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Oerg866

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Revision as of 18:29, 19 November 2011 by Theocas (talk | contribs) (2011: It's game, not game :V)

<forumuser name="Oerg866" />

Oerg866 is a German scener. His only hacking project was
Sonic Retro
Sonic The Hedgehog - Oergomized
, which primarily focused on music and small assembly edits. It won the Lava Reef trophy in the 7th annual Hacking Contest. He is best known for his activities in the demoscene and his music, which has seen public attention as he composed the entire sound-track of the work-in-progress Mega Drive title ProjectMD, by Sik.

2006

He has been in the community since September 2006 when he first stumbled across Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta page after playing around with the Sonic 2 Beta ROM. However, at that time he was an AOL user, so he couldn't register until an administrator gave him permissions to try and pass the test. Three months later he changed his ISP to 1&1. Due to the nature of his first posts, sparking a bit of drama on the forums, he was disrespected, banned and he left in early 2007.

2007

Around July 2007 he came back, passed the test and also became a full member. After a flamewar over a hidden feature in an emulator, he was banned because it was considered a fake (Tweaker later admitted a mistake, as he has seen the debug menu in question himself). He left again, to - at first - pursuit other interests. Before he came back in December 2007, he had secretly learnt about modifying Sonic games. There had also been a complete turnaround in his relationship with Nineko, who had previouly hated him. He also started to learn about xm3smps and started putting in different music into the game. He was granted trial membership again after translating a 6-page long German magazine article about Sonic 3 (unveiling details never heard of before, most notably a mention of a "Help!" item). However, he rather unwisely used all 10 posts in one day and got stuck in Pending Approval.

2008

After several discussions with Tweaker, he was able to try the Technical quiz, gaining 10 more posts which he spent well by
Sonic Retro
posting several translations
and a thread about his ROM-hack. He became a member again. Around that time, he has been editing the Wiki a lot. Mostly in terms of Sega Mega Drive/Genesis emulation. Thanks to him every publically released Mega Drive emulator now has an own Wiki article. But, time passed and in January 2009 he got banned from the forums again, after a flamewar that originated in a misunderstanding between him and another user. They resolved their conflict later, apologizing to each other, but this resulted in a ban for Oerg866 (none of the other parties received a ban).

2009

In August 2009 he was unbanned yet again. He posted about the final version of
Sonic Retro
his ROM-hack
as well as xm3smps/oerg.

During 2009, he has developed an intense liking towards electronic music originating from the 1980s, and also started to compose music. Though he was bad at first, he recently, according to other people, became better as he started to make music for the SEGA Genesis. In relation to this, he has a very strong attention to detail. He creates all his own FM-Instruments and PSG volume envelopes himself and he tends to make heavy use of the PCM channel. He published some of his Genesis music on 8bitcollective.org. Lately, he has been a bit inactive on that, but we'll get to that in a second.

He became partners with Tomy, the person behind Tototek and developed frontends for DOS and Windows specifically designed for easy usage of the MD-Pro, since he found the original software to be "incredibly unusable, buggy and slow".

2010

From March 2010 until July 2010 he was working on SMPSPlay, a SMPS-Player for the SEGA Genesis with visuals. He released a pack including the source code to it, as well as all of his notes he made while researching the RAM area SMPS occupies to the public. Actually, several people have done this independendly, nobody releasing it to the public before. People have contributed to complete this list.

He is known to attend events about retro computing and gaming. To provide a better connection with the homebrew scene, he shows off some current projects of the scene. At the moment, he is doing that with titles like Project MD by Sik, and TMFPlay by TmEE. He enjoys talking about technical things (especially Genesis) and tends to test all homebrew ROMs he can get his hands on on real hardware by using a flash cartridge. However, this love to hardware compatibility caused him his position as a judge in the 2009 Hacking Contest, because he flamed about how some hacks weren't compatible and therefore not worth being tested.

2011

His most recent development and by far the one causing the most public attention is his involement in Sik's homebrew game 'Project MD', where he is working as a musician. Although development was hit by problems several times, the current status of the game is pretty good. Most of the music is already finished and implemented into the game. He helped to fix bugs in the sound engine, and made huge progress in providing music tools for the Mega Drive.

While working with Sik to improve Echo, a new and free sound engine for the Mega Drive, he wrote xm2esf, which is by far the most advanced music tool available that produces real-time usable output (Echo's format). To enable the user to enjoy the comfort of any XM tracker he is used to, the program takes XM files as input, and outputs a stream readable by echo. The tool is very advanced as it supports all major XM effects, such as:

  • 0xx (Arpeggio)
  • 1xx (Portamento Down)
  • 2xx (Portamento Up)
  • 3xx (Tone Portamento)
  • 4xx (Vibrato)
  • 8xx (Set Panning, hint: only left, center or right)
  • Axx (Volume Slide)
  • Cxx (Set volume, very accurate formulae used to calculate volume for FM and PSG)
  • Dxx (Pattern break, always interpreted as D00)

He uses this tool now to make all music he does on the Genesis. He posted (at first privately) this small excerpt from the game Project MD. It shows the advanced capabilities of xm2esf combined with smooth FM, PSG and PCM playback of Echo.

While in alpha/beta stage, Echo and xm2esf are publically available on GitHub.

Pictures

File:Oerg866 1.jpg
Oerg866 at the German Sega Mega Drive championships on Homecon 12 in Hanau, May 2011.
File:Oerg866 2.jpg
Oerg866 at Homecon 14, playing Bomberman, October 2011.