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.

BoinkOut has been a longstanding favorite Atari game of mine. It is no doubt that this review will be at least somewhat biased. BoinkOut is a game that surely many people have played for their Atari computers. BoinkOut 2 is the latest revision of this game, adding sound, GEM XIMG backgrounds, more speed and additional timing features. It was more or less brought up-to-date. The one thing I can’t help to notice during my hour (or more ;) ) of testing this game, is that even though everything seems to be updated and new.

HTML Help 2.5 was released on New Years Eve of 2001. At first glance this product seems to be very well put together, by Matthias Jaap, master of HTML editing and Atari. During my first use of this package, I noticed that it was not quite what I expected. This program is not designed to write HTML pages at all, but instead was designed to assist in HTML delivery efforts. It does such things as convert between unix, MSDOS, and Atari newline styles.

Updated August 3rd, 2005. In addition to being completely free, Aniplayer is the most supported media player for GEM computers. It features modes to suck out the most performance for playing videos and supports many types, that, were simply not supported on linux until well after Aniplayer supported them. Didier Mequignon is the creator of this excellent media player and has worked almost singlehandedly from my understanding coding the efficient codecs.