Espozo wrote:About leaning mode 0 at your friend's house at three hundred in the morning, how old were you? I assume there weren't any tutorials online? (Or online, for that mater.) Since you've kind of given me a background history of yourself, I am going to ask when and why did you drop out of highschool? What is your current Job? You don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to.
This would have been in 1993, so that would have made 16 at the time (I was born in 1977). I skipped 2nd grade so I was a year younger than everyone else in school.
At the time there were no tutorials of any kind. The Internet (as we know it today) did not exist then. I was online at that point, and working at Oregon State University, but websites and HTTP were just barely being introduced and were very bare-bones. The web became more commonplace in the mid-to-late 90s (I still remember the first time I saw a URL shown during a TV ad -- it was from Sony).
SNES development during that era consisted mainly of discussions on Usenet (NNTP-based), a.k.a. "newsgroups", or what today is known as "Google Groups", and on private mailing lists. There was a snesdev mailing list maintained by Charles Doty (I think?) back then, and many of us contributed.
Here's some proof I put on Twitter last year (be sure to look closely at the Date: header in the pictures).
There was only one document at the time (ca. 1992) on how the SNES worked, what its registers were, and how they behaved. It was a document written by Dax & Corsair (two Amiga guys). There were typos galore, with lots of bits defined wrong, and was really quite awful by today's standards (if you Google something like "corsair dax snes" you'll find some of the docs, but not all of them). That and my own hacking is what prompted me to write my SNES documentation, which is what a lot of people used for probably the next 10 years or so (people tell me they STILL use it though, just because of how I write/phrase things, with my intention being ease-of-understanding). People have found lots of mistakes in my stuff as well, and now a lot of people (most?) have access to the official developers docs anyway. The reason I got into SNES hacking was because the SNES used the same CPU as my Apple IIGS -- the day I found that out I became completely enthralled with trying to write code on the SNES. Games like Actraiser blew my mind (we had nothing like this on the IIGS).
School is somewhat of a weird subject for me (
I absolutely HATE school even to this day. But strongly advocate people stay in school). I did "okay" in grammar school and junior high/middle school, getting usually Bs. I was never an A-grade student. When high school came around, especially my junior year, I really stopped caring about a lot of the subjects I was required to take. The subjects just didn't interest me. You could see it on my report cards: Ds in English, mathematics, social studies, maybe a C in sociology, while getting B+s in subjects like computer science and Chinese (both subjects I enjoyed). I failed biology twice (it was a semester course, and I failed both times -- it didn't help that they changed teachers after the first semester), and I failed "college-level" trigonometry as well as calculus.
By the time I was a senior, I was skipping pretty much all my classes except the ones that interested me (only 2 or 3 at that point). My lack of attendance eventually got me into trouble, where after 3 months (don't ask me why it took them so long to find me -- I was at school the entire time, I never left campus) the in-school suspension fellow was given a photograph of me and went looking for me + found me, and I had in-school suspension for (I think?) 3 days. You aren't allowed to leave barring restroom usage, and you have to use the time to do school work (and any new school work they go and fetch for you). Friends of mine kept coming to the in-school door and sliding notes under it that read things like "FREE YOSHI" and all this stuff, which embarassed the hell out of me and made the in-school guy go "WTF?"
The in-school programme gives you this "questionnaire" where you're asked a bunch of self-reflective questions about why you're in in-school, what you could do better, etc.. During those 3 days I wrote a 10-page (double-sided) response to that questionnaire, and at the end of the 3 days dropped the tome on the guys' desk, left, and went right back to doing what I had been (skipping most of my classes + going to the ones I found interesting). About 2 weeks later, the same guy came to the CS lab -- with the vice principal in tow -- and they asked if I'd come to the VPs office for a chat. I figured I was going to be expelled (my mother would have killed me). Instead, the in-school guy slides my 10-page work across the table to me and says "This is the most eloquent, well-thought-out, wonderfully introspective thing I have ever read from someone during all my years doing in-school suspension. The VP thought so too. We don't understand why someone of your calibre would skip class." I explained why, and they seemed to understand, but I don't think they *truly* understood. My opinion was that the in-school guy had probably, in all his years, just gotten people writing "SUCK A DICK" or "I FUCKED YOUR MOM" over and over rather than actually getting something coherent and intelligent. After the 30-minute chat, the let me leave, and I went back to what I was already doing. I saw both of them throughout the rest of the year (in the hall, usually when I was skipping class) and neither said or did anything.
At the same time I was going to school, I was working (voluntarily) at Oregon State University as a UNIX systems administrator (for about 4 years), which is eventually what lead to my career (although these days I do a lot more than just that, as I have a pretty strong background in networking as well;
here's my CV/resume). That was where I got my feet wet. And during my senior year, I also lived with a Chinese family (locally) for 6 months where I wasn't permitted to speak English. Also, my high school computer science department used Novell Netware 3.1; and one year (I think my senior year?) Novell offered free CNE training (and certification, assuming we passed) to those of us in the lab who were interested (at the time I was writing DOS applications in a mix of Pascal and x86 assembly to do certain Netware transactions over IPX), so 4 of us did that and we all passed. (I have no idea where my certificate is now -- I really couldn't care less, and you couldn't pay me a billion dollars to work on Novell now, haha)
So -- when graduation came around, I had excess credits in electives (computer science, photography/art, Chinese, you name it), and had barely managed to get all of my pre-requisite course credits (I think they gave me the credit for biology, barely, because I took it twice). The only problem was: I wasn't going to be allowed to graduate. You see, my junior year, the 509J school district introduced two mandatory courses into the curriculum: "Living On Your Own" and "Personal Finance". I went to both of these classes maybe 4 or 5 times at most, and they were year-long. I thought they were absolutely ridiculous -- I was already living on my own (i.e. I wasn't living with my parents during those 6 months), and I knew how to balance my chequebook (my mother ran an engraving company and was the company's bookkeeper). In Oregon at the time you could "challenge" a course -- they'd give you the final test and if you passed it you didn't have to take the class. However, 509J deemed both of these classes MANDATORY, so you couldn't challenge them. My mother and I both contested the matter with the school district and we lost. Thus, I said fuck it, and didn't attend them.
So when my senior year ended, my school informed me that because I was 2 credits short, I would be allowed to go through the graduation ceremony (and go to prom), but what they'd hand me up at the podium would be an empty piece of paper. To me that's pointless effort, and I never cared about prom or graduation, so I did neither of them. When the next school year started (which would be my second senior year per se), I went back to high school for about 4 months before dropping out entirely (and was spending most of my time at OSU working). PSU (Portland State University) was also doing a take-university-courses-by-mail thing at the time (this would have been mid-1995), so I tried doing that for a few months but I was horrible at it -- the books and curriculum had no context, so it was just like throwing random pieces of test paperwork at me without any background. I quit.
After that, still in 1995 (I can tell because the stuff I uploaded to Twitter has my Email being @mediacity.com), I ended up moving to California to live with my girlfriend, and worked at an ISP (MediaCity) doing technical support -- until the systems administrator got wind of the fact that I had 4 years of UNIX experience and so I became a kind of combination tech support + junior UNIX SA. Since then all I've done is industry work, with a brief stint in 1997 where I worked for my mother's engraving company doing vinyl application + graphic design + sign installation.
You couldn't pay me to go back to school. I absolutely hate it. But as I said, I tell kids to stay in school -- my lack of education has never hindered me (every job I've applied for, except one, I've gotten), but the early-to-mid-90s were a very unique time to be alive when it came to computing and the introduction of the Internet, so I just got lucky in that regard.
About the only thing today I'd want educationally would be to take some mathematics courses, specifically to refresh my memory of algebra. For example, until sometime in 2011, I had completely forgotten how to do long-hand division (computers spoil us, and I don't think that's a positive thing).
P.S. -- There's a hilarious twist to my lack of graduation: my sister (younger by 7 or 8 years) went to the same high school I did, and during (I think?) her freshman year, the 509J district made both of the aforementioned mandatory courses optional. I've always wanted to go back there and be like "I see you changed your mind... so can I have my diploma now? 21 years later?" ;-)
(Some of the Nazis at my school don't let you go to the bathroom without having points off your next test.)
theheheh