Whatever Happened to Bob?

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Just reading Ben's blog. He has been playing with 2D Fractal Terrains (as you do).

Bobman retro action courtesy of BenSeeing the landscape Ben generated instantly brought back so many memories. A school friend of mine, called Robert Parsons, used a similar algorithm to generate 2D landscapes that look just like Ben's. Only, he had it running on his PSION Series 3 PDA and then used the backdrops for a wicked game called (I think) Bobman where you had two little men that battled each other firing weapons that had projectile like motion at each other. It was a bit like Worms long before worms was ever invented but much faster action and additive in two player mode against each other. I wasted many hours in the my Sixth Form common room playing the game.

He then went on to do a Mandelbrot generator for the PSION (which I think had a monochrome screen but if you messed with a lot of machine code you could get shades of gray emulated by quickly flashing the black on and off). His crowning achievement was to build a basic 3D engine for the PSION which he developed from reading some computer science books at the local university library that I found absolutely impenetrable. I was hoping he was going to port elite to the PSION but we lost touch and I have never spoken to him again.

I've tried googling and looking up Robert (Bob) Parsons a few times over the years and never tracked him down. He was the first hacker I met that I knew was better than me.

3 Comments

> He was the first hacker I met that I knew was better than me.

I hang around on the Debian and GNOME lists, so I'm well aware there are many many better than I am! ;-)

Nice post.

Look on friends re-uninited for this guy?

Yup - no joy.

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