[Coco] Introduction

[Kip Koon]

Jayeson,
Welcome to the Coco list!  :)  I'm in South Carolina, USA in a little town
called Manning about 2 hours from the east coast.  Is most of the population
in Australia on or near the coastal areas?  I'll be looking forward to
reading about your Coco adventures from down under.  There are some of your
fellow Aussies on this list.  A very intelligent bunch of people!  It is so
cool that we get to chat All Around The World on this list!  I've been on
here about a year I guess and I've had the wonderful opportunity to chat
with the very folks whose ads and articles I used to read about back in the
late '70s and '80s.  Before I found out about this list, I didn't even know
anybody enjoyed their cocos like I did some 30 - 25 years ago.  Boy was I
pleasantly surprised!  :)  I have had a ball since I joined this list!  I am
glad I did.  Again, Welcome Mate!
Kip

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Jayeson Lee-Steere
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2013 2:21 AM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] Introduction

Hello!

I've been doing some work with my Coco recently and discovered this list
while exploring the vast collection of Coco info across the internet. I plan
on discussing what I am working on shortly but figure an into might be in
order.

I'm from Australia and got my first Coco (2) one Christmas during my early
teen years, after what must have been a whole year of asking for one. I
loved that machine and eventually managed to wrangle a hard disk and then a
Coco 3. I played a lot of games, some homework and entered a pile of music
into Musica. I enjoyed playing Daggorath and later Super Pitfall II a lot
but I think I have the most nostalgia for the Mark Data adventures. The
beach/jungle scenes in Calixto island seemed like amazing art at the time, I
still think it looks pretty great.

I recall that I did a lot of programming, but in reality it must have only
been a few hours every now and then. Mostly BASIC but I did force myself to
learn assembler around the time I went to college which turned out to be a
good idea. As I recall, I only ever finished two programs. One was a BASIC
demo that I "sold" to the local Tandy /Radio Shack store for a blank
cassette tape. It was cool to see it running at the front of the store
instead of the official demo. The other was an assembly disk backup utility
that made use of a 512k Coco 3 to avoid swapping disks so much (I only had
one floppy drive).

I used to get hold of a Rainbow magazine from time to time and it was tough
seeing all the great stuff folks in the US had: proper artifact colors (PAL
artifacts too, but quite differently to NTSC) and all that mail order
hardware and software. Every now and then I'd come across someone who was
importing some things on the side.

I had the good fortune of getting into games programming, first for
companies making PC sound and video cards, and then later on games directly.
Fairly recently I finished an 8 year run with Electronic Arts where I was
Technical Director for Madden at the time I left. I left mainly to come back
home to Australia. I threw all sorts of goodies into the shipping container
that would be a pain/expensive to get down here, but it didn't occur to me
at the time that an NTSC Coco 2 should have been on the list.

I'll share more on my current project later, it involves Daggorath.

- Jayeson Lee-Steere

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