About the Cover

No, it's not a real Atari graphics display, but a combination of computer printouts and special photographic effects. The landscape and mountain were drawn using Datasoft's Micropainter program. The planets and moons were generated from a sphere-drawing demo originally written by Tom Hudson. Screen dumps of the landscape, mountains and spheres were made on a C.Itoh 8510-P printer. These were cut apart and composited on white posterboard. A large negative was then shot of the composition. As with the covers of Issues 7 and 12, acetate was used to add color to the various geometric shapes. The negative was then placed on a sheet of glass and back-lit. Multiple exposures were used to "burn in" various light effects within the shot. The final result is a cover that could fool the eye of an Atari programmer: what graphics mode did they use to get that?