October MACE Meeting

Just a reminder that, as with the 3rd Sunday of September 2013, we will be meeting be in October this coming Sunday at 479 Warrigal Rd, Moorabbin 

View Larger Map



View Larger Map

On the menu, amongst the usual eclectic variety of discussion, will be a look at a classic remake of Jetpac for the Atari Jaguar, in the form of Rocketeer by the group Reboot

And for those blessed with the bandwidth and the processing power, here's a video preview

Rocketeer Trailer from rgcd.co.uk on Vimeo.

And an even better time was had by all...

As we Enduro'd yet another meeting.

And a good time was had...

Watched a video featuring David Crane.

Great Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams

Those of us with memories not too faded by the purgatory that has enveloped us all since the halcyon days of the 80's and 90's may recall a game vaguely reminiscent of Mario Brothers that appeared on the ST in 1988, called Great Giana Sisters. Despite slanderous and untrue allegations by Nintendo, the franchise has continued healthily to today.

Great Giana Sisters: Any resemblance to Mario Brother is purely coincidental

  
Introducing the latest 2.5D iteration in the franchise, Great Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
 

Tetris Printer Algorithm

It is a well known fact that Tetris has never been much of a challenge really. It is also a sad-but-universally acknowledged truth that paint programs have generally made it far too easy to produce passable pixel art. Well, fear no more. Both problems have been solved in one fell swoop with the concept of Tetris being used as a pixel-art tool. The standard of performance is currently set by the Tetris Printer algorithm... but I'm sure you can all beat that. We'll be trying at the monthly MACE meeting on the 21st of July, same bat time, same bat channel.

March 2013 meeting report

I think this is going to be a short one. Next meeting is on Sunday the 21st April 2013 at 10:00 AM Melbourne, Australia time. But we'll try and start the Google+ hangout earlier for those of you in the Northern hemisphere. By the way we've skipped out of Day Light Saving time and should now be one hour less in front of most of the World, excludes New Zealand of course.

November meeting report

Another month, another meeting! Tom was so loathe to miss the excitement and adventure of the 18th Nov meeting that he cycled 3 hours, through "fire and ice", the pain barrier, and murderous mini-vans from Broadmeadows to 479 Warrigal Rd! We watched a few gameplay videos and demo's for the ST, Amstrad CPC, and Spectrum ZX81 to fill in the time, before starting a "wildcard" round of the ST Offline Tournament, in which we chose to play Klaz's patched version of Fire and Ice.

Next meeting will be on the 9th, instead of the 16th as would be expected from the "third Sunday of every month" rule. We'll be meeting at Monty's place instead of the usual location as well, so be aware!

Finally, we did a bit of ST-spotting! An ST can be spotted in a few fleeting frames of "Enter Space Capsule", by Gerling, an Australian eletro-pop band.

MACE general meeting Sunday the 19th of August 2012...It's on again...

On Friday the 17th of August 2012 at approximately  9:34 PM Eastern Standard Time somebody wrote:

The Melbourne Atari Computer Enthusiasts meeting is on once again at 479 Warrigal Road, Moorabbin, Victoria in Australia from 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time onwards.

I'm hoping the Friday posting gives people enough warning.  Thanx!

March 2012 meeting this Sunday!

Midi Maze in all its glory!

Just a quick reminder that MACE will meet this Sunday the 18th of March, 2012 at the usual spot.. We expect to have a lot of company on this occasion, with a LAN party being hosted by our parent organisation, Melb PC.

The ST Offline Tournament game being played currently is Xenon II. I'll try to have it set up! Atari-forum thread is here.

The February meeting was an enjoyable one, with Roger setting about getting MidiMaze set up on some ST's for some multiplayer action in the coming meeting. Perhaps we can add a new FPS to the LANner's agenda this month!

Finally, we may be lucky enough to have an old member, Mark, make a guest appearance this meeting with some hacked up Atari hardware to show. If not this meeting, maybe April!

Stay Atari!

Raspberry Pi

Proving that lots of people can still get excited about enthusiast hardware platforms has been the recent runaway success of the first batch of Raspberry Pi computers offered for sale in February 2012.
The Raspberry Pi computer is a tiny, very cheap, modern spiritual successor to the Acorn BBC Micro. Its makers pay homage to the BBC Micro by including a clone of BBC Basic in the distributed Linux operating system, and continuing the model naming convention used by Acorn.
Raspberry Pi measures approximately 3.3 inches by 2.1 inches in size, costs $AU54.75 delivered, and is capable of playing back full 1080P video. It features a low-power, powerful DSP-based VideoCore IV (the less powerful VideoCore II was used in the iPod), an Arm11 700mhz CPU, 256MB of RAM, and an onboard SD card slot for storage.

An initial production run of 10,000 units was manufactured, however global demand has been very high, with retail servers crashing and millions of expressions interest being registered in the days after its release.

Whilst we here at MACE are very happy for the success of a retro-referencing, enthusiast platform, we feel it only fair to mention that marketing and viral, word-of-mouth communication is a funny thing! A number of equally interesting alternatives have been around for longer!

EDIT - someone was going to do it sooner or later! Here is a picture of a Raspberry Pi emulating an Atari 2600