Just a few months ago it seemed like creating a Falcon emulator was an impossible task. Now every man and his dog is seems to be making one. The Cafe Fuji team brings you an up to date list on the status of all Falcon emulators currently in development :
As is well known, the Café Fuji mission statement is "to serve others with honour and cheap groceries". We pride ourselves on being the Number One People Company. To fulfil these ambitions, we have polled our regular customers to find out exactly why they chose to visit our humble establishment. So what are you, the public, looking for? According to our ISP, these are the phrases most used by search engines to visit our site.
1. Bathsex
2. Sophie Ellis Bexter
3. Infogrammes
4. Bruno Bonnel
5. Wanking
6. Showering Girls
7. Atari
8. Weird Shit And the moral to this story? The shadowy financial "geniuses" behind the Café Fuji empire are always pushing us for "higher ratings", "more hits" and to "make your site stickier so we can maximise advertising revenue." In order to appease 'the man', we are going to making the following changes to the site:
See you in the shower.
Here at Cafe Fuji we are lucky enough to get our hands on a preview copy of the forthcoming DHS compo megademo. Father of Sven-Goran, Anders "Evil" Eriksson, talks us through this revolutionary production. "We announced this competition some months again and in that time we have been inundated with entries. It has been more popular than we could ever believe!" So how many screens have they got? "Um, we have 3 so far. But it's not quantity, but kwality that counts. And believe me, we have kwality, with a capital 'K'. The only problem is the chip-music." Why so? "Unfortunately this currently lasts a lot longer than all the effects put together. We are having to write a lot for the end scrolltext to compensate."
Summer is here - we can tell, our sales of swedish I.C.E. cream are through the roof. Whilst we are scrubbing pans in the kitchens of Cafe Fuji, our friends and colleagues are sunning themselves in exotic locations around the globe, like Cornwall. Not a day seems to pass without someone dropping in to regale us with tales of holiday excess. This morning, postie Matt Simpson dropped off the usual bundle of bills, junk mail and letters of complaint. Amongst the pile was this charming little postcard from everyone's favourite bald atari supremo:
The world of investigative journalism was buzzing yesterday when ST Survivor from Alive! magazine announced he would be running a series of features revealing the truth between the shadowy and mysterious nicknames of atari sceners. "I want to get a handle on their handles" declared STS Here at Café Fuji we don't like to be seen as behind the times (or original) so we have started doing some of our own "jounalising". NICKNAME CASE STUDY #1 : BLIND IO Swedish coder Nils Olov Mikael Degerfält is better known to the patrons of the atari scene as Blind IO. Amongst his productions are the "Flummer Dummer" Whip! Module and the "X-Biomas" christmas demo. Our mission - discover the 'secret' behind the mysterious nick name. We sent the swedish division of Café Fuji off on a fact finding tour.
Our quest took us to the swedish coastal town of Skellefteå. Whilst mining for information, we stumbled across Sweden's only goldmine. There was a long dark tunnel surrounded with shimmering bits - a bit like a DHS demo. Next we visited the Bjuröklubb Nature Reserve where we saw the remains of settlers from the Iron Ages ( No Crew ). Still no wiser than when we set off, we stumbled on what surely must be the key to it all, Lilleputtlandet "a paradise for children". Here we enjoyed trampolining, pony-riding, gold panning and even visited the children's zoo ( caging infants is still legal in scandanavia ). But these toddlers weren't talking, at least not to us. An evening at the Nordanå Culture Center beckoned, with a fine meal in our bellies we took the outdoor dancefloor and drowned ourselves in färsköl ( swedish beer ). Fuelled by the alchol, we took home a moose with the inention of grilling her about Nils Degerfält. Unfortunately, as we sobered up we realised we had actually got a *real* moose. Still, at least she was horny. Our geographical based investigation had drawn a blank, so time to localise and examine the man himself. Here were the Mr. Degerfält facts:
We were stumped. There seemed to be no logical connection between Nils Degerfält and the name Blind_IO. Tired, perplexed and slightly sore, we headed home safe in the knowledge that this was one mystery that even Mulder & Scully couldn't solve.
DHS weeble worrier Evil explains: "Remember The Union demos? When demo crews from across the world and synergised to create the best ever demo featuring an orange elephant faced man? We are ressurecting the spirit of The Union, but we want to bring it into the noughties with the freshest and most brainblasting effects." Quality is the issue here. "We want to get the most talented demo crews together to make the best screens for this production. And to facilitate this, we are supplying them with most of the code they will need. We want compatibility over as many atari machines as possible, and we don't want people messing around with the hardware and creating cool and innovative new effects that might show us up!" "It is very simple for crews to make screens for our demo - they just have to call these library functions that we supply: tunnel_begin, tunnel_render and tunnel_end. They are free to do whatever they want in their screen - the only limitation is their own imagination!" What about the allegation that the effects in this demo may all be a little, well, samey. "Nonsense. We are even letting people set their own tunnel palettes. This will be the best tunnel based megademo since Dream Dimension!"
Our promotions department have been doing a lot of focus testing on the site, and it has come to our attention that the word 'fuji' is not widely recognised amongst the general public. The americans asked about it thought it was a rap band. Those that are aware of it associate it with ill fated products, failure and bankruptcy. We want to portray a positive image for this site, going forward. We have dug into the cash tills and purchased a brand image from a highly successful and established games company. We feel this new logo and name will reflect well on us. We hope will now be percieved as innovators and creators of excellent product and not thought of as the turgid, badly managed, semi-bankrupt low quality fakers that we really are. So join us in toasting our fantastic new name, and let us hope those share buyers in the city are easily fooled, or our next company image with be of a man sleeping rough in a cardboard box!
This week taxi driver Jack Tramiel rants about Infogrammes adoption of the Atari brand name.
"GET OFF MY ROAD! Bloody cyclists." "Its those damn frogs shoving their big noses where they don't belong. Now I'm not a racist - some of my best customers are foreign. They never moan when I charge 'em 100 quid for a five minute ride." "Granted, the frenchies are world leaders in some areas - smelly cheeses, poncey books, those subtitled 'arty' films - but making computer games in the true Atari tradition? You're having a laugh aintcha?" "YOU'RE IN THE WRONG FUCKING LANE!!! Women drivers!" "Infogrammes though, they just don't have a clue do they? It's sacrilege. Nolan Bushnell - bless him - would be spinning in his grave if he saw what was happening today. You want to say - Oi, Infogrammes, No! Take your crappy games and bully boy development tactics and shove them where the sun don't shine!" "But there's no reasoning with these frenchies. They release one cheesey licence game, everyone slates it, and they just bounce back with another. They buy up a development studio, piss off all the staff and ruin it. People complain, but they just go off and do it all over again. They just don't listen. String 'em up, I say - It's the only language they understand." "I had that Bruno Bonnell in the back of my cab once. Bloody nice bloke."
Zealots and fanboys were committing suicide last night after Infogrames grand cheese, Cristophe Sapet, announced that his piss-poor games firm would be renaming itself "Atari". We were at the press briefing, and we left feeling shocked, saddened and slightly dirty. Sapet was one of the founders of French 'entertainment' software company, Infogrames. "In the early days it was just me, Bruno and Thomas squatting in a garden shed" He laughs. "Bruno was so bossy. When I forgot to bring him his croissants he would beat me with a stale baguette. I still have the bruises." But such beatings didn't discourage the large nosed frenchmen, and he spoke with the air of man not deterred by physical pain nor physical deformity. "I am pleased to announce the reopening of Atari's hardware division in Sunnyvale California. We have even managed to reunite a lot of the original talent." "There is Richard Miller - who created the hugely successful Jaguar and Nuon consoles. We have also managed to rehire the team who made the ST's blitter. This ground breaking graphics chip has been copied many times, but, in my opinion, never surpassed. Companies like nVidia would kill to get hold of this design!" "We also have the ergonomics guys who were responsible for the ST's joystick port location, and the team that came up with the concept of diagonal function keys. We cannot fail." When pressed to elaborate on the future plans for this hardware division, Sapet became noticeably uncomfortable. "There are teams working on some of Bruno's more, erm, unusual designs. My vision for Atari hardware is an utopian vision. I want us to create products that will change the world. I have a group that are frantically working on a device that is very personal to me." he coughs. "It is an ugliness curer."
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