pouët.net

Adok information 1145 glöps

• general:
• level: user
• personal:
• first name: Claus
• last name: V.
• portals:
• slengpung: pictures
• demozoo: profile
• cdcs:
• cdc #1: imphobia #12 by Imphobia
• cdc #2: Cream #4 by Obnoxious
• cdc #3: Project 2501 by ADDiCT [web]
• cdc #4: Lifeforce by Andromeda Software Development [web]
• cdc #5: Star Flare

• diskmag MS-Dos Hoax#3 by Epical
• Hoax #3
  
  Three months after Hoax #2, in February 1993, Hoax #3 saw the
  light of the day. It started with an intro coded by Phantom featuring a sine scroller and a 3D starfield. The interface was new, menu and text viewer were now separated. Thus the width of a text-line could be vastly increased (64 characters per line). 54 voters had contributed to the charts, which featured the same categories as in #2. The group articles dealt with Electromotive Force (EMF), Extreme,
  Quip and The Square. There was a long message from Blizzard to Mr. H of Triton, which was basically a critical review of Fast Tracker II. There was no party report of The Party 1992 in Hoax #3, only a list of demos released there. There were two reviews, with Devastator of EMF and Purple Motion of Future Crew, and a rather long article about the political situation in South Africa (transition from apartheid to democracy). The two tunes featured in this issue were made by Groo of Virtual Dreams and by Blizzard. All in all it was a small but nice issue.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:47:19
• diskmag MS-Dos Hoax#2 by Epical
• Hoax #2
  
  Hoax #2 (November 1992) looked like #1, except that it had worse fonts, which made it hard to read. It had the same
  columns, and the same people were responsible for code, music and graphics. There was only one rather long article. It was called "Comparing the PC demo scene with the Amiga demo scene" and it was written by Gore of Future Crew. The PC scene was still very young back then, and Gore wrote that it was obvious that it still had to learn a lot from the six-year-old Amiga scene. For example, the PC scene had not had its own demoparties yet. But demoparties played a big role on the Amiga scene. Amiga demos were also much better than PC demos, and Gore wrote it was a pity that many PC demo makers hadn't even seen any Amiga demos.
  
  The charts had the same categories as in the previous issue, except a new one, utils. The number of voters was also about the same. The group articles this time dealt with Digitech and Sonic PC.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:46:55
• diskmag MS-Dos Hoax#1 by Epical
• Hoax was one of the first diskmags that were released on PC. It issued in 1992-1995. It was made by the Finnish group Epical and its main editor was Kapsu. Most of the issues were downloaded from {scene.org} about 500 times. Hoax works fine on modern PCs even without DOSBox.
  
  
  Hoax #1
  
  In August 1992 Hoax #1 could be read the first time. It started with an intro featuring rotating vectorgraphics. Inside the
  magazine, the menu was displayed on the left and the text of the currently selected article on the right (36 characters per line). The contents were news, articles about various groups, charts (demos, groups, Finnish groups, BBS's, films; 20 voters), Assembly party report, a list of Finnish groups, demo reviews, jokes, an article about how to deal with lamers, a fictional letter of a lamer and some regular columns. The code was done by FCS, the graphics by Kapsu and the music by Blizzard.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:46:34
• diskmag MS-Dos heroin #1 by Beyond
• Heroin was a chartsmag edited by Pyromaniac of Beyond. Its first and only issue was released in December 1998. It is available at scene.org and got downloaded about 600 times. It works fine using the latest DOSBox emulator.
  
  
  Heroin #1
  
  The interface was coded by Armitage of Beyond, with graphics by Jamon of Hyperopia (title picture) and Sky of Xography (the rest). It uses Indoor Music System 0.6 and runs in a VESA mode, although it apparently could have also been done under standard VGA, as the title picture is 320x200x256 and the background picture (640x480) could have been realized with 16 colours, too. The music was made by Dascon of TRSI.
  
  After the title screen, which slowly fades out, you get to the main menu with a cool transitional effect. The main screen is divided vertically into three parts, as in most diskmags: On the top you see the "Heroin" logo, in the middle the table of content is displayed in a nice box, and on the bottom there are the buttons for scrolling and quitting. What's a little confusing is that Sky has also drawn buttons for selecting the previous/next article, which you cannot click, and a nice-looking progress bar background, which is not used by the interface's code either.
  
  The mouse cursor looks like an injection needle, which contributes to the stylish atmosphere. Having selected a section, the text is displayed. There are two fonts. One of them is used for the adverts; it's similar to the standard ASCII charset. The other one appears in the other texts. It reminded me of the Windows font "MS Line Draw", and to be honest, although it is well-readable, I do not like it because it looks slightly plump and sterile.
  
  What is great is the transitional effects between the text-pages. After all the fading and scrolling effects we are accustomed to in other diskmags, watching them is a cool new experience.
  
  Heroin is a pure chartsmag. That means it consists only of an Editorial, the Credits, Messages, Adverts, News, and the Charts themselves. In total there are 80 kbytes of text.
  
  The brief Editorial by Pyromaniac tells us that the staff hopes that by releasing this chartsmag, "it will serve as a friendly forum for competition between groups to strive to be number one." They also think about "setting up a section of the charts in which we count votes from people's area of expertise", e.g. by taking all the votes for coders by fellow coders and putting them in their own chart. Depending on the amount of positive feedback, they are also considering programming future issues under Win95/98.
  
  After the Credits and Messages, the Adverts follow, which make up 70% of the total text-amount of the mag. We have the same situation as in most other diskmags: 90% of the swappers are from Poland.
  
  The News (8 kbytes) describe the standings of the scene as they were in June 1998.
  
  Finally let's get to the Charts themselves. In contrast to other mags, whose voter-lists are dominated by one country, there have been 103 voters from all over the world. Even two people from India voted! There are top 10s of the following categories: demo groups, demos, intros, pixelers, coders, musicians, and a top 5 swappers.
  
  Overall, this chartsmag has an excellent atmosphere and a good quality of English (as it was edited by a native speaker).
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:46:00
• diskmag MS-Dos Genetic Dreams #4 by Escape
• Genetic Dreams #4
  
  The last issue of Genetic Dreams was released in December 1995. Again it featured texts on games and the demoscene. There were a Super VGA coding tutorial, an article about mailswapping, reports about the GASP party and Compu95, texts about soundcards, vectors and a section called "Phunny Things" with jokes about blondes and other things. All in all Genetic Dreams #4 was better than the previous issues.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:45:15
• diskmag MS-Dos Genetic Dreams #2 by Escape
• Genetic Dreams #2
  
  Genetic Dreams #2 from February 1995 started with an intro (a simple scrolltext). In the new engine the menu and the texts were separated. There were the usual columns (e.g. news and BBS list), a coding corner about using up to four gigabytes of memory, loading PCX and LBM files and the plasma effect. Moreover, there were some articles about Windows 95, techno music and von Gravenreuth. The controls were not too user-friendly: The whole mag was controlled by the mouse, but instead of being able to move the cursor freely around the full screen, you moved a box that selected the buttons. You had to make very precise movements to control the magazine correctly. That sucked. The font was as illegible as in the previous issue. A nice thing was that the engine permitted the inclusion of inline images.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:44:46
• diskmag MS-Dos Genetic Dreams #1 by Escape
• Genetic Dreams was a PC diskmag by the German group Escape. Previously they had been making a diskmag with the same name for the C64. At scene.org you can download all the PC issues. Issue 4 got downloaded about 400 times, the other issues only around 60 times each. Issues 1 and 2 work with DOSBox, issue 4 only works without DOSBox, and issue 3 doesn't work at all (at least on my PC).
  
  
  Genetic Dreams #1
  
  Genetic Dreams #1 was released in September 1994. The menu and the articles weren't separated. In the left part of the screen,
  the current text was displayed. On the right, the name of the current "chapter" (a term from the C64 scene) and a picture of its author were displayed. You could flip pages with cursor up/down and move to the previous/next article with cursor left/right. There were scene news, business news, a BBS list, a games review section and a list of new demos. The only real article was a text about "101 ways to commit suicide", which was supposed to be funny. The font in Genetic Dreams #1 was quite hard to read, that's bad. The contents were not too interesting, either.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:44:18
• diskmag MS-Dos Fuzzby #0 by Fuzzion [web]
• Fuzzby was the name of a 4k diskmag by the Spanish group Fuzzion. The idea of 4k diskmags was originally developed by Spock, who is also from Spain. He created the 4k diskmag Wilby. When the new group Fuzzion was founded as a merger of three smaller Spanish groups (DSK, Savage and MCD), they decided to release a 4k diskmag to present themselves to the scene. The result was Fuzzby #0. This one and only issue of Fuzzby can be downloaded from {scene.org}. It's a diskmag for MS-DOS, but it also works on modern PCs even without the DOSBox emulator.
  
  
  Fuzzby #0
  
  Fuzzby #0 was released on December 23rd, 1999. According to the credits, the main editors of this issue were Sml and Ufix. When you run the mag, the first thing you get to see is the title screen, with a Fuzzby logo and a background animation which will accompany you throughout the whole mag. Music starts playing in the background; it is pretty good considering that it fits in just 4k. To get to the first article, you have to press the right cursor key. The font is pretty big and well-readable. You switch from article to article using the cursor keys, there's no menu. To scroll, you also use the cursor keys.
  
  The content mainly revolved around the Fuzzion group. A list of members is presented, and there are charts about who's the laziest Fuzzion member and what Fuzzion member is the biggest IRC addicts. Only members of Fuzzion voted in these charts. In addition, there's an article about the popularity of the Spanish scene in the world. Several sceners from other countries were asked what Spanish demoscene groups and productions they knew, and their answers were printed in this magazine. Many said they knew only Iguana and a few others.
  
  Attached to Fuzzby #0 is a votesheet in which the question is posed whether Fuzzion should continue releasing Fuzzby. Probably the results were negative, as Fuzzby #0 remained the only issue of Fuzzby ever released.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:43:22
• diskmag MS-Dos fleur 3 by Dilemma [web] & Dinasty
• Fleur #3
  
  Fleur #3 was originally planned for June or July 1999, but eventually it was already released on May 11th, 1999 (on the same day as Hugi #15). The graphical design of this issue was done by Xtro of Rhyme and Ludwig of Dinasty. The music was composed by Optic of TRSI and ATX of Chrome.
  
  Fleur #3 features 320 kbytes of articles. It spoils the reader with some long, personal and therefore interesting interviews with grands personnages of the scene such as Hellfire, Danny, Lluvia, Mrock, Nitro and Fred, various insiders' opinions on the latest party-releases, and up-to-date charts.
  
  For the first (and last) time the Fleur staff got enough votesheets to open a Dutch and a German charts section apart from the Hungarian, Polish and world charts.
  
  Instead of party reports, Fleur #3 includes a list of upcoming events and some photos. In the section "Articles" we can find a lot of less interesting stuff on the one hand, and interesting stuff on the other (e.g. "The Brazilian demoscene", "The Hungarian Amiga scene in 1999", "How does real art influence the Demoscene?"), as well as a novelty: coding tutorials. They were written by the Dutch fellows from Quad.
  
  There are three hidden parts in Fleur #3, which were made for three persons: One of them is Rod of Mandula, the others are D-Lee and me (Adok of Hugi). On entering Rod's hidden part, a file called fleurx.zip will be created, which contains the original program that was used to format the articles for Fleur. I think that was a nice idea! Unfortunately it eventually had no use because Fleur #4 was never released. To access Rod's hidden part, run Fleur with the parameter "/kellettnekedsecret?". For D-Lee's hidden part, run it with "/schumi" (D-Lee is said to hate Michael Schumacher!).
  
  D-Lee managed to introduce a happy, cheerful atmosphere to the mag. It can be noticed that the editorial team of Fleur knows the demo scene well. Unfortunately, the grammar is worse than in the previous issue, as D-Lee's English is not so good as Ezah's and Jabberwock's. But apart from that, Fleur #3 isn't a disappointment at all.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:42:46
• diskmag MS-Dos fleur 2 by Dilemma [web] & Dinasty
• Fleur #2
  
  In December 1998, issue 2 of the Fleur magazine saw the light of the day, nine months after the first one. With graphics by Baste of Exceed and Immortal Rat of Astral, plus music by Sed of Dilemma and Carlos of Breeze, the diskmag comes to the critic's inspection who tries to determine if it lives up to his high expectations.
  
  Since Fleur #1, the staff has grown and become more international. Szum/Cryogen, from Poland, was one of the editors of the Polish diskmag Dragon till its third issue, then he switched to Fleur. Some of you might remember the trouble this created in the Polish scene, as false rumours were spread that said Szum had taken all English articles from Dragon with him, which would be the reason why Dragon #4 was delayed. In the meantime this has been cleared up, and after reading Dragon #4 it should become ovious that the reasons for this delay were different.
  
  The interface is based on Fleur #1, but the disturbing bugs have been fixed: There's now an adequate delay after pressing a key, you can navigate freely in the menu even after taking a look at one of the party pictures which can also be found in this issue, and music selection also works. One special innovation of this issue is the progress "bar", which is actually not a plain bar but a circle. This circle indicates your position inside the current article just in the way how election results are displayed in magazines. This status circle is located in the top-left corner of the text-window. Due to Fleur's text design, however, texts usually do not intersect the circle, except the article about hidden parts in demos, which is hence hard to read. Unlike the previous issue there is no background graphic behind the text, but on the bottom of the screen a very nice panel graphic by Immortal Rat is displayed.
  
  Another new feature is that the 's' button allows you to save the current article to disk as a text file, and in the coding compo article you can also save an example program by pressing 'c'.
  
  Fleur #2 has a total of 320 kbyte of articles. The structure of the magazine is like in the previous issue. Let's take a quick look at the most interesting articles.
  
  Ezah welcomes us to the second issue of Fleur in his editorial. He summarizes the feedback on issue 1 he has received, and states that because of the lack of articles he already thought Fleur #2 would never be released. But four weeks before the actual release D-Lee started sending in some articles, and the thing began to roll. Furthermore, he wants to make clear that Fleur is no longer a production of the two groups Dilemma and Dinasty, as stated in Fleur #1, but a production of the whole scene. In fact Dfj was the only Dinasty member who contributed to this issue, and even he did not write a lot. Finally he hopes the birth Fleur #3 will not take nine months again and encourages the readers to submit articles.
  
  "First Fleur coding compo": After Pain and Hugi, Fleur now also organizes a Size Coding Competition. Your task is to draw a rectangular snail in mode 13h. The idea came from TomCat/Abaddon. Fleur's coder, Nap, organizes the compo. The deadline was in March 1999.
  
  The news corner contains mainly news about Hungarian groups. Its size is 10 kbyte, and if you are not involved in the Hungarian scene you can discover new things there. By contrast, the C64 news corner, written by Dfj, is tiny (700 bytes), and the main message is that not much has happened in the C64 scene. The only things worth mentioning are the release of "Our darkness" at Mekka & Symposium '98, which is "definitely the demo of the year", and that Assembly '98 was really bad as regards the C64 releases; admittedly, Panic released the demo "Speedway 2", but as Dfj says this is a "typical boring" Panic demo although it contains some "cool effects". When saved to disk, this article gets the filename dfjsuxx.txt. I hope this does not mean that Dfj was depressed or another member of the Fleur staff was angry with him!
  
  Charts: 76 people voted. Most voters came from Hungary or Poland. Only eight voters were from other places of the earth. So Fleur #2 contains world charts plus Polish charts and Hungarian charts. In the world charts, usually the top 15 places are listed, whereas in the country charts the number is 10. The categories are: demos, intros, groups, coders, graphicians, musicians, modellers, mailswappers, artdisks, musicdisks, diskmags, and parties.
  
  Articles: Cousman/Platoon reacts to the article "Why are there so few diskmags?" from Fleur #1. In Cousman's opinion there are too few English-language magazines and too many diskmags in local languages, which contributes to a splitting of the scene. That is not good, as in his opinion the scene should be "one big community and not a bunch of split weirdos".
  
  An interesting detail about Fleur #2 is that the articles are sorted neither randomly nor by their subjects, but alphabetically by their authors' names. So after Cousman's article, three articles by D-Lee follow. He describes Exceed's success at Antiq '98 with their demo Riprap, forwards a letter he got from TS, a graffiti writer from Hawaii who sometimes made graphics for Exceed, and searches the Hornet Charts for Hungarian names and productions in "Where are the Hungarians?". The articles are about interesting topics (not just the x-th essay about mailswapping) and mainly refreshing to read.
  
  Eclipse/Knights rambles about 3D in demos in his article "What about creativity?!". Next comes main editor Ezah. His first article, "Amigagroups on PC", fits the opinion that Eclipse stated in his article well. He points out that many ex-Amiga groups that are now active on PC mostly do demos filled with boring 3D scenes, and begs them to make them "more and more interesting".
  
  In the next article, "Some words about ten...", Ezah states his opinion of The E-Mag Network, which is negative, as he is not keen on reading the same articles in different mags. Furthermore, he thinks that no one will send a mag articles if he knows that they will be published in other mags as well, since you usually support a diskmag because you consider it nice. Ezah also uses the opportunity to state his opinion about Hugi #11, which he likes "very much", but he is not fond of the idea to use the same 20 questions in each interview like it was done in Hugi #11.
  
  To my mind the most interesting article in Fleur #2 is "What is a diskmag today?", in which Ezah deals with a similar problem as I did in "Newsletters vs. Diskmags vs. Online-mags" in Hugi #13. It is interesting that although each article was written indepently, the two of us came to almost the same conclusions! Ezah thinks that a diskmag, which is not so often released, should only contain quality articles from "all of us, sceners". That is why he removed the advert and message sections and also considered taking the news section away. Fleur is not planned to be a newspaper because if you read a newspaper you usually throw it into the trashcan afterwards, but if you grab a book you will take care of it and maybe read it again after some time. So he hopes that Fleur is a book for its readers.
  
  Finally Ezah explains why he has stopped mailswapping: 95% of his contacts came from Poland, many of them were beginners and wrote only a few lines to him, and when Ezah did more mistakes in an English test than usually, he came to the conclusion that it had come from his contacts' bad English, which had had a negative effect on him. Secondly, many sendings have got lost, and thirdly, he works quite hard at his workplace, and when he arrives, he has too little time for mailswapping as he also has other scene activities.
  
  In "The next sound standard", Sed of Dilemma reviews some soundcards, which has become an important topic as the GUS is not built any more. Nevertheless Gus PnP gets the highest rating together with Core Dynasonix. "Covers and paper-art" by Szum deals with a rather new aspect of swapping (at least there have not been many articles in international magazines yet that dealt with it), namely how to design your disk-covers. Very interesting. The next two articles, "Oh mum! I know 3lite dudes!!!" and the "Little Polish scene report" were written by Szum, too, but the most interesting article involving Szum is certainly the interview with himself. It is long and personal.
  
  The last text in the "Articles" part is the Hidden Part List, which was once maintained by Phoenix/DC5 and now gets updated by Rod/Mandula. That's the article with the sloppy formatting I mentioned above while talking about Fleur's interface.
  
  The reviews in Fleur #2 are mainly sorted by the parties whose stuff is reviewed, but there is also a special article in which Ezah writes about some of the best demos and intros by Pulse. He plans to do that in every issue with another group. In my opinion the Reviews corner is interesting.
  
  Finally, there are a big bunch of interviews (Atx, Byter, HP, Illusion, Manka, Orome, Rod, Szum, Tudor, Visualize) and a party report about Evoke '98 by D-Lee coming along with six unique photos.
  
  Fleur #2 was one of the best diskmags of its days; it met the expectations I had had.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:42:15