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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/gus fleur 1 by Dilemma [web] & Dinasty
• Fleur was a Hungarian diskmag that was published in the English language. It was released in 1998/1999 and was one of the most popular active diskmags of that time (6th place in the Hugi #12 diskmag chart, 2nd place in Hugi #16, 2nd place in Hugi #18, 4th place in Hugi #19, 5th place in Hugi #20). Nevertheless it got only little support from its readers and stopped releasing already after issue 3. Fleur then merged with the Shine diskmag, and Shine #8 contained all articles that had been submitted for the never released issue 4 of Fleur.
  
  The first two issues of Fleur were edited by Ezah of Dilemma. For issue 3, D-Lee of Exceed took over. Until April 2008 the individual issues of Fleur were downloaded about 1000 times each from scene.org. Fleur is a DOS-based diskmag and can be run on modern systems using the latest DOSBox emulator.
  
  
  Fleur #1
  
  Fleur #1 was released in March 1998 as a co-production of the Hungarian groups Dilemma and Dinasty. In the editorial Ezah
  writes that he started the Fleur project together with Shade and Dfj because he was of the opinion that the scene currently lacked decent diskmags in the English language released on a regular basis and he wanted to help solve this problem.
  
  The code of Fleur #1 was done by Nap of Dilemma with help from Brix of Dilemma, who made the module player. After starting fleur.exe, you get to see a title picture by Xtro of Rhyme, while one of the two music tunes is played. (The music was made by Jabberwock and Ainu.) Pressing a key will bring you to the main menu. The interface of Fleur #1 looks a bit like a mix of Imphobia and the older Shine issues: The text is displayed in a contiguous layout just like in Shine, and in the menu there's a selection bar like in Imphobia. Fleur #1 uses a fixed-width font, and each text line has a width of about 60 characters. The controls are actually keyboard-based although it's also possible to move the selection bar inside the article menu by means of the mouse. Using the keyboard, you select an article by means of the cursor keys up/down. Scrolling is done using cursor left/right, both in the menu and inside the articles. On modern PCs just like mine scrolling occurs very fast, there seems to be no or almost no delay after the keypress, so you need to have very fast fingers in order to read the magazine without skipping pages. That's a bit annoying. Also, switching tunes, which should be possible with the F1 and F2 keys, doesn't work for me.
  
  Fleur #1 is divided in the following sections: Editorial (plus general information on the mag), Common Stuff (PC news, C64 news, messages, adverts, upcoming events), Interviews, Reviews (stuff from various parties), Articles, Party Reports (Hungarian and other parties), Charts, and Party Results. In addition, there are a gallery of hand-pixelled images and a collection of party pictures. There's a nasty bug in the code which has the effect that after looking at a party picture, it is no longer possible to move freely inside the menu, and thus you cannot select every article any more. That's another minus.
  
  The scene related articles have headlines such as: "Photoshop vs. Art", "A totally useless idea" (giving up all groups and creating a scene where friendship rules), "Where those swappers are?", "Craps in demos?", "Why are there so few diskmags?", "The short history of the Hungarian scene", and "Is the modem scene dead?". Interviews have been conducted with Andy, Jabberwock, Reptile, Net and Tradd.
  
  The charts are based on an interesting concept: Apart from international charts, there are also sections where you can vote for the best demos, coders etc. of your own country. If at least ten votesheets from your country have been sent to Fleur, the charts of your country will be published in the next issue. In my opinion that was an interesting idea because it could also encourage people to ask some of their fellow countrymen to vote and thus increase the total number of voters.
  
  As a bonus, the tool mxm2xm is attached to Fleur #1. As the name says, it converts .mxm files to .xm files.
  
  Proofreading of the articles was done by Jabberwock. He did his job quite well, which makes the quality of English in Fleur good.
  
  Overall impression: Fleur #1 contains some interesting articles and has a nice, though buggy interface. All in all, I like it.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:41:04
• diskmag MS-Dos/gus flash #1
• Flash was a German scene diskmag edited by Cosmic of Radical Rhythms. Only one issue was released. It can be downloaded from scene.org (about 780 downloads so far), and it works with DOSBox.
  
  
  Flash #1
  
  Flash #1 was released on May 16th, 1996. It was coded by Internal of Radical Rhythms. All the graphics (title picture and background pictures) were made by Acryl. The music was composed by Keith303.
  
  The magazine is divided in the following sections: "Most interesting news around us", Scene talk, Misc, Coding, Music Corner, Graphics, Interviews'n'more, and "The Flash BBS list". The news corner is rather small and it focuses mainly on German groups. Almost all of the articles are in English, but there are a few German ones as well. The punctuation is poor and most of the articles are also quite short and uninteresting. For example, "The German Demo Scene" is only two pages - I guess a lot more could have been written about it (introduction of all the groups etc., just like in most national scene report articles in diskmags). Most of the articles in "Scene talk" deal with parties (reports, results and invitations). In the Misc corner we are confronted with some poems by Cirion and a few articles about
  general computer related topics. In the coding corner there's only one article, which deals with frame skipping. The music corner also contains only one article, and on top of that it's a short and lame one. The graphics corner with three short articles (1-2 pages) is also very weak. But there are several interviews, with people such as Basehead, Ryan Cramer, Stalker, Alec Empire, T-Frost and Tadee. The reviews are about demos, games, music and ASCII. Finally, there's the BBS list, which contains some detailed information on 13 boards.
  
  All in all Flash #1 is quite a bad magazine.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:30:00
• diskmag Linux Windows Amiga AGA Amiga PPC/RTG Eurochart 48 by Illi Recentes ImperatoreS
• The Official Eurochart is actually an Amiga diskmag. But its 48th issue was released as a cross-platform magazine. It features engines for Amiga, PPC Linux, x86 Linux and Windows. So it can also be read on PC without an emulator. The main editor is Darkhawk of IRIS.
  
  What's also worth mentioning is that the group Talent released one issue of a magazine called Eurochart PC. It was an online magazine and it was available under eurochart.org.
  
  Eurochart #48 can be downloaded from eurochart.dk.
  
  
  Eurochart #48
  
  For Windows users, Eurochart #48 (released in March 2006) comes with the Panorama engine by Chris Dragan, the engine that was originally coded for Hugi. Therefore the sequence is: opening picture, actual mag, closing picture, back to Windows.
  
  The opening picture (which also serves as the closing one) was created by Dr. Doom of IRIS. The panel graphics were created by Darklight of Veezya. There are five tunes, which were made by Nutman of IRIS, Ijon Tichy, KAM_ of IRIS (two tunes), and Myx of Dream Merchants.
  
  Inside the mag, first comes a menu where you can choose between the three parts of the magazine: charts, (actual) mag and gallery. The charts are Amiga-only, the categories are coder, musician, graphician, writer, demo, 64k, 4k, mag and group. Most of the categories are top-20s. Unfortunately the editor forgot to use the "nopush" attribute for the links inside the charts section, so it can happen that you have to click the right mouse button several times after browsing various charts categories in order to return to the main menu.
  
  The gallery features a couple of photos from demoparties. Now about the actual mag part: There are 730 kbytes of articles. First comes the Editorial Zone, which features an Editor's Log where you can read about the making of this magazine. Then comes the News corner. There are a Danish and a Norwegian scene report in this section, with lists of Amiga groups and information on who's the best known members of them. Furthermore, there's an article about the demo division of Deviance, and the reviews are also included in this section: They deal with Sceen #1 (papermag) and various releases from the Amiga demoscene.
  
  The next section is called "Around the scene". In it, the editors take a closer look at the charts and comment several categories. Zerox comes with an article about what the scene was like 10 years ago. The next article is about the group Ram Jam, it's pretty short. Then Wade admits that he is a member of Fearmoths and talks about what productions he has been involved in. Xeron writes about the making of the C64 version of this Eurochart issue. Zerox announces a quiz competition and poses five questions; they can be easily answered with some research on the Internet. The final article from this section that is worth mentioning is "An Inquiry into the Scene", a long academic paper about the demoscene. The other articles can be regarded as fillers (and one of them even deals with the topic "fillers").
  
  After a short section about AmigaOS 4, the primary article of which is the review of AmigaOS 4, the Debate section follows. Two articles from this section are "Fun equals Crap" and "Patching Demos?", both written by Darkhawk. There's also Wade's "Life without the Scene", which was previously published in Pain. It is followed by an article by Darkhawk with comments on Wade's article.
  
  There are interviews with the following people: Azzaro of MAWI, Zenon, Hirasawa (a Japanese Amiga musician) and Frequent of Ephidrena. The Party Corner contains several reports and production reviews, of course from an Amiga perspective, as well as results.
  
  Then comes the Mag Corner. In it, there's an article called "State of the Diskmag Scene", in which Zerox interviews the Amiga diskmag editors Browallia, Rumrunner and Darkhawk. Darkhawk then reviews various Amiga diskmags from 2005. There's also a story about the online mag Grapevine, which died again, and two fillers.
  
  After the Mag Corner, the menu lists the Music Corner. This one contains primarily reviews (GooGoo #10, Hacks for Tracks). Finally, the Closing Zone calls for support and the diskmag ends with the Last Words.
  
  All in all it's a good issue with quite a few articles that are worth reading. It's also in a good engine, but some formatting errors are quite annoying (e.g. some ASCII logos are displayed incorrectly as not a fixed-width font has been used for them).
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:28:31
• diskmag intro Windows eed:mag#1
• Eedmag was the first and only "diskmag" made with Macromedia Flash. It was created by Xhale and was a solo project (code, graphics, music and content all by him). The one and only issue was released in the year 1999, and it can be downloaded from scene.org. The abbreviation "eed" stood for "electric eye design", which was a group founded by Xhale and Teis.
  
  
  Eedmag #1
  
  After starting the executable file, you got right into the magazine. There was no separation of menu and text viewer. The menu items were symbolized by gray circles. If you moved the mouse over a circle, the related text would appear. All texts were very short, fitting into the small area where they were displayed - scrolling was not necessary. In the background, some animations were occuring (moving and fading arrows, rotating circles), which disturbed reading a bit. But there was not much to read anyway: In total, there were five texts. Most of them were editorials/credits. There was just one rumour section, in which we could read things like Wojtek offering free anal sex at #pixel every day and the Polish scene having sunk into the Atlantic Ocean.
  
  In the background, music was playing, which would stop once it would be over, so you would have to click the play button in the bottom-right corner if you wanted to listen to it again. There were also squares, clicking which your web browser would be pointed to some worldwide-web pages.
  
  That's all. "It's not much", would be an overstatement. It's virtually nothing.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:27:33
• diskmag MS-Dos MS-Dos/gus Dragon #4 by Dragon (PL)
• Dragon was a Polish diskmag edited by Aborygen. Its fourth issue also contained an English Corner. I'm going to review this issue.
  
  All issues of Dragon can be downloaded from scene.org. Dragon #4 was leeched 1200 times so far. The mag works with DOSBox, although not perfectly.
  
  
  Dragon #4
  
  Dragon #4 was released in September 1998. It contains 1.7 MBytes of texts. From these 1.7 MBytes, roughly 150 kbytes are in English. When you start Dragon, you first see the title picture. Then comes the main menu. There are various sections: Scene,
  Coding Corner, Graphics Corner, etc. All the English articles are located in the Scene section. It's 32 articles in total. The headlines occupy exactly one page on the screen.
  
  One of the most interesting articles is "The disintegration of the graphics scene", by Danny of The Black Lotus. He writes in detail why he left the scene. He tells us that he entered the scene when scanning was no business yet, and when scanners became cheap, less talented graphic artists started to scan pictures and edit them instead of creating new pictures on their computers from scratch. In order to prevent scanning pictures from entering the competitions, the compo organizers demanded work-in-progress steps to be submitted. Then the lame graphicians forged these steps. Another reason why Danny doesn't like the graphics scene any more is that there is a website called "No Copy", in which various respected scene graphicians are accused of having copied other artists' (e.g. Boris Vallejo's) works instead of having their graphics based on their own motifs. Because of this site Danny has also been accused of scanning and faking by various visitors of this site, and the people haven't accepted his statement that he is innocent. All of that sucks, and so Danny focuses on his professional life at Eidos.
  
  There's also an interview with Danny, which partly is a repetition of this article. There's a party report about Rush Hours 1998, and tutorials about JPEG compression and Huffman encoding. That's all that is worth mentioning. The other articles aren't really interesting, they are often poorly written and about very trivial topics. One of them is even in the Hungarian language.
  
  What sucks is that the engine doesn't really work. It isn't possible to view the pages with even numbers in continguous articles. In the articles with a two-column layout, the situation is better. Here, it's sometimes not possible to view the last page of an article if the article consists of an even number of columns. In some articles it works with a trick (moving to the last column, exiting and opening the article again), but in some others it doesn't. Very bad.
  
  Credits: The code was done by Tuka of Dragon. The graphics were made by Kobold and Ural of 69. There are five tunes, the composers of which were Hornet of Dragon, Falcon of Pulse, Szudi of Ame, God of Prism, and Kinio.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:26:24
• diskmag MS-Dos Delta #4 by Microforce
• Delta #4
  
  This issue was even smaller than the previous one in terms of English articles: There was just one English article, and it was an uninteresting one about somebody's addiction to drugs. The editors apologized for this, they wrote that they had received letters from English-speaking people but none of them had contained an article. They promised that Delta #5 would contain at least five English articles. Well, Delta #5 was apparently never released.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:19:02
• diskmag MS-Dos Delta #3 by Microforce
• Delta was a diskmag from Paraguay which was primarily made for the South American scene. Therefore most of its articles were in Spanish. But issues 3 and 4 also contained an English section for an even more international audience. The editors of Delta were Byte Revenger and Jeu Azarru of Microforce. All issues can be downloaded from scene.org, and they work fine with DOSBox.
  
  
  Delta #3
  
  Delta #3 was released in January 1996. It contained two articles in English. One was a (true?) story of Hotblood who had some trouble driving some girls to some club. The other was a tutorial for beginning musicians about samples. It was pretty long and interesting. You learned about where to get samples from and what to do with them. The other texts in the menu section were the editorial and information how to support and where to get Delta.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:18:38
• diskmag MS-Dos MS-Dos/gus Defcon #2 by K!Prod
• Defcon was a French diskmag. While the first issue was only in French, the second and last one was mixed-language (French/English). The main editor was Arrakis of K!Prod. Defcon #1 and #2 can be downloaded from scene.org (about 1200 downloads). Defcon is DOS-based and can be run using the latest version of the DOSBox emulator.
  
  
  Defcon #2
  
  While Defcon #1 (September 1997) was fully in French, Defcon #2 (April 1998) also included a lot of English articles. You could always switch between French and English in the menu where you selected the articles. Many of the articles were available in
  both languages.
  
  After the unspectacular intro and Made's title picture, the reader came to the main menu, where he could select the section he wanted to read. The sections were: Edito, Code, Coup de Gueule, True Life, Interview and Delirium. In the Code section, almost all the articles were bilingual, except a French article about Huffman encoding. They dealt with topics such as anti-aliasing, optimizing division operations and radix sorting. There was also the announcement of a coding contest. The Coup de Gueule section had only one article in English, and it wasn't saying much to me. In True Life, the English articles dealt with Linux and Internet under DOS. The interviews were all in English only, the interview partners of this issue were Judge Miguel, Shodan, Skal, Toshi, Unreal, Probe, Veckman and Xman. Everybody got roughly the same questions. The Delirium section contained only one English article, a not so
  interesting one about how people get accustomed to using Linux with time. That was all you could find in this issue.
  
  The music of this issue was made by Alexel of Realtech, Dune of Orange, Jogeir of Pulse, PLi$CaNN of K!Prod, Snes of PolyMobil and Traven of Syndrome. For the graphics, Filter of ToadStood, Made of Bomb, Sicca of Psyko, Tec of Scarface and Veckman of Scarface are credited.
  
  Something that is special about Defcon (and the reason why so many graphicians have been credited) is that every section has its own design. That's cool. What's a bit annoying is that some parts of the design are displayed in the foreground of the texts, and so parts of the texts aren't readable unless you scroll a bit back and forth.
  
  A nice mag all in all, if you're interested in the coding articles, otherwise it's a bit poor of contents for a non-French-speaking reader.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:17:51
• diskmag MS-Dos Daskmig #8 by inf
• Daskmig #8
  
  The disaster happened after Daskmig #7. Dominei left the staff due to unknown reasons. He told me later that he was unsatisfied after doing most of the work and having Calvin get all the fame for Daskmig. Hybris and Calvin were not at all pleased with this abrupt split. Hybris had to write the editorial as a substitute for Dominei. In the end, the whole magazine turned out to be more serious than the staff had wanted it to be. This prompted Calvin write in the infofile: "Enjoy this mag. We hated making it."
  
  Daskmig #8, from September 1995, was the last issue of Daskmig. Soon after that, Calvin officially left the scene and dropped his handle.
  
  
  Daskmig 2000
  
  In 1998/1999, rumour had it that there were plans to resume Daskmig as a CD-ROM magazine called "Daskmig 2000". But these plans didn't materialize.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:16:09
• diskmag MS-Dos Daskmig #7 by inf
• Daskmig #7
  
  Daskmig #7 was released in July 1995. With excellent graphics by TMK of INF and music by Outzider of Darkzone and
  Substance of Illusion, it was quite impressive. There were articles about various trends in the scene, such as the scene getting commercialized, and a French scene report. Two coding articles dealt with the subject of filling polygons. There were interviews with BigJim of Valhalla, ReeBoK of Surprise!Productions, Gandalf of Infiny and Kaiowa of Sorrox. The Misc corner mostly dealt with music.
  
  While Daskmig #6 had no charts, this issue had some. They were based on the votes of 78 people. The categories were: demogroups, demos, intros, coders, musicians, graphicians, phrases and demoparties.
  
  Another good issue all in all.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:15:39