The Big 100 K!
MyAtari has been playing the numbers game since the early days. We know our concept and reason for being, therefore our statistics are vital information that we thoroughly analyze and try to exploit. Various tools are at our disposal, the simplest being the web site visitor counter. These not only tell us whether we're doing it right (apart from the personal feedback many of you kindly take the time to give), they spur us on to better things. So it was in late autumn of 2000 I set ourselves a target of 10,000 visits before the end of January 2001.

It seemed to be taking an eternity but everybody worked hard. Then on Saturday afternoon, 20 January 2001, I visited the site to be greeted by my own prophesy in its exactness!

Something about falling off one's chair with laughter would be appropriate here. Belief and disbelief at the same time. Since then we have constantly revised our targets as each 10,000 rolled on more effortlessly than the last. First we aimed with linear extrapolation for 70,000 before August 2002 (two years on-line), then that changed as we noticed an upward trend - 50,000 before the end of December 2001, which was achieved comfortably.

The first 50,000 took 15 months. Now, just another seven months down the line we have clocked up another 50,000 to surpass 100,000! We thank and congratulate every one of our supporters for helping build this success, whether you read us, link to us or write for us, you make it worthwhile. Let's all celebrate!

They said it would never be finished
Cast your mind back to November 2001. I'd started yet another project to help keep the house in its state of never quite being tidy, always something in progress. If demo coders have something of a reputation for not finishing things, it is for the same reason: they are always coming up with new and more fantastic distractions so their hard disks accumulate little utilities and routines that were put together in these flashes of inspiration, perhaps never to be taken further.

Like sitting on a long-awaited and much-hyped mega-demo, the constant ribbing from colleagues and the general need to take a break from the norm gave me finishing-sprint motivation. What was 75% built in one afternoon lay dormant for seven months but finally it is done and dusted.

Am I pleased? Absolutely! I wish I'd finished it earlier. The amplifier is now very well damped against vibration, especially from the sub-woofer. Even at very high volume there is no vibration to be felt when touching the amplfier though it can certainly be felt through the floor. I've noticed the bass is more taut and rhythmic, and a slightly smoother overall presentation. It's not the difference between night and day but has enhanced the performance in a subtle way.

Other distractions
The 06-2002 issue of st-computer recently dropped through the door. First impression is the heavier paper with a nice sheen, it looks, smells and feels very classy indeed. Cover feature is New Beat's ACE DSP sound synthesizer, current hot topic of the Falcon world along with the "Real, real soon now" CT60 super accelerator. Editor Thomas Raukamp gives ACE MIDI 1.03 the once-over in a five-page feature. Meanwhile version 1.05 has already been released, I got mine by e-mail and will install it as soon as work on MyAtari allows. Right now I'm listening to Mace, the great little ACE demo tune by Thomas Bergström, has this guy got talent or what. How many people can design and build their own creative tools and actually use them with such mastery as well? Yes, I've recorded this tune (so I can play it in my car), just the sort of thing schoolkids used to do to impress their mates in the good old days of computer sound chip debates, except then it was analogue cassette and now we're burning CDs.

Alive disk mag issue 5 has just come out and I'm also reading that right now. Most interesting article for me is the SCSI to IDE convertor, reviewed by Evil of DHS. The magazine's shell doesn't like something on my CT2 Falcon, I don't think it's related to the turbo mode though because with a clean boot (only HD Driver installed), it loads the magazine correctly rather than quitting to desktop. Now the shell has become open source the editorial team is inviting coders to add features. I hope it will be tweaked or re-written to be as stable and compatible as the old Maggie shell. I don't remember ever experiencing lock-ups with that.

When I last looked at PixArt (4.34) in detail exactly four years ago, I was impressed by its comprehensive and powerful features. The program has since been released for free by its authors and now, thanks to the DDP translation crew, a full English version of the newer 4.52 is available for download at http://www.cix.co.uk/~derryck/html/ddp.htm

All of the keyboard short-cuts have mysteriously disappeared in this version, though one of my main criticisms has been largely fixed. Yes, the so-called TC airbrush now actually works rather than causing a crash in the Falcon's high resolution TC mode, for those of you with steroid-pumped VIDELs in bus-accelerated machines. The small caveat is shown in the magnified window in the above screen-shot: layering of the spray introduces erroneously coloured pixels (blue specks in the black). This does not happen in MagiC PC running in 24-bit but the program has other problems with colour here (MagiC PC reports 24-bit, which is not available on my hardware, I run in 32-bit, the other nearest alternative being 16-bit).

In Falcon TC, the colour palette and colour selector still do not work predictably, as in the colour picked is not the colour that comes out, except for the airbrush when the colours are chosen from the colour palette!

Compared to Apex Media's airbrush, I find the saturation and flow characteristics more life-like. Apex has the "advantage" of variable flow rate but it's still too fast at any setting.

Best customer service award
Seemingly not content with winning Best Game of 2002 in the recent MyAtari awards and narrowly missing Best Programmer, too, the Reservoir Gods ought to take home a trophy for product support as well. When I found the Gods' latest game, GodPey, didn't work on my stock TOS 2.06 Mega STE, the guys (Leon and Hans) kept me up into the early hours e-mailiing test programs and suggestions, my internet connection never reached its inactivity time-out threshold of five minutes between either of them coming up with more ideas. I had to throw in the towel well before 01:00, I'm now at the stage where if I stay up too late, my vision starts to blur. If I can't see, I can't do!

Roll on 200,000.

Shiuming Lai, Features and Technical Editor
shiuming@myatari.co.uk

MyAtari magazine - Feature #1, July 2002