Difference between revisions of "AikenToAki"

Latest revision as of 11:51, 7 September 2009

AikenToAki (also known as Aiken) is the internet name of Ruben. He's a 15 year-old male, living in Australia. He codes mostly in C, but is known to code in ASM, and on even less occasions, C++. His main target platform is the GBA, however, he is thinking of moving onto the Nintendo DS.

Background

Ruben was born on the 29th of November, 1993 in Chile, South America. He and his family moved to Australia in 2000, and live there since. He also has a Labrador named 'Buddy' who is 7 years old.
Ruben can fluently speak English and Spanish, and can speak a fair amount of Italian and Japanese, and can read certain Chinese characters, though he has difficulty reading a lot of them.
He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome in 2008.

History of the name

The name 'AikenToAki' was chosen after Ruben (Aiken) and his partner, Yoshiaki. Before this, it used to be 'Aiken' (translated: pet dog), and before that, it used to be 'Yuudai' (translated: male warrior). 'Aiken' was chosen fairly randomly, but is mainly picked up from his love for dogs. 'Yuudai' was picked by one of his friends, and was often typed as 'HS//yuudai' or 'HS.Yuudai'. The friend that picked the name 'Yuudai' thought it sounded good, because, when pronounced, sounded like, "You die."

Programming

AikenToAki has been programming for a few years, and is self taught at all computer languages.
Before he started programming for the GBA, Aiken had been programming HTML and PHP for a site that he had been designing, that he has shut down. After this, he began writing music in MIDI, which gave him an interest in sound synthesis and things of the like. After a few months of coding inactivity, he started looking into GBA games, and got an interest as to how they work, which was further fueled by his need of knowledge. He started off by reading basic GBA tutorials and writing example programs (in C++) based off those tutorials. A bit later, he released an example of what he coded, with full source code.
However, after a few months, he decided to read TONC, and got an even better understanding of the GBA hardware, and C optimizations. The idea of coding in assembler scared him at the time, so he stuck to coding in C and trying new optimizations.
A few months later, he started looking into how the GBA outputs sound. He realized that the sound hardware was very limited, so read up on the very few tutorials on sound for the GBA. After a while, he ended up reading DekuTree's 'Sound Mixing' tutorial, and started writing a basic sound mixer based off the one from Deku. A bit later, he started writing music in tracker formats (such as S3M and IT), and wrote a raw S3M music player for the GBA, with most things (specially bias handling) done wrong.
A bit later, he coded an S3M player that played very well, but was a bit slow. Soon after, he started writing fairly optimized assembler with low memory footprint.
There was a period of inactivity from him for quite a while. However, he recently came back to activity and released AGBMidi, a project he had been working on for about 2 months.
Right now, Aiken codes in mostly assembler, but codes in C/C++ when he hasn't fully grasped what certain programs do.