I'm Elco Bouma, born in 1975 in the Netherlands. Welcome ! Started programming way back in the early 80's at age 8 on a Commodore 64 mostly basic (computing the sprites by hand :-) but also a bit machine language. Typing over listings out of programming books, kept me busy for long times, but also learned me the basics of programming and especially thinking logically. When the Commodore Amiga came out in 1985, I ofcourse begged my parents for it. Programming lots of demo's like "James Brown is Dead" in assembler that period, most prominent one was "The Afterlife", getting the most out of the Amiga hardware. Entered a national programming contest from Commodore with a game called Hyper in 1990. The music was done by a schoolmate Kasper Peters, the graphics and programming were done by me. We became second ! That was a nice achievement. Then went to study Artificial Intelligence at the Free University in Amsterdam. During my time as a student played lots of snooker, pool and darts and created Dutch Darts Revelation in Visual Basic. This game was published on CD-Rom by Dynamite under the name Darts Challenge Game.
Dutch Darts Revelation - Darts Trainer
Doing my internship at Nedap-CTP, working on their own created NOPN-2 software for unmanned gas stations. Creating interfaces with gas station pumps, pin terminals and point of sale systems. Also did my graduation project there, an Anti Drowning System for swimming pools. Using real time video capturing and image processing techniques in Java (!). It ran on a pentium 3 500mhz pc, processing streams of multiple video camera's around the swimming pool. Many thanks again to everyone there at nedap-ctp that made it possible to test the system in a real swimming pool!
Got my "Master of Science" in Artificial intelligence degree in 2000, it was broadcasted on national tv as breaking news.
After graduation started working at Summaest on HP-Nonstop systems, used at banks for processing millions of pin transactions. Worked on an EBPP (Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment) system, and pioneered with using Java and the first java webservers (Silverstream, anybody ? :-) )on those systems.
Then moved to a seperate company called Interfaktuur to rewrite the EBPP system from a Consolidator EBPP Model to a Direct Billing model. It was used by some oil companies for publishing their invoices on their own website for their customers. After a few years the company was taken over by MIQ-Europe where I worked on the software part of a track&trace system called Mobilox for vehicles. It registered trips of vehicles and more data with proprietry made hardware. As part of the EBPP proposition also created DigiNota and "De Digitale Brievenbus" website for TNT-Post at that time with a tab integrated into Microsoft's "MSN Messenger".
Created a plugin for Windows Media Center called J2MCE which was kind of the first appstore for Mediacenter. Also working on my own home assistant called James which was based on Clips from the Nasa using the Java version called JESS. It is a rule based system, an expert system shell in which you assert facts and logic rules to reason about them. Pretty fun to work and make stuff with. I created my own hardware interface to Klik aan Klik uit devices. And other devices used the X11 protocol.
Then in 2009 moved to the internal projects team at Devoteam, developing and maintaining Java and .Net projects for banks and staffing companies. Focus is mainly on web applications written in Java with at first Struts 2 and now Springboot and Angular and also .Net (Core) websites for example:
https://me.devoteam.com/case-study/devoteam-builds-smart-cloud-solution-ict-broker/
Microsoft started the "Indy Games" project in 2009 where it enabled game developers to release a game on the xbox 360. Well, that would be a dream come true. How cool would it be, your own game on a console!
So in 2010 I released Darts Arena for the Xbox 360, created with XNA in C#.
It did pretty well and even was mentioned in a japanese games magazin. (Still don't know if it says anything bad about it :-)
In 2011 followed by another game called Topochopper. Based on the game Topografie Nederland of the Commodore 64.
Remember Topografie Nederland on the C64 ?
Topochopper was my version of Topografie Nederland also created with XNA and C#.
I created a special version of Topochopper for Devoteam called Devochopper you can view a youtube video of it here. It was used in the Devoteam stand of the Dev Days in The Hague. You had to find all the headquarters of Devoteam in Europe in the fastest time to win something.
In the meantime the mobile phones also took of. In the beginning I was (and still am) a major fan of the Windows Phone platform. The livetiles are great and i still miss them on my android phone. So also ported the Darts Arena and Topochopper games of the Xbox 360 to versions for Windows Phone 7. These games can't be downloaded anymore from the store, but they were featured on the windows store a couple of times.
In 2012 released a game called Darts Arena Online for Windows Phone.
This game was written using Xamarin and is still available in the Windows Store. The backend is a .Net WCF Webservice application that can run in Windows Azure, but also on premise in my garage 😊 It's written as a generic turnbased gameserver with support for all kinds of tournaments, competitions and challenges. It uses the Azure Servicebus as central distribution of the incoming messages. Depending on the required load the number of appservices and worker services can be scaled automatically. All the arena online games connect to this server.
In 2014 released a game called Pool Arena Online for Windows Phone. This one was also based on a C64 game i played a lot called Billiards.
Pool Arena Online was also written using Xamarin and is still available in the Windows Store (but very outdated!)
As a good crossplatform develpoment exercidse, I have ported both games to Android. This shows the power of Xamarin and cross platform mobile development. I could reuse almost all the code, just had to rewrite the views for them to work. You can download them here for Android. Pool Arena has just been selected as one of the most underrated android sports games of 2022.
Then created an app that combined pool, darts and connect four in one game called Pub Arena Online. It got a nice review at the site allaboutwindowsphone.com
In 2015 I gave unity3d a try, so i ported the darts arena game to a simple unity version called Darts Arena Seasons.
Also created some apps in Unity 3D using playmaker to try a bit of visual coding and do some AR and VR demos. I created VR City Themepark demo for my kids where they could walk around in a city where at certain places theme park rides are placed which they can really enter and enjoy the ride. When they sit in the Ferris Wheel they can see a big bulletin board with their picture on it on a very high building near by. I also created a VR four in a row demo where there is a very big, like very big house, four in a row board in front of you and by looking at a row you can let a piece fall in and play the AI opponent. Another VR demo was a ball drop demo, where you are placed in a big ball that hangs below a helicopter. The helicopter flies above a terrain with lots of mountains and drops you somewhere high above it. You are in the ball and get a rough ride.
Also did some embedded programming on a Tiger processor in Tiger Basic for the Smart Save Box of VITNL. It was an aftermarket start stop system for cars. When the car is stopped the engine is turned off and when you double tap the brake the engine is started again. This involved reading information from the OBD interface and some custom car inputs. Newspaper Metro wrote a nice article about it.
And ofcourse also did some stuff on the Raspberry Pi. I made a base system to connect and configure all possible kinds of buttons and dials. And then being able to play bluetooth, webradio, mp3 etc using these buttons and dials or via a nice webinterface and easy connection setup via a QR code. This was done in Java with a JSF frontend.
Also as a fun side project turned a raspberry pi into a diskdrive for a real C64 using the Pi1541 project.
My last/current project is the Gungnir Dartstracker and trainer https://gungnirdarts.com. The Dartstracker is an automatic steeltip darts scorer, based on a raspberry pi 4 with 4 usb camera modules. The app that keeps the score, the Gungnir Dartstrainer, is an android app made with monogame.
You can view the dartstracker and dartstrainer at work on the gungnirdarts youtube channel
Still writing this page....Its A lot of stuff....
Creator of lots of software and apps.