Moleater

Lol...You are very pro active re the 8bit these days J... Clue: Paul Clue: Walthamstow Nice to see you about.......Hope all is fine old man...

Lol... I never said they were cheap :-) I shudder at the price I paid for an Atari 810 disk drive (and that's with me getting it at trade)..

I really hope its not been abandoned and purely its just been put on hold until some of the new features of Atari800 are finished. Thanks for the replies..

Agreed with what you said until you got to that last line... You honestly didn't think that nobody was going to disagree with that, did you? Or are you just trolling from sheer boredom???? I'd take any ST over any Commodore 64 any day... Later... Not trolling at all, a jovial throw away remark perhaps but based around a list that seemed to be based on 'inovation' I just can't see how an ST would have ever made the grade for it in the first place. Technically the ST is a 'bitsa' machine imho, quite a simple OS, missing simple multimedia OS features like hardware scrolling, more than 1 sprite, some form of graphical adjuster along the lines of DLI, Copper etc. I don't deny it had a good userbase but I see it like the Amiga...Badly marketed, aimed at the wrong area's. Personally I preffered the Amiga hands down.....

I used to beta test it along with probably many people on this forum but since it was taken over and the 'year 1 final' was released I've heard nothing in whats days away from a year. Has anyone heard any news re its dev? I know that Atari800 had one bad update where it screwed the sound up but I presumed that was fixed in the 2.02(?) update? Cheers.

Shame the C64 was not included, that and the Atari were my two fave machines shortly followed by my much loved Amiga. As for the C64 not being innovative I'd say sprite wise it was vastly superior to other machines and like the Atari it used a customised sound chip with filtering rather than a standard 'noise generator'. Apart from that it deserves to be there just for the userbase it had.. Btw, it's the ST that's the door stop / paperweight

I've just come across this thread after ages of not being on this forum. I've got quite a unique link in all of this (and more), when Noel, John Sosta etc were finished with Sidewinder I reviewed it for Atari User (around Sept of 86). I actually went down to meet John and Paul (no George or Ringo) to pick up some info on the editor. Noel I met in Silica and knew him pretty well, real nice guy. The last time I saw him was when he was excited about Thunderfox being published and he introduced me to Orall, always wanted to find out what happened to Noel especially after what happened to Silica. As mentioned elsewhere Errol worked there and I only met him a few times, seemed full of himself but ok, he wrote or partially wrote Foundations Waste on the ST if memory serves me correctly. Silica was also a hotbed of things, the Sidcup branch in Hatherly Road was my favourite place, bloody amazing place to be on a Saturday. The energy in the place was amazing (not to mention the odd 'pirate' flogging copies (Reg)) and the staff knew their stuff which was great. its how I got into the Atari to be exact. Didn't spend to much time in Tott Crt road branch tbh, I seem to remember one of the staff ran a HUGE pirate BBS, an obnoxious pillock named Splat or some such. Last thing I heard re Silica before they folded was that stock could be purchased at the back door at a better price with some staff members :-) My 15 mins of fame comes more from where I worked, Maplins...After I got into the Atari as tech sales I sort of graduated into many fields. Apart from reviewing for Atari User we had customers like Archer Mclean (sold him his disk drive), Adam Michael Billyard (Chop Suey & Electraglide etc), Paul Daniels......Yes, Paul Daniels, his connection is that he wrote 'A magic adventure' for the Atari. While reviewing I helped get a couple of games published for others via Futureware (Sidewinder peeps), one was Orb of Zarimeer (or something like that) which was written by an M4 traffic cop called Mike King and the more story worth game called Quest for the Maltese Chicken. This was written by a guy called John Kavagnah (and brother Pat iirc), John went on to work for Domark and on to Diakanna (spelling) with John Romero. Being at Maplin meant I was around hardware and it's development, I built my own 300 baud modem and one of the files I xfered on it was Buck Rogers from a rather well known chap (for the wrong reasons) called RobC. But apart from that I also knew a certain company also named by Carmel, Computer House. Ran from a house in Fulham by a guy named John (sure it was John) and his 'mate' Chris, they got involved in marketing Atari kit, sadly with one person John was better at selling than paying the developer. I introduced two people I'd met via Maplin, an ex manager called Dave who was a hardware mega guru and Mike who apart from being a Doctor was also a great programmer and part time Hacker called The Mole. These guys developed a wonderful OS board called something like The Dumper which extended the Atari vastly with memory dumping, built in OS replacement, custom font loading, machine code monitor etc etc. It really was a great little board yet they never got a penny for it, John who I also knew via a friend called Steve was more keen on the money in his pocket than paying up. I could be mistaken but his partner I believe ended up in prison for assault or some-such... Other people I met along life's highway were Mike Wilding (was with Atari UK until he went into business in Rayleigh), Mike crossed paths with a guy called Kevin, he had the pleasure of becoming the first person to be done for software piracy in the UK by Atari. Mind you, it's not so clever of him and his mate putting adverts in Exchange & Mart for Atari programs inc Ms Pacman (the one cited in the case). Whats odd about that is that many of the programs were falling out of Atari's back door via the very people attempting to stop piracy I hear So, after seing Noel's name mentioned it just showed me what a small small world the Atari scene really was in terms of who knew who, same as in the C64 world really. Oh, for JBJ...I even have a hand in Menace oddly enough. While reviewing for another mag I was sent Menace on the Amiga to review while it was called 'Draconius', a swift call to the nice lady at Psygnosis informing her there was a C64 title already out with that name meant that the game got renamed to Menace by either DMA or Psygy :-) Told you, its a small world :-) Btw, Carmel, if you ever run into Noel again, say hello from Paul ex Atari User...