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| < Start Up >
| Midway Games
| Motorola
| DEC
| UIUC
| Jaleco
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| Intro |
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The following are some of the job descriptions and background of the
projects I have worked/am working on. Due to the nature of company
confidentiality and proprietary work - Please do not ask me to tell
you about [anything] other than the details listed below. I will
ignore those requests.
Enjoy!
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| < Start Up > |
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This is currently under wraps... =)
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| Midway Games |
From 2001 to 2007, I was at Midway Games, makers of your favorite arcade
titles such as: NBA Jams, NFL Blitz and all of those Rush driving games.
They also released timeless classics such as: Galaga and Defender.
When I started working there, I worked on a "table top" product called the
TouchMaster. You see these and many copy-cats on the bar tops of
your favorite watering holes.
But the company all of the sudden decided to axe all coin-op projects.
So, your's truely was blessed to become part of the world famous Mortal Kombat
family. I have learned A LOT about developing video games while
on these projects. Many different dicipline and skills are needed to
develop, complete and bring the products to market.
This is an industy that I never considered was available in the states.
I always thought that all video game development was done in the land of
Nintendo and Sega. This was a dream job. But alas, all good things must
come to an end.
The primary reason I left Midway Games was part office politics and part
technology related just like what happened at Motorola (see below).
In this case, I used the many GNU tools on the development of the
Motor Kombat mode (note, that's the Kart racer) and developed this game
mode so fast on my own, that I managed to keep my schedule on track such
that I did not have to come in on weekends (which the video game industry
in general as well as Midway and Mortal Kombat was notrious for taking
-- known as "crunch"). There's a lot of details on this -- but I vowed
after developing on the previous two titles to never kill myself again
for a project that yield no compensation for those hours. There's even
a case where the company "took away" bonuses after they were allocated.
Screw that...
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| Motorola |
From June of 1998 to the end of the year 2000, I worked for
Motorola's Global Telecommunication Solutions Sector.
The project was on the next generation of Base Station
Controllers (BSC) for the future of cellular communications
and data transmission.
The basic premise of the project is simple: redundant systems
for high-availability performance.
The areas covered on this project is vast. They include
working on: real time operating systems (currently
VxWorks and in the past - Chorus and Lynx);
PowerPC industrial boards; networking infrastructures
including source version control, web servers,
data storage, data base and multi-user servers
(with Windows NT and Sun Solaris); and application development.
I once suggested that we use the existing BSD or one
of the many linux derivatives for the basic router-
like design the project was heading towards; and to also
use de-centralized server projects for the redundant
database services. I was chastised from my manager
for those ideas. I pressed on working and providing a solution
to my supervisors nonetheless. But my little project was
ulimately turned down due to office politics.
After almost a year and a half after I left Motorola, my old
roommate (who still worked there) then tells me that they
are looking into using BSD and some of the open source
projects to implement into their own projects.
What a waste of time.
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| Digital Equipment Corporation |
During college in 1997, I interned for Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) working on the development of DECtalk.
The project was a Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis
technology product.
Assignments included in assisting in final release production
quality control, build processes, implementing
new features and creating development tools for
automating the tuning and testing processes.
The DECtalk team consisted of only 10 people. This gave me an
opportunity to work on a lot of the different areas of the project.
I assisted the software managers and engineers in testing and
developing intelligible applications to help the development of
the TTS technology meet the growing customer's demands and needs.
My development work included:
- Researching near natural sounding voice speech
- Highly intelligible voice production
- Multi-language support
- Multi-platform support
- Automatic testing application tools
- Automatic speech quality adjustment tools
- Proprietary applications
The work I did for the automatic speech quality adjustment
tools was written from scratch. When I completed the utility,
it was considered for release as a stand alone
application. But since Compaq bought out Digital Equipment
Corporation and my internship ended before I was able to see the
results of that work, I have no idea what has happened to that
program - actually, I don't know what the status for the whole
project is for that matter.
But, the skills and experience I have learned from that internship
was worth more to me then all of my computer science programming
classes I had taken in college combined. I would highly
recommend anyone who is in college to take an internship or a
CO-OP position whenever possible. It is definitely worth
the extra semesters.
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| University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign |
Also during college, I worked for the University of Illinois's
Computing Services Office. Specifically, the Engineering
Workstation Lab (EWS).
While working for EWS, I assist users in using the software
and hardware supported by the College of Engineering Workstation
computer systems. Some of the software support included:
- Autocad
- ProEngineer
- Mentor Graphics
- Spice
- Mathematica
- MatLab
- Island Write, Table, Equation, Calc and Graphics
- C, C++, Fortran77, Scheme and other compilers
- and more
I also configure, maintain and trouble-shoot the computer
systems. My responsibilities covered seven labs and about
270 networked UNIX workstations, including:
- Sun SPARCstation 20/71,
- IBM RS6000,
- HP/Apollo HP-UX models 715/50 715/75 and 715/80
After becoming a seasoned member of the EWS team, I have been given
the opportunity of becoming a manger at one of the labs with
additional responsibilities, including:
- Maintenance of the lab room themselves
- Checking on attendance and the performance of the lab
assistants working in my lab
- Holding performance and merit reviews for raises
- And providing suggestions and reports on improving the
lab's status and usability for the engineer's needs
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| Jaleco |
And finally, during high school, I some how began my work experience
with a gaming company called - Jaleco USA. I have worked there
for about 4 years with opportunities ranging from running the warehouse
department as manager, working as an electrical technician,
and even got the chance to be part of the marketing team for
Jaleco's consumer electronic games.
They have been a successful video game producer in the commercial
an consumer market. In the commercial department, Jaleco has
released some well known arcade games such as:
- Cisco Heat
- Grand Pre Star
- F-1 Super Battle
- Arm Champs
- B.O.T.S.S.
- and more
In the consumer department, Jaleco made it big with their line up of baseball
games, where the object of the game was to have fun. All titles were on the
Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, and NES GameBoy System. Some of
them included:
- (Super) Bases Loaded I, II, III and IV
- Maniac Mansion
- CyberBall
- Rampart
- Earth Defense Force
- (Super) Goal
- Q-Bert
- Word-Zap
- and more
They werer featured in Replay Magazine
(October 1994), click HERE
to see some of the people I have worked with (back in the day).
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| Content |
| Midway Games
| Motorola
| DEC
| UIUC
| Jaleco
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