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Pre Millennium Party (PMP)

Report compiled by:
** UL **
(MC) Mc_Laser/ TSCC & POD
(MB) Mad Butsche / Foundation Two
(pA) Paranoid / Paranoia
** /UL **

OK, were to start? The whole journey was an odyssey. I left my little village at around 10 O'clock in the morning on Friday 30th July and drove to Wiesbaden city where I met up with Mad Butscher on the travel to coffee-shop-land. At around 12:30 we left Wiesbaden and the weather was hoooot. There were some traffic jams and it all took much longer than we expected. When we finally arrived at Utrecht, where the party where held, we drove around for ages but couldn't find the party venue and we were going crazy. Suddenly, even though we were surely headed in the wrong direction we spotted Creature XL driving behind us! After another spell driving around we parked our cars and walked into the park and... THERE IT WAS - very well hidden but displaying a large Atari banner at the entrance. When we entered there were around 30 people there. (MC)

We've described finding the party in detail because, as it turned out, we were amongst the quickest people to find the party place in best time. The Paranoia car over an hour, Splash took four and a half hours, and a French visitor couldn't find the location so returned to France, called the organisers then travelled again from France to the Netherlands! (MB)

Guys from Checkpoint, Foundation 2, Paranoia, Classic Atari magazine, Sector 1, Exa, Loud, Fun (of course), Teenage, Torment, Maggie Team (Arnel) and Wildfire were there. All the usual Atari machines could be found there: 800 XL, ST and Falcon. I just got a copy of PIE BILL GATES which I'd waited for about a year to see. (MC) (can you tell me why? MB) (Because it's fun! pA) (how do you describe fun? MB) (Falcon Users Netherlands! pA)

After we set up our computers I chatted with the four guys from the ATARI Classic. They had to leave just one hour later, but it was still nice to see people from a magazine attending a convention. After coding a little bit on my Falcon and on my XL the guys from Centek showed me their forthcoming Resource Builder which looks very promising. It includes the controls of TOS, N.AES and MagiC and also offers some nice effect controls. They also told me that they're working on an MP3 player, so we can look forward to see what comes next from France. After a while the local Dutch 8-bit Atari maniacs arrive. They showed their 1Mb extension which works with a standard SIMM. Because another Dutch group also created a new 1Mb extension hopefully we will see both of them finished at the next ABBUC JHV in October. When they weren't coding in 6502 assembler they showed 8-bit demos and games to the 16-bit crowd. It's good to see that more and more people who only know about the ST and Falcon become interested in the Atari 8-bit machines. After the last convention in Dresden I send an 8-bit machine to Slovenia and this time Frost had got some 8-bit equipment from somewhere. It becomes more and more normal to see a ST or Falcon alongside 8-bit machines at conventions. So it seems what grows together belongs together eh?. (MB)

Frost showed me a preview of the intro for the next CREM production, which will be a universal Amiga music player. It seems that some of the guys are working on small demos.
 Exyl/Sector 1 showed me some screens from his upcoming demo and it looked quite promising. EarX/Fun was working on a module compile for Falcon featuring lotsa mods by Comp7 and D-Force.

The morning after

Uuuhm, next morning. Well *I* slept quite well on the leather couch! Later in the day the room became really crowded with everyone engrossed in something or other. The deadline for music and gfx-compos was 6 O'clock in the evening. Someone kept playing YMCA all the time - now that really sucked!

Richard Karsmakers made an appearance at the party late in the evening which was great and as it got dark outside they lit a camp fire - man, that really felt good! It was great to sit around the fire talking about our Atari experiences and oddities from the past, it felt like home. (MC)

I am getting a little tired of arguing why I still use Degas Elite to create 16 colour graphics but apart from that I really had a lot of fun, meeting the friendly and FUNny Dutch people and I also hope for a Post Millenium Party. The place was really well organised for sleeping in a tent and thanks to Marcstar, my crewmate, who brought a tent, we even had a tent to stay in. I've never slept better at a convention before - wow! (pA)

At around midnight the first competitions were held. These were split into Soundchip, 4Channel and Multichannel music compositions along with the 16 colour GFX competition which featured mostly good entries. Right after that I went to bed.
 It was a pity we had to leave today at 2 O'clock - even before the demo competitions were held and unfortunately, at the time of writing this article, the results still are not available. C'mon guys, what kind of organisation is this?!

Finally I's like to say it was really worthwhile travelling to Holland for this event and I would certainly attend again so long as I can afford it. The only downside was the entrance fee of 50 guilders (23 Euro, DM46, around œ16). The EIL entrance fee was only DM30 which is a big difference. (MC) Keep on partying.

** boxout **
PMP Party Utrecht (MB's votes)

Location: Nice
Toilets: Working, but dirty
Food: Expensive but good range
Fun factor: Extremely high
Directions: Near-impossible to find - extremely stressful
Co-driver: "Heulboje"
Scene appearance: Average
Competitions: I only saw the music competition (and I was glad when that was over) and the graphics competition which featured some good entries.

Overall: 83%
** /boxout **

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