Computer Active Quotes Me on Lemmings

Computer Active has a very nice blog post about the 20th Anniversary of Lemmings; very nice because they've quoted me and asked nicely about using one of my photos! This is probably as good a moment as any to show off my belated joining of Flickr, to which I've added a selection of pics from the celebration. Here's the selection I've uploaded.

The (temporary) plaque at DMA's "old old office". I'm told that there are plans afoot for something a little more permanent. I've also taken the opportunity to add this location - and DMA's other office - to Ben Goldacre's Nerd Map in case anyone wishes to make a retro computer game pilgrimage.

Lemmings is 20

This Valentines day, I’ll do doing something a little different from the usual. Twenty whole years ago today was the release day for Lemmings, developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis. At the time I was in college, doing little freelance jobs for Dave Jones. Converting graphics for our ports of Ballistix and Shadow of the Beast occupied my spare time in the days before I was employed by DMA full-time. My job was to take shiny 32-colour graphics from the Amiga and hack them down into 4-colour character set displayable by the Commodore 64. Wednesday afternoons were free time as far as college was concerned, and that was when I’d tend to visit the office, bringing along the my latest efforts. It was during one of those days that I saw Mike’s famous Lemmings animation for the first time.

At one point in the late 90s, I came up with a small demo chapter to show what a History of DMA book might look like (a project which seems more relevant as time progresses; I never would have imagined I’d be getting interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland on this very subject two decades later.) Here’s a remastered version, without all the notes-to-self, or known typos, but with ‘restored’ text. At the time I wrote it, I was still very much influenced by the book Game Over, which was about Nintendo. The first section of the test chapter isn’t directly about Lemmings, but leads into it thematically, and is by no means a comprehensive account of its creation. In particular I haven’t mentioned Gary Timmons, who added much to Mike’s original animation and refined the appearance of the Lemmings themselves. The full story awaits a fresh text and a broader scope.

DMA Test Chapter (1996)
At the time of Blood Money, the output from the young DMA still couldn’t be accused of originality. Both of Dave’s shoot-’em-ups had been inspired by specific arcade machines. In one early demo which he showed to the KACC, Menace displayed waving tentacles on one of the levels. Tentacles of the sort which had been seen in Salamander.
A horizontally scrolling game was inevitably going to be the product of Dave’s initial efforts, Salamander being his favourite game; he played it constantly in the Reform Street arcade, Dundee’s largest. The Amiga had custom hardware to provide two layers of scrolling, making it easier (and less CPU-intensive) to display spectacular moving screens. Of the few games available for the Amiga so far, none had made use of this ‘parallax’ scrolling.
Dave had a definite philosophy about how to name his products. Out was weird ‘made-up’ titles and in their place was the sort of name which could easily crop up on the news, magazines, or in conversation. Words or phrases which were in the general public consciousness. His thinking was that the title would appear in the normal course of event and people would begin to associate it with ‘that game.’ Hence, Blood Money; a title which was at one stage going to be called IOU.
In later years, naming came full circle. The possibility of lawsuits made the use of such easily recognised words too risky and there was a return to made-up names such as ‘Tanktics’ and ‘Kraniaks.’ A name search by a legal firm even saw risk in the use of ‘space station’ in a title, but oddly, not ‘silicon valley.’ At the start of the 90s, however, such concerns never surfaced.
Admittedly, most DMA game names were only accorded the status of ‘working titles’ which nevertheless made it intact all the way to release day. It was this spirit in which Lemmings was begun.

Scott Johnston joined DMA after responding to an advert in the local paper. Setting something of a trend, he was one in a line of Science Fiction fans; something which his art portfolio clearly showed. On being accepted into the company, he was assigned to another embryonic project: Walker. Despite applying as an artist, he was soon to show that he had programming skills too, often combining them to good effect. Within weeks he had written a program to generate graphics for the Walker’s head, over which fine detail could then be hand-animated. Initially, however, he had to draw small characters for the Walker to stomp over. He elected to make them 16 pixels by 16 in size.
Mike saw this and told him that the characters could be at least half the size and still look good. Scott didn’t believe him.
“But I’ve seen it before,” Mike insisted.
What he’d seen - and later dragged out in evidence - were the characters from Beachhead which had made incredible use of the C64’s limited resolution. Each character had been exquisitely animated. What had caught his attention in particular, was a character throwing a grenade. It was everything that animation should be; smooth, detailed and ignorant of the computer’s limitations. Here, they were brought to life in a grid of a mere 8x8 pixels. Without a copy to hand, though, Mike decided to prove his point over one dinnertime.
Ignoring Dave’s ban on eating chips, which stunk out the room, he fired up DPaint and proceeded to create a simple animation with small creatures. One after the other, they walked steadily up a hillside to the top where they - in a macabre sense of humour - got blasted to pieces by a laser, just before they made it to the end of the cliff.
Biscuit thought this was hilarious, so much that legend has it that he literally fell off of his chair, laughing. (It was suggested in a later year that DMA needed another reaction like that.) Russell, immortally, said, “Just like lemmings” and followed it with the moment in which Lemmings was truly born. With a laugh he said, “There’s a game in that…” and wondered how it would be possible to go about saving the poor creatures. Dave remembers it differently, with himself playing the role of saying there was a game in the animation. Mike is openly dismissive of that.
For his part, Scott didn’t react much when he was shown it later, but sure enough the characters in Walker soon shrank to the same dimensions.

Russell began work on the PC version, purely because time was available to him, several months before the Amiga version got going. The most common PC graphics standard at the time was CGA, which had a fixed - and limited - colour palette; white, green, blue and black. Lemmings had to make use of these colours and that is the reason why Lemmings have green hair. After a while, Russell had to put work aside to focus on converting Ballistix to the PC, at which stage the Amiga became the lead development platform. Mike worked for a time on the C64 version.
As a result, 1991 effectively became the Year of the Magazines. Never before or since had DMA Design ever had so much coverage [Note: obviously this was written before GTA!]. Other games would soon be released by others, which had been inspired by Lemmings to a greater or lesser degree. Extreme satisfaction was to be had in DMA, seeing those magazines universally call these games Lemmings-like or Lemmings-clones. No doubt existed that Lemmings had been unique in games history, and had in fact kicked off an entirely new genre: the ‘Save-’em-up.’

Project MyWorld

I always thought I had a finite supply of stories to tell about my time at DMA Design. But an announcement from Realtime Worlds, which I only saw this morning, made me realise that even something which was only a few minutes long can still be relevant today. RTW have been working for the last five years on Project MyWorld, an ambitious online world which mixes social networking and gaming. No doubt the subtleties are more nuanced than that and most of us will note that five years is a long time in technology.

Mike Dailly, whom I've now known for something like twenty six years, had been working on it in complete secrecy. But now that the story is out, I realise that I've known the seeds of it since 1996, an entire fourteen years ago. Dave Jones, now Mr RTW and ex Mr DMA had clearly been thinking about it for that long. Back then I worked in DMA's Design Department alongside Mike and Dave would often come in to talk about whatever was on his mind; normally an idea for a game or about games in general. (Or about cars.)

Mike and myself were working on a project known informally as The Space Game, a name it's kept to this day, where each player would take control of a particular console such as tactical or navigation, instead of an entire ship. It didn't ultimately progress very far, but it was during this time that Dave wandered into the design dept and we told him something of the plans for it. This was also midway through the development of GTA and Dave said wouldn't it be great if you could find a planet in the game, fly down to the surface and find a city where a game of GTA was taking place. Not only that, but if you drove past some guys by the side of a river, those guys could be playing a fishing game!

This, we all agreed, would indeed be great but at the time I didn't think any more of it than just another idea in a sea of ideas. Any developer, I'm sure, will tell you that they have many more ideas than could ever be brought to fruition in several lifetimes. And that was it, a small conversation that didn't have any great significance at the time. Obviously Dave had the seed of an idea even all that time ago and has never forgotten it. What drives all the best ideas isn't stakeholders or technology, though they may enable them.

No, what drives them is simply asking "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

A Lemmings Conversion in 36 Hours

Hello Slashdotters!  (I think that's traditional when your site gets a traffic spike, though in my case it's probably minimal.  It's certainly the busiest few days my blog has ever seen!  I've been registered for years, but hardly ever post.  And then two +5 Interesting posts in 2 days.)  So just to pick up the story, Lemmings – already one of the most widely ported games ever – has had another port, this time to the iPhone.

That wasn't a surprise to me, since Lemmings has even been ported to the ZX Spectrum (I own the machine it was developed on, or at least I did).  News that it was ported from the “original” PalmOS made me blink not an eye.  Doing it in 36 hours was pretty neat.  So I posted some links for more Lemmings information and thought not that much more about it.  I thought it was an official port, and as such it was a pretty delightful piece of news.

Nope.  I was slightly fooled by the use of the word “original” and the screenshots which clearly showed the classic Lemmings graphics.  Digging (pun!) more deeply, it was obviously the same sound samples, same music and same levels.  Everyone was referring to it as a port, meaning taking the original and re-writing to run on a different machine.  It certainly sounded official, but there was no connection to the original, and the guy was wanting to make it available on Apple's App Store.  Which was the point that Sony stepped in with a cease and desist.  All the graphics were their copyright.

I have to say that I agree with Sony.

Now I have to be clear that I've no problem with someone porting a game to another platform, particularly since he wrote his own code.  Let's face it, as the director of some Star Trek fan films, I can hardly be critical of wanting to play in someone else's playground.  But the problem begins when he has taken material from the original – the real original and copied it wholesale.  Had he then followed up the code with new graphics and new sound then what we'd have is a clone of Lemmings, a lemmings-a-like game or something which was clearly inspired by Lemmings.  An open-source Lemmings IV maybe.

And that would be great!  Imitation and flattery and all that.

Oddly, though, copyright issues aren't what bothers me most.

My problem comes down to respect.

Nowhere in the 36 Hour Lemmings blog is any mention of the original DMA creators.  As I once wrote in one of DMA's manuals, we are “real people”.  We have families, we have wives, we have girlfriends, we have children and this is how we earn our living.  We aren't just some anonymous barcoded numbers in a database.  We think, we live, we feel and we care about what we do.  To have spent two years working on a game just to find someone selling copies at a car boot sale (yard sale) as I've experienced, hurts dreadfully.  It's an insult and is disrespectful.

Copyright aside, getting in touch would have been a potent gesture, simply to ask if we were cool with making a clone, or even just an acknowledgement in the game itself.  (I once saw a complete rip of the Hired Guns manual text, which I'd written, complete with an extensive “thanks to” a list of cracker buddies, but no mention of anyone who spent years making the game itself.)

Some posters are delighted that he's sticking it to The Man, who in this case is Sony.  Sony didn't create Lemmings.  DMA Design created Lemmings, which was published by Psygnosis who were later bought by Sony.  The Lemmings concept, was created by Mike Dailly.  It was coded by Dave Jones with graphics by Gary Timmons and Scott Johnson.  There are more credits of course, but sitting in that office we were hardly the embodiment of The Man.  We were doing this because it was cool and because it mattered to us.

And for me at least, because ultimately our works are all that we leave behind.

BBC Radio Scotland

It's always amazing how persistant DMA Design has been in my life.  Immediately after the museum exhibition opened, I was interviewed by James Christie from BBC Radio Scotland as one of the founders of DMA Design.  You can read my thoughts on being a 'founder' elsewhere on the blog, though it's certainly true that, in the fashion of Londo from Babylon 5, "I was there at the beginning..."

It was to be a half hour documentary, and it has just aired this morning.  I'm always nervous when something is broadcast with a contribution from me in it.  And, yes, it's still amazing when I think about it, that I can casually write a sentence like the previous one.  This one, however, was especially nerve-wracking for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on.  Would I sound OK?  Did I make sense?  Would my contribution even get used?

Fortunately the answer was yes, and now I'm left with a curious mix of nostalgia and excitement, even as I realise that only a small fraction of my interview was used and only those parts which fitted the 'narrative' that documentaries use.  I'm sure it was the same for both Mike and Russel who were also part of it.  But it means that there's a huge amount of story that hasn't been told, that doesn't exist on Wikipedia or anywhere else aside from in our heads and the odd fragment on a website here and there.  I close my eyes and I can see the old, old, office.

I recorded some important events in a journal I kept at DMA in 1996, but I so wish that I'd done the same for 1995, 1994, 1993...  But of course at the time none of us had any idea that DMA would be important and very little was jotted down and nothing at all formally recorded.  It makes the piecing together of DMA's history an exercise in deductive work where I still have scraps of paper, or tickets to hint at the exact date something occurred.

And that's what it was like in the days before blogs, twitter and 24/7 recording, when it was still possible for a mythology to arise.

Grand Theft Auto (via Gameswipe)

Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe, being a BBC overview of computer games history, inevitably got to the point where it mentioned GTA. The programme was a fun once-over by the jaded eye of Brooker and I enjoyed catching all the old games I recognised, with a spark of memory, the ones I was familiar with and being amazed by the new ones since I departed the industry. Although I'd known of the controversy at the time, I hadn't really paid much attention, and seeing it in context was quite enlightening. Just how much passion had flared over this game was put into persective, with archive BBC news clips and talking heads decrying it. All the controversy, all the hype, but not much that I didn't know or was surprised by except for this little nugget: GTA was “directly inspired by” Turbo Esprit, a game for the Spectrum.

Um. What?

That was... different. Quick summary: I worked for DMA Design from 1991 to 1997, and hung around Dave Jones doing freelance graphics work for him before that and attending the same computer club and college as him; all going back to around 1984. Turbo Esprit is a new one on me. And naturally this is just an excuse for me to talk about GTA again and by extension, me. My involvement with GTA was tangential, as at the time my main concern was writing the story and background material for Body Harvest, but it did mean that I was present for a handful of meetings and acted as a kind of low-level disruptive influence. Other than dialogue writing, I play-tested it at my desk within the design department, so I had a fantastic view of the process of creating the most controversial game ever to come out of Scotland. Which is not to say that I necessarily remember all of it!

I've read a number of the “histories” of GTA which are dotted around the web and they all cover pretty much the same ground in not very much detail. GTA IV gets the bulk of the commentary unsurprisingly enough, being the acme of the supposed “murder simulator” genre. Not any of them that I've seen were written by anyone connected with the project. Dave is interviewed, but the origin of GTA isn't given much, if any, space. Indeed it's mentioned in places that if you are familiar with GTA IV, GTA the original will come as a surprise.

Everyone knows, it seems, that the original name was Race 'n' Chase, but no-one knows that one of the suggested names was Freeway, a name that I pointed out was also the name of the dog in Hart to Hart, at which point it got dropped. Mike Dailly coded up the graphics engine that was the basis of GTA. This system was informally called Legovision and I think the engine predated the concept of the game itself, which makes the Turbo Esprit influence nonsensical. No-one had ever mentioned it.

I have a better candidate for the influence of GTA and it dates back to 1990 when Dave had the very first office (I was freelance at the time), and we were taking part in the ITV Telethon. Our goal was writing an entire game in 24 hours, and it was a car racing game with a top down view. Being an amalgam of all the racing games we could think of, we called it Super Off-Road Hot Turbo Buggy Simulator. And at the same time a game we had been playing in the office was a Commodore 64 game where you drove a car around a city, called Siren City... How Dave got the idea for GTA, I can't say for sure, but there were more potent influences than Turbo Esprit.

One of the curious things within the histories is the occasional reference to the low production values of the graphics, especially since this was 1997/98. It's possible I was insulated from the outside world when GTA was being put together, but at the time – and as far as I can see it hasn't changed – all the big name games had the same colour palette. Doom set the template, and for years after it was murky greys, browns and dark greens. Most first person shooters looked the same. Indeed in one of the design documents I wrote at the time – unconnected with GTA – I pasted screenshots from Quake, Unreal and a few others to illustrate at a glance how difficult it was to tell the games apart. One of the other guys in the Design Department, Stewart Graham, was especially keen on not having dowdy visuals. Bright, cartoony graphics were specifically intended to make GTA look unlike other games. As a secondary concern, it fitted the nature of the gameplay which wasn't deadly serious; it was fun. What many people fail to remember is that GTA was in large part a pisstake. You only have to look at the faux adverts around the printed map to see that.

This I the point that I have to introduce Brian Baglow. Brian has, so far in my life, been the only person ever to land me in shit with the management on a charge of blasphemy. As architect-in-chief of our freshly minted intranet, I apparently bore the responsibility for everyone's profile Q&A. Brian's answers were slightly spicy, and not at all respectful of the, say, devout believer in a higher power. I passed them without comment because they were fantastically funny. But a single individual disagreed and I had to carry the can for it. Brian's response was to rewrite them to be as fluffy and cute as you could imagine... and equally funny. Brian's sense of humour drove much of GTA.

At the same time as I was writing never-to-be-used dialogue for the original, I was also throwing around never-to-be-used ideas and occasionally acting as a sounding board for Brian. Which is why for a brief moment, controversial though GTA was, it could have contained a rather different message. At the time, a number of arcade games had a prominent FBI logo stating “Winners Don't Use Drugs”, though quite how FBI jurisdiction extended to the high street of Dundee was never clear. Nevertheless, we both thought it was pretty amusing.

GTA, even before it was released, was obviously a pretty subversive game. In one of those meetings of just myself and Brian, more to get away from the hustle and bustle than a proper meeting, I came up with the idea of subverting our own subversion. When the main character opened the suitcase at the end of the game, the thing would explode and the game would end with a parody of the logo saying “Crime Doesn't Pay”.

We thought it was a funny thing to do, to be able to say “Hey, we're responsible and are conveying a responsible message!” Needless to say it never ended up that way, because it was around that time that the carrot of becoming freelance was once more dangled in front of me and I ended up taking it. It was only ever intended that I'd spend two months on GTA, and I'd like to think that my most lasting effect was inspiring Brian to ever-greater heights of lunacy. And as for Gameswipe, surely there is a case for digging out all those old industry mainstays and the BBC making a full in-depth series about computer games history. I for one would be delighted to contribute.
---
Images in this post taken from Mike Dailly's Flickr stream, who got much of them from my DMA Design Macintosh (which I had from them as a leaving gift) where I stored them all, packrat style, in the first place!

Epistemology pt 2: The Story of Hired Guns

I don't think I ever truly liked the name Hired Guns, this being one of DMA Design's Amiga games and one of the key things that I usually get hung up on whenever the subject arises.  The history of the project was somewhat troubled from my own perspective, even though I am still stupidly proud of my contribution and occasionally get misty-eyed over it.  Troubled, because of what happened after I spent over a year writing the background, story and characters.  It was going to be my first published story, really published, really genuinely making me a proper author.  This was going to be great!  I iz a writer!

    I sent the final copy to Psygnosis, who were demanding it at as soon as possible.  They then sat on it for a whole eleven months, before rushing to get the booklet printed by an outside company with only three weeks to go before the release date.  At no point did they offer any comment or criticism during that time.  And then the game was released and the first chance I had to see myself in print was tearing the cellophane wrapping from the complimentary copy I'd been sent, lifting the lid and leafing through the booklet.
    Where all the punctuation was missing.
    All of it.

    Worse than that, if possible were the instructions for actually playing the game.  Scott Johnston, the designer and programmer, had written pages of notes and given them to Psygnosis who were to write the instruction booklet with the purpose of saving time while I fretted away at the background material.  Only they'd taken his notes and pasted them in wholesale, entirely unedited.
    My first published story...

    I tend to get protective of Hired Guns these days, to the extent that I imagine that anything I have to say on the subject of the story is definitive by definition.  And where this impacts on Wikipedia, the results have been interesting.  I never created the Hired Guns entry but I have edited it to incorporate the description of the story, the description of which is simultaneously factually accurate, completely wrong and occupies that strange blurry interface between fact and fiction.  So ask what the Hired Guns story is about and the truth gets slightly odd.

    Let's start from the outside, and work our way in.

    On the packaging, the box which contains the disks and the booklets, it describes the characters as fighting “mutants” and since the outside packaging is the one that's most familiar to anyone – and easiest to research -  that ought to be definitive.  It's there in plain sight after all, and the packaging is not hard to find on the net as a scanned image.  For Wikipedian purposes, it's as easy and uncontroversial a citation as you could wish to find.

    But it's flat out wrong.

    Inside the box however there's the manuals (which I wrote – this is my background story after all) and the creatures described therein, which the main characters encounter, are not mutants.  They are genetically engineered weapons.  It's not just a piffling quibble over semantics either; why this is important is why the characters are there.

    So far it's just a mismatch of info, someone at Psygnosis got it into their heads that it was all about mutants, or perhaps it was even deliberate because “mutants” made for a better soundbite.  I'll likely never know.  But where it now gets interesting is with Wikipedia's description of the story itself.  Within the game itself, the  mission centres around the task of locating four nuclear warheads “backpack nukes” and blowing the crap out of the place to kill all the beasties.  But this is not what Wikipedia says.   There it tells us that the story is about a hostage rescue which proves to be illusory and is only planted to lure the mercenaries to the planet for a live test of illegal bioengineered weapons.  The whole thing is a trap: the planet is a weapons proving ground.
    But none of that appears in the game.

    So how did such an obviously incorrect description get into the Wikipedia entry in the first place?  Where is the source for such an outrageous assertion?  How did something entirely out of left field  come to be parading itself as “fact”?  This one is rather easier to track down, because it was me who put it there.  So does that mean I'm just proving a well-trodden point about the accuracy of Wikipedia and that the story description is plain invention?  An “aha, gotcha” motive made possible by stunt-editing?  Well it gets a bit blurrier here too.  It really is a genuine description, but of Hired Guns' original plot, before it got hacked to shreds.

    Limitations of memory in the Amiga meant that not everything we'd intended for the game was able to fit in.   As you can guess, it was the story which had to be substantially changed so that it could be described in less memory, with less demands on custom code and graphics; with appropriate amounts of complaining on my part.  I'd even written a large diary entry on that day that was decided (it was 12th Feb 1993) and it was fittingly enough pouring with rain, moulding itself snugly around my black mood.  Even so, there are still fossilised clues to the original story contained within the games dialogue and within the manual.  Hell, some of the dialogue I'd written was there purely to foreshadow the next four games which I'd been sure were in the bag.

    (In fact, as part of the plot I'd even managed to come up with an invention that wasn't realised in the real world until 2007, but that's for another post.)

    I'd written that in Wikipedia with a mixture of devilment and self-righteousness because, at heart, that's what I believe Hired Guns is really about.  That was the plot, that was the story I cared about.  Indeed in those dark nights alone in my flat at 2am, this wasn't a story I was creating but a true story that I was discovering by being an explorer in some vague space of probability, not a writer.  But here's the description from when the entry was created by a user called Imran in 2002 right up to my first edit in 2004:

“The plot is that your band of mercenaries have been picked from intergalactic 'non persons' and wanted criminals, and have been hired to shut down a mutation producing plant on an artificial planet called Graveyard.”

Intergalactic non-persons?  Mutation producing plant?  Artificial planet???  All that came out of nowhere and is completely wrong.  But where it gets interesting for me is that after my correction, no-one has contested it: it is assumed to be the self-correcting mechanism in action.  Perhaps it's just a minor game out of the many thousands out there and no-one cares, or perhaps piracy was so rampant that very few possess the physical manuals to fact-check with.  Maybe no-one really cares, and if that's the case then what does the truth matter?

    In the end, a fact may be more fluid and nebulous than we'd like. Yet the original story as I described it survived intact for the planning of Hired Guns 2, even to the last-moment addition of an extra planet in the manual.  Whatever the finer points of semantics or philosophy, I consider the original story to be the real one.  After five games (yes, I was optimistic) the background elements of the story arc would have come to the fore with a huge payoff. 
    That resolution, so far, has existed only in my mind.  Not on paper.
    And how on Earth could Wikipedia have a citation to that?

Lemmings II

DMA Design Office Tour

Well, the poll has spoken. Out of the (did I break double figures?) responses came a clear preference for the old computer game days. I think it was just before Christmas 1992 that I took my new video camera into the office and asked Andolf (Graeme Anderson) to be the presenter. You can see me in my Halo Jones T-Shirt somewhere in the middle of it. My desk is surrounded with bits of paper containing Hired Guns material. Right at the end, you can see a very disdainful Mike Dailly, which has a certain level of irony since I gave him a copy of this a couple of years ago and he bloody posts it to YouTube without asking!!!!

I had this half-assed notion that I'd gather together every possible bit of video relating to DMA and make it into a documentary. I have the DMA fireworks display, the Lemming we made out of snow in the car park, and a dozen b/w frames from an episode of Working Lunch which featured us sometime in 1996. Much other stuff as well, including the big boss Dave Jones telling a sweary anecdote! (Which Mike also uploaded without asking! Bah, at least I still have the pudding eating competition on video. You don't have that on tape Mikey boy, do ya!)

Still, a documentary about DMA? Who'd be interested in such a thing? :)