For two decades the Fandal maintained the website generally known in the community as "Fandal's website" or "A8.fandal.cz" which was dedicated to the collection, curation, metadata provision and promotion of all kinds of demos and games for the Atari XL/XE system. Among the Atari 8-Bit scene enthusiasts this place was an institution with its over 5.000 games and around 3.800 demos available.
Unfortunately Fandal came to the conclusion to stop his activities, also due to the exuberant wave of AI generated content flooding the retro computing sphere.
"All right, thatโs it. My retro hobby is being eaten alive by AI at an ever-faster pace, and I definitely donโt want to reach a point where the news section is nothing more than a list of things generated by a prompt.
For this reason, and also because site traffic has been steadily declining to minimal levels, Iโve decided to stop all updates after more than twenty years."
I remember that in the pre retro computing revival era in the 2000s the website shone as an exceptional project "against the tide" and I always appreciated it. While it is very sad to lose this passionately hand-crafted institution of the Atari scene I have hope the archive remains online for further use.
EDIT: Apparently the PTODT-team has taken care of that providing a mirror!
What is left to say? Thank you Fandal, for for all the years of support and work for the Atariscene!
๐ Fandals website (PTODT mirror)
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