This month’s guest developer is Ieuan Britton aka Yeshu777
Ieuan first started coding with the arrival of the home computers, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro etc.
And, like most, his initial attempts were in BASIC, and after a couple of years he moved on to z80 assembly language. BTW Ieuan is John/Johann in Welsh!
Alongside this, his focus was initially electronics, which he studied aged 14 at night school, gaining his City & Guilds at Llandaff Institute of Higher Education.
With the advent of the Microchip PIC, both skill sets then came into play and at 16 he was hacking Sky Cards, D2 Mac satellite cards, to the point of etching the tops off chips with Nitric Acid to remove the security bits – he was quite adept at reverse engineering :-O
After leaving school he started work with a local electronics company, while continuing his evening studies at the local college.
Ieuan takes up the tale: “Quite by accident, I moved into the amusement/gaming/gambling industry, after mistakenly walking into the wrong factory. This resulted in me becoming Hardware Manager, overseeing new embedded designs and supporting a busy production line.
Over the last 30 years, I have worked with many leading companies in the gambling industry globally, including the US, UK and Europe. Like most I was now proficient in C, C++ - but my knowledge of the underlying hardware set me apart from other software engineers.
In late 2018 my health deteriorated, and I actually died in January 2019, albeit briefly! The next year was spent in hospital; I was unable to walk and had very little memory.... however, I obviously recovered as I am here writing this!
Completely out of the blue, in February 2020, I received a call from a leading UK manufacturer asking if I could possibly develop a video 'redemption' game on the Raspberry Pi.
For those that don’t know ‘redemption’ is a 'fun' style prize machine that are commonly seen at seaside arcades and pay out tickets which can be redeemed for prizes such as soft toys, etc.
At this time, I had never seriously developed on the Raspberry Pi, so I simply looked for what development tools were available. AppGameKit Classic for Raspberry Pi caught my eye and being free, I decided to download and experiment with it. What grabbed me initially was how simple it was to test ideas and concepts with the minimum of fuss, and it ran with a simple click of the button!
I then immediately purchased AppGameKit Studio, which allowed me to develop on my main PC and then simply port it over to the Raspberry Pi. So I agreed to take the project on!
It was a steep learning curve with only 12 weeks to complete the project from start to finish, however the AppGameKit forums and the support found within was what really made it for me.
The resulting products are shown below:
