Simon Cooke
Cookie
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 | 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/
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
