** 2 Maggie pages / ? words **

Leon, Tat, Arnel and Flinny visited the Siliconvention, truly a golden 
coding party for Atari users held in Bremen, Germany ...

SILICONVENTION REPORT - by Leon O'Reilly

It was a Tuesday when I left my home in Wales, some three days before 
the party itself was due to begin, but because of the route we took to 
Bremen we had to leave today. I checked my bag and wallet a lot, to 
make sure that my passport and ticket were still safe. At midday, I 
boarded the train to London, and headed for Victoria Coach Station, 
which, like last year, was full of people.

I arrived at the coach station in plenty of time, and met Tat shortly 
afterwards. We chatted about his forthcoming demo "Sonoluminesenz". Tat 
was worried that he didn't have enough effects to cover the five or so 
minutes of music. However, as things turned out, he needn't have 
worried. Our coach eventually arrived and, after making sure our bags 
were secure, we got on board. I managed to get a fair amount of sleep 
on the coach as we travelled across the Netherlands, Belgium and so on 
into Germany.

Waiting diligently at Hamburg's coach station for us were Agent T of 
Cream and Jet of Avena. Unfortunately neither of them had a car so we 
had to negotiate our way through the Hamburg underground system. We 
stopped off at a supermarket, then dragged ourselves over to Agent T's 
place. By this point my bag was threatening to pull my shoulder blade 
off, so I was glad to put it down on our arrival. We had a good chat 
with Agent T about the Falcon scene. The big news was that he had 
tracked down Mad Max (one of the hottest ST musicians in the scene) to 
a small village in Germany and had invited him tothe Siliconvention. 
The thought of seeing Jochen Hippel in the flesh was overwhelming. The 
man is a living legend on the Atari scene, and deserved to be at the 
party.

Agent T had also recently interviewed Centek, the company behind the 
exciting "Phoenix" project and showed me an article about it in ST 
Computer.

I saw a preview of "Sonolumineszenz", and even in its uncomplete state 
I was staggered. I knew even then that it was going to win the demo 
competition, despite the entries from the other crews.

Tat and I did a bit of coding before sleep set in. Compared to the 
conditions I had endured over the last 28 hours, with the coach trip, 
this was much needed!

We rose at about lunch time on Thursday, after which I did some work on 
"God-Boy", my Gameboy emulator. While Tat worked some more on his demo, 
Agent T busied himself by constructing some logos for it. He also 
showed me the graphics he was intending to enter into the competitions, 
these were stunning. The man is in a class of his own on the Falcon at 
present. Later on during Thursday evening , Arne of Avena turned up.

We stopped briefly at the Symposium party place, at Hittfeld, near 
Hamburg, where last year's Symposium '96 party was held, to drop Jet of 
Avena off with his gear. The partyplace looked a bit grim, just one 
massive hall. These type of parties tend to be a bit soulless and 
lacking in atmosphere and I was very glad we were going to the 
Siliconvention instead.

We arrived at the party place in Bremen at about 1 am, and, on finding 
that the place was locked up and deserted, headed over to Mr Coke's 
place, where we got a bit of sleep for what was left of the night.

On our arrival later on at the Burgerhaus (the party venue) there were 
some people there. Sitting in a corner were members of Dead Hackers 
Society and some other Swedish people, and sitting by the bar were two 
Polish guys who turned out to be Grey of Shadows and Winio.

Grey told me that the Shadows demo was complete and it was going to be 
very impressive. He was quite confident that it would win the demo 
competition. I looked forward to seeing it but Grey wasn't going to 
show it to anyone until the night of the competition.

*** IT.GIF ***
(The IT demo, by Shadows (Poland) )

An extra hall was open to partygoers, which had been used at Fried Bits 
3 to show demos - this certainly helped to give us more space than 
previously. It was full of crews who were coding on the Commodore 64 
and other machines.

There was a Pacman arcade at reception and a prize was promised for the 
person who got the highest score on this machine. There was also a 
"multi-media information point" - designed by Mr. Coke and based around 
his Falcon, and not some high end PC with fancy graphics card!

We went hunting for a room, and found one with enough space for both 
myself and Tat to set up and work on them. Monitors were provided by 
the organisers, which was a big help. I continued work on my Gameboy 
emulator and Tat continued putting together the demo. We were right in 
the corner and not overlooked so Tat could at least keep the demo 
secret from the general attendees.

Mod of TSCC introduced himself to us and we had a long chat about the 
general Atari scene. He showed me around the Undercover shell, although 
I prefer the Maggie one! It is great to see an alternative diskmag like 
theirs, long may it continue.

Soon after fellow TSCC member MC Lazer appeared, he was originally 
going to perform a DJ set one night at the party but, due to technical 
problems, this had to be cancelled. Flinny (Nick Flintham) turned up, 
having flown to Hamburg and got a train from there to Bremen. He 
brought his hard drive with him, as well as other odds and ends. Arnel 
(Neil Jones-Rodway) turned up a little later, intending to enter the 
Web page competition.

*** SONO.GIF ***
(Sonolumineszenz - the winner!)

The first day of the party was hit by a series of power cuts, however, 
late on in the day this was sorted out. We were joined in the corridor 
by Agent T who made a lot of suggestions to Tat about the demo as well 
as producing more graphics. I finished my debugger, but still problems 
existed.

In the Dutch room, Pieter van der Meer, author of Neurobotix, was 
coding a 4k intro for one of the competitions, but most of his time was 
spent working on his new Falcon game. This will be an Elite-style game, 
and early signs did look promising.

Another Dutch guy I met was Com7. He had brought the most equipment of 
anyone, including his music studio ! He showed me some interesting 
features on Cubase, that I hadn't seen before. The Dutch had totally 
taken over the room ! Opposite the Dutch room was the Undercover 
real-time article which ran on Tempus on a Mega-ST. Unfortunately this 
hit badly by the power cuts and lost quite a lot of text. TSCC were in 
the room beyond the article. Here they frantically worked on their 
96ktro. Also in here were Escape working on Sili-Con-Carne, Therapy and 
some ex-Spirits guy. Also in the corner was Juri from New-Line was, as 
ever, making some tunes.

The room at the far end of this corridor had some Playstations and 
other consoles stuck setup so you could play on them. Personally I 
think they shouldhave had some 2600's in there, now that is a REAL 
console! The spirit of the Swede was alive and well in the next room 
where Dead Hackers Society, No Crew and some other Scandinavian types 
made their headquarters. This was the loudest and maddest, nay, 
"wackiest" room, probably in the entire world

It was from here that the juggling originated. The second door on the 
right was the room containing TNB and RDT. RDT were working on Running. 
TNB coded their ST demo here as well. The final room on the top floor 
held Lazer, Inter, Absence and the noisy Mac owners. And out in the 
corridor sat Tat, Agent T and myself. We were later joined by Fried of 
Avena and provided a second home for Flinny and Arnel.

*** SILICONCN.GIF ***
(The Sili-Con-Carne demo)

We did get to visit the supermarket on Saturday, which is always a 
treat, particularly in Germany. Grey of Shadows spent a lot of the time 
worrying about the Pandemonium demo which was supposed to be sent to 
him via e-mail. He regularly popped down to the internet cafe to see if 
it had arrived. Flinny and Arnel also spent a lot of time there. How 
could IRC #atari survive without them?

Mad Max turned up in the evening - sporting a haircut ! He has a number 
of pieces of as yet unreleased ST music which may soon surface - keep 
your eyes peeled for these. A highlight came when Winio set up his 
Atari XL. This had been upgraded to run with 1 meg of memory and was 
certainly impressive. He showed us some of the best XL demos, which 
were quite amazing. However, a consequence of this was that sleep was 
severely lacking on this particular evening !

The demo competitions were held in a big hall downstairs. There were 
two screens with two viewing areas. I didn't get to see all of the 
competitions, but I was particularly annoyed to miss the 4k 
competition. This was due to being busy with the coding. There was a 
"fake demo" competition, which must surely have been inspired by the 
Senior Dads efforts at previous conventions. The advent of the 96k 
competition was greeted with some relief - at last, some new Atari 
demos!

It was great to see TNB releasing an ST intro and I haven't seen many 
demos for this old beast for a while. It was also a bit of a corker 
with lots of nice effects. TSCC's demo was, however, the most 
impressive of the bunch. Unfortunately, I missed both the module 
competition and the C64 ompetition.

*** TNB.GIF ***
(The bump-mapped 4k demo from TNB)

The only entries for the main demo competition were on the Falcon, with 
a total of five ! The scene is really coming back to life in a big way. 
Therapy were very unlucky, due to an important file not having been 
included on the final disk. However, the Polish new-boys "Pandemonium" 
unveiled their debut Falcon release "Ignis".

"Sili-Con-Carne" was Escape's play on words and also their rather 
splendid demos. Its good to see a demo with lots of original effects. 
The music is brilliant too.

Shadows have been promising great things  for a while, and with 
theirSiliconvention entry they finally delivered. Some brilliant bump 
mapping, even 3D bump mapping are the highlight of this demo. The 3D is 
all technically very good if a little slow as they don't use the DSP. 
This demo would surely have won the competition if it wasn't for 
Sonolumineszenz. Lets just say that many jaws hit the floor when the 
environment mapped fish started swimming across the screen. The demo, 
along with other entries, are available from the Internet and PD 
libraries.

Sonolumineszenz won with a landslide that would make even Tony Blair 
envious. Later on, after the competitions, Tommy of Avena walked over 
to me. He noticed the "Mr. Tickle" badge on my Falcon and remarked on 
its similarity to his Plastikman tattoo. We discovered that we had a 
very similar taste in music and I promised to catch his live 
performance later that night.

Tommy had just sold the computer he used to compose all his music on 
and was now using the hardware sequence in his MC-303 to write tunes. 
He was thinking about buying an old ST just to use cubase. Although he 
isn't too much in touch with the Falcon demo scene he was very 
enthusiastic about Tats new demo.

At around 2am we headed downstairs to watch Tommy's live music set. He 
was performing with a friend, the two of them were hunched over the 
keyboards and 303s like a Germanic version of the Chemical Brothers.

Monday morning was votes time. The program used to display the votes 
was a GFA one by Mr. Coke that had been used at Symposium '96 ! There 
were quite a few hiccups, but generally things went well.

There was a bit of a surprise in the 96ktro competition with TNB 
winning. Not only had they beaten entries on other systems, but also 
TSCC. The faces of the members of TSCC said it all! However, they were 
brightened by the news that they had won the 4ktro with their stunning 
bump mapping effect hich even runs on the ST.

In the main demo competition their could be only one. Sono won it by 
the proverbial country mile. "It" by Shadows was runner up. Tat picked 
up his prize, a spanking new Nintendo 64, beaming like Burnley had just 
won the FA Cup.

Agent T picked up a Playstation as a prize for his rendered picture, 
but unfortunately he didn't win the pixel competition.

The final day was soon on us and people were starting to pack up and 
weave their merry ways back to their own countries. Nearly everyone 
agreed it had been a great party, as good as the classic Fried Bits 
parties and certainly miles better than the rather dull Symposium '96 
event last year.

I got chatting with Martina of Lazer and she revealed that she was keen 
to do another demo on the Falcon, but a lack of time was preventing 
this at that time. Lost Blubb had done well since its release back in 
1995, with showings from time to time on MTV and other cable and 
satellite channels.

Just before we had to leave I had a chance to chat with Lucky and 
Innovator about their new Falcon demo "Interview" which should be 
released at the Intercon in November. It was then fun-fun-fun on the 
Autobahn all the way back to Hamburg with a brief stop for Fried to eat 
a garlic snack at his luxurious villa. Agent T managed to sleep most of 
the way back using the Playstation he had won as a pillow !

Back at Agent T's we had a well earned sleep - something that was in 
short supply at the party. The next day we had a chance to try out the 
PSX and the demo cd. Agent T spent a lot of time trying to get on the 
internet to download the other Siliconvention entries but all to no 
avail.

We spoke to Thyroxin and Jet of Avena who had helped to organise the 
Symposium, a PC and Amiga party on the same weekend as Siliconvention. 
They said they didn't enjoy this much and wished they had attended 
Siliconvention instead.

The Atari scene is characterised by friendly people who genuinely love 
their machine and have a real interest in what everyone else is doing. 
Parties like Sili-convention really emphasise the difference between 
the Atari scene and other platforms.

The Siliconvention was a better party than I could have possibly hoped 
for, especially after the Symposium. It was reasonably small, intimate, 
friendly and most importantly, a lot of fun. It also produced a lot of 
fantastic releases.

It was brilliant to see so many people still actively involved in the 
Atari scene, some people who we had given up for dead months ago. There 
was a sense of the Atari scene being reborn with new sense of direction 
and new energy.

We went Around The World and Siliconvention '97 definitely had Da Funk.