David Cowan, Mike Watson and Gordon Gibson.  Three guys you may not have
heard of before but you are very likely to have played one of their quality
shareware released games - namely Asteroids, Centipede or Galaxians.  They
form the software group known as Sinister Developments, based in Edinburgh,
and we are lucky to have an exclusive interview with the head programmer
David Cowan to find out what he thinks of the Falcon030 and what they have
been up to with it.

UPDATE: David, where did you get your Falcon from ?
COWAN: The version we have was bought in a shop for œ1000 and has all of
the ports.  We are currently trying to obtain another three machines from
Atari but are not really prepared to pay for price that they are asking -
especially when the street version (for more details see SNIPPETS - Ed)
should have been out at the start of May.  I can't help feeling that Atari
are simply trying to cash in on all those poor sods who can't wait.  I also
get the impression that the sales of these Beta version Falcons is helping
to pay for the production of the street version.  The version we are trying
to buy is the 4 Meg memory one with no hard drive because SCSI hard disks
can be gotten for as little as 80p per meg, and the new ICD Pro 6.8
software treats the SCSI drive perfectly, even if there is no internal
drive.

UPDATE: What changes will you be making to your current titles ?
COWAN: The only changes we will be making to Asteroids and Centipede is the
addition of some sampled sounds and sound tracker music.  I don't see the
point in upgrading them any more than that.

UPDATE: What are you currently programing and what do you wish to do in the
future ?
COWAN: We really want to experiment with True Colour 3D texture mapping and
ray tracing.  The Falcon is perfectly suited to this kind of stuff.  One of
the first releases will probably be an Assembler/Debugger/Monitor with an
intergral DSP Assembler.  I have always used DevPac and up until now I
have used DevPac Developer v2.  I eagerly awaited DevPac 3 from HiSoft and
was so absolutely appalled when it was released.  MonST is an abomination.
DevPac 3 is actually slower than DevPac.  They have pretty abysmal use of
Gem windows for text output which slows things down too.  I have written an
assembler (just a basic one) as a test and I was surprised to find that it
was running up to three times faster than DevPac !

UPDATE: Could you give us a history of your computing please ?
COWAN: I started off with a ZX80, a kit ZX81, 4 Spectrums (the "dead flesh"
keyboard, the typists nightmare plastic keyboard, a coffee warmer (128) and
finally a 128+2a (I still play with it)).  I now have a customised ST with
built in sampler, built in debugger cartridge, 400Mb hard drive and its
totally black.  I use it with a colour and mono monitor, HP Laserjet, Epson
FX-1050 and Mistubishi hand scanner.  I also own an Amiga A1200 with 4 Meg
of memory and about 4 9600 Modems (I just seem to keep collecting them !).
I have an Amiga genlock which actually works on the Falcon after a little
bit of re-wiring on the plug, umm... oh yes a fax and 9 arcade machines.

UPDATE: 9 arcade machines ?
COWAN: Yes !  Galaxian, Galaga (thats Galaxian 2), Ghost 'n Goblins,
R-Type, Rastan Saga, Space Invaders, Star Wars, Scramble (one of the last
ones in existence too) and Moon Cresta.

At this point Dave drops a hammer he was holding onto a circuit board from
the Star Wars machine.

COWAN: Damn !  At least I did have 9 machines anyway.

UPDATE: When did you first start programming ?
COWAN: I started programming in Sinclair Basic on the ZX80 and ZX81.  When
I got my Spectrum I started assembly and was involved in a couple of games
- namely Beach Head, Raid Over Moscow and Tapper - I was still very young
and didn't get any money or recognition, I was just glad to have been
involved !  Boy was I niave and lame then !!
I started Napier University in Edinburgh doing computing and I stopped
programming for a couple of years.  In my 3rd year I was on work experience
in London for 18 months and that was where I bought my first ST and taught
myself 68000 (that was about 1989-90).  I lost interest again in the 4th
year and have only really been seriously programming for the past 20
months.

UPDATE: You also own an Amiga so how do you view the rivalry ?
COWAN: I have been reading things like Amiga Format and CU Amiga and I
have been stunned by the sheer scale of the propaganda war waged by our
friends on the other side against the Falcon.  This is probably Atari's
fault anyway - besides it is dead easy to speculate on the bad points of a
machine especially when it doesn't exist and no-one has enough information
to defend it.  If Atari hadn't made such a song and dance about it last
June and said "it will be available in numbers by September" then I don't
think Commodore would have made such an effort to push the A1200.  With the
A1200 selling a couple of thousand machines a week combined with the
INCREDABILE price hike on the Falcon (see News pages for more details) and
no Falcon marketing whatsoever, Atari have a hell of a lot of catching up
to do !  This is unsurprising because as we all know Atari have the same
marketing department as David Mellor.  BUT I havn't seen anything yet which
may have been an over-exageration of the Falcons capabilities.

UPDATE: How do you view the role of the public domain sector ?
COWAN: There will be a massive influx of sampled sound demos into the
public domain !  There will also be a number of sampler packages available
too (I bet Microdeal are not chuffed).  I also forsee the spread of 8 and
16 channel sound tracker modules and predict that every Falcon user will
have at least one disk of trackers.  Oh yes and also slideshows, there will
be thousands of them too.

UPDATE: Why should people buy the Falcon 030 ?
COWAN: Because of the DSP and the 8 channels of DMA sound and the True
Colour screen modes - they are the real selling points.  The Amiga 1200 has
superior graphics capabilities (1280*400 and 262,000 colours) but this is
unusable except as a slideshow and even then it takes up so much bus time
that you cannot even play back an animation with it.  The True Colour mode
on the Falcon doesn't slow down the machine at all so we can write games
and utilities that take advantage of it.  8 channels of DMA 16 bit sound
are a real bonus.  It is dead easy to multiplex this to give 16 and
possibly even 24 channels.  The DSP is exceptionaly powerful running at
over 18 times faster than the ST's 68000 and thats as a co-processor.  You
should expect to see a real influx of Wolfenstein 3D type games on the
Falcon.

Wolfenstein 3D is a PC shareware game written by Appogee Software and was
revolutionary in its 'virtual reality' style landscape allowing you to move
around corners of texture mapped walls with the mouse.  It had full
graphics scaling and is quite an experience to play - Ed.

COWAN: This type of texture mapping is perfectly suited to True Colour
mode.  We are still unsure on how useful the DSP is as a co-processor
though.  Atari have seen fit to give us a little 8-bit parallel port to
talk to the DSP, send it data and receive from it, but we are still unsure
if this is fast enough to do anything useful.

UPDATE: How long will it take for the Falcon to get into the hands of the
skilled programmers like youself ?

COWAN: It is already there.  Remember the Falcon has been available in
Germany for over 9 months now and many of the large demo groups have
already released some of the first Falcon demos.  We have been getting most
of our technical information not from Atari but from demo groups - we would
recommend the DBA Disk Based Magazine issue 8.

UPDATE: How do you see the Falcon as a multi-media machine ?
COWAN: What the hell is multi-media ?!  The Photo-CD is really cool, I have
seen it in action.  Will people use it though ?  Well only programmers, no
longer must we play around with a video camera and colour filters.  All we
do is take a photo from a normal camera, take it to Boots, get it put onto
a CD Rom and then we are free to do with it as we will.  The Photo CD holds
its pictures as data so using the SCSI port we can load the data in and
play with it.  This is quite a nice feature but I have also seen the new
Cannon Digital Camera which can take a photograph and it is processed
straight into the machine without all of the transfering lark to CD.  I
don't know how long the Photo CD will last.  The genlock capabilities are a
nice addition but the Amiga has had this for years !

UPDATE: How easy is it to program all this complex hardware ?
COWAN: If you can program an ST you can program a Falcon.  The 68030 is
over 4 times faster than the 68000 and the DSP is over 18 times faster.
We will really have to wait and see just what it can and can't do... but it
will do everything I have asked of it so far.

Thanks for that David.  We eagerly await the release of the new Sinister
Developments - Space Invaders, Painter, Panic and Asteroids 2 - they will
all feature 4 channels of sampled sound even on an ordinary STFM and Space
Invaders has over 80 sprites on screen at once.  Look out for the reviews
soon but things may take a while to arrive as a few days after talking to
David his 400Mb hard drive decided to crash on him and he was in a state of
a panic trying to retrieve all the data !  Oh well no-ones perfect !!