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2003 MyAtari Reader Award results
Welcome to the May 2003 issue of MyAtari magazine. Last month I announced the launch of the 2003 MyAtari Reader Awards in which we asked you - the readers - to vote in the following categories...

  • Best Atari supporting company of the year
  • Best Atari magazine of the year
  • Best Atari web site of the year
  • Best Game release of the year
  • Best Programmer of the year
  • Best Commercial software release of the year
  • Best Non-commercial software release of the year
  • Best Hardware upgrade of the year
  • Outstanding contribution to the Atari community

Following a frantic week of nominations and almost a thousand votes, the winners of the 2003 MyAtari Reader Awards can now be announced... However, before I tell you who the winners are, I would like to thank everyone who took the time to vote in the awards and congratulate our worthy winners!

OK, the results of the 2003 MyAtari Reader Awards are:

[Image: Best Atari supporting company of the year]

Best Atari supporting company of the year
Winner: Best Electronics
Runner-up: Falkemedia
Bradley Koda at Best Electronics replied,

"I would like to thank all of the world wide Atari users who took the time to vote for Best Electronics in the MyAtari 2003 Survey!  We are honored to receive the 2003 Award for "Best Atari Supporting Company" two years in a row. It is the loyal world wide Atari users who have kept us in the Atari business now, for last 19 years. We are currently working on some new Atari items / parts and major Atari upgrades that will be announced in the next few months!"
 

[Image: Best Atari magazine of the year]

Best Atari magazine of the year
Winner: st-computer
Runner-up: ABBUC
Thomas Raukamp at st-computer replied,

"Thanks to everyone who voted for us. Receiving two awards was really, really unexpected. We know it is hard to be voted as the Best Website, but we knew it was harder to defend this title. So you guess we are very happy. And receiving "Best Magazine" is THE reward for all the hard work in the past years.

Thanks again."
 

[Image: Best Atari web site of the year]

Best Atari web site of the year
Winner: st-computer.net
Runner-up: atariage.com
Thomas Raukamp at st-computer replied,

"Thanks to everyone who voted for us. Receiving two awards was really, really unexpected. We know it is hard to be voted as the Best Website, but we knew it was harder to defend this title. So you guess we are very happy. And receiving "Best Magazine" is THE reward for all the hard work in the past years.

Thanks again."
 

[Image: Best Game release of the year]

Best game release of the year
Winner: SuperFly
Runner-up: Battlesphere GOLD
Mr Pink at Reservoir Gods replied,

"it was late in the night when havoc of fun industries and myself hatched the idea for superfly. we'd become addicted to a small flash game, but had been frustrated with some its limitations and bugs. "it would only take us a weekend to make!" we reasoned. it took over 4 months - things always take longer than expected ;)

we set the technical requirements early - it should have full screen scrolling, 4 bitplane sprites and run at 60 frames per second even on a humble STFM.

although the basic game engine came into place fairly quickly, we wanted to make this into more than just a throwaway five minutes of fun game - we wanted it to be a lasting and rewarding experience.

to that end, we invented a whole range of different game modes, different worlds to play in and a story mode to battle through.

the key to the game is its simplicity, although there were some doubters (even in the development team) in the early stages. how could a game with just one button be any good? but in the end this proved to be one of the great things about it, easy to get into but difficult to master.

it's always a good sign if you still want to play your game even after you have finished it. after months of designing, coding and debugging you are often sick of the sight of a production. but with superfly we were all still hopelessly addicted to it even after it was released.

it was also a title that seemed to have near universal appeal - people who had never played computer games before picked it up and became addicted. we had many stories told to us by infuriated atarians who couldn't use their machines as their girlfriends, parents or flatmates had become addicted to this title!

a lot of people worked very hard on this title and deserve the credit for its success. the graphics of sh3 fitted perfectly for this scenario, msg composed an amazing amount of brilliant SID tunes, and the testing team of stratagem, partycle and others spent many sleepless nights tracking bugs and coming up with ideas for improvements.

and thanks to all who voted for us. it's great to know there are still people out there playing and enjoying atari games. we will do our best to deliver more high quality games for our beloved atari machines over the next year :)"
 

[Image: Best Programmer of the year]

Best programmer of the year
Winner: Mr Pink
Runner-up: Henk Robbers
Mr Pink replied,

"wow, i'm amazed to receive such an award. it's a great honour to be recognised for all the late nights i've spent slaving over my atari machines ;)

it was about 15 years ago i got hold of some demos for my ST and i watched them with astonishment. things like the B.I.G. and Union demos really blew my mind. at the time i thought coding of this sort was some sort of magical art.

as i got more into the demo scene, i really wished to pull back the curtain and find out how the magic works. i started to learn assembly, teaching myself by disassembling programs or tracing through them in mon-st.

it was an interesting journey, learning about how all the hardware worked, as well as having to think differently in terms of how you constructed code compared to higher level languages.

although i'd learned asm on the ST, it wasn't until i got my falcon that I really put it to use and started coding on some large projects. one of the first programs i coded was the art package 'GodPaint', and this was useful to me in terms of learning lots of different graphical techniques.

for the last 10 years i've been bashing out atari code. i've worked on nearly 100 productions for the atari; games, demos, magazines and tools. and i'm still enjoying coding now as much as ever :)

the great thing about the atari scene is that it has such an abundance of brilliant coders. i am constantly inspired by the amazing work of people like defjam, earx, thomas/new beat, escape, dhs, cream and others. its a great community where we can share ideas and help others solve problems. I'm just proud to be a part of it!"
 

[Image: Best Commercial software release of the year]

Best commercial software release of the year
Winner: Papyrus
Runner-up: ACE

 

[Image: Best Non-Commercial release of the year]

Best non-commercial software release of the year
Winner: Highwire
Runner-up: Aniplayer
The Highwire team replied,

"We would like to thank each and every person who voted for Highwire in the 2003 MyAtari Reader Awards. We would also like to thank MyAtari for having these awards as they give the Atari users a chance to show their appreciation to the various Atari programmers and supporters. Ever since the support of Cab was abruptly stopped, the Atari community has strived for a high-end professional web browser. All of us on the Highwire team believe that we have the much needed program that will soon fill this void. We believe that it will make Cab a thing of the past and will become the Atari user's web browser of choice. Again, thank you all."
 

[Image: Best Hardware upgrade of the year]

Best hardware upgrade of the year
Winner: EtherNEC (by Lyndon Amsdon)
Runner-up: ScatBox
Lyndon Amsdon replied,

"I am extremely pleased and honoured to be given this MyAtari award! Thanks to all the people who have voted and given me support over the last few years. I'm still working on new projects, and always welcome people who suggest new ideas. Have fun and stay Atari!"
 

[Image: Outstanding contribution to the Atari community]

Outstanding contribution to the Atari community (joint winners!)
Winner: Matthias Jaap
Winner: Didier Méquignon
Winner: Wolfgang Burger
Runner-up: Tim Conrardy

Didier Méquignon replied,

"Thanks a lot :-)

I'm happy because since 6 months I have used lot of energy on the CT60. Now I write docs with UDO, lot of informations, programs, TOS, sources are on-line (updated each week) at http://ct60conf.atari.org.

Rodolphe try to fix the arbitration (DMA/Blitter), for me it's the last problem."

Wolfgang Burger replied,

"Thank you very much. In the moment I have many work with our next magazine. I speak a big THANK YOU to all people, that have vote for us (me) to the award. That is an indication for us (me) to work harder for the Atari in Germany."

If you have any suggestions or ideas for next year's awards, please let me know! Enjoy the issue,

Matthew Bacon

Matthew Bacon, Editor
matthew@myatari.net

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Party time
In case you hadn't noticed, JagFest UK will be upon us soon. We're very excited about it here at MyAtari, and we're working extra hard to get this month's issue produced as efficiently as possible, so we can prepare for JagFest. There is much to do. Not only has such an event been long overdue in the UK, we haven't really had any sort of major convention since the days of Stafford AMS (Alternative Micro Show), itself now ironically extinct. Unlike the commercially oriented gatherings of yore, JagFest is rooted in the underground user scene, as much of the exhibits are from users. However, there is a retail element, reflecting the still-active commercial development on the Jaguar (and Lynx, which will also have a presence). New games, new hardware - I look forward to checking out BattleSphere Gold, home-made rotary controllers and the ScatBox, among others.

[Image: JagFest UK banner]

This will be the first edition of JagFest in the UK. We have reported on Euro JagFest before, and there are events in America, too. If you attend one of these other JagFests this season, why not write a report for MyAtari? We'll be showing you what happens at the UK event and it would be great to see how the other ones go.

So who's going? From the MyAtari team, we currently have the following members:

[Photo: Matthew Bacon][Photo: Shiuming Lai][Photo: Matthew Preston][Photo: Thomas Wellicome][Photo: TXG]

Matthew Bacon, Shiuming Lai, Matthew Preston, Thomas Wellicome, and TXG (all the way from the Netherlands) will be available to answer your questions about the magazine and listen to your suggestions. Elliot Swanton, keeper of our mirror site http://www.myatari.org will also be there on the Saturday with some of his stuff (I hope someone remembers to bring a mobile generator). As a matter of fact, even for many of us it will be the first time we have met in all the time we've worked together on this magazine! Expect better things to come yet after this event.

We're still discussing what to bring. We'll certainly have some informal mini gaming competitions running alongside the official contests. Your two editors will be working live on the magazine, Matthew Preston will bring his Jaguar, Lynx, and iPaq loaded with emulators, Thomas Wellicome will be representing the 16/32 computing side, and TXG is bringing his Atari 8-bit gear plus a bunch of crazy Dutch friends. This will continue a burst of international party activity for TXG, following Schreiersgrün 2003 in Germany, Atariada 2003 in the Czech Republic then EIL 3 and Aithernet, both in Germany. He must be trying to set some kind of world record! What else we'll do, you'll just have to come along and see!

Other attractions include our good friends from Cheshunt Computer Club (Derryck Croker and Peter West are currently confirmed), and Maggie disk magazine represented by CiH and Felice, bearing goodies from their EIL 3 visit at Easter. We haven't even mentioned the Jaguar section - here there will be many new people for us to meet, judging by the visitor list on the JagFest UK home page. Rumour has it that Jeff Minter will also be attending, if this turns out to be true, all you Jaguar fans and Llamasofties must go there and make it worth his while!

Mark Rayson of Retrovision (see our March 2003 issue) is coming with his Atari gear, to present a mini-Retrovision and promote his brand of nostalgic gaming and partying. He will be very welcome, I'm sure, and I hope more people from our scene will go to future Retrovisions as a result. Let's see if he turns up with his head painted green again! I can just imagine him getting pulled over by police on his way there!

Keep an eye on the JagFest UK home page for the latest news, read (or even better, join in) the forum on MSN or MyAtari. If you plan to go for the weekend and need accommodation, make sure you contact Nick Harlow at 16/32 and get yourself on the confirmed visitors list. Also read our interview this month with the mind behind JagFest UK, Gary Taylor (Gaztee). As the weeks count down, this is shaping up to be a great event, hopefully it will be the one to put the UK on the international scene event map.

Shiuming Lai

Shiuming Lai, Features and Technical Editor
shiuming@myatari.net

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MyAtari magazine - Feature #1, May 2003

 
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