Issue 35: Sep 2003
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Going To The Dutch, Part 2: Henk Robbers (XaAES)
- | Unconventional 2003
| Unconventional 2003 continued... Saturday 30 August 2003 Midnight just gone, yet the action was just starting to warm up. I could not escape the evil jaws of the VCS Decathlon challenge - if this game doesn't mash your arm muscles to a pulp and turn you into a gibbering wreck, I don't know what will. My opponents were Mad Butscher, R.I.K. and TWH, all experienced athletes in this game, I didn't stand a chance. In between rounds I squeezed in some more SuperFly but still failed to beat my score, it drove me crazy. R.I.K. showed off his skill by drinking a beer while playing Decathlon. Incidentally, if you see people at an Atari convention wearing "1972" T-shirts, it could mean one of two things: it's the person's date of birth, or more likely, the year Atari was born. Having lost the Decathlon challenge as expected, I played SuperFly until sunrise, still failing to match my high score, frustratingly. TWW the Dutchman had woken up at some very strange time in the morning like 05:00 and accompanied my pressing of the fire button on SuperFly with his solder sucker, removing DRAM chips from another motherboard, presumably for breakfast. Everyone else was asleep and the only sound to be heard was, "Click... Click... Click.. Pop! Pop!" for at least an hour. When it was light outside, we decided to go to the field with a hard disk and evaluate different throwing techniques, trying to understand why I didn't do well last time. I finally tried the generally preferred discus swing as always demonstrated by Mad Butscher, it was effective indeed though difficult to control the release point to achieve the intended direction with maximum power. Avoiding the cars parked on the left was part of the problem, so I modified it into an overarm throw, which gave the precision and power I needed. In further testing I tried two more discus swings, they went far right into the adjacent field which was previously occupied by a wooden hut extension to the hall, now demolished. Both times I swung the disk hard enough to hurt my hand with the G-forces! By observing each other's techniques we got some good results and I convinced TWW to keep his arm straight throughout the swing. By 09:00 the hall was coming to life once more - our first new visitors of the day were led by Wolfgang Burger, president of ABBUC, the world-famous 8-bit Atari club. Of course, he was wearing his wonderful ABBUC tie. He also brought a large box of merchandise, including a set of professionally made black and gold ABBUC coffee mugs for competition prizes. Internet access came courtesy of Wolfgang as well. It was a pleasure to talk to Wolfgang and he invited me to the ABBUC JHV in October. ABBUC members at the convention also received certificates and the latest issue of the printed club magazine. Jan Krupka came to play SuperFly, grinning ear-to-ear with intent again, then cheekily smashed my score not once but twice! I would have to play that game to destruction and regain my title, but too bad for both of us the Mad Butscher came and set an unbeatable score of over 11,000 while giving a running commentary! Would I win any of the competitions? Not unless they introduce a new category: staying awake the longest. Over at the Foundation Two table, TWH was thoroughly enjoying his nagelneue Jaguar console, playing Rayman and Tempest 2000. TXG was advising him (planting ideas) of all the cool stuff available and Nick Harlow must have been very happy as TWH came back for more goodies, like a Jaguar CD unit. TWW then spun some of his heavy metal albums on the VLM. More new visitors came at lunchtime, Detlef Thielsch of a4com, the German Acorn/RISC OS dealer by himself with a new desktop system (in a very cool graphite coloured tower which would be great for CT60 Falcons) and notebook, and Bunsen and Wizard of the Wiesbaden Gaming Lab with their 8-bits. Only Grisu of the WGL didn't make it, which was a pity, I was most pleased to meet the WGL crew and we discussed ideas for future tests. Detlef passed around flyers informing people of the one-day-only RISC OS technology demonstration he had planned. People were hungry again, so came the second round of pizza. I was honestly feeling sick from the last pizza so didn't order one this time and thought about other solutions. Floppy Doc noticed and spoke to Helmut, who kindly offered some home-made German style soup from his wife Diane. This was much tastier I think next time he should bring a big pot and sell it like he sells beer and soft drinks. Perhaps the locals, especially younger ones of my generation, don't appreciate traditional German food but I like it very much. It may be a very tourist-like thing to do but then I didn't go all the way to Germany to eat just pizza! I could never resist having a peek at the MNX crew's gadgets. They had two of the new Atarimax 1 Mb flash cartridge modules for the 8-bit, even cartridges disguised as cigarette packets (or was that the other way round?). Among the technical puzzles I witnessed, one difficult challenge was ascertaining the geometry of a hard disk so TXG could use it on his 8-bit, there were no clues on the drive's label, as one would expect. We fiddled with HD-Driver for ages to no avail and even managed to lose recognition of the internal IDE hard disk, luckily I remembered how to reset the Falcon NVRAM and all was fine again. Meanwhile, TXG had found the CHS parameters of the hard disk and got it working with his 8-bit Black Box SCSI interface. TXG and Bohdan performed a Falcon MiNT installation with Ethernet, connecting to a local FTP server hosted on TXG's notebook PC. Bohdan also showed me some articles he has been preparing for MyAtari, they are good and I look forward to publishing them soon. In the Swiss corner, Sacha started running slideshows on his projector of photographs and videos from previous events. The sight of three people with notebook PCs there mysteriously tapping away was a strange sight. At mid-afternoon came the Lynx Checkered Flag competition, I really hate this because I'm rubbish at the game, it's like accepting an invitation to be slaughtered. I didn't intend to try too hard, in fact I accidentally gave away a 15-second headstart by not paying enough attention to the starting signal. I don't know any special technique for playing Checkered Flag so just drove the way I drive in real life and... I won! It was by quite a comfortable margin, too. The same technique brought the same lead and victory in my second round, then by my third round, which was the semi-final I think, it was a different track and I lost my early lead by taking a corner too fast and crashing. So don't ever get in a car with me when I'm behind the steering wheel! Sacha won in the end, putting a cap on Mad Butscher's reign. There was something in the real-time article about Swiss drivers after that... Outside, the weather was good so we could have a barbecue. I was instructed to follow Helmut to go shopping for sausages. We drove to a local supermarket and ransacked the place of sausages, then went to the in-store bakery to get some buns. The ladies behind the counter looked bemused but I think they understood, emptying two whole trays of freshly baked buns into a box and then from there into a large paper bag. I thought we'd head straight back to the hall but intstead, Helmut took me on a guided tour around Lengenfeld, during which we experienced some rain, before heading back to his house to pick up the barbecue grill and his wife and son. Although TWH is normally the master of the barbecue, these were Helmut's sausages so this time TWH was a guest - we had a very delicious barbecue (just ask Nick Harlow), perhaps some chicken wings next time wouldn't go amiss. It wasn't until later that evening when I saw some more photos on Sacha's slideshow that I realized my excursion around the village took me away from the hard disk throwing for which I'd trained and studied so hard! There I was forever wondering when it would take place. Nick's stand had hundreds if not thousands of interesting Atari things, I would have bought the lot if I had the money. I noticed in one plastic bag some home-brewed ROMs of Alien vs Predator for the Lynx, something I would have to see. Nick opened up a Lynx for me to play this, it showed the Lynx's bitmap scaling capability very well, but when you turn around it happens in 90° steps, rather than rotating like the proper texture mapped environment of the Jaguar version. This increases the risk of being seen and killed and is slightly disorienting especially when trying to approach doorways carefully. One has to step right into full view and then turn around to see through the doorway, by which time it may be too late to react. Last orders were being taken at 16/32 by early evening, as Nick had come by car and needed to be back at work in the UK by Monday morning. Even as the boxes of games were methodically packed away, punters still scoured the vast array of goods in search of that special thing they wanted. Finally when the decks were cleared, everyone helped cart the boxes out to Nick's car and help him load it up again. When this was complete and Nick was heading back home the party continued. The Czechs showed me a rare Czech computer they'd brought with them, a Tesla PMD 85-3 with BASIC program pack, a huge ROM that was more or less part of the main case styling. It was very solidly built and my only criticism was of the good quality keys, which were simply too small. If hitting the wrong key on a 520/1040ST keyboard is annoying, don't even try one of these. We had company for the rest of the night, as there was a wedding reception in the function room next door. Our door was open and after the adults from that side got an idea of what we Atari people were up to, they and their children were coming over to join the fun, it was a really great atmosphere. Several hours' eating, drinking and gaming ensued. At 23:00 I felt like getting some food, as even if there was pizza earlier I would have skipped it. I went with TWH and Mad Butscher to the local kebab house, but it was closed! That's useless, a kebab house is supposed to stay open very late to feed people like us! If MyAtari ever did a kebab test, this place would lose stars just for not staying open late enough. Back to the hall we drove, empty stomach for me. Ultimately, the Unconventional people were here for the weekend and the wedding party left by about midnight. Guess what, I was still wide awake.
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MyAtari magazine - Feature #4, September 2003
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