Welcome to my homepage.

I'm ThunderStrike, in real life known as Roel Derckx. I'm 19 years old and i live in the Netherlands, in Venlo to be precisely. In the computerscene i'm known from several activities. First of all i have one of the biggest Dutch scene bbses called Future Dimenzion. It's a multinode board (2 nodes) and hq/distro of over 70 scenegroups. Then i was the main organiser of the group Excalibur (all-around), which died recently because i was the only active member left. I'm also main organiser of the groups Logic (trance and demo music) and Boom Bass Records (house music). And when that's not enough, i'm also the main organiser of the demoparty 'Ambience'. The 98 edition was held 6-8 March 1998 in Venlo, and the 99 edition will most probably be held 26-28 Februari 1999, also in Venlo.

My Pc history starts back in 1992, when we buy our first pc (a 386 Sx-12 with 2 Mb Ram and 40 Mb Hd). Before that i was already active in on the computer for 4 years on our Commodore 64. On this new 386 pc i got my knowledge of Dos and Windows 3.11 and i coded some very shitty GwBasic programs. Lateron i got some nice sound modules from an old schoolfriend, which i could play back via the pc speaker with Inertia Player :).

My scene history starts back in 1994, when my father bought a 486DX2-66 machine with a 14k4 modem in it. In one of the modules i had was the phonenumber to a local bbs called Fiction (operated by Slackjaw). In my quest to obtain new modules i called this bbs, logged in as Laser, and slightly got into the scene. I became to know a lot of persons and became intrested in other things than module music alone. Then, in my 1995 summerholidays, i met a guy called Spark of Thaumaturge on the campingsite (life is weird isn't it?) and we had a great time. He was a Turbo Pascal, starting C++ coder. It was in those holidays that i decided to start my own computergroup, Digital Rulers. Back home i got Quick Basic 4.5 from Spark and i started coding. The first program i made was a Mastermind game, since that seemed to be one of the games we (me and Spark) played most during those summerholidays. Then a couple of dos utilities followed. In my autumn holidays i met a guy called Mario via the mailing system at Fiction. I went over to him and he gave me a bbs system called Remote Access 2.02. I started configuring my own bbs, Digital Board, but since i still had no phoneline and no money for it, i couldn't get it online. But all the time i kept on working on the bbs, and i coded some small bbs utilities. In March 1996 i changed the name of the (still offline) bbs system to Future Dimenzion and then finally, in June 1996, i had enough money to buy me a new Topline 28k8 modem and a phoneline.

The 14th June 96, the Future Dimenzion went online. That same day, me and Weazle (who had by then already joined Digital Rulers), decided to change our handles and start all over with a new group, since the name Digital Rulers kinda sucked. My new handle was ThunderStrike and Weazle became Voodoo Child. The new group was Excalibur! And that was the start of my real scene carrier. A lot of members joined Excalibur and it became a really big group (at a certain time we had about 24 members). In April 1997 i decided to start a new group dedicated to Hardcore music (Boom Bass Records), since Hightrex was making hardcore music in Excalibur, and hardcore wasn't really good for our reputation. In June 1997, my board got more and more callers, over 30 per day. A lot of users complained they had trouble getting on my board, since it was far too busy. I decided to buy a second phoneline and since than Future Dimenzion was a multinode board. After visiting Bizarre 97, we came up with the idea of organising a demoparty ourselves. Ambience 98 was born. After working hard to get all needed legal documents and getting enough sponsors, Ambience 98 was held 6, 7 and 8 March 1998. Although there were a bit less visitors than expected, the party itself was a big success. Half May 1998 i founded Logic, a music group based on quality. All great composers i knew are in it. At the recently held Bizarre 98, Logic became 1st with the music, and also 1st with the house competition! And after that at Evoke 98 Logic became also 2nd at the Multichannel compo.

My demoparty history:

As i mentioned before i started coding in 1995 and till today i'm still working in Quick Basic (i know, it's far too limited, but it works fine for most of my utils/programs). I recently finished a BIG bbs program package which maintaines your Remote Access FILES.BBS filebase. I've been working on that program for over 2½ years, and since i started coding it in Quick Basic, i had to finish it in Quick Basic. Now that i'm through with Future File, i'm thinking about learning some other languages. At school i have to learn Visual Basic, but i'm thinking about learning Java and/or C++ myself. I'm planning to code a MP3 database program, but i still don't really know in which language i will do it. But that's still the future. First i'll have to concentrate on organising Ambience 99, since that will take an awfull lot of time.

This page is (c) ThunderStrike 1998. Last modified: 01-10-98