By Chris Holland

This months profile is by no other than Chris Holland (or CiH as he likes to be known!) of the infamous Maggie Team...

1. Describe your Atari setup

My primary setup is a Falcon '030, 'early' TOS 4.01, 4MB of RAM, and various hard drives.. The Falcon has recently had a Nemesis accelerator fitted to get a 50% speed increase across the board, which is nice.. Sitting atop this lot is a battered and much used Philips CM 8833 RGB monitor.. Sitting nearby is a very cheaply acquired 14400 modem, presently cable-less, but I should fix that before too long.. My spare machine, which came to prominence at the recent Spring Atari Shows, is a fairly senile 1040 STFM (TOS 1.2), which has the added curiosity value of having the case spray painted black.. This latter machine had to do quite a lot of standing in recently, when my Falcon became unwell after the first attempt at having the above mentioned Nemesis fitted..

There is no Wintel based PC anywhere near here.. To be honest, I'm not the slightest bit tempted..

2. What is your Atari's main use?

Maggie, Maggie, and Maggie!! Most 'constructive' activity is related to writing, reviewing, or testing for the diskmag.. I'm quite fond of the odd demo or two, play the occasional game, and enjoy fiddling about with music/modfile composition software.. There are quite a lot of Commodore 64 tunes lurking on my hard drive as well..

3. How long have you been an Atari user?

Since April 1987, when I bought my first 520 from Silica Shop.. The mousemat that came with that machine is still in use! The machine is long gone though..

4. What is your favourite Atari program?

A tough choice unless you want a list of some kind? Okay then, my fave utility has to be Grauomf Tracker, arguably the best multichannel modfile composer on the Falcon today.. Quite a lot of people swear by Digital Tracker, but Graoumf pips it as it is able to replay third party formats much better than Digital can..

Favourite game, looked like 'Running' for a while, might yet turn out to be Willys Adventures but with a stiff fight put in by Crown of Creation.. Nice to be saturated with a choice here on the Falcon!

Favourite demo.. That one is easy, the brilliant Sonolumineszensz demo by Avena!

5. What is your opinion of the Atari market today?

The Atari Market in the commercial or semi-commercial shareware sense, is pretty stable and self-supporting, as long as you don't expect miracles from it.. It has the capacity to go on for a very long time, and only long-term defections to other formats, and eventually, hardware failure, will bring it low.. Very long term survival prospects may depend ultimately whether someone is willing to bring new, powerful, and affordable hardware to the market to replace the great many ageing Ataris out there.. I certainly don't expect anything from Atari/JTS now, and I don't really count the interest in the Pacifist emulator on the PC as helpful for long-term development.. The people that have got this emulator have only really got it on a nostalgia ticket to play their old ST games..

6. Any information about yourself ie your occupation etc.

The day job is something to do with Insurance, and involves some telesales work, apparently..