Meeting report for September, 2016

Today, again, a party of 5! Reinhold, Monty, Matt, Andrew, and Tom turned out at the Moorabbin Melb PC HQ.
Amongst the politics, philosophy, and heated debate on whether boiled eggs should be cracked at the pointy or the bulbous end, we had a look at the following things:

• The recent Amstrad CPC remake of Rick Dangerous, with political incorrectness intact from the 80's, enhanced graphics ported from the Amiga version, music from the ST version, and the sampled sound effects from both. WAAHHHHHHH!
  (Here's a nice, online, Flash version you can play in your browser for a quick fix!)
• The amazing Atariblast shoot 'em up for Atari 400/800 8-bit computers. Truly amazing stuff to see running on hardware conceived in 1979 (it's older than me!), well and truly rivaling anything seen on the C64
  
• The ST remake of Frogger. It's distinction from other Frogger clones (cross 'em-ups? Frog 'em-ups?) is that it's a perfect, faithful conversion of the original arcade machine version. See work in progress thread and the Atarimania game profile page for downloads and other details
• We made a video comparing the original Pac-Mania released in 1988 for the ST, to the 2013 (and beyond!) version for the STE created by Zamual A. (See Atarimania download and game details)
  
• This poor ST butchered (but also it's pretty cool) into nothing more than a musical keyboard - the YM Synth Atari ST Keyboard. Some blasphemous heathens among us (who shall not be named) thought this was the best thing to do with an old ST. Cursed be their names (which I shall not mention)
  

In a bid to make the rest of us look unproductive and useless (except for Matt, recent author of Trionoids for the Atari Falcon 030 - this needs a blog entry of its own), Andrew busted out the GFA Basic manuals (for the Atari ST) and explored some of the sample code and documentation, before moving onto the Assempro debugger with Abacus Atari ST Internals clasped firmly in hand (Hardcopies for sale here!). We'd better stop him before he does anything useful.

FINALLY, more to come on this also in possibly its own blog entry, we have discovered that a large amount of our collection is missing, presumed thrown away by people who did not realise its value and were cleaning up the area it was stored in. Items now gone from our collection include old Atari hardware and peripherals (some locally made and unique), software (MACE formerly hosted its own PD library and BBS, which included unique software written by members), magazines (many locally written and printed in Melbourne in the 1980's, as well as inter-club publications involving the now-defunct QACE (Queensland Atari Computer Enthusiasts) and other groups in Australia), club documentation and information going back to the 1970's.
This was all in storage, not accessed or reviewed regularly as part of our regular meetings. We'd been meaning to go through and catalogue it for many years, but now will not get the chance. We actually don't know the extent of what is missing because we don't know everything that was there, the club has a long history and we're just the few remaining members holding the fort. Not sure what else to say, recrimination seems pointles at this stage and all we can do is move on.