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PC is only the eXTeNSioN
by Trophy
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Yeah... here is a quite good idea by someone from the Atari-Area forum. He's
not a lucky owner of a Falcon 030 and he just wanted to see some demos for his
machine. First problem is with Falcon emulation on the PC is that it is
apparently quite hard to do. Yes, of course most of PCs today have (hopefully)
enough power to do complicated emulation. So in theory it shoud be possible to
write a Falcon emulator for the PC (ouch! Please, don't beat me ;-) But theory
is as always far away from practice, maybe it'll change in the future. We'll
see. I'm rather sceptical of the Falcon emulation idea because right now we
have some ST emulators but there are still a lot of problems to solve with
advanced graphics (such as showing Spectrum 512 pictures) and sound. We can
forgot about real STE emulation for now, so don't even think about emulating
Falcon 030. Another problem - there isn't a TT030 emulator, so we should rather
stop talking this way.
But there is another good idea - show people some cool Falcon demos in the DivX
format that is popular on many platforms (Windoze and Linux for sure). Maybe
it's a good idea to record some productions onto PC harddrive (most of them are
big and fast enough today) using a special Video card and software. Imagine,
that we'll have easy access to our best demos even without a Falcon (at work
for example, or in your friend's house during holidays). I think it would be a
great promotion of the Atari scene and our beloved machine.
For me it's a pure idea of my sentence 'PC iS aN eXTeNSioN'. We don't like PCs
but, unfortunately this is the world wide standard giving, for many of us, the
one and only chance of earning serious money. If we want to inspire more people
even those not connected with Atari we should promote ourselves. This is a good
moment because there are many little companies interested in producing Atari
clones. I know that they don't want to develop new version of Falcon but... we
can always try.
PC is an extension means also that everything (like programming for real cash)
you do on the PC is connected with Atari. For ex. you work on PCs you can make
some cash to spend on your Falcon. Or if you don't have Falcon you can always
have some fun with his extension (PC) watching Falcon prods on your PC or Mac.
Is it a good idea?
Another step. You're creating music using an Atari computer but when you're
recording it, you use a little help from your PC, thats not a shame because PC
is just an extension of Falcon possibilities. Just like media is the extension
of our senses. You know, the camera is the extension of the 'eyes', 'ears' are
extended by telephones and cell phones, Internet extends our 'space',
'communication' and whole society and culture.
This works in a different way. Falcon is an extension of your PC (if you have
one ;-) because it gives fun and a feeling of comfort while using it. But when
someone is drawing pictures using 'screen generators' like PhotoShop on PC it's
not the extending but mixing that is not 'politicaly correct'. But I don't see
any problems using the PC with its superb software sound sythethizers like
ReBirth, Reason or Reactor to make some samples for your Falcon. You can treat
your PC like a real sythesiser to play some sequences or create some background
samples or percussion loops and then use them in work with songs created on
your Falcon. There is the extending idea.
So converting Falcon prods to DivX is just extending its features. Maybe this
is not a bad idea. It's even the extension of Atari society.
Why DivX ? Because it is the most portable format today with quite good audio /
video quality. Ok - you cannot use DivX on Falcon but if you have one you can
always run the original production. Another way is to record demos on VHS as
that is the most popular format but the quality is like 'shit' compared with
'chocolate bar'. And it's rather hard to download VHS tape from a web-site. Its
just not an extension. But DivX movies with Falcon prods can be easliy
distributed via the Internet and then recorded localy in CD-R or even to VHS
tape (if someone feels that he prefers 'shit' rather than real 'chocolate').
This is just my idea inspired by a suggestion from the Atari forum on:
http://www.atari-area.net
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CHOSNECK team contact us:
we're listenin' 2 da voice of da scene! atarimsb@wp.pl
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