Addybook 14 Interview Unifier
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INTERVIEW in addybook issue #14
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welcome to another interest chapter.
this time we present you an interview,
done by rrr/oxyron with UNIFIER/spirit.
chapter music composed by PEACE/oxyron.
? hi ulf. our readers would like to get
some information about you. please
introduce yourself.
! are you sure that they would like
that? ok, then. my name is ulf h|rn-
hamar. i just got 22 years old, and at
the moment i live in an own apartment
in a student corridor (sharing a kit-
chen with 7 other students) in a
! beautiful swedish town called v|xj},
where i study programming and english
at the university. i really like the
kind of life you live while studying
here, but sometimes it makes you very
stressed when you have to do lots of
studying for several courses at ones.
i'm 1.78cm tall, and my weight is 69
kg. i've got brown hair and brown
green eyes. except for the student
! life, my biggest interests are compu-
ter and computer programming, music,
books, movies and making radio pro-
grams (i'll try to become one of the
dj's for the university's local radio
transmissions, when my studies start
again in august).
when i produce something for the c64
scene, i use the handle unifier.
? how does your "computer career" look
like?
! i bought my computer in december 1985,
and my first diskdrive sometime in
1986. late in 1986, i chose the handle
tfb (the future brain), and me and
some of my friendsfrom my hometown
built up a group called 1096 crackware
late in 1987, i bought my first modem
! and started calling some local boards,
and in 1988, i coded my own bbs-prog.
and put up a board called "old street
bbs" with it. through my board, i got
to know lots of other people, who were
trying to find some group to join. in
1988, i changed handle to beastian,
and first joined tpf (it's the same
group that exists today. zeldin and
those people built up that group, and
! then they just never left it!!) for
some month, and then me and a friend
built up a new group called sfa, and
in late 1988, both sfa members joined
sector 90.
in 1989, sector 90 canged name to
hostages, and shortly after that,
nearly all hostages members built up
a new group called eltronic. in the
middle of 1989, eltronic first changed
! name to shine (and released a kind of
nice demo, called "a lot of coke", at
the horizon-equinoxe party) and then
died. i joined zone45 for a short
while, and then weird science, where
i changed my handle to unifier.
later in 1989, i joined censor design,
where i stayed until i got kicked in
august 1990. i got kicked, because
didn't get along with dr. cool and
! other low iq skinheads who was members
of the group back then. when i got
kicked, i called some flash members
that i knew, and i joined flash inc.
three days later. in april '93, i left
flash inc. and joined spirit.
? where does your handle come from?
! as you can see in the answer before,
! i had used the handle beastian for a
long time, and i was really tired of
it. to find a new handle, i looked
trough an english dictionary. i think
that unifier is a nice handle, but i
have discovered that people who are
bad at english have got a big problem
spelling it. (they usually write it
down as "unifer", or something stupid
like that.)
? give us some further information about
your job in spirit, the current member
status and the further projects.
! well, i'm a coder and a swapper (plus
an unactive musician, i usually finish
one tune every year or something like
that).
spirit members are:
ans, art, astaroth, bulldog, cane,
! keymaster, pompom, rage, rantanplan,
rave, rcc, runaway train, starkiller,
unifier, whopper.
in the future, spirit will puplish new
demo, some more issues of our disc
magazine "impulse", and some more crax
some spirit members are also working
on game projects.
? why did you leave flash inc and join
spirit?
! i had two major reasons:
1) some members of flash inc are get-
ting unactive. i don't think the group
is going to die, but the way i see it,
they are sure getting lazier and la-
zier, and that just made me feel that
! i wanted to join some other group in-
stead.
2) when i left them, i had been a
flash inc member for over a two and a
half years, and i felt a bit limiting
to be working with the same people all
the time.
when i had decided to leave flash inc,
! joining spirit was an easy decision
for me, 'cause i've swapped with ans
of spirit for a long time, and i'ved
always loved the spirit productions.
i never asked any other group, i just
decided that i wanted to leave flash
inc, wrote a letter to ans asking him
if i could join spirit, and then i
waited some weeks.
? when you were a flash inc member, you
were also a member of the game produ-
cing group octabits games. please wri-
te down a memberstatus and the group
projects. have you coded a game yet?
! octabits members are: redstar of ???,
zodiac+morpheus+moon of flash inc.
zodiac, redstar and moon haved finish-
ed two games. the first one is called
! "psychic kaos", and it has been sold
to cp verlag, it was puplished some
month ago.
no i haven't done any commercial game
yet (but i've done two demoparts with
built-in games). my personal point of
view is that it's too late to make
commercial games now, 'cause the soft-
ware companies doesn't take the c64
seriously anymore.
? what do you think about cracking, and
what are you doing with the illegal
wares that arrive to your postbox?
! i think that nearly all games that
software companies release these days
are worthless, and i get a game that
i think is worthless, it does ofcourse
get scratched pretty fast. in my opin-
ion, it should be illegal to try and
! sell people bugged shit games like
"mc donald land".
but ofcourse i admire the work of some
quality crackers. (i'm not very inter-
rested in speed cracking, thought.)
many of the quality crackers know alot
more about packers and loaders than
the coders in the demo scene.
? do you own any other computer system?
? what do you think about other computer
systems?
! yes, i own an amiga 500, too. i'm not
active on that computer yet. but i'm
trying to start some amiga swapping.
i really like the amiga, but haven't
got the time to learn anything about
amiga coding.
in school, we also have to use pc
! computers a lot, so i know lots of
things about pc programming in high-
level languages (pascal, c, ada). i
even used this knowledge to make a
smal commercial pc utility for a swe-
dish companyin 1991. however, i have
not got any pc, and i'm not going to
buy one, 'cause i don't think those
computers have got any kind of hacker
feeling at all. (basically, i think
! that a pc is a computer for 50-year
old owner of pavement companies, who
buys lots of cd's with bryan adams and
michael bolton!)
? what are your favourite...
! demo -dutch breeze, place in the space
-let's disco, spiritual dreams.
coder-mms, k.m., tron, kjer, rcc.
! artist -hein design, ans, ogami.
musician -jeroen tel, rob hubbard,
-martin galway.
game -last ninja 1-3, monty on
-the run, creatures 1+2.
tool -unipacker v2, hackpack 3.
swapper -bulldog of spirit+incubus
-of triad.
computer -nord-100.
book author-margaret atwood, louise
! book author-lawrence, frederik pohl,
-ursula k. le guin etc. etc
tv-serie -northern-exposure, twin
-peaks (most of series that
-are shown on swedish tv
-else i've seensome episo-
-des of "beverly-hills",
-but i really can't take
-that shit seriously.)
movie -tchao pantin.
! music -r.e.m. (especially their
-old records), the boo-
-radleys, the velvet under-
-ground, marc almond, clan-
-nad, the blow pops, julee
-cruise, dinosaur jr, etc.
? what do you think about the mass of
groups beeing rebuilt lately?
! people associate groupnames with the
members and the feeling their releases
have or used to have, and therefor i
think no-one should be allowed to use
an old group name if the old feeling
is gone from the releases. it's of-
course a different thing if a group
STAYS ALIVE for many years, and grad-
ually changes it's members over the
years, like for example triad has done
? did you ever have remarkable quarrels
in your 64 carreer?
! well, nothing personal. i've been in
some groups who were involved in wars
(censor vs fairlight, flash inc vs
panoramic and light etc.), and i've
written a war note or two for my
groups, but fortunaly nothing very
brutal happened.
? thanx for the interview. if you have
any message for the scene, please
share it with us.
! i want to urge everyone who's got any
kind of interest for the c64 demoscene
to go out and buy a 256k ram expansion
unit (=extra memory) for theur compu-
ter, and then mension the fact they've
bought one, in notes they write to
! their contacts . lots of cool new demo
effects are possible to make with the
use of an reu, and many of the coders
in scandinavia already own one, so the
only reason that no special reu demos
are made is that not enough people in
the scene own one. those reu's are
very cheap to buy, so i don't see any
reason why all of you shouldn't rush
out and get one!!
! at last, i want to thank rrr of oxyron
for making this interview possible,
and the addybook editors for publish-
ing it. bye...
