Atari Legacy Magazine
I don’t recall where I first heard about it, but Atari Legacy is a new, full-color, professional magazine all about Atari. It’s from Europe (Poland) so I figured I’d never be able to get a hold of a copy, but I did recently see on Facebook that there is now a US distributor selling it on eBay. Given my love for computer magazines, I ordered it straight away and it arrived a couple days ago. Let’s take a look!
The magazine is full-size (A4) and not some mini fanzine. The cover is full-color with a Falcon030 in the foreground and other Atari computer models tucked into the background. This first issue 01 is labelled as Q2 2026 and is expected to be a quarterly.
The physical quality is amazing. The cover and pages are all high-quality matte finish, which I prefer over glossy pages that are more difficult to read due to glare. The magazine is 88 pages with almost no advertising.
It even has a nice permanent binding, which does make it look great (as opposed to using staples), but does make it a little harder to keep it open to read.
It has a US cover price of $15.99. I paid $21.99 plus $8.60 shipping through eBay.
The magazine mostly focuses on using Atari systems in modern times. There are reviews of modern games and hardware. One such game that is given a review and interview with the author is Miracle Boy in Dragon Land for the Atari ST. Unfortunately the game no longer seems available for purchase.
Unlike Goto 10, there is not much discussion of things from a nostalgia perspective.
Of the new hardware that was covered, I particularly liked the article about NetUSBee, a network/USB device for the ST computers. I really need to get one of these!
On the software side, there is a nice article about using Mad Pascal compiler to create programs for the 8-bit Atari. I’ve been meaning to try this out for a while now, so hopefully this article helps me get started with it.
I also really enjoyed “From Ultima to Dungeon Master”, an article about adventure games. Of the games covered, I really only played Dungeon Master, but I liked reading about the others.
The magazine closes with a Nolan Bushnell quote on the back cover:
Games require you to use your brain. We believe that by stimulating the brain through gameplay, we can help maintain cognitive health and keep the mind active.
One amazing thing about Atari Legacy is that the magazine is produced on an Atari Falcon (060 enhanced, of course) using Calamus. I remember Calamus from back in the 90s, although I didn’t do much more than play around with it.
Overall, I really enjoyed Atari Legacy and I look forward to more issues. There is a limited print run of 1000 issues, so if you want your own copy, be sure to order it before they are gone.
You can order it directly from the Atari Legacy site for 30 Euros, which is about $35. It is slightly less expensive, and probably with faster shipping, from the eBay distributor.
It’s amazing that they are making it on legacy hardware and software. I am always amazed at the special interest magazines that seem to be profitable enough to stay in business. Every time I talk to any of my friends who work in the printing industry they all talk about how expensive print runs are and that’s why magazine culture has largely died (compared to what it used to be). I guess that’s why so many of these magazines are printed in places like Poland.
I hope that something changes and we see a return to physical magazines. I can (and do) read a lot of things digitally, but digital has NEVER been able to compare to a beautifully laid out and designed magazine.
When I was editor of the monthly newsletter for the San Diego Atari Computer Enthusiasts (SDACE) in the early 1990s, I had use of the club's copies of Calamus and PageStream. Calamus had the reputation as the more "serious" DTP solution. I used it a couple times, then tried PageStream. Used PageStream ever after that. And, in fact, PageStream was much closer in ease of use to the Aldus "PageMaker" I would use a few years later when I was editing a monthly community newspaper on a Mac SE than Calamus ever was.
In fact, I was building a church club newsletter a couple years ago in the open-source "Scribus" program and I remember thinking, "Oh my - this is just as clunky as Calamus."
PageStream was far more intuitive. Calamus gave you greater control over kerning, leading, spacing, etc., but PageStream gave enough control and was so much faster to use.
I still I have some of those old newsletters, I think. I'll have to scan some of them in and post.