All posts by Mert Börü

Video Game Development

Unreal Engine 4 for everyone!

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Thanks to Unreal community, a rumour about the NEXT BIG THING has been doing the rounds for almost a year. Well… It seems this is more than BIG!

Today, Epic announced that “Unreal Engine 4 is for everyone!”

Not kidding… Now, it is for everyone!

For $19/month (plus, 5% of gross revenue), we can have access to everything, including the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine’s complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development. – Oh My God!

You can read Tim Sweeney’s post on the Unreal Engine website for more information.

Hats off to Epic!

Epic is one of the few companies in the video game industry that really take care of what developers are saying, and I am a great fan of them because of their nice attitude towards us.

Thank you Epic!

Books, Retro Computers and Demoscene

Who’s Afraid of Visual Basic?

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“Kim Korkar Bilgisayardan? – Visual Basic” (“Who’s Afraid of Computers? – Visual Basic”) is a computer language programming book that I have written for students and amateur programmers. It was published in February 1997 by Pusula Yayıncılık, as an introduction to Microsoft’s then-popular rapid application development tool; Visual Basic 4.0.

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Articles, Retro Computers and Demoscene, Video Game Development

“Paradise Lost” found!

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(Illustration: “Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool”,
by Gustave Doré – © University at Buffalo Libraries)

“Paradise Lost” was the first commercial Amiga game designed and developed in Turkey. It was proudly produced by Ahmet Ergen and me, and released on 4 floppy disks in December, 1991.

Though it was a phenomenal technical achievement in terms of setting the bar for game development in Turkey by the early 1990s, thanks to problematic distribution channel and no media support, it was a commercial failure. Only a few hundred copies were sold! And, as far as I know, none of them have survived. It is a game that is no longer known to exist in any private collections or public archives. Long lost and forgotten… Until now!

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Events, Retro Computers and Demoscene

Annual Springtime Gathering 2013

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Yet another Springtime Gathering…

12 hours of non-stop chat about iOS app development, retro computers, cult TV series, tips & tricks for home electronics, DIY plumbing (!!!), tube amplifiers, studio acoustics, video games, and even more video games… – not worth mentioning aching jaws!

We knew that we had to skip the late-night show and go home, when the wives stopped calling and gave up sending SMS messages 😉

Thank you, gentlemen!

(From left to right) - matahari, Alcofribas, Akermen
(From left to right) – matahari, Alcofribas, Akermen
Retro Computers and Demoscene

256 byte Overscan MEGATEXT Intro

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Welcome back to 8-bit days 🙂

The day Alcofribas kindly invited me to the 10th anniversary of 7DX Demo Party, I knew that I had to do something special for this event. Hosting Turkish demosceners for 10 years via enormous amount of hard work and very limited resources, certainly deserves support!

Since there has never been an official Amstrad release before at demo parties in Turkey, I decided to go back to my roots -early 80s- where I used to do a lot of 8-bit assembly language coding. I thought, writing a simple Amstrad intro in 256 bytes would be great. – (Yep, size does matter!)

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Events, Retro Computers and Demoscene

Meeting @ 7DX Demo Party 2011

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What a fantastic day we had at the 7DX Demo Party 2011 on December 24, 2011. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the party, meeting sceners, watching/releasing demos, snacking, chatting, and even gossipping… The breakfast at the Bosphorus was the jewel in the crown of the event. Thanks for everything!

(From left to right) - Modelist, Alcofribas, Akermen, matahari, retromaster, Adamın Biri, Shax
(From left to right) – Modelist, Alcofribas, Akermen, matahari, retromaster, Adamın Biri, Shax

Oh, by the way, don’t forget to check my 256 byte Amstrad intro that I released at the party 😉

Music, Audio Engineering, and Synthesizers

“Far Beyond The Endless” remix released

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Moist is electronica producer, artist, songwriter & remixer David Elfström Lilja from Söderhamn, Sweden.

As a remixer Moist has made a bunch of remixes for artists like Pet Shop Boys, Butterfly Boucher, Red Snapper, Erasure, Agnes, Sophie Rimheden, Håkan Lidbo, Tomas Andersson Wij and many more.

This time, he is not remixing, but gets remixed! – Today, Moist is releasing “Far Beyond The Endless” 6-track digital single, including my remix on the last track!

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