Interview
Handle: Starfire of NorthStar
How did you come up with your alias ?
Well, its kinda obscure, but you know shurikens, the ninja throwing-star? I can dash them out in high speed, so a friend started calling me Starfire. It caught on so to speak... I was, and still am, very much into martial arts.
City / Country:
Helsingborg / Sweden
Born year:
1967
What was your first computer, and when did you get it?
Well, it was a ZX Spectrum really. I got it when the 48K model was released, whenever that was...
How did you get into the scene and what groups have you been a member of ?
Atom and I got together, can't remember how we met actually, and started North Star, wich is the only group I've ever been member of. Do you know that the name North Star is really dedicated to Mike Oldfield, a really great guitarist. I got it off the Platinum album. We then later joined with Fairlight for a while, which was really fun. Yo! Strider! What did you do to be deported from sweden? ;)
What was the proudest moment in your career ?
Hmmm... As I wasn't very active writing demos and stuff, I would have to say the feedback I got from the story in the Warhammer 40K demo we did on the Amiga. Many people liked that one...
For what specific reason(s) do you think that you are remembered ?
Well, the North Star _ANTI_!-virus-virus, for one... More on that later.
What would you like to be remembered for ?
For giving Titan (now called Uncle Tom) his first Amiga music program, I think it was called Sonic or something like that. That was certainly a good deed don't you think? :)
What made you stop the scene activity ? (and do you remember when?)
I kinda grew bored with the scene, North Star got overcrowded with people when we let those who wanted to be in charge run things. We got back and cleaned house a while later, but it was too late I think. I moved on to more important things, like working and earning money.
Thinking back on the good old days, is there anything you regret?
Well, that Amiga antivirus-virus perhaps wasn't the best thing I did, but it WORKED! It was only the magazine Amiga World that cared to figure out what it really did, and that it wasn't dangerous. They said it was like fighting fire with fire.
What I did was disassemble a couple of bootsector-viruses, and write my own program to recognize those in memory or on a disk, aswell as the normal bootblock that didn't contain anything else but code to start the machine. Then I gave it virus capabilities to make it spread like a virus, but under controlled forms, thus not overwriting anything but another virus or the normal bootblock. You would not loose anything important that way. It even warned you if there was a virus on your writeprotected disk where it couldn't overwrite it. It even disabled a virus active in memory, using the interrupt vectors pointing to the virus, when you loaded it. A fun bonus I programmed in, was that it kept record of how many of the different viruses it had killed, as well as the generation of itself. One disk I got back contained a 950 generation, had killed little over 450 viruses. That can't be bad, now can it?
I heard later that someone had disabled my safeties, and that it then spread like wildfire, nothing holding it back.
What was your favorite
GAME(S)
I was very much into fast action games, and Defenda on the Amiga was my all time favourite.
DEMO(S)
Anything featuring Titans music. :)
PROGRAMMER(S) (OR PROGRAMMING TEAM(S))
I don't remember, it was sooooo long ago... Mindbender and Codejammer? :)
CRACKER(S) (OR CRACKING GROUP(S))
There were so many, and most were really good, so I will not pick a favourite.
OVERALL GROUPS :
What do you think? North Star at the peak, perhaps?
MEMORY(S)
Well, my combined 96 megabyte simms... :)
DRINK ?
Guinness, the only dinner for me!
What are you doing nowadays ?
I am working as a computer consultant, in LAN/Security.
What are you doing on your spare time?
I haven't got much of it, my fiancee and martial arts taking up most. A little bit of 3D rendering taking up the rest.
Is there anything you'd like to say to the public (read: admires)
It is a pity that the Amiga got blown up, I am still trying to build my PC into one. Right, its got more storage, memory and speed, but apart from that, the amiga was great.
What is the meaning of life?
Is there a meaning? I sure never found it! See 'The meaning of Liff' by Douglas Adams. Sure is cool, but Oh! so meaningless... :)