*** Greg of COMA in hungry / 425 words ***

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!