This retro resume is dedicated to my various achievements with Commodore 64, an 8 bit system that dominated the home computer market in the late 80s and early 90s. I guess it is also some sort of a late confession to friends and family as to why I used to spend so much of my time in my room in front of my monitor during my teenage years.

Commodore 64 will undoubtedly bring back a lot of good old memories for a certain generation that grew up waiting for their cassette decks to load their favorite game from tape. However, it has been a career and life defining experience for me only a few months after my dad had brought it home in 1988. You can read about this and the events that followed throughout my career in the ‘about’ page.

Programming BASIC routines was something I got hooked on shortly after my father got me a Commodore 64. In the months that followed, my fascination with the concept of programming a computer grew only stronger thanks to my subscription to the official Commodore magazine, which consistently came bundled with a bonus booklet that contained the source code of small, amateur applications and / or games mostly created by the readers. It was not long before I started sending in games I had created, getting them published, and getting paid for it. This was somewhere around the time when I was 13. There are a total of 6 games I have had published in the magazine. You can find a sample of the print outs here.

My Commodore 64 journey took an unimaginable turn when I unintentionally joined the editorial staff of ‘64LER’, one of the most popular and influential video games magazine ever published in the country. This premature career in games journalism took off unexpectedly as the popularity of the magazine grew even larger. For someone at the age of 13, it was demanding, but great fun while it lasted between September 1989 and December 1991.

The magazine had a distinct style that was inevitably inherent in the reviews. Unlike their international counterparts, these so called reviews actually almost always included a complete walkthrough (quite often accompanied by maps, keyboard layouts, etc.) when applicable or a strategy guide in the absence of a linear plot in the game. This approach made it more challenging for the editors to complete and deliver the final article.

During my time, I’ve reviewed 70 Commodore 64 games. 11 games out of those 70 were cover features. You can find a list of games I have reviewed in chronological order here. You can also check out some scanned copies of my printed reviews here.

In addition to the Commodore 64 game reviews, I was later on given a column in the magazine where I reviewed local arcade halls and the popular games available at those facilities.

Towards the end of my career in video games journalism, I started picking up on the much dreaded Assembly programming language for the Commodore 64 by reading through a DIY Assembly column that was being published in the magazine I used to work for. Through networking among high profile techies in and around the magazine, I managed to sneak into what’s widely known in the technology world as the ‘demo scene.’

Back when I first started my activities as part of the demo scene, I assumed the nickname TURK, which I later on changed to DIGAHOLE. Using a nickname (a.k.a. “handle”) as well as being a member of an organization (a.k.a. “group”) was one of the unwritten rules of the “scene” society. Therefore, I declared the birth of my “scene” persona, TURK / Digahole, by teaming up with Accuracy, a “group” based in Turkey. You can read an interview with me that was published in the 12th issue of Nitro, a disk magazine produced by Excess, here.

Accuracy corresponds to the majority of my scene history. Among other things, I’ve mostly programmed intros, and written for their “disk magazine”. It was only when I got asked to join Onslaught, a much bigger, diverse, and controversial “group” with a wider variety of resources available to them, that I left Accuracy along with my buddy. This move inevitably meant the death of Accuracy, because we were the leaders of the team by that time. You can access a summary of my “scene” profile online here.

Below is a list of my accomplishments with Commodore 64 during my demo scene history.

a.	Intros
	What Is An Intro? An intro, in the context of a demo scene, is a vividly animated computer software (often times accompanied by a sound track) that usually informs the user of either the people responsible for the actual application that it precedes, or the people involved in bringing the actual application to the user. Intros are meant to be brief in length so as not to take up too much memory or disk space, and non-disruptive in nature so that it is easy to skip for the audiences it does not have meaning for. Intros are how I got introduced to the Commodore 64 demo scene, because the non-existence of video game copyrights in the country at the time had made it a haven for pirated games, which always came with an intro attached at the beginning. Therefore, programming an intro as my resume for my first attempt into the scene was a no brainer. This eventually turned into one of my most common activities throughout my demo scene history.
b.	Collections
	o No More Nazis (Music Collection) No More Nazis is my first and probably only programming effort as part of my demo scene activities that goes beyond the scope of an intro. It is a music collection of 31 tracks composed by AXL of Accuracy. The music player features bitmap graphics by French Flair and Forbidden Cult of Accuracy, and is capable of loading tracks from disk in the background. o Tooldisk #7 (Utility Collection) This is a collection of 16 third-party Commodore 64 utilities with various functions. It can be thought of as an application launcher with the capability of loading applications in the background. The launcher interface features bitmap graphics by Dominator of Accuracy, and sound track by Kjell Nordbo. The “#7” represents the fact that this is the seventh iteration of this utility collection line from Accuracy.
c.	Disk Magazines
	What Is A Disk Magazine? A disk magazine (a.k.a. “diskmag”) is a magazine that is distributed in electronic form to be read using computers. These had some popularity in the 1980s and 1990s as periodicals distributed on floppy disk, hence their name. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s caused them to be superseded almost entirely by online publications, which are sometimes still called “diskmags” despite the lack of physical disks. o Splash Splash was Accuracy’s official disk magazine and the spiritual successor of Garfield News. I’ve contributed as an editor and journalist in the 18th and 19th editions. My work as an editor includes disk magazine reviews, crossword puzzle, and comics among others. By issue #18, I added some neat new features to the disk magazine engine, and improved the usability by altering some of the design. I’ve also significantly improved and optimized the text editor exclusive to Splash editors. This allowed the editors to be able to work more efficiently. o Palladium Palladium was a disk magazine produced by one of the very few other local teams, Ascraeus. Through friends, the magazine staff and I hooked up to improve the overall quality of Palladium, both in terms of content and design. Luckily, I was given almost complete control over how the next edition of the magazine would look, function, and read. This allowed me to realize my ideal of stripping the disk magazine off anything that got in the way of immediately accessing the content. That included intros, fancy-but-useless menus, etc. Thanks to the co-operation of all Palladium staff, the result was a much more streamlined disk magazine with far less junk or more quality reading that was easily and instantly accessible. The reactions to the new look and feel were mostly positive. o Vandalism News Vandalism News was Onslaught’s official disk magazine, and I inevitably contributed as a journalist after joining their ranks. Due to my prominent presence on the internet early on considering the majority of the demo scene society, I was tasked with writing the internet report chapter, The Browser. I’ve done this for the 30th and 31st editions, until I no longer had the time for my Commodore 64 activities due to college.
d.	Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)
	What Is A BBS? A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and login to the system using a terminal program. Originally BBSes were accessed only over a phone line using a modem, but by the early 1990s some BBSes allowed access via a Telnet, packet switched network, or packet radio connection. Once logged in, a user could perform functions such as downloading or uploading software and data, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users, either through electronic mail or in public message boards. Connecting to a Commodore 64 BBS for the first time was one of the memorable moments in my “scene” history. It must have been this impression that later on inspired me to build and operate my own BBS running on my Commodore 64 in my room. The system, which I had named “Monster”, ran on a modest hardware compared to more established ones that packed hard drives, super CPUs, RAM-links, etc. It had two 1581 drives and one 1541-II drive for storage, and another 1541-II drive that contained the system disk. The software behind the system was C*Base 3.1. , and I created an entire set of original ASCII prompts, graphics, and logos for it. Monster was one of the rare if not the only Commodore 64 Bulletin Board Systems s ever to have operated from Turkey.
e.	ASCII Art
	What Is ASCII Art? ASCII art is a 20th century art movement that utilizes computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. A short while after getting accustomed to ASCII graphics displayed when connected to BBSs, I noticed I could create some myself, and I did. Apart from creating the prompts, menus, logos, and other various ASCII graphics for my own BBS, I also started making some for other BBSs that I liked. Some of my art was featured in “Tales of Esgaroth 3”, ASCII graphics collection of Tyron of Hitmen. Note that Commodore 64 comes built in with PETSCII a.k.a. CBM ASCII, which is a slight variation of the default ASCII.