Simon Cooke
AKA
Biography
One of the most prolific coders for the Sam.
As well as a lot of output for Fred and SCPDU Simon was involved in many commercial productions most infamously Parallax.
| Date | Released on | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 | FRED 11A | Main menu, Disc message creator utility, Sound To Light show, various articles. |
| 1991 | FRED 12 | Main menu, Megablast sampled sound demo, Star Trek sampled sound demo, Fader routine, various articles. |
| 1991 | FRED 13 | Gauntlet II sampled sound demo, REPORTER utility, various articles. |
| 1991 | FRED 14 | Main menu, 128k Spectrum fake emulator, Coloured font utility program. Freview reviews displayer program, various articles. |
| 1991 | FRED 15 | “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition” sampled sound demo, Document reader utility, various articles. |
| 1992 | FRED 18 | Main menu, various articles. |
| 1992 | Cookie FRED Freebie Disc | An entire disk of my routines, released nowhere else. |
| 1992 | FRED 21 | “The Cookie Jar” - a collection of demo routines and effects. |
| 1992 | FRED 22 | Anti-aliaser utility / smoothing magnifier for digitised screens, Toxic Elephant demo converted from the 128k Spectrum. |
| 1992 | FRED 23 | Hot Butter demo. |
| 1992 | FRED 24A | Entro One demo. |
| 1992 | FRED 24B | Happy Birthday FRED demo. |
| 1992 | FRED 25 | Entro Two demo. |
| 1992 | FRED 28 | Main menu, Interlaced demo converted from the 128k Spectrum. |
| 1992 | FRED 29 | Main menu. |
| 1993 | FRED 38 | AMD 2 music demo, converted from the 128k spectrum. |
| 1995 | FRED 64 | Comet to ASCII file format converter (with intelligent file parsing). QDOS v1.2 - SAMDOS patch which cleans up your configuration and identifies your currently installed hardware. |
| 1992 | Commissioned to design a fast spell checker/word processor for the SAM Coupe. Wrote preliminary routines which became Spell Master | |
| 1992 | Protection for a game release, Parallax. Involved writing a disk copier and designing the protection itself. Also involved writing the game DOS. | |
| 1992-1994 | Some graphics for the SAM Coupe version of Lemmings, as well as designing the password encryption routines for the game. | |
| 1990-1994 | Private use: Various converter utilities and demonstration routines, including 3D starfields, wireframe vector graphics, large “out of the screen area” scrolling text and other routines. | |
| 1993 | Work on an adventure game similar to Monkey Island started. Still continuing in the game design / graphics departments. | |
| 1994 | Defender game routines started. | |
| 1994 | Rooksoft | Commissioned to write the O/S for a new hardware device, the MiDGET, as well as software for a programmer’s toolkit utility ROM which includes an assembler, monitor debugger, disk toolkit and library routines. Also was involved at a grass roots level in the design of these devices, more so the MultiROM interface. |
| 1995 | Snapshot software for the MultiROM |
Other Stuff
| Date | Released on | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 | SAM Computers Limited | 128k Spectrum Emulator; completed this to roughly 50%, but due to the methods involved, it ran at about 1/16th of the Spectrum’s speed. Other methods of converting the games using patches were designed after this fell through. |
| 1991 | Conversion of Bubble Bobble by Taito. Ditched because the license was deemed unattainable; SAMCo was only a small company. | |
| 1992 | Started work on ZUB. Ditched due to untraceable bugs in code; eventually worked out that the bugs were due to the compressor I was using that had been written by a fellow coder, David Gommeren. However, SAMCo by this time had collapsed in the recession. | |
| 1994 | SAM Prime 6 | Articles, The Entropy Experience - a collection of most of my previous software releases. |
| 1992 | Search: “SCPDU 4A” | Entro One. |
| 1992 | SCPDU 5 | Main Menu, Entro Two, SCPDU 6 Advert demo, Slideshow, Compression of various utilities, Various articles. |
Unreleased software:
- SAM screen$ to BMP file converter.
- Comet to ASCII converter.
- Vector Cube and vector Entropy E routine.
- Largest Scrolly on the SAM routine - fills both the screen and the border.
- Termite comms software.
Lots of other stuff that I can’t even remember at the moment. But there’s been lots of them, whatever they were!
Simon has also written for Your Sinclair magazine, Internet & Comms Today, .net magazine, arcane magazine, Internet Today and Net User.
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Cooke
IMDB entry: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1325927/
GiantBomb Game Developer entry: http://www.giantbomb.com/simon-cooke/3040-57062/
Moby Games entry: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,86605/
Where are they now?
Senior Engineer and Ubergeneralist in Microsoft’s Xbox Advanced Technology Group, where he works on games technology, game dev conferences, new consoles, Windows game technology and more.
Blog: http://www.accidentalscientist.com/
Twitter: @fleetingshadow https://twitter.com/fleetingshadow
Facebook: @simoncooke https://www.facebook.com/simoncooke