Made on an Atari

Paolo De Felice shows that Atari computers can be professional machines

Can an old Atari computer be useful in a professional job? I think so. I grew up with Atari. Although I live and work in Italy, I have been lucky enough to know the Atari world. In the middle '80s an English friend of mine had a 2600VCS, a few years later I bought an 800XL, then a 520ST and a MEGA4 STE.

Recently I bought a Jaguar and a Falcon. Obviously, I took the Atari "to work" with me. It has just been natural! Here at Protom Multimedia, we develop offline and online business-oriented multimedia content in training, marketing and productivity areas. I ask my programmers and artists to avoid "one program does it all" tools and use as many programs and development platforms as they like. I know for sure that Atari computers are more stable than any other computer and that Atari programs are not built on a "let's release four versions in three days" basis; so we use them for:

• some of the graphics work
• all of the musical work
• some of the animation work
• some of the special effects work
• some of the word processing work

Let me show you some examples:
Figure 1 (below) is a screenshot of the main title of a multimedia product. We used (guess what?) Jaguar VLM and Overlay on a ST for the moving pictures.

Figure 2 (below) is from an animated 2D chemical reaction. We made about twenty of them in three days. We used Overlay, and we couldn't find any other program able to achieve those results (both in speed and in flexibility).

Figure 3 is a scrolling text (final credits).

We also often use our Atari for image conversions, word processing and sometimes for programming (Atari BASIC, it works!).

Conclusion
I always thought that there is something in an Atari computer that goes beyond its age; it is the efficiency, it is the fact that you are never slave of it, and you can be confident that the time is used for working, not for waiting. When we put something Atari-made in our software, our customers ask, "How did you do that?". I just smile, and say: It's a secret!

Useful contact

• Protom Multimedia
  URL: www.protom-multimedia.com