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! |
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