Let's talk about coding.

[DerVVulfman]

I'm gonna throw you guys for a loop with my story.... I began with a computer sold by Mr. Jello Pudding himself. Bill Cosby promoted a system called the TI 99/4a Home Computer, a very basic system which was promoted as both gaming and an entry level programming system. It allowed you to write programs in BASIC.... and you used an actual TAPE RECORDER to store your programs. How long ago was this? Well, I made games when I was in High School based on Ghostbusters, the Last Starfighter and Star Wars. Yes, I was making very simple shooters in the early-to-mid 80's on something that made the Commodore 64 look like a Cray Computer.

Now during HighSchool, I wanted to take a computer course, but found out I needed to take a manditory typing course. Well, I type 80WPM... so Yep, I did okay. During the course, I became the teacher's guinea pig. If I couldn't figure it out.... NEXT ASSIGNMENT? I was given insight on BASIC (right), took Pascal (BARF), Fortran (PUKE), Cobol and Assembly. Oh, and a fellow classmate was allowed to play Wizardry in class... my first shot at seeing a true RPG Computer game.

Not that I wouldn't BUY others later.

My friend Carl who lived down the street from me got an IBM PC Jr which used DOS, and I later got a full fledged IBM PC that ran with DOS 2.0. Both of us started messing around, and tried to make a TOP GUN based game. We got the cockpit fine... though we only had FOUR COLORS AT THE TIME!!! Oh, we both kept upgrading our PCs, taking out Hercules Graphics cards, replacing them with CGA cards, replacing them later with SVGA cards... and so on. In the early 90's, I could swap out Cardinal Modems and replace them and their software in 10 minutes... they weren't plug and play back then. But we still did PC BASIC programming. AND We both messed with the Original "DOOM", making maps, graphics updates, and so on. Technically, it's when I got my username. He was gonna be DiMOOSE and I the Wolfman. Wolfman wasn't available at AOL... already taken, so DerVVulfman was borne).

I later went to a school called Yorktown Business Institute for programming, and had to work with the ... WANG.... computer. Seriously? That's the name of the system I had to make programs with? Well, they had teachers for Basic (HAHA), Cobol (HAHA), Assembly (okay... it was still annoying), and some others. The teachers could see I had more experience than others.... Actually, me and two others. We three were given assignments and (ROFL) told to beat it! We had extreme latitude that we could just hang out in the lounge, do the work, and come back while the others were still being lectured. Well... MOSTLY, unless it was something we didn't know about. But one teacher was so bad... WE THREE ENDED UP TEACHING THE CLASS! The teacher didn't know the subject and even the Dunce of the class complained about him. I almost got a job teaching there.

While at home, I continued using Basic and Visual Basic, and learned SQL for some database manipulation. Hell, I was working on my own D&D offline software systems for Dungeon Masters. I got online and discovered software updates here and there, and libraries that could add to what I could do while I wanted to make an RPG engine. At the same time, another friend and I wanted to write a series of novels and went under the pen name "Totally Deranged". I made a website with the space granted by AOL and began learning basic HTML. So I'm not completely a novice... just out of practice with pure HTML code. But I think I've gotten better at Css over the years.

And then discovered Don Miguel's RPGMaker 2000 site from Russia and the letter from ASCII which granted him permission to translate RPGMaker 2000 into English. Hey, it wasn't until 2001 that ASCII had to make a debt deal and 2002 for a merger. The 2000 letter mighta been genuine. After the merger "All Rights Reserved" would have kicked in regardless.

Oh, I did some eventing back then.... and looked to other means to make an RPG engine regardless as the whole incident with Enterbrain and the 'illegal translations' scenario. And you had to literally purchase the Japanese licensed version of RPGMaker 2003 if you wanted to legally use the RPG Advocate translation of the system. I know a couple in the community that did.

But I literally waited until RPGMaker XP came out before I began coding in RUBY. That was in 2004-2005 with RMXP.net and Creation Asylum where I met Trickster, Derk Jan (yep, back then), ccoa, tnsi (You may know him as Cocoa, but under another name that far back) and others.