Issue 48: Oct 2004
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | CCC To The Rescue!
- | Club Trek
- | Falcon030 AT Tower Case Fitting
Review
- | Xenomorph
M@ilbox
News
| Happy birthday Welcome to the October and birthday issue of MyAtari. Here at MyAtari HQ we are currently celebrating our birthday - yes MyAtari has been running for four years. As ever, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you the readers for your support over the last 12 months (keep those e-mails and ideas coming) and of course our talented contributors, without whom this magazine could not be. In a nutshell The last 12 months have been extremely good to MyAtari. Since our last birthday we have been fortunate to feature some fantastic articles and reviews from our equally fantastic contributors (you know who you are) as well as smash 290,000 hits on our site counter! On top of this achievement, during the last year, MyAtari managed to inspire the multi-format internet Nexus magazine, hold our second annual reader awards as well as meet many of you at JagFest UK. Finally, the year ended sadly with the loss of our domain name www.myatari.org. However, out of this misfortune has risen a new mirror site at http://www.myatari.co.uk (which long-term readers will remember we lost back in February 2003) and a dedicated back issues repository at http://backissues.myatari.net. Feedback wanted Now, following the success of last year's reader poll we are asking readers to complete the feedback form below to help us make the next 12 issues even better!
Name: |
Favourite issue: (last 12 months)
Why? |
Favourite article: (last 12 months)
Why? |
Favourite review: (last 12 months)
Why? |
Your birthday message:
What do you like most about MyAtari?
What do you like least about MyAtari?
What would you like MyAtari to include in future issues?
Alternatively, please e-mail us and tell us what you like - or don't like - about the magazine. But enough of my dreadful rambling, it's time to open the champagne once again and shout Happy birthday to MyAtari! Matthew Bacon, Editor matt@myatari.net It'll be Christmas soon... Welcome to this very late October issue. MyAtari is four already! In that time I've worked in as many different jobs, and the issues currently span five different calendar years, so it feels to me like we've well and truly flown. Our birthday celebration gathering at the beginning of October was jolly good fun with lots of tasty food (yes, we'll torment you with pictures later). We'll definitely plan more events of our own as well as support others, check this month's news page to see the next major gig we'll be attending, it's going to be a meltdown. I'm glad to report that as the magazine has matured, its readership has also steadily increased - we now have nearly 1,000 subscribers from all over the world! This doesn't even count those who merely stop by to casually browse, without subscribing to our mailing list. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yes, that's a lot of potential contributors. One common condundrum we hear is, "I want to write, but what shall I write about?" - the quick answer is, "Anything Atari-related" - just contact Matthew or myself and we'll guide you towards getting your work published in MyAtari. We're not short of ideas, only time for doing them! Would it be useful if we had some kind of bulletin board on the web site, specifically for article suggestions? Atari Computing used to run a page like this. Again, write to us and let us know, we'd like to make it as easy as possible for you to share your knowledge and enthusiasm. One aspect of the magazine we'd like to develop more is the cover artwork. I know there are many talented artists on our scene, let's see more of your fantastic creations! The style is not as important as the art. We welcome traditional pixel painting, photography, 3D rendering and more. Look at our past covers for some inspiration. I always think it's great when I look back at all these covers together, so colourful, and we're now just four covers short of being able to decorate a full deck of playing cards with MyAtari cover images! MyAtari mirror saga continues! I'll spare Matthew the frustration of recalling the story of the loss of our original, myatari.co.uk mirror domain, which was due to circumstances beyond our control. In a similar twist of fate, we then lost our myatari.org mirror domain, which was kindly provided by Elliot Swanton (who, for the record, always rises to the vindaloo at JagFest Vindaloo, apologies to Elliot for my oversight of this feat!). Since we lost myatari.org, LinkoVitch (Graeme Hinchliffe) stepped in with hosting space for our back issue archives. However, there was one small problem: we didn't have a backup of the archived versions of each issue, believe it or not! We'll call it a minor slip, as we're always so busy with the daily running of the magazine. We only had a full, uncompressed version of the entire web site, and while we could have simply created the Zip archives once again, I had a nagging feeling about only releasing one version of anything we publish, so even an archive with two different date/time stamps (easily faked, I know, but...) would constantly bug me in the back of my mind. Also, to create the archives again would mean going through our quality checking procedure another 41 times, something for which precious time does not allow at the moment. As of the time of writing, we haven't actually archived any issues since April this year! Fortunately, Cheshunt Computer Club member, Mark Branson, had every issue and archive since the beginning. The next task was to get this off his Falcon. Ethernet was not an option, Mark doesn't have a CD writer, and his SCSI port has been very unstable for the last few months anyway. He even considered e-mailing the whole lot to me, but as we'd later find out, it was a good job he didn't, what with lack of broadband internet at his end. Finally, he acquired yet another old bit of kit, in the form of a rather nice MiniS external SCSI hard disk. After many attempts and SCSI errors, Mark managed to get all of our archives onto this and handed it to me at last month's CCC meeting. Then it was all down to myself. All I had to do was connect it to my Falcon and copy all the files across, right? For a few scary moments I came to realize that I'd probably forgotten how to connect an additional hard disk, so long had it been since I last did it, and so reliably did HD Driver work. One of those things you set up once, and never really have to touch again. My CT2-powered Falcon boots so fast, I had to reboot it about ten times before I could catch what version of HD Driver I was using, but then this was not necessary at all, I just ran HDDRUTIL.APP which was already on my desktop, and installing the new drive was easy as falling off a log. 43 files safely copied to my Falcon, now what? No Ethernet, so the next best thing would be to record a CD. By chance I stumbled across some Atari software packages while tidying up, one of which was SoundPool CDRecorder Pro 2.34, I'd totally forgotten I had that! So now we have our archives back and all is well once more. Need I tell the moral of this story? You can read about another recovery job involving Cheshunt Computer Club, in Peter West's article this month. We could almost call that club our Cheshunt office! Shiuming Lai, Features and Technical Editor shiuming@myatari.net
[ Top of page ] | MyAtari magazine - Feature #1, October 2004
Copyright 2004 MyAtari magazine