to become my slave? Call Chaos!). Fuck the EC, I'm doing this for fun, if I want business, I should code games! ?: Tell me your opinion about smoking and drinking! !: Smoking is simply stupid. Everybody who smokes has no right to fight for a cleaner environment because he seemes to prefer breathing a mixture of tixic gases. Drinking is danger- ous, too, and you have to know it. But it's good to booze from time to time, It's Ok. But I don't want to Chaos Mega Interview - page 11/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT be stoned from Friday 16:00 till Sunday 24:00 every week (although I am seeing forward to the next occasion...). Drunken coding is non- sense, nobody can code drunken (I tried...), not even Slayer, and I usually don't drink at copy-parties because I want to meet old and new friends and have a good chat, I do not want to lie in the corner and throw with bottles. ?: Which country has in your opinion the best AMIGA-scene? !: Not Germany. I think, Scandinavia (+Denmark) is the heart of the Amiga demo scene. Most elite groups like Phenomena, Cryptoburners, Scoopex and some others come from there. I don't know exactly from which country in Scandinavia they come, but this is the corner of the world with the most talented coders. Strange, but Germany seems to be the country of the musicians. Romeo Knight, Bitarts, Hülsbeck, Jester (Hm hem) come from there, all my favourite Musicians, not to forget Mad Max Hippel (THE musician on ST). If I could choose, I would want to live in Sweden. But only for coding. ?: Do you have any commercial programs in development? !: I just finished a very small game without any hard coding, but with a new idea (one of theese silly little thinking-games). Cthulhu is working on the GFX and the levels(I hope so, most times he's painting this stupid dragon...), and perhaps it will be- come a hit. Perhaps it will be a mega-flop, but I haven't spend too much time on it. ?: Are going to learn C (or do you even Chaos Mega Interview - page 12/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT use it?)? !: C was the first language I learned on Amiga. After finding out that AmigaBasic is slower and less com- fortable than C64-Basic,I learned C. It is totally impossible to learn MC68000 Assembler! 100000 different combinations of comands! I'll never get that! Only a small elite can learn this, some kind of profession- als! Well, later I found out that assembler is much easier than C, and now I'm using C only in a few cases, I prefer ARexx. ?: What's your opinion about cracking, swapping, trading scene? !: Where would we be without crackers. If the police wants to bust someone, they only have to wait outside a computer store, write down name and address of everyone who buys an Amiga and visit him 4 weeks later. They WILL find something illegal. Do you know someone who has no illegal copies? Perhaps 1%! Commodore knows this and they know that they would be dead without the sale of many little Amigas and C64 to many little lamers who know exacly how to get some illegal stuff. I don't need the games. I haven't got any games for a long time because I'm not inter- ested. When I play something, it's MechForce or Archon I or II. So I don't care about the crackerscene, but I know that we would not exist without them and that the scene will surely die if they stop their work. Another thing is that some guys do not realize what they are doing. It's illegal to copy games, everyone knows that, but we got used to this. Then everyone started to use calling cards. This is burglary! You steal money from the one who owns the Chaos Mega Interview - page 13/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT number! Don't you know that? Blue Boxing is stealing! Stamp-faking is stealing! Don't say it's a big company from where you steal and that they don't even realize what we are doing, always remember that you are stealing from the others. Some people think that they are allowed to phone without paying because they are computerfreaks, this is just the way it is! There will be the day when you start stealing car-radios to get the money you need for swap- ping 'cause bluebox is dead. Is this ok? Think about what you are doing! Can you say a modem trader is lame because he won't ruin his carrier by blue-boxing? You can't afford modem trading without bluebox? I can't afford a car, but I am not going to steal one, only because someone told me how to do it! I never phoned illegal, and I hope I never have to. (But the phonebills! Oh these phone- bills!!!) Blue-Boxing and similar things can't be stopped, but please, nerver forget what you are doing, never think that it's allright to do it. ?: Ok, I think you're basically right but you also have to realize that you're a thief, too, when you make some copies of your favourite tool! I can't accept that you say that this ok only because all computer freaks have illegal copies! I don't care whether it's is called copying stuff or blue-boxing - it's the same illegal action! But let's quit this topic... Another question: How long is your longest source code? !: The Elysium source was about 300K long, in several files and all of them assembled alone, then simply merged together 'cause everything is Chaos Mega Interview - page 14/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT PC-relative. My monitor is 300K long too, also spread over about 20 files, but the files get linked together, they build one unit, one source. Just imagine! I used Meta- comco-Assem to assemble this! ?: Do you any unreleased demo effects? If yes, please name some! !: I have much lame code hanging around on my source-disks, I never released this crap because it didn't make any sense to me. I also have a quite good convex vectorroutine but why should I show everyone that I am not as fast as Kreator? Well, I coded 4 parts for the next demo, and one of them will not be released, because it looks not as good as I hoped it will. I call it $102-Plasma, and it is hard to explain, but if you are a coder you should know what I mean with $102-plasma. By the way, Panther coded one 1 and a half year ago, but nobody realized. ?: Ok, do you have anything to say to the Amiga-Scene !: If nothing changes, the demo scene will crash in a short time because of boredom. Since one or two years everybody is interested in demos. There have been demos before, but they were not that important. But there will be a time when demos aren't IN anymore, because we have seen to many of them. Demos have been a competition between coders. They wanted to show the others who is best. But today the coding seems to be totally unimportant if it is at least a bit good. How else could demos like Substance or Global Trash be so successful although their coding is behind the standard that was set by Tec and Tai Pan and it Chaos Mega Interview - page 15/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT does not feature new effects? There will be the day when nobody wants to see any more vector demos, and demos like the latest Anarchy release (Digital sonstwas) will speed up the process. Just think about what you have been seen! In most cases it will look like: Vec- tors, Vectors, Vectors, Fractals, Vectors, Colorcycling (now called 1 pixel RGB-Plasma), Vectors, Fractals Vectors, Endscroll or: Sprite-Vector on text page, Sprite vector on normal pic, Sprite-Vector on ham pic Sprite-Vector on normal vector, Sprite-Vector on beast-scrolling... (McDeal: Noooooo he doesn't mean Silents... ;-) ) Do you really enjoy this? I don't! Another problem are the computers. The Amiga will die sooner or later. Will there be another computer where we can do demos? Look at the PC. Impossible. Macintosh? Oh no. Archi- medes? To few sells. No software company will continue to produce high quality games for a computer where you can plug in a diskdrive, and there would be no scene without games! If you want to play you have to buy a console, and if you want to work you must buy a PC (or whatever will replace the PC in near future). It simply does not pay to write a game for Amiga. The most complicated thing for a software-company is the game design. It's not the problem to code it, exspecially on one of the new consoles or RISC-Maschines. If you have a brilliant design, you won't release it on Amiga because you know everyone will copy it, you release it on the consoles. If you release it on Amiga and the console nobody will buy the module 'cause he can play it on Amiga. Perhaps we'll Chaos Mega Interview - page 16/16 held by: McDeal/D-TECT all see the dead of the real home computer like the C64 and Amiga. Perhaps there will be no new computer after the Amiga that sells good enough and that has enough software to build a new scene. A computer stands and falls with the software, and the software-companies make no penny with the scene, they will produce software for computers without this kind of scene, like PCs or consoles. A computer that was build for office-work would be a horrible demo machine, only a computer build for games like the Amiga(!) makes a good demo-machine. And there might be no more game machine with keyboard and diskdrive! Perhaps we will continue our work on 68030-Amigas with 25Mhz blitter, perhaps we will use consoles with self-made keyboards and diskdrives attached, but perhaps we will simply vanish in two or three years. ?: Ok, I think that was a nice end! Let's see what the future will bring! Bye, bye, hope to meet you on the AmiExpo... !: Bye!