Since i am around here for a while now i might as well introduce myself (warning, *long* story!).
My full name is Thorsten Kuphaldt, but people call me "kufi" for as long as i can remember. Not the coolest of nicknames but it is okay
I was born on April 13th 1980 in munich, germany, and had my first computer-experience with about three years when i messed with the keyboard of my dads TRS80, resulting in my first written word, "FOTO" (german for photo). A few years later (1984-ish) my dad bought a breadbox-C64 and that was the coolest thing ever for me. One game i liked especially, not exactly because it was so great, but because of the title track: Hunter Patrol. After a while i started recording music off my dads 64 on tape...
In 1990 i bought my very own C64 and had a blast playing games, listening to their music and later starting rudimentary BASIC-programming. Sadly i never really got into assembly. Again i started to record music off the machine on tape, and started to annoy my classmates with it (i still remember fondly trying to persuade my gym-teacher to play the cybernoid-title-theme as music for aerobic...)
1994 was the year when i parted with my C64 to replace it with an Amiga 1200 (which i own to this day). I really loved the Amiga (and its music), but i started to miss the 64 after a while. In 1996-ish i got a CD-Drive for it and started to browse through a few PD-CDs. In one drawer i noticed a program called "PlaySID". I thought to myself: "could that be a C64 Musicplayer? Nah, probably not, that is not possible". Boy, was i wrong!!!
Around that time i played around with a MOD-Tracker (i think it was OctaMED), and tried to "remix" the first-level-tune from Katakis (one of my all time favorite C64 games and tunes)... from memory of course. The result was OK, but after the first minute or so i ran out of voices, and my memory of the tune also was not the best (i remembered the beginning but not the rest) so i abandoned the conversion there. After i got hold of the SID i compared both and it was pretty accurate, even if it only covered about a minute or so. The file still lies around on my harddisk, and every now and then i threaten to finish it
After i got an internet connection (and a PC... sadly) one of the first searches i did was for "C64"... and so i discovered the HVSC and SIDPlay. A few years later i found c64audio.com and started downloading and listening to some of the early remixes that were available. I heard of the BIT-events, but i never actually thought of going there, simply because i lacked the money and time (and english-skills) to go there.
When i downloaded or listened to C64-music i mostly concentrated on stuff i knew from "the old times". The reason was that i thought that i already heard the best stuff that was out there, and even if i played some random Galway or Hubbard-tune in SIDPlay, i stopped after a few seconds, because in Galways case the stuff started too slow and in Hubbards case it started too distorted and crazy
. Believe it or not, i never listened to such gems as Thrust, Green Beret, Human Race, Last V8, Rasputin, Sanxion Loader and a *lot* of others until a few years ago!The real wake-up-call came, when i tried out SlayRadio for the first time (last year, after the CRC had taken place), and i really started to get blown away by stuff that i completely dismissed in the beginning. The following days and weeks i produced lots of traffic at RKO when i started to "beef up" my remix collection. Before i had around 30 - 40 remixes laying around, now i am up to about 250, not counting the CD-tracks. Since i discovered SlayRadio (and the hundreds of gems that i missed) i hardly listened to "real world music"...
Apart from C64-related stuff i started programming in C and perl (on windows-platforms) about five years ago, and the biggest result is my game Dogfight (see signature) and my commodore-museum-website (also see signature) which is generated with a preprocessor written in perl. I also do some 3d-modelling since i had my Amiga, starting with spaceships, and now i make computer-models for my commodore-museum. I also have a sizable computer-collection (around 50 computers, and tons of peripherals).
Wow, i got a little carried away with my writing there, i hope i did not bore you to much. See ya!
