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Text File | 2003-01-26 | 26.5 KB | 445 lines

<head> <title="...forever..."> <font=monaco10.fnt> <font=newy36.fnt> <font=time24.fnt> <image=back.raw w=256 h=256 t=-1> <buf=6765> <bgcolor=-1> <background=0> <link_color=000> <module=console.mod> <pal=back.pal> colors: 251 - black </head> <body> <frame x=0 y=0 w=640 h=6765 b=-1 c=-1> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- F A C E T O F A C E W I T H F A M O U S S C E N E R S ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ::: ::::::: ::::::: :::::: ::::::: ::: ::: ::: :::::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::::::: ::::::: ::: ::: ::: :::::::: ::: : ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::: :::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::::: ::: ::: :::::: ::: :::::: ::: ::: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- D R A C O N / T A Q U A R T ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- top graphician on the 8-bit Atari scene responsible for the outstanding gfx-bits in the latest TQA release titled "Numen" (deserved 1st place in the demo compo at "Lato Ludzikow 2002") madly tormented by Grey / MSB join to the trip through the amazin' 8-bit's world! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Grey: Hi-ho, <link=g13.scr>Dracon!</l> Let's begin with the steady part of every interview - please introduce yourself to our readers! What are you doing apart from scene activity, what's your amount of springs etc? Dracon: Hello everybody ! My real name is Michal Garbaciak and I was born in a half of seventies in the past century. In the Atari 8-bit scene I use the nick 'Dracon'. I'm graphician in TAQUART and sometimes also write texts (I conducted some interviews with famous atari-people, wrote several articles related with the scene or computer graphix and also prepared some text for NUMEN's demo webpage - http://numen.scene.pl). I'm mostly interested in computer graphics. I like to test some newer gfx-proggies as well as play games (both EMUlated and PC ones). Also, I like to watch good movies and read interesting books. I live, study and work in Gdansk (in Poland) - a beautiful city at the Baltic Sea. My study and work are related to humanist matter. I work as a librarian in the Central Maritime Museum. Grey: Do you remember your first heartbeat watching Atari? And where it was? Dracon: Well, there were quite many heartbeats... ;) I think this occurred when I was playing some old great games like "Montezuma's Revenge", "Pitstop" and "Bruce Lee". I don't remember exactly what was the first such impression. Grey: When did you learn about the meaning of "demo scene"? Dracon: I learnt about it in the first half of 90s in the XX century.I bought my atari 8-bit in 1990 and several months after that I went to a copy-party that was held in my city. The party was called "Atari Stars Party" and there were quite a lot of great Atari 8-bit coders. Some of them later wrote commercial programs, they also founded several software firms like Mirage, ASF, Sonix ... I remember this party due to the fact that it was the first place where I saw demos in general ! I watched some nice productions from Atari 8-bit and Amiga 500 (!). In 1994 I formally joined scene. And it was lucky in entering since I won gfx-competition in the "SHADOWS PARTY" (this party was the next one after "Atari Stars Party" in atari scene history). During those (90s) years I was in several groups and also I had some different functions. :) Grey: And when did you start to experiment with gfx painters? Your first impressions? Drawing a picture using a humble joystick was very terrifying I guess! ;o) Dracon: As far as I remember I started drawing in 1992/93. One day I took a closer look at graphics in "MISSION SHARK" game and found out that drawing it is also possible for me, so why not try ?! And I started to use KOALA MICROPAINTER. One of my works from that time I sent for a small competition in local newspaper called "Dziennik Baltycki". I won an atari game and my name was mentioned in the sum up article! :) After some time I changed gfx editor to "XL-ART". This is a fantastic and very comfortable drawing tool for 8-bit! Even later, when I was using newer tools, I always liked this one. By the way - I was one of the first atari-graphicians that tried to achieve better quality in graphics (more colours, more shades ...). I used many different tools (or new graphics program modes) like GED, CIN or XL-PAINT. They mostly used interlace mode to get better image quality ... You asked me if I thought that drawing with a joystick was a terrifying experience. What a catch question ! ;) Of course everything is possible when you get used to it. So that wasn't bad at all. Drawing with a joystick only requires more strength than using a mouse and one should be more patient to get expected results (for example, it's hard to get smooth shapes in the picture). By the way, I was also testing C-64 mouse and original Atari Touch Tablet that I won in one of gfx-compos at the Orneta parties. I wish I tried Light Pen. Grey: Why did you choose drawing on the Atari? Did you ever try to compose a POKEY tune or code something? Dracon: Drawing is a part of my life. I started drawing when I was three (there was a... TAMK on my first picture ! :) ). So when I grew up, I got to know that it would be nice to express my mind by another means. Computer graphics seems to be an un-explorable and tempting area. And it is really cool, although lately I attend a special 'classic' drawing course (to get more fundamental knowledge of art). Why did I choose Atari 8-bit instead of other compys ??? Mostly because it was widely available in Poland at that time and some of my friends from primary school had this type of computer already. Besides, small Atari looks really nice (very smooth and modern look). Yes, I also tried to compose some music using CHAOS MUSIC COMPOSER (CMC). But soon it turned out I haven't got any good skills to do it in the right way... ;) Anyway, you can listen to one of my few tunes - I put it in ASMA archive (http://asma.atari.org), and it is called "DELICATE". ;)) Grey: When did you join the arrays of Taquart? And what's the current member-list? Please add a little description to each dude... Dracon: It was in the second part of 1995. SLAVES, founder and leader of TAQUART, contacted me via snail-mail and put forward his proposal about joining TAQUART (he had got my address from info file from my 1st slideshow that I released about one year before). As I had succeeded in winning some gfx-competitions at parties, I got several offers from remarkable scene group (e.g. Shadows). And I chose TAQUART as one of the most promising group here. :) This is the 3rd group I joined (I was in NOVA and USG before) and the first one that allows me to show off my talent. :) I think it is common that there aren't many people in most scene groups from Atari 8-bit. And so is in TAQUART nowadays. By the way, my group consists of people that are living far away from each other: I live in the north part of Poland, some people are in the central part (e.g. Warsaw) and there is also one man abroad - from Germany !! OK, so let me show the current member list (full index you can find at http://numen.scene.pl/?f=n5 ): Fox - coder ; pure powerful mathematical brain! He has mostly coded our latest "NUNEN" demo. He is also responsible for developing a PC crossassembler to write programs for Atari 8-bit (http://xasm.atari.org) and for many useful corrections to Atari800Win emulator. Newest gfx-mode "TIP" is also his idea. :) Eru - another gifted coder, also took part in coding "NUMEN". He developed some useful gfx-tools in the past like CIN and HIP-converter (some programs to support newer program graphics modes for XL/XE). Besides, he was successful in a special internet coder-competition called "Algorithms conquerors'". Heaven - coder and designer. His 16kB intro called "Really Unreal" won in Rush Hours party in 1997. Similar to Fox and Eru, he is also interested in developing graphics modes for the XL/XE (but not only about this!). He gave some ideas for design and effects in "NUMEN". Besides, Heaven coded TAQUART's intro on PSX and is playing around with Gameboy Advance stuff. X-Ray - just the best musician from atari 8-bit scene. He creates very nice tunes that show off capabilities of POKEY chip! He also composes some music on PC. Bac - similar to X-Ray, he wrote pleasant, joyful music for TAQUART's productions in the past. He has his own, dynamic style. I hope he will compose something new soon. Samurai - another musician with own good style :) Together with X-Ray he composed series of tunes called "PORAZKA" (every song from this collection won msx-competition on different atari parties !!). Slaves - founder of TAQUART and gfx-man (at beginning). Very gifted webdesigner and admin - he set up NUMEN website and also he is one of the people that are responsible for SCENE.PL's portal (the biggest information site about Polish Scene - 16/32-bit compys). (http://www.scene.pl) Dely - similar to Slaves, he is a good webdesigner. He owns ATARI-AREA website. It's very good source of information on all Atari 8/16-bit events. (http://www.atari-area.prv.pl). Dracon - that's me ... :) Needless to say, right ? ;) Hey! Have you noticed a picture in "NUMEN" of all people that were involved in making this production ? Just watch a Viking's warship with some people inside of it. From the left: Fox, Eru, myself, Heaven, Slaves and X-Ray. I use cartoon-style drawing there because I just like it very much ! :) Grey: Tell me the truth - what's the picture of the Atari 8-bit scene nowadays? Is it still "alive and kickin'" or slowly fading out? Dracon: It's hard to say. The scene isn't what it was some years ago (I mean quite strong and quite numerous). However, there are still some atari fanatics that are faithful to 8-bitter. Poland is the main atari scene resource, because in so called "West" there are mainly 'collectors' that are mostly interested in having some more atari times and not in writing new impressing software, etc. There are 3 atari parties being organised a year in Poland. Unfortunately, similar to other computer platforms, demos are mainly released only at those parties. I think atari scene will survive in future, because the sentiment for Atari 8-bit is too strong to be forgotten in many hearts ... So even if Atarians buy PC's to work or play with, they usually don't forget about Atari. For example nowadays I mostly use PC to draw, play and study, but I also support ASMA archive (by ripping some tunes from old programs). :) Grey: How many groups make up the 8-bit Atari scene? Dracon: Not many, really. :( As far as I know, the scene is only in Poland. Outside this country there are mainly only computer clubs like ABBUC (Germany) or OHAUG (USA). Slovakia and Czech Republic also seem to have some similar clubs and individuals like Bewesoft (nowadays he writes games for multi-joy, a cool piece of hardware that enables up to 8 Atarians to play in one game at the same time!!). SATANTRONIC is a Slovak group which members come to Polish party every year. They are interested both in 8-bit and 32-bit Atari computers. I heard there were some Atarians also in South America (Chile) from there comes e.g. cool game called "LINE-UP" (great tetris clone!). Back to groups' list, I know about following ones in Poland: - Quasimodos - Tristesse (publisher of SYZYGY magazine) - Dial (publisher of Serious magazine) - Mad Team (only TeBe seems to be alive and kickin') - Zelax (maybe they will return but situation is similar to Mad Team - only one coder is ready to rave) - Bit Busters - inactive, but maybe one day it will change ?? - New Generation - Allegresse - Sword Soft - Animkomials (funny fake crew! ;) ) - Slight (but rather inactive, besides X-Ray) - Shadows (to tell the truth only legendary Marek Konopka aka Konop wants to write some new stuff) - and of course TAQUART Grey: Did you hear about any "groundbreakin'" demos in the pipeline? Dracon: Well, in a discussion on the ATARI-AREA forum, Marek Konopka (formerly known as Konop) wrote he would write a new demo for Atari 8-bit (it seems watching "NUMEN" gave him some more encouragement! ;) And it's gonna be quite different from what we are used to watching at present. It sounds interesting and I'm really curious how it will look. His demo is announced to be released at Orneta-party in 2003! Several different famous people from the atari scene have congratulated TAQUART after releasing our demo. They wrote really nice e-mails. For example, JACOMO LEOPARDI, a cool atari coder from Germany, wrote that "NUMEN" was the best and most impressive thing he saw during his 15-years of atari coding. And I heard he recently showed his new demo at a big ABBUC-club meeting (unfortunately the demo wasn't totally finished but I hope he will succeed with it). Also I hope that QUASIMODOS will bring another quality production in future... Grey: What do you think - who has the hardest job during demo making: coder, graphician or musician? Dracon: It's equally hard work, because nowadays scene people pay attention to the overall impression in demos. Complicated, ultra-fast code isn't the most important, I think. Specific, nice (or just incredible) mood is what I'm mostly looking for in demos. And it consists of proper graphics (animation) and sound (music), together with good code that links everything. Therefore, my favourite demos ever are the following productions: RISE (Amiga), LOST BLUBB (Falcon) SLEEPLESS (PC) and SPOT! DESKTOP ADVENTURES (PC). Grey: Talking about demos - my best congrats for the 1st place with the latest TQA release! "Numen" is an asskickin' piece of hard work, no question! Maximum respect to all ppl involved in putting it all together! Dracon: Thank you very much! It took us many nerves and much time (it has been prepared for about 5 years), fortunately we managed to release it (although there are still some things we could change there! ;) ). Reception from scene people was great and I think it rewards us all our pains. :) Grey: How much time did you spent on painting gfx-bits for "Numen"? What tool you used to do it? Dracon: As I wrote above, it took long time to complete. You know, there are some different matters in life apart from scene activity. :) Particularly I mean that working, studying and going out with my girlfriend took sooome time ... ;) The title screen (with Einstein's face) was the hardest part of my graphics work ... I used really varied tools to prepare the graphics: Trzmiel (nice hires program for Atari 8-bit that reminds me of paint progs for ST), XL-ART (old good 4-colour paint program), HR (a simple editor that allows to draw 3 colours in bigger hires pictures - written by our old coder), COLOR EDIT (small editor that enables to colorize pictures - written for PC in Java language by FOX !), PAINT SHOP PRO 7 and PHOTOSHOP 7 (both are well-known and widely used by graphicians on PC platform). So, graphix for our demo was partly done in PC (especially colour images). I prepared some pencil sketches before main drawing on computer (it was a kind of conceptual work). Grey: All graphics in "Numen" seem to be in countless amounts of colours thanx to the special "interlace" mode. The final effect is simply mind-blowing! Unbelievable stuff for the 8-bit computer... Could you reveal to us some details about gfx modes on 8-bit Atari? I mean about these "new" ones discovered by the scene community. Dracon: If anybody wants details, I give a link here: http://www.s-direktnet.de/homepages/k_nadj/tip.html One of the aims of the "NUMEN" demo was to use as many colours as possible. Older demos often lack them :( Fox has invented another new graphics mode called TIP (TAQUART INTERLACE PICTURE) and we used it in the demo. Both the title screen with Einstein's face and a screen with a human's brain use this new mode. It's good you like it! I draw colour pictures on the PC but still keep in mind that they are for Atari (so afterwards I had to reduce size and colours). There isn't any paint tool for TIP available for Atari 8-bit (and probably it won't be in future as it's hard to obtain specific mode requirements) so the only way was to draw it on PC where I have many useful proggies. :) In general, HIP mode is capable of showing many shades in medium (for an 8-bit computer) resolution 160 x 200 pixels, with little flickering. I don't know exactly how many colours are used in my demo pictures (I guess it's about forty or so), but theoretically TIP could display 4080 colours at one time (there will be 30 colour shades available). So far, we experimented only up to 256 colours. :) Grey: Would you take a risk to say that 8-bit Atari has better graphics than C-64 for example? :o) Dracon: No, because it depends. Commodore users have definitely better possibilities to draw nice, high detailed fullscreen pictures, especially in hires mode (320x200 pixels). Of course they also use interlace-trick but in general it seems they have more chance to improve such type of graphics. As for hires gfx on Atari 8-bit: I was using 3-colors hires mode (there are 2 such pictures used in "NUMEN"). What else makes drawing fullscreens on C-64 better? There are also many more talented gfx-man in C-64 scene maybe due to the fact their scene is really bigger (and so it exhorts better graphics quality) ! Well, on the other hand, Atari has better graphics modes for displaying effects in demos. Especially 3D-stuff (Gouraud and Phong shading) looks heavenly better (when using many colour shades) than similar effects for C-64 (it just sucks there in my opinion!). Grey: How do you see the future of this scene? Is it possible to dig out something new from the 8-bit Atari? Could we still call it a "never drying sponge"? Dracon: Hmmm... It's not easy to answer it. Some people in the past claimed that Atari 8-bit would be gone for good when better computers appeared, but they were wrong. There are still some Atari fans .... Even somebody said this type of computer has HEART on the contrary to all those 32-bit machines that are changing themselves all the time. :) Everybody in TAQUART has got their own PC computer, but this year we finally released our biggest demo for XL/XE. So I think the scene will be alive, maybe with only few people but there will always be somebody else ... I saw some younger people (16-20 years old) in this summer's party at Opalenica. Maybe they will continue what we are doing now ? Besides, I see that so called emulation- scene is still growing... So, "nothing's forgotten, nothing's ever forgotten" (that's a quotation from my favourite TV-series "Robin of Sherwood"). FOX is absolutely convinced of the fact that small Atari is able to do much more than we already saw in todays demos. He said that possibilities are still really huge and other people should find and try them out ! Grey: Can we expect any new demo released under "TQA" label in the near future? :o) Dracon: Definitely not. "NUMEN" was our biggest and long-lasting project. This is gonna be our "good-bye" demo. We will move on to higher projects, I think, but the future is not clear yet. I hope our last demo will "kick" somebody else to bring more quality demos for Atari XL/XE in nearest future ! Grey: 8-bit Atari scene did a huge step forward in hardware expanding. Most of new releases don't work on the "standard" 64KB machines but none seems to complain about it! Does it mean that there is "a new hardware standard" set for 8-bit Atari? What's Your configuration for example? Dracon: You asked about new hardware standard ? Oh nooo, it's not just like in bigger machines... :) You have ONLY to add some more memory (our latest demo requires 320 Kb of RAM). Computers from Atari family turned out to be very flexible machines. As years go by, some wise (and clever) people have developed different hardware solutions that expand Atari's power. I mean 16-bit version of 6502 processor (MOS 65c816) or built-in different operating systems and tools (on eprom chips). Generally, there are two main directions of hardware enhancement: sound (stereo sound, MIDI connection, C-64's SID chip inside (!) and Covox interface) and storage devices (adding 3,5" fdd drives, hard disk, cd-rom ...). Above all, the only true requirements nowadays is to add more memory (320 kb at least). As regards my Atari configuration, it's a bit expanded: Atari 260 XE (256 Kb), Toms OS, Qmeg OS, Tight Freezer (very handy thing!), stereo, Tight Tools (some useful tools that are placed on eprom chip). I have also SIO2PC cable that allows to connect Atari 8-bit directly to a PC computer (PC may act as a virtual disk drive for atari and there is a possibility of fast data sending via PC-Atari as well). Grey: Thanx for all your answers, Michal! I hope you don't regret the time spent on completing this interview :o) All the best for you and your crew! Dracon: Yeah, it was nice to share my thoughts with you. I hope some matters are clearer right now ... :) By the way, I would like to greet two nice people I met from ST/Falcon scene: EAR_X (Peter Meer) and ALDN (Alain Derpin) !!! Good luck with your zine. Let the Power (Without the Price) be with you ! :) (If anybody wanna contact me for a legal reason: dracon@scene.pl) -- --- --- --- -- --- --------------------------------------------------------- CHOSNECK magazine contact us: we're listenin' 2 da voice of da scene! greymsb@poczta.fm ---------------------------------------------------- ---- ----- ------- ---- -- </frame> </body>