Kangaroo MusiQue
(note: this article has been cut down upon Kangaroo's insistence, for some reason; you can easily find older versions, however, by looking at this article's history)
Kangaroo MusiQue of SPRING aka Ghostbuster & RUN/STOP from Germany, aka Thorsten Norman Mitschele. He composed about 450 tunes on the Schneider/Amstrad CPC by using the Soundtrakker from New Age Software. A lot of the tunes were used in CPC-Demos from different groups, also he composed some tunes for CPC and Nintendo Gameboy Games, programmed by Elmsoft (EGS) published by Titus Software in France.
The summer 2009 controversy
Kangaroo offered home to several CPC projects, including CPC-Wiki and cpc-forum.de. Kangaroo was therefore the man who hosted CPCWiki on a company server almost from its beginning, as he did with other CPC-related projects (like cpc-forum.de). At some point, Kangaroo claimed that the hosting of CPCWiki cost him in excess of €3000/yr (!!), and even managed to get a donation from Prodatron to the tune of €1000.
However, in a controversial move during the summer of 2009 and without any prior warning, he withdrew support, taking over the old CPC-wiki domain and shutting down cpc-forum.de, deleting the database in the process.
After the general outcry Kangaroo offered to host CPCWiki at a cost of €120 per month. Of course it was too late, to say nothing of running the risk of hosting the project with someone who might take it down again at his whim. This was imposible to fund (and other hosts offered much cheaper solutions for dedicated servers), so Kangaroo was asked to sell the domain (cpcwiki.com) so that we could move the wiki to another host.
This Kangaroo declined to do for personal reasons. What's more, he forwarded all relevant domains first to his personal blog and, subsequently, to gay-related websites.
This forced us to register cpcwiki.eu and transfer the database there.
It's worth noting that Kangaroo's server at CMO presented lots of problems and needed constant attention. During the period of looking for another host Kangaroo claimed, in very derogatory (and even racist!) terms that the administrators of the wiki were useless and ignorant. Given that after the move we stopped encountering problems it seems unlikely that this was the case. We haven't had much trouble since then.
In November, 2011, Kangaroo threatened our host, a member of the CPC community, with a lawsuit if this page was not removed from the wiki. It is not known what basis his lawsuit would be on. Instead of backing down to his whims, we decided to move the wiki once again to another host instead of having our host deal with the threat. This was the second time that Kangaroo threatened with legal action.
In January, 2012, Kangaroo donated money to the project. Many users suspected that this was not out of the goodness of his heart, and after a few days they were proven right: Kangaroo demanded a refund of the donation because the page was still here. He also claimed he was promised that the page would be removed, which is of course a blatant lie since no communication with him ever took place.
It's also worth noting that, on several occasions, Kangaroo tried to gain access to the CPCWiki's database. His aim was to copy the data and create his own version of the CPCWiki.
As of January, 2012, the cpcwiki.com domain is up for sale, despite everything Kangaroo has said about it, thus proving he only wanted to keep it to spite us and cause harm to the project...
...and in September, 2015, Kangaroo is trying to sell the domain on eBay for €250.
Original article
Since Kangaroo complained that "all the things he's done positive to the scene" (sic) were deleted, here is the article as written originally by Kangaroo:
You want to know someting about me? Here we go: Who i am, how it started
My name is Thorsten, i was born 1971 in Stuttgart, Germany. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 i got from a neighbour and i also got a 64K-Memory-Expansion-Kit later for it.
The first contact with the Schneider / Amstrad CPC was 1985/86 at school at the LSH Wiesentheid in Bavaria where we had about six CPC 464 and later also one CPC 6128 in a computer-room for educational use. A few of us at school where in the computer-room always we had some spare-time and we copied Tape-Games and sold them to our classmates :-) Also we tried to programm in Basic and to get rid of some copy-protections those stupid tape-games had.
As i played clarinette and piano very early, i started to compose my own songs and tried to get them on cpc with those nifty sound-commands. I also tried some music-software wich was available for the cpc like "The Music Studio" and also the Noisetracker from MTI. But none of them where good enough. After BSC coded his Soundtrakker for the CPC i started to use this software and most of my sounds are done with the Soundtrakker 1.x and Soundtrakker 128K.
Over 450 sounds where coded by me from 1992 till today, and still growing. A few of them can be downloaded here in the "my music"-section. I will upload all of them one day if i'll find time to convert them to MP3.
My nickname, and where it comes from.
The most people on CPC think, that my nickname "Kangaroo MusiQue" comes from the kind of music i compose or how i act on parties. Jumping around is surely one of my favourite hobbies, but the story about my nickname is this:
In the middle 80s i fell in love with a very cute guy at our school, called Dirk. He was always wearing those "Roos" (www.kangaroos.com) , some sport-shoes wich where very popular in the 80s but also very expensive. I always wanted to get some "KangaROO"-Shoes, to be a little bit "closer" to my boyfriend, but my parents didn't want to pay for them. So i gave me the nickname "KangaROO".
As i started to compose music on the amstrad cpc, i met a very nice french boy, who was visiting germany for a few months and also was in my class at school. Because i composed some songs on the piano for him (he also was very cute), and i wanted to dedicate all other work to my first lovers i called myself "Kangaroo MusiQue". So the whole damn nickname is just about sex :-)
Groups i was or am in
- BENG!
- Frankenteam for a very very short time :)
- HJT
- Die Drei Lenoere
