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Happy birthday Welcome to the October and birthday issue of MyAtari. Here at MyAtari HQ we are currently celebrating our birthday - yes MyAtari has been running for four years.
As ever, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you the readers for
your support over the last 12 months (keep those e-mails and ideas coming)
and of course our talented contributors, without whom this magazine could
not be.
![[Image: 48 issues of MyAtari]](images/four.jpg)
In a nutshell The last 12 months have been extremely good to MyAtari. Since our last birthday we have been fortunate to feature some fantastic articles and reviews from our equally fantastic contributors (you know who you are) as well as smash 290,000 hits on our site counter!
On top of this achievement, during the last year, MyAtari managed to inspire the multi-format internet Nexus magazine, hold our second annual reader awards as well as meet many of you at JagFest UK.
Finally, the year ended sadly with the loss of our domain name www.myatari.org. However, out of this misfortune has risen a new mirror site at http://www.myatari.co.uk (which long-term readers will remember we lost back in February 2003) and a dedicated back issues repository at http://backissues.myatari.net.
Feedback wanted Now, following the success of last year's reader poll we are asking readers
to complete the feedback form below to help us make the next 12 issues even better!
Alternatively, please e-mail us and tell us what you like - or don't like - about the magazine. But enough of my dreadful rambling, it's time to open the champagne once again and shout Happy birthday to MyAtari!

Matthew Bacon, Editor
matt@myatari.net

It'll
be Christmas soon... Welcome to this
very late October issue. MyAtari is four
already! In that time I've worked in as many
different jobs, and the issues currently span
five different calendar years, so it feels to me like we've
well and truly flown. Our birthday celebration
gathering at the beginning of October
was jolly good fun with lots of tasty food (yes,
we'll torment you with pictures later). We'll definitely plan more events of
our own as well as support others, check this
month's news page to see the next major gig
we'll be attending, it's going to be a meltdown.
I'm
glad to report that as the magazine has matured,
its readership has also steadily increased
- we now have nearly 1,000 subscribers
from all over the world! This doesn't even count
those who merely stop by to casually browse,
without subscribing to our mailing list. Are
you thinking what I'm thinking? Yes, that's
a lot of potential contributors. One common
condundrum we hear is, "I want to write,
but what shall I write about?" - the quick
answer is, "Anything Atari-related"
- just contact Matthew or myself and we'll guide
you towards getting your work published in MyAtari. We're
not short of ideas, only time for doing them!
Would it be useful if we had some kind
of bulletin board on the web site, specifically
for article suggestions? Atari Computing used
to run a page like this. Again, write to us
and let us know, we'd like to make it as easy
as possible for you to share your knowledge
and enthusiasm.
One
aspect of the magazine we'd like to develop
more is the cover artwork. I know there are
many talented artists on our scene, let's see
more of your fantastic creations! The style
is not as important as the art. We welcome traditional
pixel painting, photography, 3D rendering and
more. Look at our past covers for some inspiration.
I always think it's great when I look back
at all these covers together, so colourful,
and we're now just four covers short of being
able to decorate a full deck of playing
cards with MyAtari cover images!
MyAtari
mirror saga continues! I'll spare Matthew
the frustration of recalling the story of the
loss of our original, myatari.co.uk mirror domain,
which was due to circumstances beyond our control.
In a similar twist of fate, we then lost our
myatari.org mirror domain, which was kindly
provided by Elliot Swanton (who, for the record,
always rises to the vindaloo at JagFest Vindaloo,
apologies to Elliot for my oversight of this
feat!). Since we lost myatari.org, LinkoVitch
(Graeme Hinchliffe) stepped in with hosting
space for our back issue archives. However,
there was one small problem: we didn't have
a backup of the archived versions of each issue,
believe it or not! We'll call it a minor slip,
as we're always so busy with the daily running
of the magazine. We only had a full, uncompressed
version of the entire web site, and while we
could have simply created the Zip archives once
again, I had a nagging feeling about only releasing one
version of anything we publish, so even an archive
with two different date/time stamps (easily
faked, I know, but...) would constantly bug
me in the back of my mind. Also, to create the
archives again would mean going through our
quality checking procedure another 41 times,
something for which precious time does not allow
at the moment. As of the time of writing, we
haven't actually archived any issues since April
this year!
Fortunately,
Cheshunt Computer Club member, Mark Branson,
had every issue and archive since the beginning.
The next task was to get this off his Falcon.
Ethernet was not an option, Mark doesn't have
a CD writer, and his SCSI port has been very
unstable for the last few months anyway. He
even considered e-mailing the whole lot to me,
but as we'd later find out, it was a good job
he didn't, what with lack of broadband internet
at his end. Finally, he acquired yet another
old bit of kit, in the form of a rather nice
MiniS external SCSI hard disk. After many attempts
and SCSI errors, Mark managed to get all of
our archives onto this and handed it to me at
last month's CCC meeting.
Then
it was all down to myself. All I had to do was
connect it to my Falcon and copy all the files
across, right? For a few scary moments I came
to realize that I'd probably forgotten how to
connect an additional hard disk, so long had
it been since I last did it, and so reliably
did HD Driver work. One of those things you
set up once, and never really have to touch
again. My CT2-powered Falcon boots so fast,
I had to reboot it about ten times before I
could catch what version of HD Driver I was
using, but then this was not necessary at all,
I just ran HDDRUTIL.APP which was already on
my desktop, and installing the new drive was
easy as falling off a log.
43
files safely copied to my Falcon, now what?
No Ethernet, so the next best thing would be
to record a CD. By chance I stumbled across some Atari software
packages while tidying up, one of which was
SoundPool CDRecorder Pro 2.34, I'd totally forgotten
I had that! So now we have our archives
back and all is well once more. Need I tell
the moral of this story?
You
can read about another recovery job involving
Cheshunt Computer Club, in Peter West's article
this month. We could almost call that club our
Cheshunt office!

Shiuming Lai,
Features and Technical Editor shiuming@myatari.net
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