Bob The Bug

Sounds like a great idea... I'm up for helping with the graphics.

I've never entered either... and haven't written a game for over 20 years... so I am fairly happy with my effort so far

If anyone reasonably local (SW Scotland / Glasgow) is looking for a nice 27" CRT TV, I'll swap this one for a decent Atari joystick and an ST mouse...

If anyone else in the US wants to order, they will be delivered pretty quickly as Orpheus is now mailing them out to customers in the US as orders are received.

Very happy to see the magazine is being appreciated in the Atari's home country! The second issue is going to be even better... and issue three is also underway,,, Many thanks to those of you who have offered assistance - I have some great stuff lined up already for the next few issues.

If you haven't seen this, check it out... it's amazing! Atari 8bit JOKE 5 - Hallucinations

Another great Speccy game! Fantastic!

I went from Atari 800XL & 130XE to Amiga 500+... and then shortly afterwards to the mighty A1200, which I loved - and spent a fortune on - 50Mhz 68030, Tower Case, SCSI controller, 1Gb (Holy Crap!) Hard Disk, 32Mb Fast Ram (Holy Crap!), CD-ROM, Multi-Scan Monitor, Video Digitiser... ... and by the time I had assembled all this, everyone I knew who had an Amiga had moved on to the PC... lol... The A1200 is my second favourite computer ever...

Hi Philsan Glad you like the magazine and thanks for the info and advice. I will remove that new logo with all speed... I didn't even know that was the Infogrammes Atari logo - I thought it was a "homemade" logo... lol... Sorry also for my ignorance of the 1064 and XM301 - I will correct these too. I've never owned either of these and never recognised them, I will try and make the default font size a little bigger for the benefit of all us old timers... lol... Thanks for the feedback!

Another batch of magazines run off at the weekend. And issue #2 may well be out a bit earlier than planned... I look forward to receiving a few more orders - or they'll be joining ET in a landfill...

Hello People Well, that was an eventful week...! First of all, thank you very much to everyone who has ordered the magazine and for all the nice reviews of the magazine so far. I'm quite proud of my first issue and will strive to make every issue as least as good. I have now updated the website and added subscription options for 6 issues, which offers a discount - subscribe for five issues and get a sixth issue free and a reduced postage charge. I have also reduced the overseas postal price for individual issues by £1 as I now have a much better idea of the costs of sending the mag to various places (eleven different countries so far!) and don't want to put people off. I can't do any more than this as it's impossible to haggle with the Post Office - air mail rates are expensive but surface mail isn't much cheaper and takes 2 weeks to get to Western Europe, 6 weeks to North America and up to 12 weeks to Australia. If you are an overseas customer and have already paid £5 shipping for the first issue (or indeed, for both issues) and would like to subscribe, contact me and I will provide a coupon code which will discount your subscription order by the difference between what you paid already and the updated postal rates. I've also uploaded all the old Excel Disk Magazines onto the site as well as the software reviewed in the first issue of the new mag. Have fun! Roll on issue #2...

A little teaser for the first issue is now on the website...

25 years after starting a floppy-disk based Atari magazine, I have resurrected Excel as a full colour printed magazine... Please have a look... www.excel-retro-mag.co.uk

Genius work, Tezz... fantastic. I am about to get back to my Sabre Wulf / Atic Atac Spectrum conversion projects... your Manic Miner work is what I call inspiration!

hee hee... I clicked Run/Break and then it works... oops! Didn't have to do that in 2.6...

Is there something wrong with Debug>Disassembly in 2.7? I can't get it do display anything but it seems to work just fine in 2.6...?

Hi Steve I tried Charpad - it's brilliant, but I ran into problems trying to get the saved files into the Atari. I actually drew my Sabre Wulf character sets on CharPad and ended up re-doing them on my own Colourfont Editor on Altirra.

Thanks, Fred ! I used to have an Atari penpal in the Netherlands called Fred... but I think he was Fred_W...

Of course, the Spectrum and BBC basically both have the same colour palette... but Atic Atac on the Speccy is soooo much better than the BBC version...

Hi Tezz ! Love your work - can't wait for... dare I say it... Manic Miner! I've been looking at all the versions of Sabre Wulf.. most are very close to the Spectrum original but mine is going to be a bit different looking, as you will see if you look at the graphics I did in my old character/map editor I posted earlier. The BBC version looks quite good, unlike Atic Atac, which I think looks horrible on the BBC. Those colours don't suit the game at all... and the graphics are pretty poorly drawn. I love both games so much - I can imagine I'll probably end up like you: working on more than one project at the same time...

Keep going! Looking nice so far - what programs do you use for designing your character sets / player/missiles? I'm all for code sharing - I'll have to write some code first though... lol... still doing graphics at the moment.

Hey Steve, I've just been reading about your old football game (which I am about to download) when I found the above... I wonder if the guy from TWAUG who gave you the box of tapes was Dave Ewans? It was Dave who bought all my Atari gear from me when I had a lapse of judgement around 1992 and upgraded to an Amiga... I'm afraid Dave died of a heart attack many years ago. I never actually got to meet him but I had many conversations with him on the phone. There was always plenty of laughter with Dave!

Hi Snicklin I never had any contact with Stuart Murray I'm afraid... sorry! However, I did collaborate with Neil Ottaway (Tiger Developments) on a game called Lizard. Neil did quite a few Atari games (the Boing and Tarkus games). I recently chatted with him on facebook after over twenty years. He asked if I was interested in doing graphics for a Blackberry phone game...! He reckons he's obsessed with writing games for dead platforms... I will be writing my games from scratch, (re-)learning 6502 assembler on the way. I was always more of a graphics guy than a coder but these will be my first all-machine-code games. No excuses now with the amazing software available... I don't have any knowledge of Z80 code whatsoever so porting the games would be well beyond my capabilities! Also, I want to play to the Atari's strength, so the games will use lower resolution for more colours and lots of hardware sprites, so a direct port would not really be feasible. I'd rather not see these all-time favourite games of mine running on the Atari in hi-resolution black and white. I am intrigued to learn that you are developing a Druid-style game... sounds very interesting! Druid was an awesome game - the Atari conversion was very well done (for a change!).

Thanks for the replies! I'm amazed that someone remembers my old disk mag... and my old Amnesia game (how could you forget a game with a name like that... lol )... but then I suppose pretty much everyone on here is a die-hard Atari 8-bit fan. I think I have just about (re-)mastered Atari Basic and am now having fun with assembly language using MADS / WUDSN. I am working on Sabre Wulf and can't wait to start posting videos of my WIP. Thanks to Jac! for adding me to the WUDSN IDE user base (your demos are extraordinary, by the way, and I am enjoying your assembler tutorials on YouTube... I used to HATE using the Atari assembler/editor... Hi to Jose whose enthusiasm for the Atari seems practically limitless - oh, and I love the game X8 !! Hi Philsan - I can't wait for Atic Atac either - I had always wanted that game (and Sabre Wulf) for the Atari so I decided I am just going to have to write them myself... lol... ! Hi Snicklin - thanks for the links - and for the kind words - looks like another couple of great Atari sites to add to my bookmarks!

Hello to all Atari 8 bitters! I used to produce a disk-based magazine (called Excel) for the XL/XE back in 1990-92. I have been playing around with Altirra a lot recently and all the amazing new Atari games and hardware mods have really inspired me to dig out my old programs and play around with them. I have added some extra features into my old Colourfont character editor and the accompanying Tile/Map Editor and have been designing some graphics for an Atari version of the old Spectrum game Sabre Wulf which was an absolute favourite game of mine on the old Speccy before I got my first Atari. I am attaching an ATR disk image if anyone else would like to have a look at it. I've had a lot of fun with it over the last couple of weeks and now I want to go and design some sprites for Sabre Wulf... and then hopefully start writing an Atari conversion very soon. And then Atic Atac... I have been so into the Atari emulator that my partner got me an actual 130XE for Christmas from ebay... so now I want to get a VBXE and SIO2SD... I forgot how much fun the old machine was. Since I finally sold my Atari gear I had several Amigas and many, many PCs but the Atari is a bit special and I hope to be doing a lot of stuff on it now that I have a bit more free time. I have had a go at the MADS assembler on the WUDSN IDE and I am well and truly hooked. Happy New Year indeed! COLOURFONT & MAPMAKER.atr