Reviews

I’ve had my CT60 accelerator for my Falcon for a few weeks now and I believe I am only scratching the surface at what I can now do with my Falcon. Thus I feel that only now am I truly able to write just a first impressions review of the CT60 both in terms of hardware design and speed. Installation: My Falcon has been in a tower case for approximately 1 and a half years.

In the land of tons of trackers, who needs a new one? We do. Every tracker up until now has been unfortunately a plain vanilla tracker. Right up until Groumf tracker we haven’t really experienced much that is worth talking about. Groumf tracker takes things one step further by pushing far more channels of audio through the slow Falcon, and also allows for conversion of XM’s. Flex Tracker then allowed for DSP effects to be applied to samples - nice.

What is Europe Shareware? Europe Shareware is a middle-man organization of sorts. It allows for a very easy ordering of commercial and shareware products for primarily Atari, but also for Macintosh too. Europe shareware benefits both West and East countries by allowing a common currency ordering system (USD and CDN Dollars in particular) as well as a central location to order a very vast number of software projects from. Without Europe Shareware to order 5 software packages, you would have to: Write up 5 little letters, get 5 International money orders of different denominations and currency, do currency conversion, work with the author on a price for overseas shipping and other details, and pay postage for five letters.

Although I have many interests, I am sincerely a music lover. Since a child I have learned to play guitar and sing reasonably well. I also am fairly talented at whistling as strange as that may sound. Throughout High School I played the Trombone on a daily basis and was in the Jazz band and was fairly good. The one common denominator is that I have always been musically inclined. If not for the audiophile ear, it\’s the ability to tell pitch by ear, etc.

A huge demoparty seems to have occurred right underneath my nose. The Mekka Symposium 2002 held in Dresden Germany on Easter must have been an interesting event. Reportedly 20ish people from the Atari demoscene showed up and something rather interesting happened. The Atari demoscene met up with a nice guy named Ephydrena who’s Amiga demo group rallied for him to make an Atari Falcon demo. And Abehn was born and is a result from attendance of Mekka 2k2.

GemGT2 is a Groumf Tracker module player for GEM. It works under MagiC and MiNT in whatever flavor of AES/desktop you might happen to choose. In my search for a decent media player for GEM, I do believe I found it. GemGT2 was created by SWE of YesCrew, and uses extremely highly optimized Groumf Tracker routines created by earx/FUN. The one thing I couldn’t help but to realize is that before playing an XM, S3M or whatever particular song you have interested in an in the full version of Groumf Tracker, it is quickly converted to native Groumf Tracker format.

MyMail version 1.54 is the brand new updated version of this highly recognized e-mail software. MyMail uses the STiK TCP stack for it’s internet connectivity. My first use of MyMail was for this review and I must admit, it was a delight. I quickly figured out that any particular feature of MyMail that I might not have liked could easily be turned off, on or otherwise adjusted through the advanced preferences menu system.

What is Arthur? Arthur is a simple language conversion utility. It utilizes custom dictionary files allowing any language to be converted to any other language. While using Arthur I couldn’t help but notice one thing. The actual language conversion of just one word seems kind of slow. It almost takes a full second on my falcon because of whatever it is doing to the video. It seems kind of rediculous to me, but it’s a price I’d be willing to pay as the functionality of it is very cool.

The program I will be reviewing for you today is called Resource Master. The version is 3.2 demo and it was created in 2000. It is (currently?) being distributed by Application Systems Heidelberg. Resource Master is somewhat of your typical GEM .RSC file editor. If you are confused as to what a resource file is, you can simply click here. Although I am not very qualified to make an intensive review of the functionality of this program, what I do intend to give you is somewhat of an overview of the program.

I can admit, that I am rather impressed with EasyMint. Mostly because, the amount of work that goes behind a linux distribution installer is excessive, but even more work must go behind a MiNT installer. I’ve setup a MiNT distribution entirely by hand and I can appreciate the work this programmer has done. No matter what the challenge though, Easymint installer did it perfectly. One of the things I couldn’t help but to notice was that the easymint installer must have been thoroughly tested, because every level of detail was paid attention to, right down to the auto folder sorting.