pouët.net

Adok information 1133 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]

• diskmag MS-Dos/gus budyn#2 by budyn.staff [web]
• Budyn #2
  
  Budyn #2 from December 1997 was one of the biggest diskmags ever released: It contained 2.4 MBytes of articles. But most of them were in Polish. The English corner was small (30 articles).
  
  Apart from adverts and news, there were two interviews (Laila and Smade), a few party reports, only one coding article (about streams in Pascal) and several other texts. I personally found the interview with Laila of Crusader Girls interesting. Crusader Girls
  was a sub-group of Crusaders which consisted of girls only. It was founded at some edition of The Gathering (probably TG 1996). One fact that is very interesting is that the coder of this demo, Candy, didn't know how to code before the party except for HTML. Yes, she learned coding at the party - I'm surprised that this is possible.
  
  All in all the English corner was not too bad, but it was small.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:02:48
• diskmag MS-Dos budyn#1 by budyn.staff [web]
• Budyn was a merger of the two Polish diskmags Smok and Izwestia. It was mostly in the Polish language, but its first and second issues also had small English corners. Budyn issues can be downloaded at scene.org (most of the issues have been downloaded around 1000 times), and they work with DOSBox.
  
  
  Budyn #1
  
  Budyn #1 was released in June 1996. Its main editor was Astra, the former main editor of Smok. The English corner occupied one column in the menu. There were interviews with Darkness, Necros, Rage and Schwarz and a couple of so-so articles. Unfortunately on my PC the engine is buggy and skips some pages inside the articles so that it's not possible to read them completely. That's why I'm not able to write anything more about Budyn #1.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:02:17
• diskmag MS-Dos MS-Dos/gus Belgian Scene Report #13
• Belgian Scene Report was a diskmag from - you guessed it - Belgium. First it was published as a text file. From issue 11 on until the last issue, #13, it was embedded in a graphical engine. The editor of the first five issues was Bytemare, of issue 6 Hacker and of the other seven issues Baxter.
  
  Belgian Scene Report can be downloaded from {scene.org}. Each issue has been downloaded about 600 times. Issues 11 and 12 work fine with {DOSBox}. With issue 13 I'm having problems.
  
  The regular elements of BSR that can already be seen in issue 1 are news and a list of Belgian groups with some information about each of them. In some of the earlier issues also whole infofiles of groups were published. Moreover, starting with issue 2 there are also some articles and (not scene-related) stories. For example, issue 8 contains an interview with French coder Skal. In issue 12, an interview with Darkness of Imphobia can be found. There are also some (short) party reports in some issues of BSR.
  
  The last three issues are executable files and start with a title picture. Then the actual mag begins. With the buttons at the bottom of the screen you select the section you want to read. By moving the mouse to the upper or lower edge of the screen and clicking, you scroll inside the current article.
  
  Most of the issues contain between 30 and 50 kbytes of texts. Belgian Scene Report is a small but nice mag all in all.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:01:22
• diskmag Wild becanne 04 by Centolos [web]
• Becanne was a magazine distributed in PDF format. Edited by Humphrey of Centolos, its first three issues were in the Spanish language. The fourth and last issue was in English. All the issues can be downloaded from {scene.org}. They got about 200 downloads each so far.
  
  
  Becanne #4
  
  Becanne #4 was released in February 2005, about a year after the first issue. Like all issues, it spoils the reader with a professional looking layout - one to three columns per page, photos and other images included, various different background graphics. It's 40 pages in total, including the front and back covers. The contents include an interview with the coder Trace of xpslv, a Bcn Party 100 report, a tutorial about texture generation (it's already part 3, the previous parts were published in the Spanish language issues of Becanne), an article about German demo parties, and several one-page-long statements by individual sceners such as Crest, Spock, Sergeeo and ps.
  
  It's a nice magazine all in all, and it makes the reader wonder what he has missed due to his lack of knowledge of the Spanish language.
  
  As we can read in the Editorial, Humphrey didn't want to remain the editor of Becanne. He thought it would be better if a fresh spirit came to the magazine once in several issues. Too bad nobody wanted to become the new main editor of Becanne and so the magazine stopped issuing.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:58:53
• diskmag MS-Dos bad news #4 by Pulse [web]
• Bad News #4
  
  Bad News #4 was released in April 1996. After Niko of Pulse's wonderful title picture you came to the main menu, which had the same sections as in Bad News #3. The main graphics were drawn by Sketch of Pulse. Unfortunately the contrast within the
  background picture was slightly high, which disturbed reading a bit. The tunes were made by XTD and Scorpik, both members of Pulse.
  
  The charts categories this time were groups, demos, intros, coders, graphicians, musicians, swappers, diskmags, musicdisks, slideshows, games and films. There were no Polish charts any more, just world charts. 94 people voted, which is quite a lot.
  
  Apart from the usual columns, the scene sub-section of the English Zone featured articles about animations in demos and swapping as well as party reports and six interviews (Darkness of Imphobia, Metal of Analogue, Unreal of Pulse, Maf of Camorra, Gatekeeper of Xtacy, and Yarpen of Substance). The Forum sub-section contained articles on metal music, computer games, capital punishment, Toy Story and Windows 95.
  
  It was another nice issue for the time, although it would be rather weak compared to today's diskmag standards.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:58:10
• diskmag MS-Dos/gus bad news #3 by Surprise!Productions [web]
• Bad News was a Polish diskmag that also contained an English section in some of its issues. The main editor of the issues I'm going to review here was Akira of Surprise!Productions, later a member of Pulse. All reviewed issues can be downloaded from {scene.org} (about 700 downloads so far), and they work using {DOSBox}.
  
  
  Bad News #3
  
  Bad News #3 was released in October 1995 as a co-production of Substance, Surprise!Productions and The Grid. It was coded by Sebl of The Grid. The graphics were from Sketch of
  Surprise!Productions. The music was created by Falcon of Substance, Key G of Substance, Raiden of Substance and Scorpik of Surprise!Productions.
  
  After the cute title picture the reader would get to the main menu, where he could choose from among the links Welcome, The Charts, Polish Zone, English Zone, Credits and Advertisement. In total it was more than 800 kbytes of articles, about 100 kbytes of that in English.
  
  The charts were about groups, Polish groups, demos, Polish demos, intros, Polish intros, coders, Polish coders, graphicians, Polish graphicians, musicians, Polish musicians, swappers, Polish swappers, diskmags, unpopular and lame sceners, games, paper magazines, women, films and drinks. 45 people had voted.
  
  In the English Zone, we could find news and rumours as well as "crazy news" (invented fun stuff). There were interviews with Ervin of Abaddon and Gredon of FSN, articles about ripping samples, disk stealing and why there were no swappers charts in other diskmags. There were also some demo reviews, party reports and a quotes corner.
  
  All in all the English Zone of Bad News #3 was quite good compared to other diskmags from those days. The level of grammar was not ideal though.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:57:37
• diskmag MS-Dos Autark #1 by N-Factor
• Autark was a diskmag released by the German group N-Factor. Its main editor was Diskhawk. Only one issue was released. Then Diskhawk's harddisk crashed and he didn't have any contact to the scene for almost a year. Moreover, since too few people participated in the diskmag, Diskhawk gave Autark up.
  
  Autark runs on modern PCs even without DOSBox, but there's no music playback as no EMS memory is detected. With {DOSBox}, music playback works, but it slows down the magazine a lot. Autark #1 (and the small preview issue released two months before) is available at scene.org, from where it has been downloaded approximately 450 times.
  
  
  Autark #1
  
  Autark #1 was released in August 1996. Its interface differs from the interfaces of other demo scene diskmags in a refreshing way. The code comes from Prodatron, the graphics from CiDER, and the music is from The Rew of Nostalgia, KB and C.O.N.S. of N-Factor.
  
  The interface runs in the mode 12h (640x480, 16 colours) and has a remarkable graphical quality for only 16 colours. After a short intro (zooming Autark-logo) you get to the main screen. In the upper half of the screen the editorial is displayed, on the bottom there is an Autark-logo. From the bottom, the article menu scrolls upwards by split screen till about the half of the screen height. In the left window of this article menu you select the section (General, Charts, Scene, Politic, Music), in the right, vertically scrollable window the article headlines and the authors of the selected section are listed.
  
  As soon as you have chosen an article or quit the article menu by pressing the right mouse button, the article menu scrolls downwards again, and the selected article (or the article that was active before exiting the article menu) gets displayed. If you move the mouse downwards to the Autark-logo, the Autark-logo gets replaced with a list of commands like Print or Quit. You can select these commands either by clicking on them or by moving the mouse on them and then moving to the bottom of the screen. Inside the articles, you scroll like in Imphobia. Keyboard support is available, too.
  
  A background picture is displayed beneath the articles. The text display features multiple colours, several fonts (including fonts with a non-fixed width), various formattings, graphics inside the articles and links. Furthermore, articles can be printed and saved to the harddisk.
  
  Autark #1 is bi-lingual; while the scene corner is mostly in the English language, the politics corner is almost entirely in German. About 25 people have written articles, among them also some non-sceners. In total the mag contains almost 600 kbytes of text in a bit less than 100 articles.
  
  Apart from the usual charts (top 15; categories: groups, demos, intros, parties, coders, musicians, GFX-artists, mailswappers, BBS's, homepages, diskmags, beers; number of voters: 50), party-invitations, party-reports and results, news, messages and adverts, the topics are mainly mailswapping and the 8 bit scene. The interviews partners of this issue are Fuzzel of Masque, and IronEagle. There's one coding-related article, which deals with 2D bitmap waving. The scene section also contains some reviews. The politics section is mostly about the Transrapid (very extensive report!) and various concepts of society forms. Furthermore, there's a music section with e.g. a report of the Loveparade 1996.
  
  All in all it's a good first issue and it is a pity that it remained also the last one.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:56:42
• diskmag MS-Dos Armor Of Gods 4
• Armor of the Gods was a diskmag from Russia that was released in the years 1997 and 1998. The first three issues, edited by Warhawk of Religion, were almost completely in the Russian language. The fourth and final issue, edited by Programmer of Universe, had an English and a Russian section.
  
  Armor of the Gods is available at scene.org. The fourth issue has been downloaded about 100 times. On my modern PC, it doesn't work. If run with DOSBox, the title picture is displayed, but I haven't found out how to get to the main menu - there's no response to keypresses or clicks.
  
  
  Armor of the Gods #4
  
  Armor #4 (subtitle: "Reborn") is from July 1998. The engine was coded by Warhawk. The pretty nice title picture (it's "Celia", which got the 15th place at The Party 1997) was drawn by Made of Bomb, and the background graphics are from Greenpix7 of Universe. The music comes from Tangerine of T-Rex and Xhale.
  
  There is a very smooth transition from the title picture to the main menu. The AOG main menu itself is divided into three parts, like in Imphobia: The part on the top of the screen contains the AOG logo, in the middle there is the text window with the background gfx and on the bottom there are some more graphics and, instead of a progress bar, the name of the current article.
  
  Now let's come to the controls. AOG is mostly controlled by mouse, the keyboard can only be used for scrolling in the articles but not in the main menu. You select an article from the main menu by clicking on its name with the right mouse button and scroll by moving the mouse to the left or right screen edge. The right mouse button exits the current article or, in the main menu, the whole mag. That's very much the same as in Imphobia. To get into the music menu, you have to move the mouse cursor to the bottom edge of the screen, which reminds me of Autark. Then a small and nice-looking music menu gets displayed. It looks like a rectangle and contains the buttons "stop", "play", "select tune 1", "select tune 2", like we know them from stereoes, a stereo-system-style display, a volume control and the name of the current tune. If you move the mouse upwards, this music menu vanishes again.
  
  The design of the text windows is very much like in Imphobia: the text window is split into two columns, each of a width of 38 characters and a height of 15 lines. If you scroll backwards and forwards, however, it always scrolls by two columns to the left or to the right (the same as if you answer the question "Do you want to force a FULL (80 columns) scrolly?" in the Imphobia set-up menu with yes).
  
  Only in the main menu more than one text-colour is used. The font in the articles themselves is mono-colour. But the interface supports the possibility of embedding pictures into the text, which is used in some articles.
  
  After leaving the mainmenu, the mag exits and displays an ending ascii before returning to the OS.
  
  About the text-design: There are some annoying mistakes. For example, in the main menu there is a section-headline on the bottom of the left column, and the first article-headline of this section is displayed in the right column. In the articles themselves things like this occur as well. I even spotted a headline-in-between on the bottom of the left column and its
  underlines in the right column. There are also some tables which would have easily fitted into one column but are split into two columns. That makes reading harder and is really bad text-design. On the other hand, the pictures which were inserted into some articles make the texts more lively and contribute a lot to the atmosphere of the mag.
  
  AOG #4 is divided into three sections, the International Section, the Russian Section and some "Interesting Stuff" at the end of the mag (in English). These sections are divided into several sub-sections. The sub-sections of the International Sections are Main (editorial, news and rumours), Party (invitations, reports and results), Articles ("How to make the best demos", "Tips for IT to XM Conversion", "Friendly Sceners" and others), Interviews (Virago, GooRoo and Amusic), Charts (top 10 demogroups, graphicians, composers, coders, demos), Hardware (only one article: "Soundcards Review") and Nonsense (short stories and jokes). All in all AOG #4 contains 500 kbytes of articles (according to the file_id.diz). 38 people contributed to the charts, mostly Russians.
  
  Many of the English articles were taken from the Coders F/X BBS Newsletter or from other diskmags. This "recycling" of articles was done with the permission of the other magazine editors who were parts of The E-Mag Network [TEN], a mailinglist where some diskmag editors exchanged articles.
  
  Moreover, AOG #4 contains a Graphics Gallery with the pictures "Angelic Particles" by Danny and Louie, "Trapped" by Orome, and "Just another Story" by Orome. What motifs would you guess they have? Right, hand-pixelled uncompletely dressed women.
  
  The news sections are small. The international news have mostly been gathered from the votesheets and are sorted by the people who have sent them. In total there are about three columns of international news. The Russian news section is larger. There is also a nice feature: After each news Programmer has added a value in percent indicating how probable it is that this news is true.
  
  What else is in AOG #4? Well, there are lots of spelling errors in the non-[TEN] English articles and the mainmenu ("Mekka and Symphosium"), and some party-results that use the Windows charset were not adjusted to DOS ASCII.
  
  Moreover, attached to the mag, there is a zip-file which contains an example program to the Russian Vesa tutorial by Warhawk.
  
  From a technical point of view Armor of the Gods #4 is great. And in contrast to some other diskmags which are technically also great, Armor doesn't lack international content. 500 kbytes is a large text-size compared to other PC diskmags of those days, and that's good even though many articles were already published elsewhere.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:55:43
• diskmag MS-Dos MS-Dos/gus AnotherMag #1 by Tobakk Porno & Fyrverkeri
• Anothermag was officially a diskmag by the groups Tobakk Porno & Fyrverkeri. In reality it was mostly the work of one person: XCene. He made the code and most of the graphics, and was also the editor. Only one issue was ever released.
  
  On modern PCs Anothermag runs perfectly even without DOSBox. It can be downloaded from scene.org from where it has been downloaded a bit more than 700 times (including another location at the scene.org server).
  
  
  Anothermag #1
  
  Anothermag #1 was released in February 1998. Featuring music by Smash of Tesko and Jogeir of Pulse, it was presented in a rather conventional way: After the quite good title picture (by dineS of Contract) came the main menu where you
  selected the article. The entire mag was controlled using the keyboard, and controlling it was quite hard as the cursor was moving fast. Inside the articles, which were displayed in an Imphobia-like two-column layout with a mono-colour fixed-width font, you scrolled using cursor left/right. A progress bar was displayed at the bottom of the screen. It was not working perfectly, as it had a fixed width and in articles that consisted only of a few columns it would keep moving for a lot of time once the last column was reached. Fortunately you didn't have to wait for the bar to reach its final position, but could exit the article or scroll back at any time.
  
  After the editorial, the first section inside the magazine was the charts. There were 15 voters, and the categories were demos, intros, fast-intros, utilities, Rectum Cauda handles, diskmags, babes, wristwatches and superheroes. All entries that were voted for were listed. Next came the "What?! Scene" section. It consisted of messages, advertisements, news, an article about demos written by Vastator and the results of Piffi's coding compo which had been announced in V.o.l.v.O #1. That was all for the scene section. Then there was a section with miscellaneous articles called "Universe Uncovered". The first article, a McDonald's FAQ, was the only article inside this diskmag that was in Norwegian language. The other
  articles were about AIDS research (can HIV be spread via oral sex?), a conspiration theory concerning Nokia, MDMA (ecstasy) and that a 7 Hz sound can kill a chicken. Finally, there was a "GamerLamer Sexxion" in which there was just one article, which dealt with the game Haemal.
  
  All in all Anothermag #1 was a very small and not too interesting diskmag.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:54:04
• diskmag Windows Amnesia #1
• Amnesia was a diskmag by Paranoid, a former member of Eclipse. Its only issue can be downloaded from {scene.org}; it has been downloaded about 160 times so far. The diskmag is Windows-based and works on modern PCs without any problems.
  
  
  Amnesia #1
  
  Amnesia #1 was released in March 1999. Although it is supposed to be a demo scene diskmag, it also contains many articles about hacking, phreaking, and piracy.
  
  The mag comes with an installer. The interface was coded in MS Visual Basic 4.0. It is pretty simple, runs in windowed mode, has MIDI music (which unfortunately cannot be stopped) and is without any graphics. The reason is that Paranoid could not find any graphician or musician who was willing to do something for his mag in time.
  
  The mag runs in a black window with a size of 640x480 that is displayed in the center of the screen. So if you want a full-screen view, change your screen resolution to 640x480. On the top of the window, the name of the current article, icons for returning to the menu, switching to the next or previous article and quitting the mag are located. Below that, there is a red Amnesia 'logo' in a Windows standard font; that is why Paranoid credited the "Microsoft font drawers" for the graphics. The text is displayed in an ordinary RTB control. It is stored in the Rich Text Format (RTF), so it supports various fonts, colours, sizes, styles etc.
  
  After exiting the mag, the credits are displayed. You can stop the program with a simple mouse click.
  
  250 kbytes of texts are in this issue, which is quite a lot considering that Paranoid has written most himself. It's 35 articles in total.
  
  In the Editorial and the following texts, such as "Amnesia Technical Info", Paranoid makes excuses for the delay and anticipates possible criticism regarding the interface, the articles, etc. That was a good move. The readers see that he is honest and realistic. In general his writing style is relaxed, the texts are refreshing to read and in a good English. Paranoid gives the magazine a "voluntary age classification" of 15 or over. He warns that illegal topics, such as piracy, hacking, and phone fraud, are covered in the mag too, but nobody should complain about it to him because that is the free nature of the mag. Nothing will be censored.
  
  In "Eclipse - Some Information" Paranoid states that he wanted to get a small crew together before releasing the mag. He had been in the rather successful group Eclipse back when he was active on Amiga. This crew also released the original "Amnesia" diskmag. Most of the former Eclipse members he now asked to re-join forces, however, said they did not have enough time for the scene. So in the end, Paranoid was the only one left and decided to dissolve the ghost-group. He knows that it can be dangerous to produce something without assistance, without people he can rely on for graphics, music, articles, etc. But he hopes that a gang of regular Amnesia supporters will be built up with time. Then a group will not be necessary anyway.
  
  "Amnesia Vs The World" should actually be called "Amnesia Vs The World Wide Web". Paranoid explains why he decided to publish Amnesia as a diskmag rather than an online magazine.
  
  Since the mag was so heavily delayed, it contains some old, outdated articles. An example is the following text, "Essential Scene Links!". As Paranoid writes, he only did some quick editing before finishing the mag. So some important new sites are missing or wrong. The links mainly concern the demo scene, and there are only a few warez sites. All addresses have a few lines of comments. More URLs are located in the "Amnesia Scene Directory", however without any comments.
  
  This issue contains three interviews: one with Paranoid himself, one with a famous demo scener (Marvel of Future Crew) and one with an underground BBS scener (Tornak). The serious questions are customized for each individual, and all interviews are rounded off with some fun questions: for instance, what the guys would do if they had to live alone on an island and were allowed to take only three things with them, who the sexiest woman is and what they were wearing when filling in the interview form. Good.
  
  Some of the General Scene articles are already known from Hugi, such as "Ramblings On The Scene", "Computers For Mankind!" or "Linux Hate Campaign!". They were written by Paranoid. Some other articles were taken from scenelink.org, a mainly warez/underground scene support site, and finally, some texts were made exclusively for Amnesia. One of them is "Prophets of Doom!". Here Paranoid presents his views on the debate whether the scene is dying, that had been initiated by some incorrigible pessimists. He says things like, it had been believed that the scene was dying years ago, when he was still active on Amiga. Nevertheless, in his opinion the PC scene is only a poor cousin of the old Amiga scene which he lists arguments for along with suggested remedies.
  
  "Warez Sites Are Shit" is harsh criticism on the semi-commercial, entirely scene-unrelated warez sites that dominate the Internet underground. In the following article, "Emulation Zone", Paranoid reviews some video game emulators for PC. Next comes advice for people who want to start a new scene group. The article ends with the self-ironic sentence: "There ya go, follow these steps, and your group could become the next Razor 1911 or the next Future Crew - ignore them, and your group will become the next Eclipse! ;)"
  
  "Killing Modem Time!" is a rather humorous article with some suggestions on what you can do while downloading something off the net or a BBS. It was written while Paranoid was downloading Netscape Communicator 4.
  
  The General Scene section ends with an article that is completely unrelated to the scene: In "Video View!", Paranoid reviews and rates several movies.
  
  The next section is called "Hacking + Phreaking". It contains three articles: a brief (well, 26 kbytes!) history of hackerdom, taken from scenelink.org, an article about "The Secret Warez Underworld", which was originally published in the commercial magazine Forbes, that might be good for a laugh for people who are involved in the warez scene, and an entertaining text by an anonymous person using the nickname "PhreakMaster P" about his experiences with a phreaking technique called carding.
  
  The last section, "Amnesia", contains everything that did not fit any other section. "The Melting Pot" is a collection of snippets, i.e. "small thought-provoking pieces" that could not be dragged out to full articles without digressing. Everyone is welcome to send in any thoughts for this column. The "Amnesia MailBag" contains some real letters sent to Paranoid and some that were invented. Amusingly, we also find a so-called "Hugi^Amnesia VoteSheet" in the diskmag, which is the votesheet that was attached to Hugi issue 11 - another indication that some articles are already a tad old. Finally, Paranoid introduces a few diskmags (Hugi, Fleur, and Pain) to the readers and says goodbye till the next issue.
  
  Amnesia contains some very good articles. One clearly sees that Paranoid is no beginner. If he had found enough supporters, improved the outer appearance of the mag and released Amnesia on a semi-regular basis, it could have made it to the top of the PC diskmag scene.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 16:53:09