** 1 page feature / 670 words **

Inter Jam 98

The Mad Butscher of Foundation Two and Grey of Mystic Bytes report 
from this annual coding convention...

** IJ1A.JPG here

Over the last week weekend in May the Inter Jam was held near 
Karlsruhe in Germany. The convention was organised by Inter and 
Go64 magazines and there were over 150 attendees complete with 
their Atari ST/Falcon/XE, Commodore 64 and PC machines at the 
party.

I left my flat at 7 o'clock Saturday morning to drive to Frankfurt 
and collect Grey who left his home in Poland twenty hours earlier. 
His bus was delayed several hours and we finally arrived at the 
Inter Jam early afternoon.

During the journey we exchanged news and gossip and Grey revealed 
that apart from coding fantastic demos, Mystic Bytes are 
considering coding a Falcon game - all they have to do now is come 
up with an idea and code it!

** OLIVER.GIF here
Oliver and a copy of STraTOS #4

The first person we ran into was Oliver Heissler, one of the guys 
involved with the French STraTOS magazine. He showed us a copy of 
STraTOS #4 which is now in A4 format and he told us Centek's 
Centurbo II accelerator was in production and would be available 
within the month - it is now available and should be shown 
publicly for the first time at the Atari Messe '98 in Neuss, 
Germany.

After setting up my trusty 8-bit Atari machines I showed 
Foundation Two's latest game Dryegg on the Falcon to 505 of 
Checkpoint. Next to 505 sat the brother of 505 - No! of Escape. He 
was working on his cool Escpaint graphics package and a 4Ktro for 
the competition. Next to Escape and Checkpoint sat TSCC. Llama was 
working on another 4Ktro and MC Laser was creating a Mod and was 
pleased to release Module Compilation #15, certainly more pleased 
than he was with his prize in the mod competition - but that's 
another story.

MC Laser is also a member of the Poets of Decay who produce the 
Undercover disk magazine which will include the real-time article 
in its next issue.
                                              After just four 
hours sleep I was up again and THE MATCH of F.U.N. showed me his 
latest game called Snatch which is a logical puzzle style game. 
He's currently working on a Tron clone with some cool extras. 
EAR_X, another F.U.N. member, is working on an intro and improving 
the Undercover shell. BONUS of F.U.N. demonstrated a new version 
of Man at War, a two player game.

Next to F.U.N. the Popsy Team from France were coding some new 
routines, but were struggling with the German keyboards.

The Running development team were also there offers boxed versions 
of Running which looked slick. They plan to release a level editor 
in the near future and they're also working on a multi-player 
version.

ST Survivor of Loud! (Reformation of No Limit Coding) said Loud! 
are also programming a Tron clone and they continue to work on the 
Toxic magazine.

42 Bastian was programming a five games card for the Lynx 
including Invaders, Snakebyte, Mines, Isolation and SFX.

Most of the Atari enthusiasts were either coding or creating 
graphics or sounds, most of the PC users were playing net games 
including Quake, C & C and Age of Empires. The Commodore 64 
enthusiasts were more active producing some fine demos. The only 
two Atari 8-bit enthusiasts (Heaven and Mad Butscher) were busy - 
check out the next ABBUC (8-Bit Byter User Club) disks to see the 
results of their efforts.

Before the convention the organisers had stated this year's event 
would be the final Inter Jam due to the amount of work involved. 
However, hopefully, there will be another Siliconvention to attend 
next year.

** IJ2A.JPG here
Grey (Mystic Bytes) plus EAR_X and THE MATCH (F.U.N.)

** boxout **
Competition results

Atari demos

Place  Title        Group

1      Time Out     Mystic Bytes/Poland
2      Reanimation  Syntax/Poland

Atari 4Ktros
1      Surprise!    Mystic Bytes/Poland
2      Power Off    Escape/Germany
3      Fish         TSCC/Germany

Atari 96Ktro:
1      Kaleidoskope TOSCrew/Netherlands

** /boxout **