** Maggie pages feature / 1014 words ** The Alternative Party Richard Spowart reports from this unusual Atari event... Held from the 10th to the 12th of April, 1998 (Easter weekend) in the city of Turku, on the east coast of Finland, the Alternative Party was probably one of the best coding parties for the Atari scene so far. Why the name Alternative Party? For some time now, most coding parties have been dominated by people owning high-end PC's or Amigas, which left minority platforms like ours without a look in. With this in mind the organisers decided to ban, from the competitions at least, any PC above a 286 and any Amiga above the standard A500 machine that, as readers will know, was the main competitor for the ST back in the late eighties and early nineties. With the high end machines banned from entering the competitions this cleared the way for people with an interest in older machines to make some headway. Apart from people from the Atari scene, who were the best represented platform, other people brought a variety of machines, some I haven't seen in the UK for many years. A couple of these veteran machines were connected up to relatively new peripherals such as zip drives including an MSX machine. It just goes to show there's more to life than PC and Mac hardware! The party was hosted by members from the Aggression demo crew who produced one of the classic ST demos called Brain Damage. There was a large Swedish contingent at the party consisting mainly of members of Dead Hackers Society, one of the best Atari demo crews. They are still supporting the Falcon to some degree and made some good entries in the demo competition. Daniel from New Beat Development was also there and he showed us the latest developments to Willie's Adventures. It was great to see the game looks almost ready with just a few minor improvements remaining to be completed before release. The English contingent consisted of myself, Chris Holland (CiH), Leon O'Reilly (Mr Pink/Reservoir Gods), Kev Dempsey (sh3/Reservoir Gods) and Neil Jones-Rodway (Arnel). We also met up with Martin-Eric Racine, better known as Q-Funk on IRC #Atari, who had flown over from Canada for the party - Chris and I met him on the flight from England. Q-Funk unfortunately had a slight problem with his luggage on arrival at Helsinki - thanks to bods at Heathrow not being on the ball, his luggage had to be delivered later on to Fishpool. People outside the demo scene may not recognise the name of Anders Eriksson but may well recognise him from his IRC-name as Evl of the Dead Hackers Society. Chris and I were both looking forward to meeting him for the first time because he has done a lot for Maggie over the last year or so. Another coder from the same group, known as Loke on IRC, was also there and he was very pleased to see us. There might well be an appearance from some of the Swedish contingent at the next Atari show, whenever that is organised, in the UK. One thing we soon realised was Swedish coders are generally a lot taller than ourselves! One guy was there with a Hades machine - whilst I personally didn't get to see much on it, from what I heard the owner did have some impressive stuff to show off. As is usual with coding parties of this nature, there were some competitions. The first of these was for ASCII art, which ranged from the impressive to the downright bizarre. After a long wait there were also some music competitions. Later on during the party, the main part of the competitions were shown, which included several new intros and demos for the Falcon. The Senior Dads had sent in some entries but it was a shame none of the crew could make it, but, as they said, maybe next time... There was also a prize given for the most obsolete machine at the party which was won by a machine built in the late 1960's, early 1970's. This consisted of two circuit boards and an LED output, and won the prize comfortably - let's hope Atari machines never win this accolade! Some visitors brought in a big pile of classic hardware, which was placed on a table and used in the demo competitions. Hardware such as the Aquarius, ZX81, Spectravideo, Atari 2600 console and one or two other unknown machines was viewed with a lot of interest by people at the party. The only thing that was reasonably up-to-date on this particular table was a Playstation !! One user who was heavily into the MSX scene had customised his machine in a number of ways. He had fitted an internal hard disk and connected an external SCSI Zip drive! It just goes to show that, with a little ingenuity, it's possible to connect up the latest hardware to obselete macines. I chatted to the machine's owner, who told me that he had made up the lead to connect the Zip himself and hadn't had too much difficulty finding the parts, which was nice to hear. Although the Atari scene was the largest contingent the general level of interaction between the scenes proved, no matter what machines people own, impressive programming can still be produced. Amazingly the winner of the demo competition wrote an intro on an unexpanded Commodore Vic 20. This was very impressive viewed on the big screen and all the more impressive considering just how old the the Vic 20 is compared to the other platforms! In general, the party was very well organised by the members from Aggression and IRC #Atari - Setok (Kristoffer Lawson), Partycle, WizTom and Lance. It was also great to meet the Swedish people as well and a big Hi! goes out from the Reservoir Gods and the Maggie Team to Anders Eriksson (Evl), Baggio, Luke, and everyone else who attended - not forgetting the person who travelled probably the furthest distance to get to the party, Q-Funk! ** Images ** ** ALT_014.JPG ** ALT_021.JPG ** ALT_031.JPG