-> About this site
Hi, my name is DFPercush (well, on the internet it is) and I dabble in coding, hacking, and general computer tinkery. I've been in love with the old Metroid for a long time. I remember sitting at home in the dark, parents away, with no light but the purple glow of a dark tunnel in norfair, and no sound except the haunting echoes of desolate chiptunes. Metroid provided me with lots of memories from childhood, and reading about how the games actually work inspired me to get into game programming myself. So I owe a lot to the series and to this community. This page is my way of giving something back. I hope you like the content I offer. Some of my programs are more useful than others, but they all have their niche. Some of them don't necessarily involve Metroid, but I'm sure at least someone in the community will find them useful. -> About me
The name DFPercush comes from the fact that I am a drummer, a.k.a. percussionist, thus the Percush. The DF are my initials. Check out my band.
I got into programming at the age of 16, and my first program of any substance was written for a TI-83 calculator. It took several nights of tedious entry into the calculator without the luxury of copy/paste. MOLES calculated several things about matter, atom counts, molar mass and the like. I passed it around chemistry class. Then some A-hole lifted my calculator when my back was turned and erased all my hard work. That was the only time I got into a fight in high school.
From there, I moved on to Quick Basic for DOS. Although a bit outdated even when I started, I was impressed by the sheer processing power of a modern PC. It's not hard to beat a calculator, after all. Fun fact: The TI-83 graphing calculator uses a Z80 processor, the same CPU as a Nintendo GameBoy. The pinnacle of my work in QB was a simple game, named 'game' (i know, I'm so creative.) Check it out here, if you can run a DOS program.
After realizing the obsolescense of DOS and gaining a foundation in basic personal computer programming, I moved on to the world of Windows. Visual Basic seemed like an obvious choice for my next language, since I already knew one flavor of Basic. After learning the concept of event programming and object oriented code, I felt like a duck in water. I wrote so much VB code... so... much... <Slaps self> so yeah, you'll find that a lot of stuff in the programs section is VB. That's not because I think it's a superior language, it's mainly because it was written back then. I mean, VB is great as long as you're only interested in Windows, and don't have to do complicated things with pointers. I still use it on occasion. But it has several limitations and it tends to encourage lazy coding, to an extent. Not as much as Visual FoxPro though, don't even get me started.
In 1997 I discovered The Metroid Database. It was then that I played Super Metroid for the first time. I played for hours, days, exploring the ruins and corridors of the new Zebes. But I found there were these pesky yellow doors which I could not open. I searched high and low, inside and out, for power bombs, but I just couldn't find them. So I turned to the internet. The rest, as they say, is history. On the MDb forums I met people of like mind from all over the country, and other countries too! Egads! The Metroid Redux team was formed from these people.
In 2001 I took a class in C++ and never looked back. It was also around this time that I met Etecoon/SeaElf through the MDb community. He taught me the ways of 386 assembly and the WIN32 API. I must thank him for helping me get a foothold on Windows API, because that knowledge has proven extremely useful over the years.
Starting in 2004, I spent a good year or so of my life playing Final Fantasy XI. That doesn't mean I stopped in 2005. I did not include when I was offline sleeping, working or studying. One year (actually more.) That's total play time. After that came World of Warcraft. Now the online phenomenon known as Minecrack looms on the horizon. Silver_Skree beats me whenever I mention that I'm thinking about playing it (Hypocrite). Anyway, that's why nothing major happens on the programming front during this time.
In 2009 I started working on a 3D game engine, and to support it, I hatched a project which I have dubbed glWidgets. There is other software which goes by this name, so I'll probably rename it when it's done. This project is meant to be my answer to the need for an easily developed GUI library. Yeah I could use Qt or fx; there are a number of other cross-platform GUI libraries out there. But none of them work quite the way I envision. More to come on that later. This relates to Metroid because, guess what is based on glWidgets? SMAll! The very reason for this domain. I started development of SMAll in July 2010, and now here we stand.