Contract Work: iOS, Android

iOS and Android app design and development. Work for large and small clients including Roche, Medtronix, Great Fridays, Vodafone and Medex Media. Applications deployed and supported at numerous large events. Development of apps and server side data collection & serving, installation and setup on location, support. High pressure jobs to meet clients deadlines.

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Local small business services including system setup, website design, hosting, email, print design and IT.

Arrow Mania 2 (2014)

More crossbow arrow shooting challenges, and now you can use your vacuum cleaner too to suck up those pesky birds! Makes total sense.

Datel (1994)

I went straight from University to Datel Design and Development.

Datel’s most famous products were the GameShark (Americas) and Action Replay (Europe/Japan) “game enhancers”. We also made all sorts of addon peripherals and software for games consoles and handhelds.

Playstation Gameshark Pro (1996)

The second version became “Pro”. Slightly higher in stature it included RAM chips and new features including a built in code finding system.

Playstation Gameshark CDX (1997)

So Sony decided to save build costs by removing the cartridge port on the back of the Playstation! Hence GameShark had to become a CD!

PC Action Replay (1994)

This was for PC’s running Dos and Dos4GW, pre Windows 95!

An ISA card and software for your PC. I’d only just started at Datel and this was one of the first Action Replay products I worked on. I started at a time Dos4GW was prevalent in gaming (e.g Doom had arrived) and the Action Replay didn’t support Dos4GW. I developed the 386 “protected mode” system which breathed new life into the product and allowed to work on all the latest games like Doom, you soon had the ability to fire 20+ rockets in a few seconds and other fun cheats.

This was the beginning of the end of my involvement with Action Replay/Gameshark engines and front ends. Times had changed in the industry, all consoles were now disc based optical media, all consoles use their own proprietary optical formats and advanced protections to prevent piracy (the public were copying PS1 discs with CD burners left right and centre so something had to be done).

So, Datel needed to be able to release products, by now Datel built its own CD duplication factory. It was now my job to figure out how to make a bootable PS2 optical disc…… oh!

I’d be reading all the optical media specification books multiple times and anything else I could find, I’d write full decoders and encoders which would work not only on EFM but HF signals too. Tools to capture high resolution HF waveforms digitally, tools to decode HF into EFM, then to sector data, then back again. Tools to search for patterns and anomalies in masses of analogue and digital data. Use numerous high spec hardware including Audiodev testing equipment, high resolution A to D capture, microscopes, a replication plant!

12 months and 100+ presses of CD stampers later, it was done…..

Wii Optical Disc (2007)

Luckily for me, the Wii optical disc was much the same as the Gamecube disc, some tighter protection checks, and we had a working disc within a couple of months.

PSP Gameshark / Action Replay (September 2008)

My interfaces were always nice I think, even the Sega Saturn had scrolling and opening windows even though we were limited to graphics (I was literally plotting pixels back then with no access to hardware registers). Now with more powerful hardware and a hacking scene emerging Datel had a bit more ability to find out more about the hardware and actually draw some nice graphics for the front end. I dare say the PSP interface, as an interface for selecting from lists and toggling items on and off, is a 60fps joy. Every bit of interface design from detecting direction presses to scrolling titles to the next screen for continuous fluidity is in there.

I even added features to allow people to skin the menus and backgrounds (the public weren’t told in the end but could choose from a selection in the options screen). You could update your code list from the internet direct on the PSP (probably one of the first pieces of software to update like this at the time).

I didn’t code the engine or in game interface for this one, that was down to another Datel programmer (if you’re reading this and want me to write your name here just say). Products were taking a lot longer to produce at this point what with the better graphic interfaces, larger more complex games to make cheat codes for, lengthened time to reverse engineer hardware and develop ways to supply the product (in this case a memory stick, the disc in the package was for your PC, the media manager software).

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The above video is a customer reviewing the PSP Action Replay, it shows some of the user interface.

Max Media Manager Pro PSP

The PSP was by far the most popular multimedia handheld and multimedia player, hence it also had its own “Pro” version with extra features. An advanced video edit mode that allowed features such as trimming, resizing the frame, cropping, advanced bitrate+quality settings. It also featured the most active online saves community with people swapping their game saves (e.g. start on the last level with this save, in this save you have the secret gun, etc).