August 2014 Meeting

A short post.

• Details, Mace meeting Sunday the 17th of August. Same bat time, same bat channel

June 2014 Meeting

Oops! Unofficial start time at 11:30 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time, did you miss us? Did we miss you?

• Oops!, Mace IS meeting this Sunday the 15th of June. Similar bat time, same bat channel

May 2014 Meeting

Did you get my email ;-)

April's Meeting(s) and other news

Just a quick update as I run out the door for some camping (let's hope the rain stops!).

• Firstly, Mace WILL be meeting this Easter long weekend on Sunday the 20th of April. Some members may also be meeting the following weekend (27th), to be confirmed. Same bat time, same bat channel
• Assuming low attendance this Sunday, I plan on putting some more research and work into an article that documents every Doom, Wolf, first person shooter or other real-time first person perspective game on the ST and Falcon or other Atari machine (Jaguar excepted, as they are not as remarkable on that platform).
  
  So far I have BadMood Alpha for the Falcon, The Running, pmDoom for 060+, Wolfenstein 3d (Ray tscc), Legends of Valour, Substation, Hellgate (rough STOS basic 3D shooter), an old ST WAD viewer I need to track down, Midi Maze, a very fast Midi maze clone that was ST Format cover disk that I recall, some 3d construction kit RPG's I recall being common like Darkside and Castle II? Xybots would be scraping the bottom of the barrel?
  If you have any to add to the list, please leave them in the comments.



VideoGamesNewYork shopfront
on 6th Street in New York, USA

• Of interest to most readers of this blog I am sure is a retro gaming shop recently brought to my attention on, of all places, a picture gallery on Imgur!
  The shop, VideoGamesNewYork, looks to be a veritable nirvana for retro-gaming geeks and stranded time travellers trying to get back to the 1980's alike. If ever one goes to New York, this surely has to have displaced the Empire State Building as the most important site for us to visit, fellow Atarians!
  
• Finally, I have noticed that most of the traffic to this blog goes to an old entry on fictional, wishful update to the Atari ST range for the new millenium, the ST2. I noticed that the links given were dead, and the pictures gone. I've updated it and added some more pictures I happened to have on my hard drive, so hopefully those wandering in from google and elsewhere on the information super highway will find it useful again for a while.

BadMooD Alpha for Atari Falcon 030

January 2014 saw the technically mind-boggling resurrection of the first Doom engine to appear on the Atari Falcon, BadMooD.
The latest release achieves amazing results considering that it runs on a standard 16mhz 030 Falcon. The framerates are very playable, and unlike earlier versions there is full true-colour texture mapping of floors and ceilings and lighting effects which not only equal but exceed the features of the original Doom engine made for the PC. This may be due in some part to the fact that unlike most Doom engines available today BadMooD is not based on the officially release C sourcode of Doom, but was written entirely independently based on the old WAD viewer of the 90's, DView.
It can be downloaded from Douglas Little, the authors, site. Or, as always, can be previewed in the following video!
If you want to quickly remind yourself of the Doom experience, you can play it in your web browser here.

We Are All Connected - C64 Demo

Whilst this is not directly Atari related, I thought you might all appreciate this extremely impressive demo just release for the Commodore 64 through a collaboration between demo groups Fairlight, Prosonix, and Offence.
I present We Are All Connected!:

Another notable recent demo worth checking out the Commodore 64 is Continuum. Video here.

February 2014 Meeting

Just a friendly reminder that this Sunday the 16th of February, 2014, MACE will be meeting at the usual place, Level 1, Suite 26, 479 Warrigal Rd, Moorabin
View Larger Map

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Terry Cavanagh's hit, and Jeff Minter makes a comeback

Some may be familiar with Terry Cavanagh's work. He's an independent game developer who has made a habit of knocking out addictive, retro-themed games for Flash, Android, and iOS in recent years. I immediately became a fan after coming across one of his early games, Don't Look Back, which is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euradyce.
We here at MACE HQ are pleased to report that Terry has a mobile hit on his hands currently, in the form of Super Hexagon, and that he is finally starting to be paid back for his many years of creative, interesting retro games!
Super Hexagon is an "avoid 'em up" game, which genre includes previous hits online such as Canabalt and Flappy Bird. In Superhexagon though, instead of the obstacles being strewn across a scrolling 2-d landscape, they confront the player in an ever-expanding , "zooming" play-scape that resembles the game Tempest, if anything. See the video below. We note with some amusement that comments on this video and various other discussions online make requests for the games music as downloadable MP3. It doesn't sound like anything our good old ST's couldn't belt out!

Speaking of Tempest and retro-style gaming successes, Jeff Minter, another faithful proponent of gameplay over modern graphics, and of keeping the retro roots of computer gameplay, graphics, and sound relevant today is also having some success with his Tempest 2000 remake, TxK.
Sony is publishing the game for it's handheld PS Vita console this month. Source.
Gameplay of Txk is shown below!

January Meeting

BBQ was had, the birds got stoned, the cars rolled by, we all went home

December Meeting

And so it came to pass that the December meeting was indeed held at Moorabbin...Anyone for a game of Video Pong?