Jim Leonard's Home Page

On the web since before you knew what it was

Personal Info:

We just had our first child, a wonderful baby boy. He has his own home page if you'd like to learn more about him.

Another announcement, however sad: I have no more time for HTML fun, so the rest of this page is fairly outdated. Someday I'll update it, but probably not for a while. Caveat Surfer.

Trixter is my demo-scene "handle". I am heavily involved with the demo scene, having loved demos since 1990. Want to know what the demo scene is? Visit the PC Demos Explained page, which describes what a demo is and defines some of the common slang. It also provides a brief history on demos and the Demo Scene.

I also have a love of MOD music, and have written a tool to help me catalog my collection called ModInfo. The current version is usually available at ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos/music/programs, but I also keep a copy readily available just in case it's not there.

Alas, if you have absolutely no interest in demos whatsoever, then feel free to check my personal list of neat places. I've collected these sites as I've hopped around the Web, and many are springboards to a whole new level of wasted time. I try to collect sites based on quality, not quantity.

Current Events:

(This section is no longer updated. Newest entries are from top to bottom.)

(7/24/95) I finally got the button thing to work on my PC Demos Explained page. Check it out to see what I mean.

(7/4/95) Taking some time out on the holiday, I noticed that my PC Demos Explained pages were taking an average of over 3000 hits a day! Yehaa! I've attained 10 of my 15 minutes of fame!

(6/20/95) We got two more cats, Raven and Spatz. I haven't updated the family album uet, but look there soon for pictures of all four of our cats.

(6/10/95) Now I've done it. I talked to some guy from Wired for about 2 hours and they went and wrote an article about the Demo Scene. :-) Now I just hope that my Web pages hold up...

(5/25/95) If you haven't heard from me in quite a while, that's because I'm very busy at work working on a client-server project using Microsoft Access (client) and Oracle 7.0.16 (server). In fact, all this week I attended DBA class at the Oracle Training Center in Chicago.

(4/17/95) Yehaa! I'm back from going to NAID, and it was fantastic! Here's a short list of stuff I'm very glad I did:

• I met several people I've admired for the past three years, like Basehead, Necros, C.C.Catch, Maelcum, and others.
• I talked to several people I've admired, like Maelcum (about 30 minutes) and Daredevil (we talked for over an hour!).
• I got to judge both the music compo and the demo compo.
• I finally got out of the US and saw what another country looked like.

Random Thoughts:

(Stuff I think about for no apparent reason)

• I wrote a letter once to PC Magazine expressing my distaste in their sound card review; I thought they had completely omitted the Gravis Ultrasound, which is easily one of the best sound cards on the market. I didn't look before I leaped, and I found out that not only did they review the Gravis Ultrasound, they gave a good review. (Oops.) If you're interested, you can read the letter I wrote. In fact, here's a comparison of its wavetable synthesis against a Sound Blaster for your listening pleasure, in both Microsoft .wav format and Sun/NeXT .au format.
• Video digitization is quite fun. I've digitized about 100MB of clips so far. Now if only I had a better editing program and a DOS playback library...
• I honestly can't believe that Stafford Huyler had an article in People Magazine (3/07/95)... I went to school with this guy, and we even used to be friends for a while (he might not remember), and I can honestly say that he has fallen, slipped, frauded, and scammed his way into money and the media. It's really a shame, actually, because he's an extremely talented artist, and a funny guy... I wish his talents were put to better use.
• Stargoose has to be the one of the most pirated games on the face of the earth. StarGoose is a good overhead shooter with a neato 3D part whenever you go into a tunnel, and did very well with the technology at the time it was programmed (~1988). But somewhere along the way, it was confused as being ShareWare or FreeWare. It has since been seen on more BBS's and shareware collections than I can remember. I can't remember the name of the publisher (I believe it was SpringBoard UK?), and I'm very curious as to who programmed it, because they did a great job. On another interesting note, the game Blockout is right up there with Stargoose--Blockout is a 3D Tetris game from California Dreams software, and yet you can find it practically everywhere. (Even the Amiga version was spread amongst similar channels.) You can get Stargoose from ftp.pht.com://pub/msdos/games/space/sg.zip or from ftp.leo.org://pub/comp/platforms/pc/msdos/games/action/sg.zip (if anyone can find blockout on the 'net, please email me),
• Emulators are cool. There's all sorts of emulators for the PC, like MacIntosh, Commodore 64, Apple ][... There's even a Tandy CoCo 3 emulator (yuk). Sadly, I only know of one place that houses them all: ftp.uni-erlangen.de in /pub/pc/msdos/emulators.