A Year in the Rearview - 2006
So what has gone on over the past year, how has 2006 matched up to the
expectations of Atari lovers? Well the news is a bit mixed, not as good as
hoped for in some areas, but still plenty of nice stuff going on regardless.
The traditional gathering at the big Easter party suffered a decline this
year. The Noise party only attracted a relatively small number of visitors,
in spite of deserving more support. This continued a downward trend over the
past few years, and the idea of an Easter party must be seriously in doubt
by now? However there was better news for the late Spring period as the
Outline party was revived as a summer party, and enjoyed some success with a
multi-scene combined approach.
Nothing much happened until Easter, demo-wise, but then the under-attended
Noise party had one surprise, with the final and finished version of
Evolution's very long awaited for the past two years CT60 demo
'Supernatural'. This was the first full-sized demo for the CT60, and not a
minute too soon! Another Falcon '030 production from the Mystic Bytes
narrowly failed to make it for that party. But we will hear more about it
later on.
And May was a memorable month, as the Dead Hackers Society rewarded us with
quite a good CT60-based invitro for Outline, to go with the less hardware
intensive ST-based one from Lineout. Also the Chosneck Supplement diskmag
was released. I remember a lot of activity around the Easter period for that
one, being personally caught up in the creation process myself! This Falcon-
specific diskmag had reached another issue, and had as its "intro", a full
length demo called "Menace". This was the delayed production intended for
the Noise Party, but only a little late after all. A lot of this work was
down to Mikro, who's name will be mentioned again later in this text! Menace
wasn't a CT60 demo, but instead made great use of a stock Falcon and its
extra-special bits such as the DSP, and was in the upper echelons of classic
demos for the Falcon.
Outline also produced a healthy splurge of releases, as well as being a very
cool and relaxed party in general. It was *Very* cool if you were one of the
people sleeping in the teepee's! Apart from another CT60 production, a
96ktro from DHS called 'The Genocidal', there was also a neat 4ktro from
gwEm, lots of little productions from the likes of Paradize and MJJ
productions. We also got a chip-music bonanza from Cyclone, and even another
fake, erm, demo from a notorious fake crew! Not forgetting a neat 96ktro
from Paradox a hatful of bootsector intro's, and even a few "for the hell of
it!" life-signs from Defjam, who incidentally gave us a look at some new
stuff he's working on right now, which sort of looks like it will take
Checkpoint to the next level when it's done!
There was also an appearance by the ever more reclusive and hard to find
Reservoir Gods, and a game was released by them, but one without Mr Pink in
charge or any input from him. This was the comedic card game '#atariscne
card battle ex plus alpha'. At this point in time, it is a very open
question as to whether we will see anything much of the Reservoir God's
anytime soon?
The 'No Fragments' and 'Fading Twilight' CD compilation series continued
their tireless mission to collect everything going and reached issues 7 and
11 respectively.
Summer deepened, and it seems to have turned out that downgrading the Easter
party concept only delayed the inevitable big demo releases that were coming
for this year, as the Commodore-centric "Big Floppy People Party' in Sweden
was treated to the DHS tour-de-force, their first full-sized CT60 demo
called "Derealization"! This lived up to its billing, and added to what was
turning into a very productive year for the Dead Hackers.
When Derealization was released, it was finally becoming the year where the
'060 Falcon was finally breaking through properly into the Atari mainstream.
Two demos and two intro's may not be a big deal to most other scenes, but
compared with the barreness that had come before, it seemed like a big deal
to us. Which makes me wonder what would have happened if all of these had
been released at a single (Easter) party along with the Chosneck Supplement
and Menace demo. I think we would have been comparing it, not unfavourably,
with the great Error in Line parties in the last few years?
Just to add to the mood of wellbeing, there was even a revival of the long-
absent 'FalcAmp' project, the MP3 player had been improved and reworked to
v.1.2. All we need is a new verson of Flaysid to appear!
There was additional support for fans of the Falcon '030, as long-term
"industry" veterans, Dbug got busy with a new range of HD-installable and
Falcon compatible versions of many classic ST games. I might add that Virus
(Zarch as was) already ran just fine on a Falcy, even the boot disk worked,
as I remember it being the first thing that I got running back in '93 when I
first got the machine! With their efforts, a new (or older) generation of
Falcon owners were able to revisit such classics as Starglider II in 16 mhz,
when it wasn't a slow game on the ST anyway!
The next noteworthy events, were the release of the previous issue of this
diskmag, followed by the latest instalment of YM Warriors, "Warptyme". This
returned to a more conventional format than before, but with tunes that
really pounded the humble YM into bloodied fragments!
The Bits club started to reappear too, ah well, into every scene, a little
rain must fall.
We had a complete surprise next, which was a completed game from some early
Falcon pioneers, a crew called 'Opium'. This game was an Eliminator clone
called 'Rave', but most definitely for the Falcon, including classic 'coder
colours', which fit this mid-nineties creation rather well! It is all the
more remarkable because I don't remember Opium doing any major productions,
or pre-announcing anything like this? What next? A Doom-clone from the
Mugwumps?
As we head into Autumn, or the global warming version of extended summer,
Mikro pulled out a nice surprise for fans of ported famous games, in the
form of a CT60-optimised version of Quake. This was taken from Amiga, rather
than PeeCee sources, and ran quicker than the previous Doom-ports! We now
had *three* versions of Quake for the CT60, from the original Patrice Mandin
port, through the 040-inspired 'Doug-Quake' from Douglas Little a long time
ago. This second version didn't perform too badly with my CT60 last year, as
I remember. Now we have this extra version from Mikro, so a degree of
overkill possibly? Time for game porters to move on from Quake now ;-) Still
Mikro had another major project on the way.
There was a stream of smaller releases, a couple of games 'Znax' and
'Nuclear Waste Dump' from Paradize appeared, a lost diskmag intro from the
mid-nineties reappeared, courtesy of a lost crew called "Psychosis", who
produced a nice Amiga-ripped slideshow back then and not much else. The
diskmag the intro was intended for, was the 'Falcon Owners Group'.
Interestingly, the author in subsequent postings on Pouet.net talked about a
Falcon-specific diskmag shell which had never been used?!
gwEm stepped in for an end of year competition, when he released a new
MaxyMizer chiptracker version, the condition being that the authors had to
use that tracker. At the time of writing, we're awaiting the results of
that, but gwEm was moved to tell the world that he had some of the best
music for this competition that 505 had ever made.
DHS rounded up a productive year, with a little invitro for the ST,
announcing the Fiskeboda Coding Konvention. (Which was sadly cancelled due
to lack of numbers.) None of which denigrated this intro and its neat ST-
based transparency effects.
Mikro then came back with something even more interesting than a Quake port.
This was the game 'Duke Nukem', a PeeCee classic which came after Doom, and
expanded on it, which in turn supplied a lot of inspiration to the Falcon
game 'Running'. Now at last, we had a fully playable version of the game
which was better than Doom, and less murky looking than Quake!
As Xmas approached, the traditionally held Paracon party managed to attract
a healthy number of visitors for a small party, expecially compared with
Noise Party. There was one known (to date) release, 'Poker Square' from the
prolific Paradize Software.
There were other things going on, as early in the year, Peter Persson aka
'PeP' had a fit of porting over several emulators of other systems to the
Atari. We already had Frodo (C64) from the year before, but he went and gave
us working emulators for VCS 2600 (a bit buggy), Lynx (The evergreen Handy),
and a rather good Sega Master System/Gamegear emulator. There was even an ST
emulator 'Castaway' ported across. Lately, this seems to have dried up, and
I'd be interested to see if Peter has anything more planned.
The most exciting news for the end of the year is that the long yearned and
long delayed effort to get a Falcon '030 emulation working on other systems
seems to be paying off at last. Thothy announced he was working on Falcon
emulation in a new version of Hatari. There were screenshots which already
promised a level of compatibility above that of Aranym! Even better, a pre-
CVS build of Hatari 0.9.1 turned up, and I was able to test this in time for
this issue of Alive. If Thothy maintains the momentum, then a good Falcon
'030 emulation is not so far away.
We might also spend a little bit of time to ask what has not turned up for
this year. We are still awaiting the forever in development 'Heftig' demo,
still under endless polishing and tweaking from Ultra. The Aggression 15th
anniversary demo is still in limbo too. Also it is unlikely that the
Reservoir Gods will be back among us soon, as the distraction factor has
reached an all-time high in that quarter. I might add that there haven't
been too many Ethernats made yet (yes I did get mine, but I've yet to
install it, as there has been very slow progress on the USB support, which
is what I'm interested in), there is no Supervidel and slow progress with
the CTPCI. I hope that next year will see some positive movements on the
hardware projects.
There is more new hardware in the pipeline. Jookie of Satantronic has got
busy with a new MMC/SDram-based storage system for the ST called 'Satan
disk'. This promises to provide a pretty damn cool hard disk replacement for
the ST! Of longer term interest is the possibility of New Coldfire-based
hardware. "Rugged Style", formerly aRt, has got hold of a coldfire
evaluation board, and reckons he could make a pretty cool Atari compatible
out of it. The new machine will be called 'Opsrey'. The reaction has been
mixed, but this is bearing in mind all the promises made and broken before!
I'll end with some questions for next year.
After the Dead Hackers and Evolution, where is the next CT60 demo coming
from?
Come to think, what about the next F030 demo?
After Quake and Duke, what next for abandonware porting?
Will the CTPCI/Supervidel/Netus Bee/Satandisk arrive? Two out of four would
be pretty good!
Is there any future in Coldfire, or is it another folorn hope?
Do something with your existing set-up now, or wait until the next new
promised hardware?
What cool fixes are next from D-Bug?
How far will the Hatari Falcon emulation get?
And finally, will the Bits Club discover "design"!?
Ok, that's all for this year!
CiH,for Alive Mag,Dec '06.
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