Markus Weichselbaum - IT background
In the late '80s, during his undergraduate years at university, Markus was partner of software company "Pleiss & Weichselbaum Software Development GbR" that developed video games and scientific software for universities.
It was the hey-days of home computer legends Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, both equipped with Motorola MC68000 CPUs. Markus has started to become interested in programming languages, starting with Pascal, programming little mini video games. He then met Detlef Pleiss (see footnote), who had a similar interest in programming games. Detlef had more experience in BASIC. Both Pascal and BASIC were not suited to create video games that ran fast enough, so they started to learn the native machine language (MC68000 assembly code) to improve the speed of their creations.
Using classic computing literature such as Donald E Knuth's works, both Markus and Detlef began to study and auto-didactically learn the ins and outs of efficient computer code. It didn't take long before both were almost competing on who could create the faster, shorter and more efficient code, squeezing every ounce of performance of the the 8 MHz-clocked Motorola CPU.
Soon after, by amazing coincidence, when Markus was still an undergraduate student in the biophysics department at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany, he met Andreas Borchard, the author the powerful, yet little known macro assembler "Easy Rider" for the Atari ST. Andreas was at that time a PhD candidate in the biophysics department and literally lived around the corner from our modest office at that time. (Interestingly enough, Markus later also become a PhD student in the same biophysics department.)
Screenshot of AIR SUPPLY (released 1990). This image is a full size screenshot - the resolution of the Atari ST really was only 320x200 pixels, with a palette of 16 colors.
The collaboration between Markus and Andreas proved very fortuitous. We were able to use the absolute fastest and most powerful assembler on a real life commercial project. The Easy Rider assembler was used to create both the Atari and Amiga versions of our first commercial video game, the vertically scrolling shoot-em up "Air Supply". The game was published in 1990 by Magic Bytes.
Markus' aspirations to become a musician were reflected by playing keyboards in local bands - using his beloved DX7 digital algorithm synthesizer - and coloring a strand of his then full head of curly hair in blue (Markus thought it looked cool at the time). Soon after he began to explore how to use computers to make music, and vice versa, how to get good sounding music out of the very limited sound chips that were present in computers of that era.
Markus soon developed his own music system for Atari ST and Amiga, and both his music and his software were used in several video games (Air Supply, Apprentice, Logical, Vision). Markus "FastPlayer" tracker code was utilized in a popular shareware game called BattleDuel.
Markus also developed the legendary 14-bit DYN system for the Amiga, and incorporated it into a version of the then ubiquitous Protracker music software. In brief, the DYN system used 16 bit samples that were compressed into the 8bit range of the Amiga and then uncompressed in realtime during replay. This allowed for unsurpassed sound quality with very little use of system resources - the samples were only insignificantly larger than normal 8 bit samples, and the interrupts that would "decompress" these samples would take less than 1% of system power. [Searching online, I found a brief mention of the 14-bit DYN system here]
In an almost tragic turn of events, before the DYN system was commercialized or even used in a commercial application, 8-bit sound was rapidly becoming extinct and 16 bit sound became common. Similarly, computers had more RAM and thus the main benefits of the 14-bit DYN system were simply no longer relevant. Markus decided to discontinue the DYN system. He briefly worked on Protracker 4 that resembled more a modern 16-channel music recording system, but in 1995, after one year of development time, this project was also discontinued as it became clear that the whole Amiga platform would become extinct.
At about that time, Markus commenced a new PhD in physiology, and for the next years he focused his energy on his PhD research. However, Markus didn't leave music and video games completely. In 1997, he began publishing useful links for Sony Playstation owners on his student website. His collection of reviews and updated and direct links to cheat codes for Playstation games proved very popular, and so the "Playstation Reporter" was born, moving to its own domain psreporter.com in 2000.
Since 2000, Markus has continued to monitor the world of video games, and has developed and operated a range of video game related sites, such as xbreporter.com, gbadviser.com, ps3focus.com, xb360info.com and nrgame.com.
Footnote: More or less unrelated to computer programming, Detlef was the first to introduce Markus to the field of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). By now, NLP has become mainstream and today is best known through the books, tapes and late-night infomercials by Anthony Robbins. Back then, it was another coincidence that helped shape Markus' life - namely the discovery of Tony Robbins' book "Unlimited Power" is his mother's personal library. Markus felt enlightened and empowered by the book and began to study everything there was about NLP and the connection between mind, body and human behavior and performance. It is probably not really a coincidence then that Markus undertook a PhD in Neurophysiology soon after. To throw in yet another little anecdote: During his years of PhD candidature, Markus supported himself by working as a handwriting analyst.