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Crisp / Crux


__This time, an interview with a real genuine cool guy. Coder, Cracker
and fun to know guy. A guy almost half my age, but who's knowledge is
about 100 times my age :) Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, It is
my pleasure, to share with you all, an evening on IRC with my good
friend CRiSP. Without any further delay, lets get right down to it.

ZOLTRiX:  Hi there Crisp! First of all, introduce yourself to our readers.

CRiSP:    Well, my handle is Crisp, I am 19 years
old and I live in Belgium. Currently I am
a coder in the demo group Crux and still 
one hell of an Amiga addict ;)

ZOLTRiX:  When did you first decide that the Amiga
was to be your machine?

CRiSP:    That must have been back in 1989. A
friend and I were deciding what computer
we were going to buy and we had the choice
between Atari ST and Amiga.
I just knew ST and Amiga from magazines
and never saw one in action. Oneday we went
over to a dude with an Amiga and there I saw 
the game "Batman: The movie". I was sold :)
Just loved that game... But hey, I was
only 10 years old back then ;)

ZOLTRiX:  10 years old! and do you still think that
you made the right decision?
CRiSP:    Damn sure! Even nowadays the Amiga is
better in many aspects than other
platforms (we're not going to do some PC
bashing, right? :)
The Amiga userbase is so tight and
connected; on other platforms you're a
number, on the Amiga you're a friend.

ZOLTRiX:  Not at all. I mean the right to chose
the platform that suits you is what it
is all about. Most people will remember
you from the BAD KARMA days. How did you
first become involved with BAD KARMA?

CRiSP:    That is quite a story actually ;).
When I joined the scene in 1994 I became
part of a group called Purple Turtle
(any newbie from Belgium was a PTL
member back then). In PTL, I started coding
some doors for bbs but soon the PTL leader and I 
got in a fight and I decided to quit.
Bad Karma was a fresh new group (founded 
by -TCB-) and I applied for membership
as a coder. It was back then that I
coded my first intro and I have to admit
that it was really AWFUL. Just some stupid 
pictures scrolling in the screen with a 
homemade module (and I am definitly not
a good musician :)))
About two weeks later Franky also joined
in and when -TCB- had to quit the scene
we both (as co-leaders) decided to run
BK .. That's my BK story :)

ZOLTRiX:  As a coder, do you prefer to code rather
than crack?

CRiSP:    Cracking is a lot of fun.. It feels
really good when you see the program
accepting your homebrew registration
code... But since there's not much left
to crack I stick to coding... Don't get
me wrong: Coding is also a nice way of
spending your time, but it can be very
hard to keep up with the latest developments.
Cracking will always be the same, coding
will always get harder and harder ;).
Coding is more fun in the way that it
gives great pleasure to see people enjoy
something you coded (not that that
happened often in my short coding career
;))))) But I have to admit that it is not
as satisfactory as cracking Wordworth or
the latest IBrowse ;)
To summarize: I had some great days/nights
cracking programs, but currently I spend
all my time coding utils and small demo
stuff like diskmags.

ZOLTRiX:  As you will know, I did an interview
with Franky, and he told us that he was
an organiser of the BSE Party, and that
you are also involved. Tell me, what
made you decide to go ahead and do it?

CRiSP:    Like Franky said, it all started with a joke
from Deathrider at my Birthday party. He told
us that the partyplace would be a great place
for organising a computer meeting. A few days
later (when we were all sober again;), we did
some thinking about it and the BSE was born... 
The real motivation for the BSE I have now must 
be that we want to show people that there still
are some good things in Belgium... It's really 
cool to meet you scene guys at a party and have
a good drink :)

ZOLTRiX:  You say it was started as a joke. But when
the day drew closer to the BIG DAY, were you
nervous that not many would turn up?

CRiSP:    Well, actually I myself was a bit nervous..
After all, we invested a lot of money in the
BSE and I was really a bit nervous about
EVERYTHING going wrong... But the arrival of
the first partypeople was a real relief:
At least 4 guys had heard about us :))...
When all 32 visitors had arrived, Franky and
I were very satisfied about the result. We only 
expected about 20 people and we got 12 more ;)
ZOLTRiX:  This is the thing. For people like me, that have
never had the time to go to a party, nor the money,
to get an idea of how many people actually do go to
these parties, is a real insight. I take it, that as
with most things in life, things do not always go
the way you planned or expected them to go. Any
funny thing happen up to the time when the doors opened?

CRiSP:    Well, nothing really went wrong BEFORE
we opened the doors, but afterwards
there were some incidents (frustrating
at the time, very funny afterwards ;)

ZOLTRiX:  Can you give us Examples?

CRiSP:    For example: At a certain moment we had
a power failure (due to a short circuit
in someone's powersupply) and we went
out looking for the fusebox. Nothing
was wrong with the fusebox we found so
we were starting to worry that there
was another fuse box that they did not
tell us about. It turned out that there
were 2 more fuse boxes of which we DID NOT have the
key... We ended up waking up the
partyplace owner in the middle of the
night to ask for the key to the fuse box
;))) Another example: During the compo's I was in charge for
changing the screens between every
entry... About everything can go wrong
at that moment (the A1200 can crash,
videobeamer can blow up (ahem) ...) so
I was quite tensed... After two or
three entries were shown I started to
relax. Of course I relaxed too much
with the result that
Scala was shown between two entries
instead of the entry's name. The
partypeople found that pretty hilarious ;) 

ZOLTRiX:  Always good to have a sense of Humour :)
Power cuts are a pain in the arse at the best of times
Especially if your machine happens to be writing to the
hard drive at the time. Well, you overcame those little
problems. What is the first thing you do, once the doors
are opened? How do you determine the running of events?

CRiSP:    Loads of things are planned in advance
of course, improvising is not a good
idea in front of 50 or 60 people (you
could fail miserably ;) ... Everything
depends on the partymood ofcourse. When
you see people are getting bored you
have to get up and go talk to them (and
that is not in order to bore them even
more ;))
Another solution would be to organise
a fun competition like we did last year
(N64 Mario Karting on a bigscreen rules).

ZOLTRiX:  Don't you think, that these little
incidents such as power failure, help
to raise the atmosphere a little more?
I mean, most people got to Car racing
to see a crash :)

CRiSP:    When it happens one time: yes :) ... On the
other hand, the famous TP7 power failure was
also very amusing (alcohol was not allowed, so
everybody popped open a bottle of liquir when
the power was down) ... From my
party-experiences I have learned that seeing
organisers rush around and drown in their own
sweat is a very entertaining thing to watch ;)
So little incidents do raise the party
atmosphere...

ZOLTRiX:  What is your relationship with Bacon?

CRiSP:    Hehehe :) .. It's my favourite food...
People who have ever seen me in real
life can testify that I always carry
around some bags of chips ;)))
I'm a real mean chips-eating machine.

ZOLTRiX:  Getting back to your talent as a coder, What was
your very first thing that you coded? Hello
World as in most text books?
CRiSP:    Not exactly :) The first thing I coded was a
small program called 'Poep Het Systeem' (which
is Dutch for "Fuck The System") ... It kinda
destroyed your system by resetting it all the time ;)))

ZOLTRiX:  Actually we have many programs like that
today and some are commercial packages. So
tell me, what do you consider to be the first
thing you coded, that was good to you?
Did you have help in coding or was it a self
taught thing?

CRiSP:    The first real useful program I ever coded
was before I joined the scene. Malcomn (also
a belgian scener) and I had a small group we
called 'The Vidiot' and we sampled complete
songs from CD's... We put them on disk and I
coded the menu (a real basic DOS window with
text displaying) ... It was really lame
of course, but it was the first working thing I ever
coded... Some years later I found out that
the code dies miserably on 040 though ;))))
I learned all the basics myself actually
(like displaying texts on the screen), but
when I started to do more serious stuff (file
i/o, hardware coding) I had a lot of help
from my friends (Rex Orient, Dirty Harry,
...). Those guys were really nice and taught
me some basic things (like coding without bugs ;)

ZOLTRiX:  This is the thing, which leads nicely into my
next question for you. The demos of today
demand High speed processors such as the o6o.
It seems to me, that the fun that used to
exist in demos, has faded away, to be
replaced by CPU hungry effects. What are your
views on this?

CRiSP:    You can do some magnificent stuff on the 060
(like realtime rendering), but some democoders
today don't seem to understand that chunky
effects (which usually require fast processors)
are not everything... Just 314 rotating,
realtime rendered objects don't make a demo...
What you need is music, graphics, design and
some code. I really miss demo's like 'Hardwired'
(Crionics & Silents) and Budbrain Megademo I
:))) .. If you show me two demo's, one with
some nice pictures and good music, and one with
realtime rendered effects, then I will
definitly vote for the first one! ... I have to
admit that Haujobb had succeeded in combing
design, music, gfx and chunky effects into one with
their demo 'Aphrodisae' (which is magnificent in my opinion)

ZOLTRiX:  You are probably right there, but in
the old skool days, They squeezed the
machine dry, by taking everything the
could out of the machine to gain real
excellent effects, which left you
wondering, "How the hell they manage
that" But today, its oh yeah, another
3D vector etc... Don't you think the
fun from demos has gone? and that they
are there just to exploit the high end
Amiga machines? Remember the demo wars? on who could
get the most bobs on screen etc? thats
what I am talking about here :) Fun and
competiton.

CRiSP:    Exactly my tought... I have the feeling
that nowadays people are concentrating
on making things go faster, instead of
coming up with new stuff... I think
that we are trying to copy PC stuff
(where all the realtime rendering
cpu-hungry effects originate from) on
the Amiga... That's not the right idea
to start from, you
have to code something that is unique
for the amiga.. Like coppereffects,
boing!-ball sprites, ... ;)
Well, today the demowars are not Amiga
group vs. Amiga group, but more like
Amiga vs. PC :((
At least that's the
impression I have when seeing the Amiga
demo's and comparing them to PC
demos... Although at M&S1998, the Amiga
definitly beat the PC.
ZOLTRiX:   We all know the PC vs Amiga wars over
the years, and to be honest, it will
never stop. Each person has the right
to choose his machine, but not the
right to make others choose what they have.
Would be a nice idea if the
Organiser/Coder could put together a
demo of the BSE event :) You know, The Beginning, Peeps arriving
and the pics from compos as they
progress and the winner etc... :)
I dont think this has ever been done
and would be Original :)

CRiSP:     Not a bad idea actually... We'll keep
that in mind for after the BSE 1998
;))). We already had some plans to
take regular snapshots of the
partyhall, we can always integrate them
into a demo ;)

ZOLTRiX:   So you love to code. Have you coded
anything that has been released, that
now you think, Gawd! why did I do that?

CRiSP:     well, yes.. The demo we released at M&S1998
(La Fureur) had the most AWFULL code ever
seen on this planet... It was coded under a
lot of pressure in only 5 hours... I will
definately change that code when I have some
time ;)

ZOLTRiX:   What is your Favourite demo of all time?
CRiSP:     Well, I don't really have ONE demo that I
like alot... There are some demo's that I
will always keep in mind: Budbrain
megademo's, Anarchy's Madness II demo,
Hardwired, Switchback (i love the roller
coaster part), Paradisio... to name some.

ZOLTRiX:   I remember those :) remember RSi MegaDemo?
and the secret life of the juggler? Wonder
how many will know how to get at that part?

CRiSP:     The RSI megademo was released a bit before
I started watching demo's... I saw it about
2 years ago and I was impressed by the
stuff they pulled back then ;)

ZOLTRiX:   This is the point. I think we are more
impressed of the old demos than we are of
the new ones a lot of the time. Do you agree?

CRiSP:     Yes and No... Yes because the old demo's
really pushed the Amiga to it's limits and
often were funny (today's demo's are rather
serious IMHO)... No because I sometimes
fall of my chair of a cpu-hungry effect I
see ;) ... But in general I have to agree
with you: old-time demo's were more
entertaining!

ZOLTRiX:   Here you are, its 1998, the Amiga is in
turmoil, fun seems to be dying rapidly
these days, and you at 19 years old, what
keeps you going? What plans do you have
for the future in this Amiga scene?
What in effect, keeps you here in the scene?

CRiSP:     I am certainly going to stick with the
Amiga for the rest of my life, probably
coding utils (I am still better at utils
than at intros ;) ... I'm also having some
thoughts about opening an Amiga shop (!)
What keeps me in the scene? That's a
simple question: all the cool guys out
there! I have some very good friends in the
scene, and I think you can never turn your
back on friends.. :)

ZOLTRiX:   Everyone tells us that the market for the
Amiga has bottomed out. Software houses
holding back on releases etc.. It all looks
dismal, yet the Amiga still goes on. Do you
think it will end up as with the case of the C64?

CRiSP:     No... I see a bright future for the Amiga
ahead! The WOA show in London next week
will probably bring a lot of positive amiga
stuff (the Amiga theme, the major
announcement ;) ... I don't think Amiga is
going to die: Gateway 2000 is a powerful
company and I have the impression they
really want to put some money in the
Amiga... But who can tell what the future
will bring?

ZOLTRiX:   It is nice to see another guy hoping as
much as I do that the Amiga will live on.
What about Graphics? Ray traced seem to
have taken over the Pixel painters?

CRiSP:     Nah, I don't think so... I've seen loads of
pixelized graphics lately.. The problem is
simply that raytracing is dead easy and
that everybody raytraces... the number of
pixel painters stays the same so in general
it seems that they are a dying species ;)

ZOLTRiX:   I have to agree with you there. One Young
lad, WADE^GODS now NVX, has an incredible
talent, but alas I feel guys like this are
wasting away, becuase RAY TRACE can take
hours and Pixels, months.
Well, as is only too common in interviews
:) Who is your idol in the coding scene?
and for what reasons?

CRiSP:     Raytracing even takes a lot less, on the
060 you can raytrace in minutes! Pixeling
takes a lot more of course...
Idol is maybe a bit exagerated, but there
are certainly some people I look up to..
Grey/CRX (my tutor ;), Azure/ex-Artwork
(the only person who can code a rotating
realtime rendered donut in 184 bytes ;),
the Haujobb-coding team (they surely know
how to design)

ZOLTRiX:   Finally, what are your ambitions in life?
What direction are you now going to take?
Will we ever see the return of Bad Karma?

CRiSP:     Well, to be honest, after reading your
interview with Franky I really started to
feel nostalgic... It will completely depend
on the Amiga market ofcourse, when there will
be something to crack, then I think BK will
we kicked into live again!
And besides, the cracker inside me wants to
do something again ;)
Well, in real life, I'm going to finish my
studies (Physics) and afterwards I will
either go and do Astronomical research (on
the Amiga of course!) or I will open an Amiga
shop... As you can see, the Amiga completely
changed my life in a very positive way!

ZOLTRiX:   Not many can actually say those words and
mean them, "the Amiga completely changed my
life in a very positive way" I just hope that
the governing bodies behing Amiga, pull their
fingers out their ass and give us back our
pride and motivation that seems to have
dwindled in the past three years :(

CRiSP:     Well, I was on a computer fair just two weeks
ago and I talked to Petro Tyschtschenko over
there... This is one of the few people I have
a lot of respect for: he works about 12 hours
a day to kick the Amiga back to life...

ZOLTRiX:   But will he do it? or is he another ESCOM
agent? Remember, we have heard nothing but empty
promises before from Escom, Viscorp etc.. Why
should we stand up and take note of this guy ?

CRiSP:     From the brief conversation we had I learned
that he definitly isn't an ESCOM agent with 3
PC's at home... He seems to care alot, and I
think that when the president of Amiga REALLY
cares about his product, that it simply can't
fail... Commodore officials just wanted to
make money, I don't think Petro is that way.
Good point: You might have noticed the very
few news from Amiga International when it was
bought by Gateway2000. They learned a lesson
and now they only announce something when
they are sure they can keep their promises!

ZOLTRiX:  All companies are out to make money! if they
are not, then they are liars. But the thing
is, the prices! can he match those of the PC?

CRiSP:    Of course Amiga International wants to make
money (they're not a charity company ;) - but
at least they understand that the Amiga
community won't buy some lame bullshit :)

ZOLTRiX:  Very true indeed. You got to get more to
support your product, and you cannot do that
if you keep a lid on it.
Did he give any indication as to when the AMIGA
Would be back in the stores, and indeed the prices
and specs, and who exactly they were aiming at,
as in the type of market?

CRiSP:    Nope, in fact that isn't Petro's
department... Amiga consists of two
companies: Amiga International (with
president Petro Tyschtschenko) who are
responsible for marketing and Amiga Inc.
(with president Jeff Schindler) who are in
charge of R&D... I think (and hope) that Jeff
Schindler will announce loads of new amiga
stuff at the WOA next week.

ZOLTRIX:  I, as I am sure many others, will hope so.
Thanks for sharing this insight into the life
and times of CRiSPY BACON :) And I wish you
all the best in the future and hope we remain
in touch :) Are there any words you wish to
say to the Amiga Community on the whole?

CRiSP:    Well, all I can say is: Stick to the Amiga...
It has been a friend for many of us all along
and you simply can't drop a friend who cries
out for help... (I am in a very poetic mode
today ;)

ZOLTRiX:  Ah yes :) My poem too, Friends To The End :)
And was my true feelings! Okay, anyone you
want to Greet out there?

CRiSP:    Quick greetings (in random order) fly out to:
Franky, Grafitto, Grey, Malcomn, and of course
to all true amiga sceners! and Shane :)

ZOLTRiX:  Thanks man! And I hope that a lot of people will
read this and think of their Amiga in a Positive
rather than negative way. Remember, it is not
who or what you know, it is what YOU believe in!
That is what counts, and that is what will, make
a difference. Respect to Crisp and the many like 
him out there, who believe in the one thing that
most of us hold dear to us. 


THE AMiGA - Friend to the Very end.










by Zoltrix (c) Insomnia'98