I didn't get chance to look at this deeply, suffice to say the machine appeared to fly along!

However, romours are it's being held back from the UK as it's distributors here would like it to be a little more stable before they release it. Hopefully these fixes won't take long.

This rather natty board could actually be described as three boards in one. It's a combination of a memory upgrade, a screen expander, and an accelerator all in one. Installation, however, can be a little tricky, depending on which bits you want to install. Let's look at the three parts seperately:

• Memory Upgrade
  This part requires no soldering, the board simply plugs in the Falcon's internal expansion socket. It accepts either 2Mb, 4Mb, 8Mb or 10Mb of memory. Add to this the 4Mb most people already have, and you can get up to 14Mb, which is of course the maximum allowable amount of ST RAM you can have in a Falcon. This memory is FastRAM, but it is still ST RAM, so it can be used by all applications (although Cubase currently has a few problems, but it is being fixed by Cubase's authors). Later, a daughterboard will be available for all serious power users allowing you to add TT RAM on top of that.
• Screen Expander
  This bit does require a teeny bit of soldering - from what I've heard. Apparently it's doable yourself if you have some experience at soldering. If however, like me, you don't know which is the hot end of a soldering iron get it done by a professionsal. The screen expander is essentially the same as in the BlowUp Hard I kit, it's just installed internally, and therefore a lot neater (no cables trailing to the joypad ports). There aren't any improvements or extensions, but then the original worked well enough anyway.
• Accelerator
  This bit, I've been told, is definately a job for the experts. Nasty wires in nasty places. Unless you're an expert or you're feeling very lucky, let somebody else do it. However, the results are superb - the system bus, the CPU and the FPU can be accelerated up to 40MHz, and the DSP up to a staggering 50MHz.

  For software that doesn't like the speeder, it can be de-activated by the means of a supplied CPX module.

Unless you're only after the memory upgrade, it's best to let the experts install the whole lot for you. And even though some bits are still a little rickety, the board can be reprogrammed, and software upgrades are quite regular at the moment.

I guess it's important to note that the FX board will fit snugly inside the cramped conditions of a standard Falcon case. It also has a throughport, but I doubt there'd be room left to fit anything on it unless you have a Tower case. The memory daughterboard, however, won't fit in a standard Falcon case, so you will need a Tower for that. But if you're seriously considering adding even more than 14Mb to your Falcon, I guess you'd have taken the Falcon out of it's slab and put it in a nice big roomy Tower case long ago, wouldn't you???

With Atari out of the computer business, there has been a suprising spurt of third-party machines. Most of them are expensive however, out of the reach of most users pockets. Even though the Hades can still be classed as "Expensive", it's a little more reachable than the Medusa or Eagle. Basically a cut down Medusa, it's based around a PCI architecture (yes, the one designed for Pentium systems), and comes with a 68040 CPU.

I didn't get too many details on this though (far too expensive still!), but details of a UK distributor should be in the magazines soon.

A new model of Falcon!!! This is finally a decent incarnation for pro-musicians. It's housed in a desk-top case, and it has industry-standard audio jacks on the back, rather than the headphone jacks we've had so far. It also has a PC keyboard.

Other than that, it's the same Falcon we know and love.

It's finally available - MagiC on the Falcon! And very nice it looked too.... So what's new in this version???

• Falcon compatibilty
• Full 3D AES
• MultiTOS-style U: drive, allowing pipes (and therefore Drag & Drop between apps)
• A new version of MagiC Desk - far more fully featured than before!

Well, I guess many of you feel it's difficult to get worked up about a screen saver. But what TwiLight does, it does with immense style.

So what's so special about it? Well, it's major plus point is compatibility - it hasn't had a problem with any of the applications I've run. It's also quite small (the modules are loaded in when the screen saver is activated), and the supplied modules are fantastic. My current favourite is the pengiun party - Penguins stroll across the screen, knocking back the alcohol, hiccuping, burping, falling over, and even being violently ill [memories of your trip to Helsinki? FFF]. This one turns a few heads, believe me! The modules are fairly configurable, in the aformentioned penguin module you can specify whether the penguins are light drinkers or alcoholics, and even specify what they're drinking!! (which, of course, has an effect on how violently ill they get). You can also specify the number of penguins on the screen at once!

Other features of TwiLight let you alter the processor usage (useful in multitasking environments), add wake and sleep corners, assign a wake-up gong, and select an order for the modules to run in, or allow them to be random.

One of the cutest screensavers around. Especially if you like penguins.

Good news and bad news. The good news is that Papyrus 4 was on show at ProTOS. The bad news is that it still wasn't on sale.

I couldn't do any speed comparisons, however. They were showing the program off running under MagiCMac, so I've no idea what was down to the re-written code and what was down to the computer! However, as most of you know the code is being totally re-written in C, so you can expect a general increase in speed (especially in the slower search functions). I, for one, still can't believe the Papyrus I know and love was written in GFA Basic!!!!

Also, most of you will know that Papyrus is also coming out for PC's running OS/2. Later, it will also be available as a native Mac application (rather than needing MagiCMac). Those of you who are worried that this may lead them to drop Atari support, fear not. All three versions use the same 'core' code, to which R.O.M. Logicware attatch a machine-specific extension, and there was a guarantee that they will always support the Atari platform with Papyrus. Ain't that sweet :)

Neon Grafix put in an appearance at the show. Even though we weren't treated to seeing the Falcon version up and running, Team Computer had the OS/2 version as the main attraction. No doubt this was to show it off to it's maximum potential - even though the Falcon version is plenty fast enough (I've seen it!), a super-fast Pentium will still beat it! However, the demo CD's were available which had on them, among other things, pre-rendered animations, and demo versions of the Falcon and OS/2 Neon.

Neon is available, and even though the whole program is actually in English, there is only a German manual at the moment. Hopefully Compo will get around to releasing a UK version soon. Don't expect it to be cheap though - in Germany it costs 750,- DM (that's around 300 pounds!). It's cheap considering what it can do, and compared to similar programs on other platforms, but it's definately not something you can buy to toy around with.

Hands up all who though MultiTOS was dead... Well, Atari's version may very well be, but Overscan have used the same basic principles and came up with N.AES. As you may have guessed, it's an AES replacement - just like the majority of MultiTOS was - but N.AES goes a lot further.

It incorporates all those features that were in Atari's unreleased AES 4.1 (which was nice but still pretty unstable), along with the latest version of MiNT (and as Eric Smith is no longer working directly for Atari he may keep on updating it as Public Domain). Also, as the Atari Desktop doesn't work with this, a specially made version of Thing, called N.Thing, is also included. Not that that's a bad thing, of course - Thing is probably the most highly regarded PD desktop available.

So, we now have NVDI and N.AES... all we need now is N.GEMDOS, N.BIOS and N.XBIOS and we have a complete N.TOS...... (Though many believe it's already available and called MagiC!)

NVDI four?!?!? Well, it was a suprise to me too. In fact I very nearly didn't notice - the packaging was identical to that of version 3, only with (of course) the big '3' changed to a big '4'. Even though version three hasn't been with us that long, the new version is here, and it has some rather natty new features.

Firstly, as you may have guessed, it's a little quicker at rasterising fonts than it's previous incarnation. Not an awful lot, but I guess that's mainly because it was pretty fast to begin with. There's now an optional module which will let you use PostScript Type 1 fonts. It has faster printing routines, and it comes with a utility which lets you view fonts (even if they aren't installed), group them in families (useful for using TrueType fonts with Papyrus). NVDI now also has support for UNICODE, which lets you have around 65,000 characters in a font (quite why you'd want to have this many, however, is another point!).

Upgrades are, of course, also available.

It's suprising how many games are being released for our supposedly "dead" platform. Confusion is one of the latest puzzle games for the Falcon, and it was released at the ProTOS show. The game is basically Sokoban, where the aim is to push blocks around the screen so that each block sits on a pad. This usually involves a bit of forethought to ensure you or the blocks don't get stuck. Even though it is infuriating at times, it's also addictive.

However, it's the overall presentation of the game that makes it stand out. The game's packaging makes a very good first impression. The glossy box contains three disks and a manual. Unfortunately, the manual is used for copy-protection. The game's graphical style revolves around ainchent Egypt, with some fantastic still pictures. The music is good quality, but of the style you normally associate with demos.

You should be able to get hold of a demo of this game from most PD libraries or straight off the Internet, so if puzzle games are your cup of tea, Confusion could well be worth a look.