www.modchipman.com

[Mithras]

Why do I deserve to win?

If we go by need or utility, I’m a nearly compulsive tinkerer, and I’ve been modifying games since Doom. I’ve kept most of my work private, but have had a few publicly released things here and there - I did the expanded inventory for the Fusion mod for Diablo II, including the first expanded stash that wasn’t a crude hack, which was cribbed by a number of other projects and was a popular enough change that Blizzard expanded the stash in the official expansion. I’m familiar with X86 and MIPS assembly, and a number of higher level languages, and I’ve been wanting to get into DS and GP2X homebrew recently, although I haven’t been able to afford a GP2X or DS homebrew setup since I’m wrapping up college.

If I won this contest, I could get into DS homebrew pretty much immediately and would get into GP2X coding a lot sooner. I’d probably do something relatively simple first as far as homebrew goes - stuff like save game editors - but I’m very interested in the DS’s wireless networking abilities, and once I felt comfortable with the platform I’d like to experiment with that, making stuff like a messaging and whiteboard program (like internet-capable pictochat) or some proxy software to try to play LAN versions of DS multiplayer over the internet (like a DS version of warp pipe for the gamecube).

If we’re talking deserving in a cosmic karmic sense, since I’m naturally pretty calm and collected and have (relatively speaking) got my head screwed on straight, I’ve been the “reliable friend” who provides emotional support and practical help getting out of tight spots for a number of people I know, and back in high school I managed to talk someone out of a suicide, which I’m still fairly proud of. I’ll admit that I’m a smartass and can be a jerk, since I don’t really care about being “nice” in a day-to-day sense, but I’m there for people when the chips are down and it really counts.