Foreword
 Greetings
and welcome to another bundle of fun and
games. As of writing it's only four days
until I'm off to Unconventional 2001. According
to the expected visitors list the Germans
outnumber the Brits by 25:1. Bad timing
there, England having just beaten Germany
5-1 in the World Cup 2002 qualifier, but
my flight is now booked!
Recently,
a visit to www.calamus.net yielded a great
discovery. Die Feder is a new, currently
German-language colour magazine all about
DTP with Calamus. The first issue is absolutely
packed with articles, news, tutorials, interviews
and glossy imagery. Best of all, it's a
free, reasonably-sized download (1.6MB for
issue 1, containing 31 pages) in Adobe PDF
format. Calamus has matured into much more
than just an "Atari killer-app",
it's now a platform in its own right, supported
on Atari, Mac and PC and with a growing
legion of loyal users. It's achieved this
by continuous development to embrace new
technologies while remaining true to its
original values. Others have come and gone
but Calamus marches on.
It seems
not only Infogrames is intent on rejuvenating
the Atari brand. Manchester-based iFone
Ltd sent us a press release and demo CD
of classic Atari games it's developing for
mobile phones. I suppose it makes sense,
after all, modern phones often have large
dot-matrix LCD screens, some in colour,
there are now ones which can play (and record)
sampled sound in addition to the simple
bleeps and bloops, there are even ones which
can vibrate instead of ring, ideal for force-feedback
action games.
Some of the
other titles mentioned do sound more ambitious
than Asteroids or Pong. Maybe we'll see
the hardcore gaming fraternity turbo-charging
its phones with faster graphics chips, boasting
about 3D benchmark results, overclocking
CPUs, recasing, adding fans, heat sinks
(in between cursing at beta driver conflicts)
and coming full-circle to the brick-sized
yuppie accessory of the '80s.
iFone's plan
might start putting an end to those frequent
and annoying "I'm on a train"
type monologues one endures in the course
of a day now. There's a nice thought.
Best Regards,
Shiuming Lai, Features and Technical
Editor |
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Issue
11