Company history
Lightsoft was born way back in the summer of 1990 when Amigas and ST's were in vogue. The company was made viable by the advent of cheap, fast (300 baud!) modems and decent BB's.

Prior to 1990, the people who now make up Lightsoft covered D&D, Fantasy and Role playing games, parsing and game systems in general, pattern recognition, emotion simulation, graphical routines, assemblers, voice analysis, eating large amounts of prawn cocktail flavour crisps whilst at uni,and never, ever, no way,hacked VAXen anywhere (for the uninitiated, VAX = Virtual Address Translation).

First published program was "DynaRAM" for the Atari ST, which was a tiny OS (yes, contrary to what a lot of Ameoba owners thought, it has got one :-)) patch to display the amount of free memory on the desktop.

For 3 years, we developed 3D games systems for 68K based computers, then in 1993 moved to the Mac. With no "hand rolling" assembler available (well, one which didn't cost lots of hardware), we had to write one to continue work, and here we are now with Fantasm6 and LIDE 3!

People

Lightsoft is run by two people, Robert Probin and Stuart Ball.

Robert Probin
Rob has been writing computer software almost as far back as he can remember.

In 1981 he was programming the Sinclair ZX81 (also known as the Timex-Sinclair 1000). He has since programmed a succession of machines including the Speccy, most 8 bit machines, Atari ST, and Amiga, various UNIX's (Unicies?),PCs running dos/Win3/95/NT/etc..., and Macintosh.

He has written code and designed hardware for many embedded systems using 4, 8,16, and 32 bit microcontrollers and microprocessors, from many different manufacturers. He thinks that 4 bit processors should be outlawed as inhumane to programmers.

He has a degree in Engineering and currently lives in Glasgow, programming for Lightsoft, and working at an Embedded Control System company as a Development Manager and Senior Development Engineer writing software and designing hardware.

The two passions of his life are Claire (his better half) and, of course, writing software. At the top of the list of things he enjoys writing most are computer games, 3D graphics, ALife and AI. He also likes to develop programming tools to make his job easier, although he thinks that a simple paper and pen goes a long way. Rob also wishes there were more hours in the day.

Rob's primary responsibilities at Lightsoft include looking after Fantasm and Anvil (currently working on the OS X version) along with Zex, and its scripting engine, as well as various other bits and bobs.

Stuart Ball
Stu left school at 17 to join No 1 Radio School, RAF Locking to study Aeronautical engineering and computing. After graduating, he stayed at Locking for a further nine months before embarking on a thirteen year career working on various flight, radar and electronic warfare simulators.

In 1996 he took early retirement from the RAF and made a living running Lightsoft for three years. The Summer of 1999 saw Stu take a position at the Blagden Consultancy in London consulting to the Mac pre-press trade. Unfortunately he found the daily 300 mile round trip too much. At the end of 1999 he moved to an embedded systems company and now only travels 30 miles a day.

Stu's primary responsibilities at Lightsoft include looking after Fantasm and Anvil (currently working on the OS X version) along with Zexs' engine and various other bits and bobs.