News

I woke this Sunday morning (21/01/2018) to see on Twitter and Facebook the sad news that Bob Wakelin had passed away.

Bob’s artwork is well known for people in their mid-40s and above. He drew the artwork that adorned a great many Atari ST releases, but also the earlier titles from the likes of Ocean and Imagine Software during the 8-bit heyday.

In some cases, it was his artwork that made people choose that particular game over another one that was vying for their pocket money on the shelves of their local computer shop.

He influenced that purchase, similarly to how Rob Hubbard’s music helped to shift a lot of Commodore 64 games. You knew you were getting quality, even if the rest of the game didn’t live up to the hype.

I, like many teenagers during the 1980s, would be looking at the cover artwork of our newly purchased 8-bit cassette whilst we sat waiting for an Ocean or Imagine game to load on my old ZX Spectrum. Most of the time, it would have been someone’s job at Ocean to attempt to transfer Bob’s artwork into a loading screen. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t.

I found a tribute video on YouTube by It's A Pixel Thing that covers most, if not all of Bob's artwork, complete with a fan remix/rendition of a classic Martin Galway C64 track to accompany it.

Atari ST related work
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Bob’s artwork graced almost 30 different titles for the Atari ST. From the early Ocean releases such as Tai Pan and Wizball, through to some of his last work that adorned titles such as Epic. See the list of Atari ST games here.

Not all of the games were great, or they felt like they were quick ports of 8-bit titles onto the Atari ST – especially back in the days when there wasn’t an Amiga version available. But we, as a buying public, bought the games sometimes because the artwork was so good.

This quote from Bob sums it up:
"A couple of times the guys at Ocean said to me 'Look Bob, this game really isn't very good so we need an extra special cover.'

I suppose I should feel guilty for it."

A full interview (circa 2015) with Bob is available on the following site.

Meeting Bob
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In my later years (after hitting 40), I went to quite a few retro events around the UK. One was held at the Lass O’ Gowrie pub in Manchester. Bob was appearing at the event and he was signing copies of his artwork. That was my first glimpse in the flesh of someone I would go on to meet and work with.

A few years later, when the Lass O’ Gowrie was forced to close by the brewing company, there was a “fire sale”. It was held the day after the “closing down” party. Myself and my other half went down to see what we could pick up as there was a regular retro-gaming night held there once a month on a Tuesday and I was curious to see what I could pick-up.

We also helped with the tidying up as there was a lot of chalk-based graffiti / protest words left on the walls aimed at the brewing company that had made the decision to close down the pub!

I was lucky enough to be able to buy the three framed pieces of artwork that the Lass had got from Bob those few years earlier. These will be kept in my possession and will not be going anywhere else.

It was only after attending these numerous gaming events in the UK where I was helping to man the Attic Bug stall that I got to meet Bob. Bob would be selling, and for most visitors to the stall of a certain age, signing his prints of his well-known artwork. The A3 prints were usually the fastest ones to sell out and, if Bob wasn’t on the stall, there’d be a backlog waiting for him to sign when he got back. The prints would be rolled up and put into art tubes to ensure that the customer got the print home in one piece. Visitors from around the world would come to these events knowing that they could get a signed piece (sometimes more) of his artwork.

If you had the time to listen, Bob had many a tale to tell. He was well known as having “been there” during punk music’s early years. He was part of an act that opened up as support for Joy Division back in the day. He drew for Marvel Comics too as well as adorning our shelves of games.

Whilst he was a friend for the short time in my (and his) later years but I’m glad to say that I met him, got to know him and I will miss him.

We were christened 'Da Management' by Anna & Dave who run The Attic Bug and the photo at the top shows us posing at one of the events we attended.

Gweddill mewn heddwch!
(As Bob was born in North Wales, it is Welsh for ‘Rest In Peace’).

Our sister website Stonish.net, which is devoted to menu-disks, is celebrating its third birthday. For this occasion, it presents us the 3000th menu-disk. And not just any disk! Nr 3000 is a rare Evil Force disks, which contains tools & a huge list of cheat codes.

At Stonish, all disks are downloadable and contain games, demos, tools, docs, etc. There's almost 2 GB of packed files, so don't hesitate to browse the site, use the search engine and download anything you need.

More disks will be added in the days to come, so stay tuned.

The new version of the huge archive SNDH is available. It now offers 4925 files (total 10238 tunes). Here are the changes:

+ All the sid-i-fied tunes from HIPSid incuded
+ More SNDH-Digi tunes including Altair, Populous & Fighter Bomber
+ Tonnes of rare tunes by Mephistow & Jovis
+ More ancient un-ripped tunes by Daglish, Loriuax, Shimskey & Legace
+ Curse of Ra, innovative chip-digi driver for the time

Visit http://sndh.atari.org website to download SNDH 4.7 archive. Thanks to all people involved to the project (Grazey, Ben, Evil, TAO, Lotek Style,...) for this impressive work.

We have a pretty big announcement to make today. Our December update has been delayed a bit, but it was hopefully worth the wait. We have been talking about this in the past, but as of today, a first part of the Atari Legend project has gone open source. From now on, any developer who is interested can download the full database (except the sensitive user related data) and all the screenshots, boxscans and other graphics used for their own project.

You can find the download link at the front page in the 'Open Database' tile. We are planning a full blown API this year, but this will take some more work. We will also be updating our database structure this year, to further enhance the project so it will be able to handle all the different versions of game releases ever made. That is for later ;-) A full technical analysis of the DB structure will be made available in the future. Should you be interested in using it and have questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

So this also means that all user contributions from now on will be shared with the rest of the world. All your efforts will never be lost!

Also in this months release, we have drastically updated our CSS files, so if there are layout glitches on your system (wether it is a pc, tablet or phone), let us know.

We are a bit late on this news (the site wasn't available in recent days), but NoExtra team released three new compilations. It seems they are the last productions of the group, since the leader Zorro2 decided to leave the team to join another very famous group. Sad news...
We would like to send a huge thank to NoExtra for providing us so much quality intros for over 13 years. Without NoExtra, Atari Legend would probably not be there.
We will miss you, guys.

Finally, please note that one of the three compilations contains the famous megademo Bluesie, which never came out because never finished. So here the final release. Congratulations to Maartau for spending so much time on it and doing something functional.

Download Extra Volume 5
Download Extra Volume 8
Download Extra Volume 9

Steven Seagal is just coming to publish a new version of Steem SSE. As always, the emulator offers a lot of patches and enhancements. Nice to see the dongle of Jeanne d'Arc is now supported, that's so cool.

Download the new version on Sourceforge (all versions) or take a look at the official website (Win32 D3D version).

Here is a list of new features and fixes:


v3.9.4 Features
_________________

- Dongles: Jeanne d'Arc (French).

- A DirectDraw build of the Boiler is now available.

- Notice:
Option 'Alt YM2149 emu' (MAME-like PSG emulation) moved to sound page.

Option 'Machine/Wake-up' is now persistent (and the default is STE
demo-friendly as requested).


v3.9.4 Emulation improvements
_______________________________

- CPU: STOP timing and behaviour (Audio Sculpture, thx ijor, npomarede and
troed).


v3.9.4 Bugfixes / Refactoring
_______________________________

- Can recover from a BLIT ERROR and from 6301 crash in some cases.

- Video rendering of STE hscroll with normal borders (We Were "distorter".

- Sound: STE DMA sound in 16bit mono.

Pro Sound Designer in 16bit (Wings of Death, Lethal XCess STF).

- CPU: RTE check new PC for crashes.

BTST timing (Phaleon/Chaotic Motion Interferer).

- GLUE: Timer B in shift mode 0 or 1 on a monochrome display (Audio
Sculpture).

No left border and no-prefetch hscroll (Hard as Ice)

- FDC: Only type 1 commands can be changed while the drive is spinning up
(Froggies Over The Fence).

Run commands even if current drive isn't connected (Audio
Sculpture STF).

- WD1772: Negate motor line on reset (Audio Sculpture SCP - undoubtly the star
program of this release if you see all the fixes it caused).

Reload first rev at first opportunity (Turrican SCP 2 revs).

- MFP: Reading a timer when it just looped (Froggies Over The Fence back to
menu after disk 2).

Make MFP timer latency one cycle longer (Sadeness on STF WU1).

- 6301: Mouse movement in high resolution and when the ST is much accelerated.

Option C1 compatible with non-English keyboards and key combinations.