FLOP 61 - Editorial

Dear readers,

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 61st issue of our Flop diskmag. This issue brings many changes. Let us hope these changes have made Flop better.

Firstly, I would like to thank Franta, who has been leading and assembling Flop since its 55th issue, after Radek's tragic death. Franta was carrying the torch for Flop until the last year.

During the last autumn and winter, our Atari user group managed to assemble a team whose mission is to remove the burden of leading and assembling Flop from Franta. With the new team, we can split the work more evenly.

The editorial staff is now the following:

It is noteworthy that three former editors-in-chief are in the team. I believe it is a good sign.

When thinking about Flop improvements, we came to conclusion that there have been three major problems with the diskmag: 1. Limited target audience because of the language barrier. 2. Mistakes and errors in last few issues. 3. Insufficient instructions for software published in the diskmag.

Therefore, we have made the following changes:

  1. Flop becomes a multi-language diskmag! Until now, the texts were written only in Czech (or Slovak). However, atarians from abroad seem to be interested in reading Flop too. As the German-speaking audience already has the ABBUC magazine, we have decided for including texts in English language.

    Surprisingly, no English diskmag for 8-bit Atari computers has been published for some time. We therefore close a gap in the market. For now, you will find a handful of articles (including this editorial) in both Czech and English languages.

  2. We try to schedule and plan our work better. The goal is to allocate more time for testing of our work. We do appreciate that people applied for proofreading and translating. This should contribute to improved quality.
  3. We have set a new rule. All software published must be accompanied with a short text that describes the purpose of the software, hardware requirements, and how to run the software. These instructions are always available in both Czech and English.

Since the previous issue, the Flop reader can read compressed texts. We used 6502 port of the inflate routine by Piotr Fusik (https://github.com/pfusik/zlib6502). Piotr, you have our thanks. The compression allows us to deliver more content to our readers.

For the future, we are considering more improvements. Because our team has grown larger, and some texts are written in both languages, we managed to populate the floppy disk sooner than in previous years. We are toying with the idea of publishing one more issue this year.

It is my hope our readers will appreciate the modernized Flop. We are looking forward to getting your feedback, so we will be able to make any future issues even better.

Bohdan Milar