** 2 pages Maggie / 1809 words **

** boxout **
The Final Curtain!

Well, here are the final Maggie pages for their outing in Atari Computing.

We're reluctantly going from here, but the Maggie disk magazine is still very much around. See us in our current issue, and join us in the forthcoming tenth anniversary celebrations.

In the meantime, try to sponge away those tears and enjoy our rantings one more time!

Chris Holland
** /boxout **

Madness Music compilation demo by Cream

ST/e/Falcon

** MADNESS.GIF here **

This is a nice little taster for future productions by German ST demo makers Cream.
It is a very simple production, a music demo featuring tunes from The famous chip music composer "Mad Max" aka Jochen Hippel, written for the Amiga in a proprietary seven channel(!) part chipsynth, part sample replay format.
These are cover versions of well-known ST tunes for well-known games such as Leavin' Teramis and Chambers of Shaolin produced by the famous ex-demo sceners software house Thalion. The melodies are recognisable to those people with ears battered by the YM2149 soundchip squawk from the ST. They are completely transformed by the enhanced Amiga replay system however, and sound a lot like a "luxury" version of a Commodore 64 SIDchip tune.
It isn't a completely effect-free production either, as there is a very cool take-off of the stylised Thalion logo introduction. This time it's done as a bunch of spinning 3D texture-mapped objects, on an ST! There is a reset demo, which even works on Falcons.
You might also be interested to know this is a precursor to a new music player being prepared by Cream, which will be able to play nearly all proprietary Amiga music formats. This is to be accomplished by wholesale emulation of the Amiga Paula soundchip!

Overall: 77%

Chris Holland

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Emulation, that's the name of the game?

Emulation, a term familiar to many PC users, especially those returnees who have come back to their rightful place in the Atari sunshine with the help of one of those ubiquitous Atari ST emulators. I'm sure if I throw around names such as Pacifist and Winston, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

Less well known, but possibly of even more interest is the sort of emulation carried out by Atari TOS compatible computers of other computers. Yes, there are such beasts, and some of these do quite a successful job of it as well.

Emulation on the Atari 68k has quite a long history. Early bundles of STs were sold with something called CP/M, an early 8-bit business standard. These disks, along with the regrettable Metacomco BASIC, were the first to be recycled. Along the way, there were fair to middling attempts at emulating anything from an 8-Bit Atari, right through to early model PCs and Macs. These are still around, but have tended to fade into the background as being somewhat historical.

The first acceptably "modern" emulators were of computer platforms somewhat closer to home. Sinclar ZX81, and Christian Gandlers ZX Spectrum emulators were among the first realised, that could run large amounts of the software produced for these machines. The ZX Spectrum emulator was particularly successful with the common SNA or snapshot file format.

** SPECCY.GIF here **

This meant that large amounts of popular classic old games were in easy reach. The Speccy emulator got as far as version 2.07 in 1993, but has gone quiet since. It still is a very good representation of a 48k Spectrum on even a standard ST, although a Falcon is needed to get nearasdammit full speed.

Other 8-bit computers were also possible to emulate on standard hardware, a notable also-ran of the 8-bit era, the Oric, is currently at version 0.9 of ATOric. This really needs higher powered TOS hardware to run properly, as it is unbelievably slow on an ST, less slow on a stock Falcon, but really needing a TT or above to get the best from it. Again, a wide variety of software can be run. This emulator also makes use of certain physical parts of Atari hardware, the timeless AY Yamaha soundchip!

** ATORIC.GIF **

Going back a bit earlier, to the prehistory of home computing, is the 2nd Life Tandy TRS 80 emulator. This is unique, as it is the only emulator that can run under a mono monitor, indeed, it will require this. Also, it is the only one that runs fully under GEM (ATOric has a partial GEM interface.) It is fairly undemanding of the hardware, and can get something like full speed on a stock Falcon030. It is a very well designed emulator that can run virtual disk images, and even provides tools to network to an actual TRS80 to transfer programs to an Atari. This one ran to a virtually complete version 1.0, but work stopped on it in 1997.

** TRS80.GIF here **

You might expect there have been some fairly serious attempts to do "Atari on Atari", with emulation attempts of the famous 800 XL series. This has some radically different hardware from the ST family, more in common with the Amiga, and is quite a challenge to emulate. The famous early attempt was Xformer by Darek Mihocka which was fine until it had to go beyond BASIC programs or try to get the more esoteric graphics modes.

More recent attempts include Peter Stehlik/Joysofts Atari 800, which is a conversion of a C coded generic emulator for the PC. It is described as very accurate, but needing a brute force TOS computer, as the last speed benchmark described it as only 40% of full speed, even on an 040 Afterburnered Falcon! There is also a less complete, but faster ASM-coded XL emulator EmuXL slowly being developed by Draco, which is currently at version 0.37.

Console emulation was always thought to be a bit of a non-starter. That is, until the Reservoir Gods came along with their Godboy Nintendo Gameboy emulator. This, and the follow-up NES emulator Godlynes took a different approach to other emulators. Recognising that a stock 16MHz Falcon was a marginal system for this type of emulation, they opted to patch individual games to run more closely, rather than try to make a generic emulator capable of running everything, but more slowly.

At the same time, individual patching of games allowed for some major enhancements, such as vastly superior Falcon audio, and recoloured Gameboy graphics. Recent activity has been limited, but we understand the Gods are close to a generic and much more compatible Gameboy emulator, having ruthlessly optimised their sourcecode to run ever faster and better.

The picture for TOS emulation of other computers is patchy. We seem to be missing out certain classic computers, such as the Commodore 64. Also there has been a notable lack of current PC favourites such as the MAME arcade multi-emulator, although to be fair, we're probably looking at Hades levels of power to carry that one off.

Where there have been other developments, is in the field of soundchip or sound player emulation. Here, there has been quite a lot of activity. For example, although no really good Commodore 64 emulator exists, there are two separate SIDchip music players, in the case of FlaySID, offering full compatibility with the GEM desktop environment on the Falcon. The earlier effort from demo crew Cream has a version for even the humblest of STFMs.

There are further developments in the pipeline here, with a POKEY 8-bit Atari soundchip music player being considered by the author of FlaySID, and even better, a generic Amiga soundchip player, in effect an emulation of the Amiga Paula soundchip, being worked on for imminent release by Cream.

To conclude this article, you may be interested to know there is an excellent website maintained by Homepage Penguin author, Matthias Jaap, which covers just about all aspects of emulation on TOS computers. There's even information on "lost" or rumoured emulations, as well as just about all the emulators mentioned in this article. By the way, did I mention there is a Sinclair QL emulation for TOS? I thought not.

This very useful "starter for ten" site for emulation for TOS computers can be found at:

www.atari-computer.de/mjaap/emulator/index.htm

Chris Holland

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Maggie 10th Anniversary!

Many of you may be unaware that Maggie is one of the longest serving publications on the entire Atari Scene. Indeed, we're coming up to our first decade next year! Quite apart from thinking that this past ten years worth of Atari activity makes us a dribbling old fool in the equivalent canine years, we are fully intending to celebrate this landmark survival.

There is a special issue of Maggie planned for around that time next year. The actual anniversary date is the 30th May 2000, ten years to the day that The Lost Boys debuted the diskmag on their chaotic stand at the Hammersmith Novotel 16-bit Show. However, we're taking the so-called "official" anniversary date of the 19th August 2000, which happens to be five years to the day since the 5th Birthday party.

This later date gives us the chance to take a bit longer on that all important 10th year issue. Coincidence? I think not!

There are no firm plans for the content of this 10th anniversary special Maggie, but one theme will be definitely along the lines of "bumper issue". If anyone wants to contribute to this forthcoming very special one-off issue, then feel free to email me at cih@atari.org under the subject heading "10th anniversary issue or what?"

Additionally, there is a smallish celebratory party under consideration for that weekend.

This will be mainly of interest to UK-based Atari people, past and present contributors and the like, but if you're potentially interested, then do get in touch.

Chris Holland

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Atari Computing Final Issue Retrospective

Our involvement with Atari Computing has been a bag of laughs from the first issue, and it has been great fun reintroducing a demo scene and disk magazine perspective to a professional paper magazine, sadly missing since ST Format lost the plot.

It is sad to see Atari Computing go, but at least they did give us all reason to carry on in that difficult post ST Format collapse period. I'm pleased they lasted as long as they did!

For the Atari demo scene community, the sort of people represented by us. the writing on the wall has related to the contents of a website for some time now.

We've been running in a confident and self-contained fashion for the last few years on the net, and we don't see any likelihood of failure, unless something truly catastrophic, such as this Millennium Bug thing really does come to pass.

Don't worry about us, we'll still manage, even without a paper magazine anymore. Check out our 10th anniversary plans for next year on the regular Maggie pages.

Chris Holland - Editor of Maggie Disk Magazine