= FLOP 66 Editorial =

Fellow readers,

I greet you in a still difficult time. You may be asking why this issue of FLOP is only now being published, almost a year and a half after its predecessor. The reason is that our editorial staff was affected by several fundamentally negative events shortly after the publication of issue 65:

  1. The editor-in-chief had a baby in July - a very positive occurrence from a private point of view. However, it is a very negative development for his free time and therefore for the possibility to work on FLOP (or Atari in general). Of course, I had anticipated this and therefore tried to take effective measures in advance, e.g. to "raise" a successor. My choice was a promising young duo - Petr Postava and Michael Kalouš, without whom we definitely could not have published 2 issues a year in the last few years.
  2. Petr Postava tragically died in a fire at his friends' apartment in Bohumín in August.
  3. Michael Kalouš ended his cooperation with us in autumn for personal reasons.

Thus, in essence, the editorial office of FLOP (in the sense of a team of initiative collaborators) ceased to exist. All that remains is a time-overloaded editor-in-chief who communicates with ad-hoc external helpers and content writers.

I don't want to make excuses or feel sorry for myself. I'm just stating a sad reality. Despite all this, and despite the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the number 66 was finally put together.

Thanks to all the authors of the content and other persons who helped with the preparation.

== Issue Content ==

So what did we manage to prepare for the readers?

FLOP 66 brings three technical articles:

Two of the articles are accompanied by graphics.

Fandal didn't disappoint either, this time with an interesting Bone Cruncher game from BBC Micro. I recommend reading the accompanying text before starting it.

The positive news and the discovery of the year, so to speak, is Zdeněk Zubr (Zdenda). This newcomer wrote 6 games for FLOP! Among them, one for multijoy, which can be played by up to 17 players! In this sense it is probably a first for Atari.

List of Zdenda's games:

I mustn't forget the nice intro that R0ger created for us (including the music). He is also the author of the slideshow you can find on disc C. It's a separately bootable floppy with 6 photos of Petr Postava, which automatically rotate on the screen. This is our way of remembering Petr and additionally thanking him for all the good he did for Atari.

As a new feature I have added help or description of FLOP reader control to the hypertext. It appeared in some earlier issues as a separate text. It is now available under a link from the home screen where the language version of the menu is selected.

The last thing I would like to mention about the content is the formatting of the texts. I've tried to unify the formatting on a look that is inspired by the economical markup language for text preparation, AsciiDoc.

== Cooperators ==

Apart from the authors of articles and software, the following people contributed to this issue of FLOP magazine:

If you would like to be involved in the preparation of future issues of FLOP, please do not hesitate to contact me. I will be glad to receive high quality lyrics, music, pictures, games, demos or other software. Texts can be in Czech and/or English. Proofreaders, translators, graphic designers, testers or other members of the editorial team are also welcome. We expect issue 67 to be published in the second half of 2022.

In any case, have a great year, enjoy your Atari and may Covid-19 and other disasters avoid you.

We look forward to seeing you in the next issue

Bohdan Milar
editor-in-chief

2021-11-07