Platariada 2002

TXG of Dutch crew MNX reports

This year we went to Platariada 2002, a party in Budweis in the Czech Republic, organized by Petr Liebl. I started the trip on 20 June at 19:30 to Mad Butscher's flat, I arrived at 00:15 and we drank some beer and talked about Atari, of course... When I awoke the next day I saw the German soccer team play against the USA, with a lot of luck the German team won.

After the match Bjorn arrived and he was impressed by Mad Butscher's room when he saw all these Atari computers, then he heard about my collection and he didn't believe it at first that I have much more than Mad Butscher. After a short while he began to believe that he just met some of the real Atari maniacs that are still active. Then we talked a little more about Atari stuff and began to put all our stuff in the car, a VW Golf, it was just big enough to fit three people with their computers and bags.

Then we drove to Carsten Strottman's, where we waited for Mr XY to arrive by train - then we could start our trip to Platariada. We travelled in Carsten's VW van and had some beer and a fridge to cool the beer. This was needed because the temperature was over 35°.

In the middle of the night we arrived at the party place where we searched for the exact location, but as always we managed to find it. Then we unloaded our Atari computers and put everything where it should be. The next thing we did then was to have some beer (of course), smoked some cigarettes and started to boot the Atari machines. Carsten began to program in Forth on his 8-bit and Mad Butscher was programming in assembler, he was writing a new game.

After a few hours talking, programming and playing demos we went to sleep. Three hours later I was awake again, we went to the supermarket and bought something to eat, some normal drinks and real Czech beer (Budweiser Samson), this tasted very good, and as you maybe know, they make the best beer in Czech... Then when we were back at the party, we played the snake game with eight players on the 8-bit.

Then I started to talk to the people that were there and showed my hardware expansions. I had my 800XL with 65c816 CPU and 1 MB Flash OS and my 130XE with my Ethernet prototype with me. The people were very interested and took pictures of it. Then I looked at an Atari 130XE that had the SIO2IDE interface built-in and they demonstrated what it could do. It was very impressive. The interface cost €32 and I ordered three of them.

I demonstrated the Flash OS from MacFalkner and everybody looked at this nice piece of hardware. After talking for two hours about this hardware I told people about the current status of my Ethernet interface. The hardware is about 80% finished and the software is being ported by a German programmer. I will try to have a fully working version at the Unconventional party 2002. Then there was time to relax and play some games and have some fun. That evening we looked at some great Falcon030 demos on a projector, after that we made a camp fire and a little barbeque.

Later we went inside, some people went to sleep, but some of us played a Frogger clone on the Falcon030 with six players, this was a lot of fun, then we watched some Futurama cartoons and finally we also went to bed at 04:30. At 09:00 I was awake again and we did some more programming on the 8-bit, playing games and some talking with the other visitors. At 14:00 we began our trip back to Germany. I had a good time at this party. That day I slept at Mad Butscher's place again and the following day I was back at home in the Netherlands at 21:00. The next day I went to work as normal.

Photographs courtesy of Honza Krupka.

MyAtari magazine - Feature #4, July 2002