Exophase

Exophase (Exo)
Join date	DMZX: October 23, 2000; mWorld 1999; AOL/IRC/MZX ML 1996
Interests	Programming, anime/manga
MZX games	Brainfuck Interpreter (with Spectere), Dark Nova (with Wervyn/Guyver)
Companies	Duky Inc, New Revolution, Arctic Fusion, Mindforge
Contact info	IRC: Exophase Email: exophase@gmail.com AIM: Exophase

Exophase is the programmer who was the head maintainer of MegaZeux from March 2002 until December 2006 (versions 2.62b to 2.81c). He has since stepped down from development, although he still provides code here and there and is available for consultation. He was the major player in the porting/writing of MegaZeux for Windows and other modern 32-bit platforms, taking on the bulk of the translation of code and the vast, vast majority of the bugs that have appeared in MegaZeux code since then.

Early Community Involvement

Exophase joined the MZX community in early 1996, at the age of 12. He started out on the AOL ZZT/MZX message boards, using his household's AOL login (dkutnick). He also made a few posts on the MZX mailing list, including a buggy battle engine; in response to being ignored he made an exasperated post which was actually also ignored. The mailing list spearheaded a move to IRC, where he would eventually find himself. Here he spent countless hours under the identity gaK, often into the middle of the night, mainly with a small group of west coast MZXers who were well known at the time.

From early on Exophase was interested in developing RPGs in MegaZeux, in particular with battle engines that attempted to approach the industry standard level in contemporary console games (as opposed to the more simplistic battles occasionally present in MZX games). He began work on a game titled "Era's Light" which was to be an epic length RPG. Like many projects of the time, the game was constantly revised and didn't get too far, and was finally abandoned years later.

New Revolution

In 1997 Exophase started an MZXing group known as New Revolution. This group was something of a brute force attempt to out-perform the highly received group Autumn Dreams. It consisted of well over a dozen members at its peak, merging several previous groups (although after a dispute Luke Drelick pulled the previous Duky Inc. members from New Revolution). Although initially shying away from leadership, Exophase was eventually established as "president", with MenTaLguY as "vice-president", and the two spent much time discussing plans and rallying together the other members. New Revolution planned on releasing a demo/mini-game bundle in the vein of Autumn Dream's Xenogenesis titled "Shades of the Future." Although quite a bit was done, this release never saw the light of day. Exophase, discontented with the MegaZeux community (which was growing more and more chaotic at the time) quit New Revolution and left the MZX IRC community altogether, while still staying around on other smaller channels. In an attempt to salvage the group's image MenTaLguY released Gates: The Puzzles and Hunt the Wumpus 3D, New Revolution's only two releases. MenTaLguY himself quit shortly after, but in spite of this New Revolution somehow survived for more than a year (gaining members such as Stargazer, author of Dylan's Gems, and Starfire/Tabris/SyntaxGlitch, author of Eggplant Adventure). New Revolution members would occasionally band together during MegaZeux *oZ competitions.

Competitions

As of this writing Exophase has participated in ten Day of Zeux competitions, always in teams (usually of three, but once in a team of four), producing the following games:

• Dark Nova: with Wervyn and Guyver, winter 1999, topic "COSTAN", sixth place
• Freedom Bound: with Ghent and Tabris, summer 2000, topic "Freedom", first place
• Soul Excursion: with Ghent and Tabris, winter 2000, topic "Exploration", first place
• Impact: with Wervyn and Quasar84, summer 2001, topic "Rebirth", first place
• Torn Creation: with Ghent and Tabris, winter 2001, topic "Stability", first place
• Trinity: with Tixus, Quasar84, and Esdemo1, winter 2002, topic "Equilibrium", third place
• Distance: with Ghent and Quasar84, winter 2003, topic "Intelligence", sixth place
• Memory Leak: with Elig and Quasar84, winter 2006, topic "Memory", third place
• Last Generation: with Tixus and Quasar84, summer 2007, topic "Genetics", second place
• Ataraxia: with Lancer-X and Quasar84, winter 2007, topic "Tranquility", first place

Exophase has also hosted two DoZs, during summer 2002 and summer 2003, with the topics "Disease"/"Solar Energy" and "Trust"/"The Internet" respectively. He also judged two DoZs and a Weekend of Zeux competition.

He attempted to complete an entry in ZzCrook's ill conceived Week of Zeux competition. The competition took place right after MZX 2.65 was released, and Exophase was absolutely determined to finish it in time so it could be used. This resulted in a week of focused work before the WoZ even began. While juggling classes and two jobs, Exophase was completely swamped with work, but smugly believed that he could still make up for the lack of dedication of his teammates. This resulted in him staying awake for nearly 40 hours straight towards the end of the competition, before completely breaking down and quitting.

Community relations

Exophase has been in a position of leadership within the community for a long time now, and has always been a very polarizing figure. From early on he has rallied against injustices in IRC channel administration, gaining both support and opposition. As a channel operator and DigitalMZX administrator he has been perceived as both a role-model and protector, and as an object of fear and resentment. He has gotten into an uncountable number of fights on IRC and the forums thanks to his highly argumentative and occasionally hostile nature, driven by his pet peeves of large egos and people who talk about things they don't really know about. Some of his most heated fights have actually been with people who are otherwise friendly with him: in particular ajs, whose similar temperament has led to IRC clashes of epic proportion.

Exophase's rather absolute, hard line nature has made both long term enemies and close friends within the community, although the lines have probably blurred over the last few years as he's become more broken and complacent.

Exophase has quite likely established more real life contacts with community members than anyone else in the community. He has spent time with Stephi and Apollyon, Wervyn on two occasions, and has arranged multiple day get togethers with Tixus, Esdemo1, and Quasar84 on several occasions. He ended up at the same university as Esdemo1 for two years, where the two even took a class together (and even more coincidentally, were assigned to work on a project together). He was in a fairly serious romantic relationship with Tixus's cousin sirotrax (who was a minor member of the DigitalMZX forums, mainly lurking). This relationship ended very badly and was a major contributing factor in Exophase leaving the DMZX forums for several months, ceasing his involvement with MZX development, and abandoning MZX IRC channels almost entirely. He also spent time with Elig for a few weeks near the end of 2006, and inadvertently became friends with his wife. Elig's wife divorced him shortly after and was romantically involved with Exophase for a few weeks; although Elig and Exophase were still friends after this ended they have since had a major falling out.

Outside work

After temporarily leaving the MZX community during the summer of 2006 Exophase focused his effort on programming a Gameboy Advance emulator for Playstation Portable and later the GP2X platform. He continues to develop emulators for other platforms, as well as his GBA emulator. He's somewhat of a polarizing figure in the homebrew communities as well, although he tends to be much less directly present than he was in the MZX community.

In fall 2006, a website dedicated to console/handheld homebrew named exophase.com surfaced. The name was intentionally (although rather arbitrarily) named after Exophase, who had by this time made himself known in the PSP homebrew scene. When Exophase confronted the site administration for ripping off his name they offered to change it for him. He instead opted to have them put in a disclaimer that the site was named in his honor. This is a decision he has since regretted, since most people fail to notice the disclaimer and assume that it's his website.