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                        '__ d i t O r i a l . . .
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The Humane Remains?

Well we're back again, infesting the tracks and sectors of your storage media with our unique brand of lame drivel. It's only been several years since I last wrote one of these editorial type texts, and even longer since I wrestled a diskmag to completion myself. In the latter case, that was twelve years ago, give or take a few days, which takes us all the way back to that final issue of Maggie at the STNICCC 10th Anniversary party.

Back then, the major emotion was one of overwhelming relief that a prolonged journey had finally come to an end. A lot of bits and bytes have flowed under the bridge since then, but it seems that all things come around in some kind of strange circular motion of time and space. So here we are once more, shoving hard against a deadline to unleash another diskmag on to an unwitting Atari world.

The birth of this one-off special goes back to a suggestion made by Felice, back in October, that it might be a good idea to clear the cupboard of unused articles that have been marooned since the non-arrival of Alive issue 15, There have also been other things started previously, which did not fit into the strict criteria of other publications and deserved some form of exposure. The natural venue for this to be released, would be the very eagerly awaited Sillyventure 2012 party at Gdansk.

Most other people have their orphan projects which lie around stuck frustratingly in hard disk hell, never released. These textfiles were my version of that. Now the cupboard is cleared, I can start again with a clean sheet of electronic paper, without feeling the weight of years of unpublished regrets dragging me down.

Whilst editing and adding the 'historic' material , it was pretty easy to start writing some new articles as well. So once more, the typing fingers were in full flow, and almost before we were aware, here we are now!

Why not Maggie?

The initial suggestion was to release a one-off 'Maggie'.. My feeling on the matter is that this issue, thrown together quickly in a limited amount of time, would not be able to do justice to the Maggie name. There may be a future occasion where the Maggie name could be revived, but that will be revealed in due course. If I were to do this, I would also like a lot more time to prepare something worthwhile and get a lot more people involved as well.

Anyway, what you are getting is Mag! - Which is not quite Maggie. But we hope that you will get a lot of the old familiar sensations and nice feelings from reading the rest of this, which comes close enough!

Why the HTML version?

The Maggie menu shells were state of the art for their time, the 1990's, and they held up well until the final issue in 2000. Since then, I have enjoyed further facilities on different platforms, including the limited ability to display pictures in text with the Alive! menushell, and latterly, the feature-rich online textual environment offered by Wordpress for the Low Res Magazine.

The ST Maggie menu shell is still good for a 'retro' approach, with Felice working on that. The Falcon menu shell less so. I opted for a more universal HTML-based pseudo-shell. With my fairly simple skills, this offers multi-platform portability, and if done right, nothing too excessive with reference to file sizing. The aim, eminently realisable at time of writing this, is to get this all on to a single (high density) floppy disk, screengrabs and all. Probably as a single zipfile for ease of transport. I'm not nasty enough to expect people to have to read it off the floppy disk!

The cunningly themed 'Daily News' end result (hopefully) looks halfway reasonable, offers some capabilities I'm looking for these days and manages to recreate the diskmag 'feel'. It has been tested on a number of Atari and mainstream systems and seems to come up smiling on all of these.

Are there going to be any more of these?

I'm really not sure. This was intended as a one-off tidying up exercise, as already explained. A lot depends on whether any other publications are going ahead or not. There is another traditional style diskmag which we have offered support to, but seems to get itself indefinitely delayed. The Low Res website appears to be pending some sort of decision as well. So I'm not going to say yes or no right now.

The great news is that there is still enough active Atari scene to demand a continued interest on our part. This is seriously cool. We're all supposed to be dead, or passively "liking" things decided by other people in advance on Facebook, but for some reason, the Atari Scene just keeps on ticking along. Some people who have been away, even come back to it!

Certainly whilst that remains the case, then there must be some sort of demand for our particular services, which we will provide in one way or another.

So to conclude the editorial from my end, readers, this special issue, has been made possible by all your continuing activity and interest in the world of Atari. Long may it continue, and for making my job here fun and worthwhile, thank you all!

CiH - 1.12.12 for Mag!

We're handing over to Felice, who has a few words of his own to add, off you go matey, and be gentle with them!

Editorial contribution by Felice

Well, it has certainly been a number of years since we last saw an issue of Maggie hitting the streets. This one-off special publication, 'Mag!' - intended for release at the Sillyventure 2012 demoparty, being held in the wonderful city of Gdansk in northern Poland, is a departure for us, but we hope you enjoy reading. Hopefully we'll be back in the reasonably near future, but not on a regular issue release, due to life getting in the way quite a bit.

Life has certainly changed quite a lot though, since those heady days of 2000 or so. We've had the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in New York City, plus other equally nasty events that have occurred since then. Thankfully most if not all former contributors to Maggie are still on this earth ... despite everything.

We have had some good events that have happened too, more on a personal level than anything else. I got married in New York to my wife, Paula; CiH was invited to be my best man (and did a fantastic job) ... his good lady also did an excellent job of being our bridesmaid. Even though both of us are British, there were various family issues circulating that wouldn't have been easy to deal with, had we got married here in the UK. Besides, we had a day to remember; at the time of writing we just celebrated our fifth anniversary a few weeks ago.

Now, enjoy this special release !

Felice

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