OK, let's get this out of the way first, this is me... Here's a little bit about the bloke that you'll be listening to on these pages.

I am 39, and I live in Hertfordshire in England with my wife, eight of our ten children and seven computers; there is rarely a dull moment in our house. We have six boys and four girls, ranging in age from twenty down to two years (at time of going to press), and four PCs and three Macs, ranging in age from positively archaic (pentium 1 and PPC 603e) to reasonably modern (2.4ghz pentium 4 and Intel MacBook). I am currently studying to become an 'Apple Approved Service Provider'.

I was introduced to, and became fascinated by computers in the late eighties, starting out with an Atari ST. I moved to Amiga (very briefly) and then progressed to the Mac (when all three shared the Motorola MC680x0 series processors). After mastering STOS Basic I taught myself assembler, as it was the only way to achieve the necessary speed on these early machines, and moved on to C as the megahertz increased. After playing around with the Acorn Archimedes for a bit, the inevitable move to PCs came with the advent of Windows 95, and I started to dabble "under the hood" at this time. None of our desktop PCs have the case screws in, and I had two little Compaq presario laptops... I now have one big one. The Macs, of course, just look after themselves ;-)

Career wise, I have worked for several software companies developing mainly Mac based apps in CodeWarrior using Standard ANSI C. I do web design these days, mixed with a bit of software development, PC builds and network installs. A Jack of all trades and Master of the universe really...

When not up to my proverbial in all things computer related I listen to music, which is almost exclusively The Jam, or seriously dubious '80s nonsense, and am almost terminally obsessed with the phenomenon that is LOTR (that's "Lord Of The Rings" for the un-initiated).

Well that's me, so what about this TNT2 thing...

OK, let's get the ball rolling... I'm going to rewrite TNT Basic from the ground up... I must be mad! What do I get out of this? A fuzzy warm feeling and a serious case of RSI (or whatever they call fiddler's elbow these days).
"So why do it Nods?" I hear you ask, and it's a good question. I really loved my time with STOS on the Atari, and when I first saw TNT I though "Here we go again!", it had the same raw edge to it, as well as a nice homely feel that made me want to use it. I felt I'd met TNT before, it just looked a bit more grown up nowadays... it probably had kids and a mortgage but I felt the need to sit down with it, buy it a pint and talk about the old days.
Despite the similarities, there were features in STOS that I felt were sadly lacking in TNT, the ability to manipulate memory being the largest omission though there are obviously others, and I offered my services. This was the very same time that Mark had decided to Open Source it.
I was, and to a degree still am, against the whole Open Source thing, not in general I just don't think it is right for TNT, I don't think it will benefit from the move for the simple reason that the users are not likely to be able to advance the project. IMHO it would benefit the TNT community more by getting dedicated and experienced developers on board to move the thing along. It's got more potential than its limited competition and could become a serious player in the Mac game development market.

TNT has a great feature set, and I plan to retain this in the newer version. I also plan to implement a few additional bits that I feel would improve useability, nothing too drastic to start with, but more on that in a while... I am also working on a parallel project, I'm rewriting Hieroglyph. Not because I think the current version is particularly bad, I just want it to output things in a different format, and while it would be a simple case of altering a couple of routines in the existing version, it requires that I get an XCode version running. Well obviously if I could do that I might just as well drop the rewrite thing and go for broke on TNT 1.31... The editor is not a priority at the moment though, it's just a buffer project to work on when TNT2 starts doing my head in. To start with there will be a conversion app to transition existing tbproj files to the newer format, and these files can then be dropped onto the new TNTBasic app and run that way. Linking the project and the runner engine (like creating a standalone in the current version) will have to wait until the new editor is in place. Eventually, and I mean really eventually, I intend to write a real compiler for it. For the first time, TNT will actually produce an executable binary app.

Writing something like this takes time though, I've worked on large scale projects before and know the importance of planning. When done correctly the act of finally coding is almost done for you. I'm coming to the stage now when the initial spec is almost complete, and the time to start on the pseudo is rapidly approaching. There are only a few more issues to iron out, so I'm now ready to share my thoughts with the world, or at least a very small part of it!