maggie

Maggie
This month we feature a selection of articles including one written by Natasha O'Reilly, best known as Ripley, the graphics artist from Reservoir Gods. Her graphics feature in both the Maggie Falcon and ST/STe shells and show Maggie is not an exclusively male domain.
Last year I managed to get into the European Computer Trade show, held twice yearly in London, to bring news of the Jaguar console - before it became widely available.
Finally there's an amusing report from the Maggie 5th Birthday party, written by Mike Noyce, who has also written many articles for ST News.
By the time you read this we should have changed our Internet Service Provider (ISP) from Demon to Zetnet but, for the foreseeable future at least, our web pages remain accessible at:
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Richard Spowart and Chris Holland, The Maggie Team

Maggie 5th birthday
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Maggie, a coding party was held, Michael Noyce tells us how the day went...

Most of this crowd, pictured at Symposium 96, attended the Maggie party
I received my official party invitation to the party held at the Rilton Hotel in Rushden, Northants at which all kinds of events were planned. The biggest event was to be the release of 'Maggie 18' and the new Falcon specific shell, courtesy of Reservoir Gods. I went on behalf of Richard Karsmakers, who couldn't make it in the end, as a contributor to his now discontinued disk magazine, ST News.
An early morning start meant I had to forego my usual Saturday morning lie in but fortunately, I woke at 7:00 after a few hours sleep and by 7:50 I was at Chichester Railway Station catching the train to Wellingborough. At Wellingborough I was waiting for Chris to turn up when I realised I didn't know what he looked like and vice versa! After several minutes looking at each other we figured it out.
After a short, fast, drive to Rushden I was dropped off at the Rilton Hotel, while Chris went off to fetch James 'Power' Mathews. The room where the party was being held wasn't difficult to find and soon I was with the other members of the party. I put my bag in a corner and started to mingle as best I could - which meant sitting next to the famous Reservoir Gods. Someone eventually talked to me, and this turned out to be Richard (a.k.a. Felice) who turned out to be a jolly nice, talkative chap indeed. It was also nice to hear some genuine feedback from a fellow Atarian about my articles (in both ST News and Maggie). I was shown some Falcon demos which left me unable to speak words other than 'Gosh' or 'Amazing' which resulted in me having a moan about my financial dire straits preventing the purchase of a Falcon!
I was shown the finished issue of Maggie 18 on the ST, with the Falcon shell due to be finished later in the day. Richard was kind enough to buy me a Coke and I stole a few glances at the impressive new Falcon shell as it was being worked on. On the other side of the room some guys were involved in a SubStation competition, so I spent some time looking at that. Chris returned with the news that James Mathews (Top Byte) had got lost in Taunton which resulted in much mickey-taking throughout the day and into the early hours but it was also dissappointing he didn't make it in the end because he was intending to show off some new Top Byte software.
A vacant ST with Maggie 18 loaded had me sitting in front of it having a closer look at the contents. Beside me, Richard was at the keyboard of a laptop adding to the real-time article (which appeared in Maggie 19). It wasn't long before I'd made my first entry. Back on the Reservoir Gods' Falcon some of their other stuff was being demonstrated. Double Bobble 2000 looks and sounds very faithful to the arcade original. Since the party it has been released as shareware and is still doing very well - order a copy today.
By mid-afternoon people had come and gone. Ralph Lovesy of Impact Software had arrived with a copy of 'Team', which was loaded on Reservoir Gods' Falcon, while they took a break from coding. With premier league football being broadcast by the radio in the room things reached a low point partly due to the overwhelming afternoon heat.
At some point during the afternoon a new CD drive arrived for Chris. He was rather excited by this and it was quickly set up on an unused Falcon in the corner and we were soon browsing contentedly.
My attention wandered to some people playing Stardust on another machine - rather badly it has to be said. I decided I'd show 'em how it should be done and, though I say so myself, I did a pretty good job of showing it off - well, at least got onto the second world!

As evening approached, attention turned once again to finishing of the new 'Maggie' shell. All the people at the party were digitized using Expose and Apex Media which was a good laugh. More people came and went as the evening proceeded and, thankfully, the temperature started to go down as well. Quiet celebrations abounded as the new Falcon shell version of Maggie finally appeared on the screen. Things started to wind down a bit shortly before Richard Karsmakers telephoned to hear how things were going. After that, several very tired people fell into bed.
I woke up early Sunday morning and, after Chris arrived back, everyone was up and about by 10:00, revitalised with cups of tea and coffee. Breakfast took the form of a birthday cake that had been bought for the occasion - it was really nice!
After some more copying and chatting it was my turn to leave with half of Reservoir Gods. After dropping them at Northampton Station Chris took me to Wellingborough Station where we parted.
I arrived home in the evening, tired but content. Once I'd had a shower and a hot meal inside me I felt much better. I thoroughly enjoyed myself over the weekend and had a brilliant time, hopefully we'll do it again sometime in the near future...

Maggie 1995 ECTS report

Despite the fact Maggie are not part of the 'trade', determined members of the team managed to get into the European Computer Trade Show...
Maggie have attended many different kinds of events, all in the name of having a good time and to bring news of the latest developments to you. One particularly memorable visit we gate-crashed the European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) and watched Atari trying to convince the sceptical trade and press how marvellous the Jaguar was. These extracts from our show report gives a flavour at those desperate times.
The Spring '95 ECTS promised to be the largest such show yet with its new home at Olympia providing some much needed elbow and breathing room compared with the squeezefest of the previous show in Islington.
As you might have expected, the latest viewing of the Jaguar and assorted new games on show for the first time at the show were our top priority. In pleasing contrast to the two previous ECTS visitations, Atari decided to splash out on a proper stand with a large showing of new games, in stark contrast to their hole in the wall 'hostility suite' approach at the previous spring show, where you were truly privileged and blessed if you got inside to see the four or five games then in existence, or the 'no show at all' approach they deployed for the Autumn show. Having some money to spend, and some product to show no doubt provided the motivation Atari needed to attend the ECTS in force at last.
At the time the Jaguar CD-ROM drive was making its UK debut and several units were actually up and running sowing several pre-release games alongside several cartridge based games. Rayman, the thoroughly tasty TrueColor platformer, was enjoying top billing and it looked rather more finished compared to its appearance at the previous ECTS and it was released shortly afterwards.
Over in the 'fun' corner two Jag machines we linked together playing the release version of Doom and I finally got to have a go on the Jag version. It's noticeably chunkier compared with the PC version but the frame rate was comparable and playability remained high.
Blue Lightning, despite being a showcase CD-ROM game, showed its 16-bit origins a bit too much. There's probably more under the bonnet but visually it had that 'made on the SNES' look to it.
I did lay my hands on a very early version of Soul Star, the Mega-CD classic converted to the Jag. This is a first perspective 'Afterburner' style sprite scaler shooter - the sort of thing the coin-op division of Sega usually dream up. The graphics engine on this could spit more objects your way, than there were business lunches being eaten in the hall, but the depth of gameplay was nothing to write home about - let's hope the release version is better.
Highlander seemed very much in the same vein as 'Alone in the Dark' but features a sumptuous TrueColor background. A fragmented sequence of clips showed early work on Varuna's Forces, a complex looking role playing game, but this one seems to have slipped quietly away following the Atari/JTS merger.
We collected the handouts and freebies and perusing these after the show reached the conclusion we'd amassed lots of glossy, but fairly useless paper in fifteen languages, seven of them variants of German, the inevitable pens and badges, a travel toothbrush and an Italian gamer magazine.
One especially ribcage-bending freebie was the tear-out-and-fold paper aeroplane, a cunningly fashioned replica of the 'Amazon Queen' supplied by Warner Interactive Entertainment (part of Time-Warner) - this made its test flight across the overpriced bar/snack area before being launched from the top balcony of the Olympia hall and came to rest some suits below. Imagining the scene where said suits were about to sign a contract with pen poised, we didn't linger long enough to find out.
The show was an appropriate showcase for Atari's hopes and ambitions but true to form the Jaguar bombed and sadly the sceptical press and trade pundits were eventually proven correct.

HUNGARY
Greg from COMA (a Hungarian Atari disk magazine) tells us about the Atari scene there...
Atari ST computers appeared later in eastern Europe thanks to a ban on Motorola processors! The first machines were snapped up by musicians but as the prices dropped the scene expanded. My brother and I first got our hands on an ST towards the end of 1990 and founded The CGD Software Team despite having no great ideas!
Quite by chance we discovered an Atari club called 'Csoki' in a community centre sponsored by the former Hungarian Atari Trading Centre. There were six 1Mb STs running colour monitors and all kinds of different people including students, actors, musicians and even the odd mathematician. Initially this club was a centre for huge coding parties but gradually these events turned into 'talkshows' and these days most of the games players and demo scene people are interested in GFA and assembly programming.
The very first Hungarian Atari ST disk magazine was called BOMBA. Back in the spring of 1992 we were part of its editorial team but after some conflicts we planned COmputer MAgazine (COMA), which is the only remaining Atari mag in our country nowadays. The first issue was published in September of 1992 and is still going strong today.

The contents of COMA normally features games, utilities, news, humour, graphics and more recently coding & MIDI. Most of the articles were written by us (in Hungarian). Last year we decided to team up with Lord Chaos, a gifted ST/Falcon/asm programmer to produce a joint BOMBA-COMA diskmag - but it's still just a dream.
We've recently obtained a Falcon so COMA volume 3 issue 2 which may be the first Falcon compatible version! Previously other Hungarian printed magazines had Atari columns but these days only one, called the GURU, deals with our machines.
The main focus of the Atari scene is in Budapest, the capital, but there is activity in other cities including Miskolc and Szeged with maybe up to 1000 users throughout the country.
In addition to producing COMA we're currently working on some games (CGD Software). We recently obtained a copy of Maggie from a German friend - the first foreign disk magazine we had ever seen. Our team was quite surprised to find we had a lot of things in common including mini pictures in the articles, the graphics slideshow and even Monty Python sketches... We're keen to join the European Atari demo and other scenes and have a truly international presence!

Joint Venture

Chris Holland reviews the Joint Venture, Absence's final freeware demo on the Falcon scene ...
This final major work by German super-group Absence is a good send off. Unusually for a demo of this type, it fits onto a single high-density (HD) disk and unarchives onto a hard drive or large RAM disk. The demo leads you into a whirl of screen stretching and plasma bubbling effects backed up with a great soundtrack which seems better suited to a more dynamic series of demo effects than the ones we're presented with.
As expected, the standard of presentation is of the highest standard and meshes well with the apparently flawless coding. Several tunnels and textures really do stick in the mind and the demo ends with an understated poolside scene with 'real' rippling water. This demo is different from, but reminiscent of, the 'Lost Blubb' demo - a suitable farewell performance: 78%

Game review
Leon O'Reilly, Mr Pink of Reservoir Gods, enjoys Neurobotix a new Falcon only shareware game...
Neurobotix is the first release from Dutch coding team Earchaeopterix Software. It's a platform game which uses the Falcon's 256 colour mode. The plot seems straightforward, you're a large robot and you have to shoot things - always a good recipe for a shoot 'em up game. The sprites are huge and the whole thing has full screen scrolling through some sprawling platform levels. Despite being written in assembler, the frame rate isn't as fast as you'd expect and the graphics have a home-grown, amateur feel to them - but this somehow adds to the appeal of the game. The sampled sound FX are satisfyingly loud and clear. This game is shareware with a sensibly priced registration fee. The author is committed to supporting the Falcon so do encourage him by registering your copy. Neurobotix reminds me of some classic 8-bit games - you're not quite sure of what you're supposed to be doing, but it's fun finding out! Rating: 72%