NOTE: The following originally appeared on the www.mame.net General MAME message board in a post by SWStiletto, whose *real* nick is Stiletto. :) I just *had* to post it at Retrogames - afterall, Aaron submitted a fully working STUN Runner driver just the other day! ;) (Prophet 8/11/00) NOTE: I've done a minor edit based upon a message from Aaron Giles on the MAME board. Essentially he verified the veracity of this info except for 2 small things which I changed for the sake of accuracy. (Prophet 8/12/00) Info On Aaron Giles: ----------------------------- Aaron Giles Aaron Giles has worked on games as early as 1994 and as recently as 1998. He has been credited with Programming, Additional Programming, Interpreter / Development System and Lead Programming when he worked for LucasArts. He is also one of the many people pouring his time, effort and little bit of love into MAME. Aaron hails from Toledo, Ohio. He studied physics at the University of Chicago, but then decided that his childhood passion of computer programming was the ticket to fame and fortune and worked at Cornell University Medical Center for a while. So now he does Mac and Windows programming for a living. CUMC was and still is heavily invested in the Macintosh. They do a lot of work providing educational materials for the med students here, mostly images and hypertext documents. They also pushed forward in creating telemedicine systems, where two physicians can sit halfway across the world and consult in real time over high resolution images. For that, they were involved with Cornell University proper in developing CU-SeeMe, the free Internet videoconferencing system. Their primary goal with CU-SeeMe was to provide an easy mechanism for others to build applications on top of the core videoconferencing technology. Their telemedicine system was one of the first and one of the largest. While working at Cornell University, he created several Internet freeware tools such as uuUndo, Transparency and of course CU-SeeMe. He also worked on a never-released Mac game called Phred which may show up someday as freeware He also helped develop MacMosaic; and created JPEGView, which won a prize in the '94 Apple Cool Tool competition. He can pretty much say that his Cool Tools award helped him land his dream job. Shortly after receiving the Apple PowerMac 7100 that was the prize, he picked up a copy of LucasArts' Rebel Assault and was disappointed that it wasn't PowerPC-native. So, in a furious fit of late-night hacking, he managed to write a patch which was at least partially native - enough so the game ran decently on my new machine. Foolishly releasing the patch to the net, he was on the verge of getting a cease and desist order before LucasArts decided to hire him. Aaron and his wife Vera (and their two cats) moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area from Manhattan so that he could take a job as the Lead Macintosh Programmer at LucasArts Entertainment Company. Among his interesting experiences with LucasArts was that he got to sit within an arm's reach of the big man George himself at their Christmas Party once. LucasArts Games: --------------------------- Day of the Tentacle (MAC) Star Wars: Dark Forces (MAC) Full Throttle (Additional Programming, 1994) Star Wars: Rebel Assault II (Additional Programming, 1995) The Dig (SCUMM System, 1995) Afterlife (Programming, 1996) Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Game Programming, Additional UI Programming, 1997) Outlaws (Programming, 1997) The Curse of Monkey Island (SCUMM System, 1997) Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith (Lead Programming, 1998) One of his grade school friends introduced Aaron to the Apple II when he was 11. Of course, that was right when the big arcade boom was starting, and they wanted to make our own games. They soon found ourselves competing against each other to see who could write the coolest game, and have both been writing games in spare time ever since. Aaron writes for the MacOS because the development tools are awesome, because he likes the PowerPC a lot, and because the Mac market is a much friendlier place to be in. His first experience with emulation was porting Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator to the Macintosh. He had written some nice sound code for that, and when he heard how bad Pac-Man sounded in MacMAME, he decided that he could make a positive contribution. It snowballed from there. Aaron says his area of expertise is generally optimization. He wrote the sound system for MacMAME, completely rewrote and optimized the video display system, and have so far written many CPU emulation cores in PowerPC assembly language. He has also done a bunch of drivers for MAME generally. Aaron's first driver was Mappy, because that was his all-time favorite arcade game. Then he did Dig Dug because it was Brad's favorite. Since then he had a hand in doing Dig Dug 2, Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Spy Hunter, Rampage, Tapper, Tron, the rest of the Bally/Midway MCR games, as well as many others like Mortal Kombat III and recently, Hard Drivin' and S.T.U.N. Runner... A few of his favorites are Food Fight, Roc 'n Rope, Mappy, and 1943. Aaron spends way more time programming than playing, however, sometimes upwards of 20 hours a week if he can find the time to do it. Fascination fuels much of the time he spends more than anything else. He played a lot of games when he was a kid, and that helps drive him to write drivers for some games, but nowadays learning how they worked is much more interesting to him than the games themselves. He also thinks that it is fantastic figuring out how to write a driver for a game you've never even heard of. When he can find the time away from work and MAME, he enjoys hiking, a good book, or an old movie. His favorite Mac games include Battle Girl, which he considers a lovely homage to the classic arcade games, and Heroes of Might & Magic II, a game that he's enjoyed when he gets the time to play. In addition, Aaron is also on the Retrocade development team, and his current employer is Connectix, where he is one of the lead software engineers, and is responsible for the creation of the highly-rated cross-platform Playstation emulator, Virtual Game Station. Drivers Aaron Has Created For MAME: -------------------------------------------------------- 2 On 2 Open Ice Challenge - 0.37 720 Degrees - 0.33 All American Football (rev E) [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Alley Master [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 APB (preliminary, and bad ROMs) - 0.33 Arcade Classics - 0.36 Arch Rivals - 0.36 Arkanoid (bootleg) (preliminary) - 0.31 Armor Attack [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Ataxx (set 1) [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Bad Lands - 0.35 Baseball The Season II [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Batman - 0.36 Blasted - 0.36 Blasteroids - 0.33 Boxing Bugs [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Brute Force - 0.37 Cerberus [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Championship Sprint - 0.33 Cheyenne - 0.35 Chicken Shift - 0.36 Chiller - 0.35 Clay Pigeon - 0.35 Combat - 0.35 Crackshot - 0.35 Crater Raider - 0.31 Crossbow - 0.35 Cyberball 2072 (2 Players) - 0.35 Danger Zone [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Demolition Derby - 0.28 Demon [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Dig Dug 2 - 0.27 Discs of Tron - 0.28 Domino Man - 0.28 Escape from the Planet of Robot Monsters - 0.33 Food Fight - 0.30 Gauntlet - 0.30 Gauntlet (2 players) - 0.31 Gauntlet 2 - 0.30 Original version of Gauntlet, Gauntlet 2 and two intermediate releases - 0.31 Gimme A Break - 0.36 Goalie Ghost - 0.36 Hat Trick - 0.36 Hatris - 0.37 Hit 'n Miss - 0.35 Hydra - 0.36 Indiana Jones - 0.31 Ironman Stewart's Super Off-Road [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Ironman Stewart's Super Off-Road Track Pack [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 John Elway's Team Quarterback [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Journey - 0.28 Kick - 0.28 Klax - 0.33 Kozmik Kroozr - 0.28 Major Havoc [with Michael Appolo, Brad Oliver, Neil Bradley, Bernd Wiebelt] - 0.30 Mappy - 0.26 Marble Madness - 0.31 Max RPM - 0.34 Mayday - 0.36 Mayhem 2002 [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Mini Golf - 0.36 Mortal Kombat 3 - 0.37 Motos - 0.29 Name that Tune - 0.36 NBA Maximum Hangtime - 0.37 Night Stocker - 0.36 Off the Wall - 0.36 Off the Wall (Sente) - 0.36 Pac & Pal - 0.27 Paperboy - 0.33 Peter Packrat - 0.31 Pigout [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Pigskin 621AD - 0.36 Pipe Dreams [with Bryan McPhail] - 0.37 Pit Fighter - 0.36 Pole Position [with Ernesto Corvi, Juergen Buchmueller] - 0.36 Pole Position II [with Ernesto Corvi, Juergen Buchmueller] - 0.36 Power Drive - 0.36 Quantum [with Paul Forgey, Hedley Rainnie] - 0.30 Quarterback [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Rabio Lepus / Rabbit Punch - 0.37 Rampage - 0.28 Rampage: World Tour - 0.37 Rampart - 0.35 Redline Racer (2 players) [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Relief Pitcher - 0.36 Rescue Raider - 0.36 Rip Off [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Road Blasters - 0.31 Road Runner - 0.31 Sarge [with Brad Oliver] - 0.30 Satan's Hollow - 0.28 Sente Diagnostic Cartridge - 0.36 Showdown - 0.35 Shuuz - 0.35 Skull & Crossbones - 0.35 Snacks'n Jaxson - 0.36 Snake Pit - 0.36 Solar Fox - 0.28 Solar Quest [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Space Wars [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Sparkz - 0.36 Speed Freak [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Spiker - 0.36 Spy Hunter - 0.28 Spy Hunter 2 - 0.36 Star Castle [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Star Hawk [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Stocker - 0.36 Street Football - 0.36 Strike Zone [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Sundance [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Super Baseball Double Play Home Run Derby [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Super Sprint - 0.33 Super Volleyball - 0.37 Tailgunner [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Tapper - 0.28 The Tower of Druaga - 0.29 ThunderJaws - 0.36 Timber - 0.28 Toggle - 0.36 Toobin' - 0.31 Top Secret - 0.35 Tri-Sports - 0.36 Trivial Pursuit (All Sports Edition) - 0.36 Trivial Pursuit (Baby Boomer Edition) - 0.36 Trivial Pursuit (Genus I) - 0.36 Trivial Pursuit (Genus II) - 0.36 Trivial Pursuit (Young Player's Edition) - 0.36 Tron - 0.28 Turbo [with Ernesto Corvi] - 0.36 Turbo Tag - 0.36 Two Tigers - 0.28 Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 - 0.37 Vectorbeam [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Victory - 0.37 Vindicators - 0.33 Vindicators part II - 0.35 Viper [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 Wacko - 0.28 War of the Worlds [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Warrior [with Zonn Moore, Jeff Mitchell, Neil Bradley] - 0.35 Who Dunit - 0.35 World Series: The Season [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 World Soccer Finals [with Paul Leaman] - 0.37 WWF: Wrestlemania - 0.37 Xybots - 0.33 Zwackery - 0.36 This is all from public information available on the Internet. Stiletto