Interview

Handle: Mahoney - Homepage unfortunately deleted!

How did you come up with your alias ?
Quite embarrasing getting a handle from the hero in the "Police Academy"-movies? I have to live with that now... It was my friend Zap (of the Defiers) who suggested the name.

City / Country:
I was born in Lund in the south of Sweden. People in the real world use to call me Pex Tufvesson, and just recently I moved to Oslo, as soon as I'd eventually finished my education.

Born year:
1974 - exactly 720 days after Kaktus!

What was your first computer, and when did you get it?
My first computer was a PET in 1979 (at the time I was five years old...). As I was just 5 years old at that time, I did not do anything I want to be remembered for then. But I wrote my first word-processor at the age of nine! (On an ABC80, a Swedish computer manufactured by Luxor). I have been playing space invaders on the Specturm ZX80 (not the one with the rubber keyboard, which was excellent for erasing mistakes drawn with a pencil!, but the first one with a plastic hammer-sensitive layer on). It was soo cool having your computer hooked to a TV set, and a screen which didn't flash each time you tried the keyboard! The 16 kB Spectrum was also a friend of mine (Spindizzy, I love it!).

How did you get into the scene and what groups have you been a member of ?
I started by programming the Commodore 64 assembler by translating op-codes by hand, entering them in a BASIC-program with, and then trying out the magic command "SYS 16384". My efforts were saved on a cassette-player, and backups of my, if you excuse me, "demos" were taken on my home stereo equipment with two cassette players. I used to call myself "Zax" then, and I was the only active member of CCC - Commodore Cracking Crew.

The real thing started when I got my first disc-drive, in a combination with Kaktus entering my basement in summer 1986. We formed "Mahoney & Kaktus", and things started rocking!

Written by Kaktus (I'm too lazy to write this once more...):

Mahoney was a member of a local group called The Defiers, so I joined them. We made our first demos together, Alvesta-Sirap and Skruv. Both huge one-diskside-demos. When we made Skruv we had joined a group called Triumph. The same day that Skruv was finished, we migrated to the Amiga. After the demos Blue, Funny and Scrolly we joined NorthStar, a group located mainly in Helsingborg. We made some new demos, Scrolly II, Bobby, Green, Squarey, White and Black. Our first Amigademos plus some of our new demos were released on NorthStar MegaDemo II, a one-disk demo. At this time, Mahoney started to work on the NoiseTracker V1.0.

Mahoney again: The reason for me to program Noisetracker was just that suddenly you could get (as I thought right then...) high-quality sounds from inexpensive equipment! I wanted to have the freedom to make insane music with as much freedom as possible. I sometimes catch myself humming an ancient Amiga-tune on the train home from work, when what I really should do is keep quite as all the other passengers. NorthStar wanted to release a MegaDemo III, a two-disk demo project, so we made some demos for it too, for example Flummy, Scrolly III, Flummy Intro and Flummy Intro II. Later NoiseTracker V2.0 was finished. NT2.0 was supposed to be a commersial product, released by EAS Software in Germany, the same company that sold Obarski's Soundtracker. Unfortunately, we wanted to make a working and useful product, so when we considered ourselves finished with our work, EAS didn't exist anymore. The vice president converted to doing business buying and selling houses!

As you all might know, the NT2.0 was good as long as the hardware of Amiga 500 was left unchanged. I always wanted to squeeze as most as possible out of the hardware, which in this case ment that all systemcalls and such was ignored. I used the hardware through hardware registers, which later on changed due to upgrades to A2000, A1200, etc. For instance, the first NoiseTracker versions didn't even work when a hard-drive was connected to the computer, a "feature" which people spending 4000 SEK for a 20MB hard-drive didn't like.

Well if you really want to know from a safe source, the four letters "M.K." present in most 32-sounds Soundtracker and NoiseTracker modules/songs does not stand for "Mahoney&Kaktus". These are Unknown/DOCs initials, I think. But I am responsible for the more unofficial "M&K!"-marking. If you try to load a module with these letters instead of "M.K.", you will be rewarded with a little traing going over the screen from left to right. This was a joke for all those people ripping Mahoney&Kaktus music from our demos. If anybody out there actually happened to notice this, please tell me! (This was in NoiseTracker v2.0). You could also try "X:-K" (which in Swedish with a lot of fantasy would be X kolon-K = Xolon = Exolon, my friend from Fairlight), or "GLUE" for Gluemaster). Or have you ever tried to type "Hallonsoft" in any Mahoney&Kaktus demo? In Nitropac, you'll be rewarded with a black smiley in the lower right corner of the screen. Or tried to hold all the keys "MAHONEY" or "KAKTUS" down at the same time on our last C64-demo SKRUV? (which will play a sample "Pump up the volume" for you!). I have forgotten most of these "hidden" features which were planted everywhere in our demos... most of the time it was keycodes, but try holding the right mousebutton down while booting "Sounds of Gnome" (a music disc for Amiga 500 (1.2 or 1.3, not newer!, original chipset!). The result I will not tell you, but somebody ripped the font from this demo without giving any kind of credit to us, and I think I spent a week drawing it!

Well, I should just keep quiet so the interview could go on...

What was the proudest moment in your career ?
When I sold my Amiga and bought a water bed! (Which gave me many exciting moments!) No, seriously... The best with being in the scene is all the inspiring fan mail I got, I was amazing getting one or two letters a day with greetings from all over the world (from South Africa to Iceland), being the 14-year-old boy I was.

For what specific reason(s) do you think that you are remembered ?
The total lack of "style" in our demos. They were supposed implant a big questionmark in the head of the audience. Many people also appreciated the scrolltexts, long ones dealing with normal life, not only computers...

What would you like to be remembered for ?
Well, not the yoghurt I threw at Exolon in the train going home from a copy party (read Gluemaster's page for info on this one...) Maybe the best quotation I've heard about me (in fact, about my music, but it fit just as good on everything else about me) was said by Celebrandil: "His music is before its time". And, since most dance music nowadays sounds like trackermusic, he made a better guess back in 1988 than he knew!

What made you stop the scene activity ? (and do you remember when?)
The major thing was girls! (Well, it was in fact only "girl", I'm one of the few men on this planet who has only one at a time...)

Thinking back on the good old days, is there anything you regret?
I regret calling "XAKK" for "KRAX" which started a really silly fight about nothing... But quite a few people enjoyed watching!

What is Internet?
Well, this is the unlimited way of expressing human stupidity! Just because a story is printed does not mean that it is true! And even worse, just because you read it on internet, IT IS NOT TRUE! There are so many lies out there that you have to think. Use your brain and sanity, that's what it's for.

What is WWW?
I thought it was short for World Wide Wait! I remember my old 300 baud modem (also configurable to 75/1200, send with 75 bytes/second, I could even type faster than that on my keyboard!). Sane people try to limit their homepages to around 40 kB of loading. Did you ever realize that the size of my favourite game on the 64 (Drelbs) was less than that?

What was your favorite
GAME(S)
On the 64: Lazy Jones. I love the idea, as well as the music. Drelbs is another favourite of mine. And Ghosts&Goblins was wonderful! Delta was another favourite! On the Amiga: No... playability was not the same as on the 64. Games looked great, but mostly lacked the smoothness of the 64. On PC? No... sorry...

DEMO(S)
MeGaKLoPpaRnA - always on the right side of sanity! (For their funny approach to computing). Otherwise, I envy people daring to stretch the hardware to its limits. I did NOT like the scroller in Soundtracker whatever version it now was, where Unknown from the group DOC used to spoil all my creativity. I ended up reading about ste-ste-stereo speeded scrolling when all I really wanted to to was making music! (But it was a great program, anyhow!)

PROGRAMMER(S) (OR PROGRAMMING TEAM(S))
Celebrandil, I've always admired your mathematical talent! Stavros Fasoulas - wonderful work!
I also enjoy people who are into arcade emulation and then, of course C64 and Amiga 500 emulation. (That day when my musicdisc "His Master's Noise" is working 100% on a fast PC, I will eat my hat! It should not be possible to emulate the hardware that exact. I was using abosolutely everything of the hardware to the extreme (which made it sometimes impossible to run on a real Amiga - bugs? me? naaaaah!). So far I've only seen an emulator capable of showing the exploding Lemming and the fist picture of the dancing flowers (drawn by Uno!), but then crashing... It was all timed to when the discdrive should be finished reading some tracks, and most of the code in the loader was not loaded when the demo began, which means I was running the program when only about 7% of it was in memory. This worked on the original hardware. This did not work on faster/newer machines, of course. But all my programming had one sigle goal, to sqeeze as much as possible out of the limited hardware. I did not care about software emulation and faster hardware. I used the one available... My programming strategy is worthless today when a 333MHz PC can multiply X-bit values in one clock cycle when it used to take over thirty instructions and 1/8 of the memory filled with tables on my 64, running at 1MHz. Where is the inspiration? (Am I complaining? Is everything I've got memories? Are my days gone? Is there a meaning of life? Was this all I could do? Is it over? Has technology gone out of our hands? Will robots take over earth? Is "Terminaor I" really executing 6502 code? (Yes! watch the movie once more, and carefully study the assembly language when the red-terminator-is-watching-pictures appear. A Terminator coming from the next century, running an 8-bit microprocessor! I love it!). Well, then I just have to sit back and relax and let other persons work hard for me... I have no intention of mastering the PC hardware as I did with the C64 and the Amiga. (the problem: it is not "the" hardware, it is different everywhere, which leads to huge compatibility problems, which leaves me with my final question: "How come computers work at all?", and I'm supposed to be working with constructing hardware...).

CRACKER(S) (OR CRACKING GROUP(S))
Triad and Fairlight.

OVERALL GROUPS :
Never needed any, but the people in Northstar/Fairlight were all nice!

COMPOSER(S)
Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, Chris Huelsbeck, you know them all... When I heard Jean Michelle Jarre's "Chronology"-album for the first time, I thought it sounded like an Amiga-module by Mantronix (Hej Martin med den roliga Kristianstadsdialekten!).

BEST COMPOSED TRACK(S)
Zoids by Rob Hubbard.

BEST GRAPHICS
Everything Kaktus made - NOT!

EVENT(S) (E.G. COPYPARTY)
The ECES event in Eskilstuna by Razor and a few more. Sorry for fooling up the demo-competition when I forgot to disable the extramem on the A500, causing the classic Guru Meditation-alert to pop up a few times...

MEMORY(S)
The best: Blowing up Youghurt with green Austrian fireworks in a meeting held in Kristianstad, south of Sweden. The smell, the look, the laughs and last but not least, the 10 meters in radius youghurt-cloud slowly moving away with the wind. The explosive pizza-salad flying up to the 3rd floor was also great!

DRINK ?
Milk energy!

What are you doing nowadays ?
Recently I graduated as a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. Now I'm working in Oslo at Nordic VLSI (since October 1997) as a project manager doing VLSI hardware digital design. When it comes to music, I have been producing a number of CDs, mostly live recordings of choral music, but some dance music as well. I'm a member of an a capella group "Vokalàs" in Oslo, 12 persons performing acappella jazz. Check out Vokalas homepage (in Norwegian only...).

What are you doing on your spare time?
Learning Norwegian! No, that's not really necessary. I sing a lot, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what physic rule makes the norwegian trains fail to be on schedule.

What is the meaning of life?
Being a nice being! And use your imagination, because that's what it's for!

Any final words?
Now go away from your computer and hug your girlfriend! If you don't have any, go and find one! If you don't want one, then I suppose you are a girl, and then go and get yourself a boyfriend. And stop watching that silly TV.