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From 1987 until 1990, I produced a variety of software on the Commodore 64 microcomputer for the Australian groups TOUR DE FUTURE and TERA using the pseudonym MATT'. My productions were highly regarded and established a significant and lasting reputation for these groups in the international scene. This was a quite an intensive and productive time.
"Commodore 64 Repository" (Public, November 2001)
![[thumb]](C64repositoryV090.jpg)
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This document captures my experiences, the history of the groups and extensive detail about my productions, including references, screen captures, images, snapshots and source code. There are various refinements that need to be made, including party photographs. You need to forgive a few of my generalisations, but I wanted to document some of this C64 history as it seems that no one else has and I am just one of many that were involved at the time. I urge someone to undertake a serious treatment of the C64 culture and period.
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"Commodore 64 Productions (MATT', TOUR DE FUTURE & TERA)" (Public, January 1987)
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With the exception of SOLICITUDE, these works were produced entirely by myself for TOUR DE FUTURE and TERA (although some of the constituent artifacts were produced by third-parties, e.g. music, fonts and other multimedia elements). I recommend using the VICE emulator (tip: associate file extensions .d64 with VICE to enable autoload/run). It should be stated that the material provided here contains elements used without permission of the copyright owners on the principle of "fair dealing.
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| BACK FROM BEYOND (TOUR DE FUTURE, 1988) |
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| Produced for an Australian Demo Competition, this was the first significant production. It is
a simplistic multi-part single-file demo with a thematic nature, using design elements (the
past, and the future) to create a sense of timeless and epic grandure. |
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| HUH (TOUR DE FUTURE, 1989) |
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| A slightly more technically sophisticated product that was created for another
competition, that never came to fruition. The various parts have no unifying theme, but do
demonstrate increasing mastery with raster and graphics. |
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| OHH MATE!! (TOUR DE FUTURE, 1989) |
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| Released at the TEC copy-party in Sydney, this product has a narrative illustrating
an increasing fascination with bulletin-boards. The parts are somewhat sophisticated, and
include specialised fast loading routines, and better capabilities with raster routines and
graphics. |
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| MISC (TOUR DE FUTURE, 1988-1989) |
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| Miscellaneous demos and productions from TDF, many of them early and unrefined:
in particular the BTR demo, other contact demos and co-operation demos. |
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| DAMNABLE (TERA, 1989) |
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| The product that I am most pleased with - all coding and graphics were created by
myself, and released at THE FORCE copy-party in Adelaide. It includes increasing use of self-
modifying and pre-computed code, and more refined graphics. The multiple parts are seamlessly
linked with a self-created fastloading mechanism. |
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| SOLICITUDE (TERA, 1990) |
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| The end of an era. Various parts were created by me for this production, but it was assembled
after my departure. There's predominance of self-modifying code, and one part that
had been created for an X-FACTOR world demo competition. |
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| DISK UTILITY DISK (TOUR DE FUTURE, 1988) |
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| One of the various tool style products, designed to assist coders, this collection of disk
utilities included the TDF 'FASTDEFLOAD', a tool in itself designed to be of use to all users
and thus make our name on the scene. |
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| NOTEMAKER V1.0 (TOUR DE FUTURE, 1988) |
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| This entirely self-contained and self-reproducing utility allowed users to write
and save notes that could be played back with accompanying music. The utility could then be
used again to create new notes, ad infinitum. It became quite popular in the scene. |
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| NOTEMAKER V2.0 (TERA, 1989) |
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| The second version of this utility was internally rewritten, included a few enhancements
(e.g. ability to load new music), and was released under the TERA label. It was partially a
way to capitalise on the previous version to gain a reputation for our name. |
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| STUBBY-NOTER (TERA, 1989) |
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| After the success for the notemaker, there seemed to be an interest for a compact and
cut-down notemaker with little overhead - short music and system character set. This tool
became very popular and resulted in numerous derivatives and similar tools. |
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| 4 BLOCK NOTER! (TERA, 1989) |
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| The final production in the notemaker series was this super-compact notemaker that offered
the smallest possible size (4 blocks) for a single screen note. Internally, the design is
interesting for its 5-bit compression mechanism. |
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| BEEFTRUCKER (TERA, 1989) |
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| This RLE packer broke the world-record with a depack routine overhead of 56 bytes, and
released as an overall ensemble with fast load and save routines. It was widely distributed
in the scene and included in most packer collections. |
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| AUSSIE GAMES (TERA, 1989) |
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| This Australian oriented game from mindscape was cracked by myself from the original 4 side
version to 2 sides: the game was deprotected, level packed, fast-load enabled and
released with TERA intro, showing that we had first-class cracking skills. |
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| ECONOVAN (TERA, 1989-1990) |
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| This disk magazine was first released in 1989, then subsequently for a total of 5 issues
(issue 3 is missing), using two different engines, with all coding and graphics by myself.
The text was mainly authored by XLR8 and MISTIC. |
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| INTROS (TOUR DE FUTURE & TERA, 1988-1989) |
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| Various intros were produced under the TOUR DE FUTURE and TERA label, including those
made for other groups (711, TSS6802, etc). One of the more
significant is a TSS6802 intro with a small application (incl. fast loader + saver) to
allow the user to create text, append file, and save the result. Note that many of the
other productions have their own (and different) intros in front of them (e.g. econovan). |
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| SCANNERS (TERA, 1989-1990) |
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| These modem (wardial) scanners were used to search for possible modems on the local
008 and international 0014 free-call numbers, part of the increasing curiosity with
bulletin-boards and communications that came towards the end of my C64 interest. |
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| TOOLS (TOUR DE FUTURE & TERA, 1988-1990) |
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| Various other tool products from TOUR DE FUTURE and TERA. |
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"Brief history of TERA AUSTRALIA from MATT's perspective" (Public, July 2004)
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This document is a short history of TDF, TDF+RFX and TERA, as it existed on the C64 scene from 1987 to 1990. The party photographs should also be referred to. It was published in Vandalism News #42.
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The C64 scene is actively maintained by a number of dedicated individuals who are committed to preserving this important period of computing history. This was the first ever international, youth centric, cultural and social scene centered around the creative production and distribution of computer programs - nothing like it on such scale had previously existed. The C64 Scene Database, C64 mags, C64 intros, Onslaught and Lemon are some examples of activities that are preserving the past. We should put more effort into looking at this part of our history, and learning from it.
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