History

I was young, very young. And I wanted to have that thing, too. A good friend of mine (his father, to be exact) had a one - and games, lots of games. Then, on christmas 1986 I finally got it: my first computer. A C64 II and a Floppy-Drive 1541 and probably just as everyone of my age I used it only for games ('Blue Max', 'River Raid', 'Ghostbusters', 'Summer Games', etc.). I spent a lot of time playing, but after about a year my interest grew and I read the C64-user-manual completely - including the chapter about BASIC, which was my only source of information about programming at that time. Soon this world of coding was a lot more interesting for me than the games and I wrote my first BASIC-programs.

Divus Ianus' parents and mine knew one another for about three years, but for some reason we never became close friends in this time (maybe because we were living in different cities and went to different schools.). But one day it turned out that he owned a C64 and that he no longer played games but programmed in BASIC just as I did (I remember one of his bigger projects, a vocabulary-trainer that already used a kind of window-technique). He was the only one I knew who programmed and so we started to meet more often. I don't know when we decided to make demos, but we were both fascinated by the colorful crackerintros and soon we realized that if we wanted to code something like that, we had to learn Assembler. We did - and almost every day we learned more about the C64 by reading articles and disassembling other demos/intros. I still remember the first one that really fascinated us and tought us a thing or two: a pretty simple logo with scrolling colors in the background by Dynamic Duo.

Meanwhile we met almost every weekend and since our parents could not drive us by car every time, we sometimes even transported our computers by bike. We spent most of the time on coding effects, demos and other programs, but most of them remained unfinished. Of course we played some games, too - mainly 'Wizball' (one of the greatest two-player-games) and 'The Great Giana Sisters' (my personal record is finishing all levels with one single life) - and consumed tons of pizza (Peppino's - the best deep-frozen I know).

I chose 'Han Solo' as my handle as I liked the character in the 'Star Wars'-movies. I don't know what made Divus Ianus choose his handle, but I do remember us searching for a group-name. On the one hand we wanted to have 'Crew' or 'Group' in the name, but it was more important that it would consist of at most eight characters, since we wanted to use it in some sinus-sprite-effects and sprite-multiplexing was too complicated for us then. The funny thing is, we made use of this fact only once and then we completely forgot to activate the sprites :)

In the production-section you can read more about our finished works, but as I mentioned before we started a lot more and two of them even made it into the 64'er-magazine: Divus Ianus realtime-memorymonitor 'Spion' and our 'Sprite-Sucher'. You can find the first one in no. 10/89 on page 59. The second program is in no. 1/90, page 51, but the editors made two mistakes there: we are not brothers and our picture is placed beside the wrong program (I corrected that on the scan). (late 89)

In 1990 I got a PC (a 286/12) and after about a year I stopped coding on the C64 and learned PC-Assembler (my first PC-works are described in the production-section, too). In 1993 I met some guys who wanted to found a PC-Demogroup, and my new 'career' as a PC-Democoder began. But that's another story... Divus Ianus exchanged his C64 for an Atari ST, later he bought a Mac and now owns a PC.
I've been at several Demoparties since then and I've seen many new C64-Demos there. Unbelievable, that they all run on still the same machine that we used... One day I felt like coding something on the C64 again and out came a little plasma-routine. It really was fun, although after all those years I now missed all the comfort I was accustomed to from the PC. But there's still this idea in my mind of making one other c64-demo... Who knows? Maybe one day... (Jan./Feb. 97 (96?))

It was a cool time and I'd like to know what happened to all our personal heroes... And I hope that all the guys whose music or graphics we 'borrowed' will forgive us ;)