January 2006

EAO Zmdriver

EAO ZM Driver was born in a small town near Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom.

He’s a Carpenter by trade, and has had no formal training in anything other than the carpentry. Everything else he has done, he has taught himself.

When I told him he was chosen as our next Member of the month, I had to invite him over at War’s bar n grill. We had a few drinks and there he started to tell me all bout himself:

Eventually the long load times for the Commodore 64 got the better of me and I shelved gaming for a while and decided to indulge in my other hobby of Model making, something I had always done since early teens. I had given up on flying planes as they never seemed to get off the ground, I always seemed to spend ages building a model only to bring it back from the flying field in a few carrier bags. I decided to build r/c scale model boats, the one I am most proud of has been featured in the British modeling press a couple of times, took 2.5 years to build, and just about everything worked on it, including the cranes. I built my own radio control equipment for this as well as most of the internal electronics.

My interest in electronics progressed in the 90’s and I decided that an up to date pc, was required. I have to admit I bought the first one as a complete unit, It was a 100mhz compaq ( a far cry from the systems I build these days) On this system I found there were driving games available, like the Nascar series and the Indy car series, both from Papyrus. These were loaded from floppy disc, and I enjoyed playing them in single player mode, racing against the AI opponents. I also enjoyed the FPS games of the time, the Doom series, and Quake. It was not long before I decided a faster pc was required and I decided to build it myself, even with not knowing what I was doing. A lot of research later and I had the information I needed to build one, this I did and have built every pc I have had since, as well as building them for other family members.

I have only started gaming online in the last couple of years, as with a 56k modem connection to the internet everything seemed so slow, and I could see no point in getting fragged before even seeing the person doing the fragging. I mainly started online gaming with the FPS games, Quake 3, and the Medal of Honour series, but got fed up with cheaters on the public servers with those. I again turned my attention to driving games, which I had always enjoyed in single player mode. Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix series was one of my favourites, along with the later Nascar and Indy car titles. Although I had tried the a couple in the Need for Speed series, I decided that they were a bit too arcady for me, pedal to the metal all the way did nothing for me, so I decided to stick with simulations, Grand Prix Legends fitted the bill here, again only in single player mode.

I then got another hobby, My Car. The modeling had long since taken a back seat, as I had no workshop to build them in. Up till now a car had been for getting from A to B, and washed occasionally, probably not enough. I decided not to buy another “family car” as my need for 4 seats had long since gone. I decided a sporty car was needed so my 4x4 had to go. I bought my first Z3 in 2002, a 1.9 in Montreal Blue, this colour needed polishing every wash to keep it looking at its best. It was washed and polished most weekends, in fact I spent more time polishing it than driving it. More power was needed after 18 months, so it was part exed for the M power version of the Z3. During my ownership of the 1.9, I decided I would use my free web space with my ISP and have a go at doing my own website, this I did and the site still shows what myself and the car get up to during the year.

Anyway back to computers and gaming, During 2003 I went to Spa to watch the 24 hour race, then came GTR, which uses the tracks and cars from the 2003 season, I soon got fed up with racing the AI drivers, so I decided to try my hand at online racing against real people. I needed a nickname, but what do I call myself? Eventually I decided that as I drive a ZM it was obvious and ZmDriver was born. On joining a few servers I realized that I was rubbish at it, but I would not give up. One thing I was annoyed about was that a lot of guys were driving like it was a demolition derby ( yes I had tried that game too) So maybe joining a team would be best, at least I might get help to get better.

Eventually I joined UKB, after getting to know them for a while. There I was given the opportunity to become manager, which I did, and organized a hotlap competition. This was the first contact I had with EAO, Ali and Pro Kid joined us for some of these. On the break up of UKB, I needed another team to join and EAO fitted the bill, Good, Clean racers they had been. So I joined EAO and convinced a few of the UKB guys to join me here. I was in the process of organizing a championship for UKB when it broke up, so brought everything with me to EAO. This included the dedicated server I had built as a backup for the UKB one. I now run an FTP server containing 90 GTR tracks and 54 car sets, this is growing all the time as new ones are released. The league system is also run on the server box as an extension to my own web site, which also has a version hosted there. Hopefully, shortly my internet connection will be boosted to 10mbs download, and 512k upload, so should make the server a lot better.

Games currently on my pc include, Call of Duty 2, GTR (of course) and GT Legends.
“I am not the fastest GTR driver out there, but I do finish races” I suppose could be my catch phrase if I had one.

Quotes from other people:
During my trip to Spa in 2004 one of the women in the party asked this question, “How long is the race” she had just been looking at the program which had 24 hours of Spa plastered all over it.
10 mins later the same lady asked, “If the race is 24 hours, how do the drivers use the toilet?” Needless to say we were all in stitches for about the next hour.


Then the bartender told us we had to go, cuz War’s was gonna close in a minute.
You wont find many fellas like ZM Driver,and we’re glad to have him in our team.
It isn’t really a surprise he was chosen as our next M.o.M.

CONGRATULATIONS!

EAO Zmdriver

January's EAOutlaw of the Month!