Dear readers,
The jubilee 64th issue of the FLOP magazine is just appearing on your screen. Why jubilee issue?
There are two reasons. Firstly, number 64 is written as 1000000 in binary notation. But most importantly, the first issue of the FLOP magazine was released 31st October 1989, i.e. exactly 30 years ago!
Zdeněk Burian prepared an interesting text where he is summarizing the history of FLOP. Tonda, thanks to his new graphics routine, converted digitized photo of Petr Vičar - the founder of the magazine - to the 8-bit Atari.
This year, we are commemorating another anniversary - nothing less than 40 years from the first sales of the early Atari 8-bit computers, models 400 and 800. On that occasion, we are bringing two new games with support for 4 joystick ports these two machines are equipped with.
We also bring the second part of the overview of the sound chips used in 8-bit computers, written by Pavel Tišnovský. Another contribution to the technical section, description of the FPGA-based MIST machine, comes from Honza Křupka.
In the previous issue, we published two game reviews written in English, provided by our colleagues from the ABBUC magazine. The cooperation turned out to be fruitful, so we bring two more reviews.
In the software area, we have four new games for you:
As usual, the games are on the disk (side) B, except Imogen, that occupies whole disk D. Side C is a special bootable disk for running Space Arena 16K on Atari 400/800.
Beside the authors of the articles and the software, the following team prepared this issue:
If you would like to contribute to FLOP, do not hesitate to contact us. We will appreciate quality texts, music, images, games, demos or other software. The texts can be written in Czech and/or English. We will arrange a translation if needed.
On behalf of the editorial staff, I wish you like FLOP 64. We are looking forward to your feedback so that the next issue will be even better. We expect publishing of issue 65 in April 2019, with editorial deadline by the end of January.
Bohdan Milar
31. 10. 2019