The History

EchoStyle started somewhere in the year 1992, under the name of HS. (Hendrickx software) That was on my first PC, a 80286 with 1 meg of ram and a harddisk of 40 MB.

Since I always have ideas for games, I decided to 'pick up' programming, as I already was interested in computers to a higher extent.

At first... Well, I don't think you could really call it programming, but what the heck! I made programs with batch files and the choice command. It was a start :)

In 1993, I released a little disk calles HS easy Utils. It was some batch stuff which would easely put the keyb line in your autoexec file and some other crap.

Later that year I actually released a game in batch called DR Dat en het Kardaat. That's dutch (I'm Belgian) for Doctor That and the kardate. (In case you're wondering, kardate doesn't really exist ;) ). The player would see a pic (made with autodesk animator) of the scene, where every object had a number. The user would then type the number and select an action with the use of the choice command. It was an adventure game.
Anywayz, it was never completed, because that way I had to put the entire storyline inside the batch file, which is near impossible.

Somewhere in december 1994, I went to the library. (What a Shock!)
I saw a book labeled 'programming in basic'. It has a guy sitting in front of an ancient computer on the cover (you know, the kind connected to a television screen).
I tought, that might refer to that little QBasic program in my dos directory which I don't understand one bit of.
My english was rotten those days (not that it's so good now) , so the QB help file didn't help a lot. So I borrowed the Basic book from the library. It was really old basic, with line numbers and stuff, and it took me a while before I realised that you didn't need those with QB.
In the back of the book, there where some examples. One of them was a codebreaker. I typed it over and had no idea what I was typing!

So at that time I began doing little stuff in QB, like proggies that would calculate your age in seconds.

In the year 1996, I bought a modem and an Internet connection. That's when, like with most QBers, my real QB time started.
You can learn a lot on the net.
One day I started my first QB Project. It was called the little sweet light bulbs, something like lemmings, but different. It was coming along just fine, in screen 9 (640X480X16). (Not knowing anything about screen pages)

Then someone actually convinced me to start doing C++.
As stupid as I was, I believed that QB sucked (please forgive me) and deleted all my qb files!!!
I started C++, and after 2 months, i really regretted it. I learned about the revolution of QB. The ways of domination.
C++ looks better cuz it has the rep, but Basic has evolved so much since the internet arrived, that it's almost, and maybe even completely, as powerful as C++, yet still easier. Since my dream is to become a professional programmer, I guess I'll have to use C++ once. But for now I'm staying with QB. I'm even addicted to it :)

Anyway, I restarted in QB, little sweet light bulbs was lost in the batlle.
To forget the C era, I decided to rename my little HS company. (I hated to name anyway)
Let's see, a name. It just popped into my head : EchoStyle.
Simple, yet powerful in some way. Oh joy. Altough I've been working for a year now, I still hadn't published anything. Believe it or not, I always have technical diffs. One of my projects, BFD, was restarted for three times due to harddrive data loss, that project is on hold now. Two other projects where also lost. Now one of my projects was saved becuase I had just released a beta to my friends. It's called PowerWorm, and you can find it at the games.