Happy New Year
Welcome to the first issue of MyAtari in 2003.

Now for some shameless plugging and free advertising :-) This month sees the launch of my new Atari portal, ATARItoday. Now I know what you are thinking, and no, ATARItoday is not yet another addition to the crowded Atari news scene. ATARItoday is a site from which you can read all the latest headlines from all the top Atari news site (including Atari.Org, Atari Users Network, Atari-Source.com, Atari Age, Atari-Home and ST-Computer) as well as find reviews and links to all the best Atari web sites. ATARItoday also includes an English version of The Atari Up-to-date list.

The theory being... why visit each news site individually, when you can quickly read all the latest headlines at a single site?

I am interested in hearing from any MyAtari readers that would be interested in supporting ATARItoday by searching the internet for great Atari sites and possibly writing short reviews of them. Together, lets make ATARItoday the definitive and most up-to-date Atari links site! 

See you next month,

Matthew Bacon, Editor

No more champagne, and the fireworks are through...
As I write this it's coming up to midnight on 31 December 2002. Matthew is up in Edinburgh (Scotland) for the new year celebrations, so we're going to launch 2003 ever so slightly late, but we already have some nice articles lined up as ever. Seems like not even the holidays can slow down MyAtari's contributors!

I've been busy not eating too much and not indulging in any kind of seasonal excesses, unless you can count computing. If you keep half an eye on the internet you'll know there is a healthy underground development scene for Atari consoles and computers, cooking up an assortment of what should have been, and what couldn't be done back in the Atari days. When I find space to set up my VCS 2600, I'm going to stock up on a load of classic games (this machine was given to me, but not before about 40 of its vintage games were criminally thrown away!) and some of these interesting and great-looking new cartridges.

An excellent web site for keeping up to date with new and rare prototype games is AtariAge. It was here I discovered a site dedicated to some long-lost games in development. I think it's very good that programmers and artists of old games care enough about their work to set up web sites to tell the story. Unlike even the best of fan sites (Alex Holland's Thalion web shrine springs to mind), nobody can have quite the insight and artistic interpretation like the developers themselves. For example, I was really happy to find the official Lethal Xcess web site, created by one of the original developers.

Getting back to the subject... How many Atari 8-bit computer owners remember a certain Harlequin Software from 1990? To cut a long story short, this UK-based outfit had managed to secure conversion rights to a handful of big name games of the day, some famous Psygnosis titles like Menace and Shadow of the Beast. A small advertisement featuring the proper logos of these games was even placed in New Atari User magazine. The thought of these games coming to my good old 800XL was almost too good to be true, and sure enough that's how it turned out as Harlequin died a quiet death after getting one game released, Plastron. Even then I wondered how Shadow of the Beast, originally featuring up to 13-layer parallax scrolling and stunning 128-colour in-game art, would translate to the humble 8-bit. Much to my annoyance, the tables were turned on XL/XE users, as the arch-rival Commodore 64 became the 8-bit machine to receive a full conversion of Shadow of the Beast, in cartridge form (published by Ocean, originally developed to promote the Commodore 64 GS console, taking advantage of fast ROM access to shovel large chunks of graphic data at breakneck speed). Then came Amstrad, Spectrum and Sega Master System versions! So much for feeling smug for a change. Yes, we all know Shadow of the Beast as a game was style over substance, but it would have made a good technical demonstration title. We're talking about school days, a time when sound and graphics ruled, man.

OK, what I'm trying to say is that when I visited AtariAge I thought, "Wow, I never knew Shadow of the Beast actually reached coding stage!" Look at these tasty screen-shots of the overground level (it has four-layer parallax on the Atari 8-bit), and doesn't the beast look rather like Frognum from Draconus?

Goes to show what was possible all that time ago, doesn't it? Artist Stephen Goss is the man behind this web site. Turns out he was one of the members of Harlequin Software. Oddly, in the pre-launch version of the site he mentioned Plastron only came on cassette and that no other version was produced, whereas now the page states more tentatively "came on cassette". I know otherwise because I bought the disk version with proper 5.25" disk case and matching sleeve from Harlequin itself at the Atari 90's Show in London Hammersmith's Novotel in 1990!

This point aside, and it was hardly yesterday so it can be forgiven, all XL/XE fans should visit the site and check out all the great looking games. Drool over Menace (precursor to my favourite ST game of the time, Blood Money), and complete versions of Contagion, Z-Force...

Continuing the theme but with a game currently in development, I also found out about the Space Harrier XE project, a conversion of the popular '80s Sega arcade hit for the 130XE (or machines with at least 128 KB memory). Although it was announced many months ago, progress during that time has been fickle. A work-in-progress demo file is available for download, it uses interlacing to give the impression of more colours on the screen, the sprites are suitably chunky and it plays at a quick pace with fluid control. Let's hope this one gets finished, it's looking good.

While still in XL gaming mode I found a disk image of Druid, a really old game from Firebird. I ordered a copy of this 13 years ago (and it was old then) as it was going cheap, but somehow it never reached me and I soon forgot about it.

Fired it up and for a moment I thought I was on my Falcon playing GodBoy Zelda, so spooky was the similarity. Once I figure out the game, as I don't have any instructions (and instructions are for wimps, right?) I reckon it'll be quite fun, certainly hope to get a rating above halfwit before February.

Before I wrap and get on with the magazine, big thanks to Joe Connor, formerly editor of Atari Computing magazine (RIP). The domain http://www.ataricomputing.com is still active and showing up in search engine results, so Joe kindly re-directed it to MyAtari, seeing as it no longer has any content of its own. Joe now runs a web portal called Can't B arsed (http://www.cantbarsed.com), among other things you can order back issues of Atari Computing on-line there. These are now rare and some issues are already sold out so hurry and start or complete your collection, you'll regret not being arsed!

Hopefully the AC site diversion will bring many more visitors to MyAtari. We're always looking for new readers, because every reader is a potential source of new ideas and enthusiasm to help push the magazine forward.

Happy new year, happy new year...

Shiuming Lai, Features and Technical Editor

MyAtari magazine - Feature #1, January 2003