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Imphobia #6 by Imphobia
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popularity : 56% |
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alltime top: #18958 |
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added on the 2003-02-26 17:16:01 by front243  |
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comments
The beginning journey to a great magazine.
rulez added on the 2005-12-13 09:36:58 by d3pth 
the first imphobia i read, so, major sentimental value, especially realizing for the very first time that i wasted a whole night to the demoscene. :) the new interface was great for the time, although it's a pain to get working right on newer pc's and in dosbox.
Imphobia #6
Issue 6 of Imphobia (from August 1993) finally was the first real Imphobia, the first issue of Imphobia like we know it. It had almost 600 kbytes of articles and a new interface, namely the interface we usually call the "Imphobia interface" - the
interface that has since been copied by other PC diskmags many times although it itself was probably inspired from disk magazines of other computer systems and World Charts by Future Crew.
It worked in a screen mode with a resolution of 640x480
and probably 16 colours. The screen was split vertically into three parts. On the top, there was an Imphobia logo. On the bottom, there were some background graphics, and in the center of the screen, there was the main part, where the main menu, the article selection menu and the articles themselves were displayed. The article text was split into two columns, each filling almost half of the screen width, i.e 38 characters. With the left and right cursor keys, you could scroll through the text. The text moved using a horizontal scrolling effect, which was very smooth indeed.
Basically, this interface was used in all of the next Imphobia issues till the very end. There were only minor changes since, such as 80-columns-wide-text, which was used in adverts, party invitations and some articles, or coloured text (since Imphobia #9), which was scarcely used though, but nevertheless suited the atmosphere well.
Since this issue, Imphobia had its own music player for Soundblaster, and each issue had 3-4 modules from various composers on the PC scene from all over the world. In this issue the music came from Zodiak of Cascada, Redor and CC Catch of Renaissance.
From issue 6 on, Pascal Loef - aka PL - painted most of the graphics of Imphobia. He was, and still is, an excellent graphician whose pictures contributed a lot to the overwhelmingly good atmosphere of the mag.
Now about the contents of Imphobia #6: The main menu listed the sections Edito, Charts, Articles, Interviews and Credits. This structure of the magazine remained unchanged until the very last issue of Imphobia. The Charts were based on the votes of 101 sceners and had the categories groups, demos, coders, gfx-men, musicians, tools/utilities, movies, music groups and games. In the articles section we could find the Front News as well as reports of Cebit 1993, Assembly 1993, stories about the groups Witan, Renaissance, Cybernetic Dreams, Anarchy and Ultraforce, reports about the USA and Australian demo/art scenes, texts about IRC and IRC addiction, various random fillers such as "Are You Cool?" and "A thousand ways to fuck up", the (text-based) advertisements, messages, list of distribution sites and greetings.
The interview partners of this issue were representants of Triton, Avalanche, Extacy, Xography, BlackRain, Epical, Faic, DarkZone, Dust, Onyx, Virtual Visions and Extreme.
All in all Imphobia #6 was the first issue of the Imphobia as we know it: the leading PC diskmag of the early 1990s. It was also the first issue for which Aap of Acme wrote articles.
Issue 6 of Imphobia (from August 1993) finally was the first real Imphobia, the first issue of Imphobia like we know it. It had almost 600 kbytes of articles and a new interface, namely the interface we usually call the "Imphobia interface" - the
interface that has since been copied by other PC diskmags many times although it itself was probably inspired from disk magazines of other computer systems and World Charts by Future Crew.
It worked in a screen mode with a resolution of 640x480
and probably 16 colours. The screen was split vertically into three parts. On the top, there was an Imphobia logo. On the bottom, there were some background graphics, and in the center of the screen, there was the main part, where the main menu, the article selection menu and the articles themselves were displayed. The article text was split into two columns, each filling almost half of the screen width, i.e 38 characters. With the left and right cursor keys, you could scroll through the text. The text moved using a horizontal scrolling effect, which was very smooth indeed.
Basically, this interface was used in all of the next Imphobia issues till the very end. There were only minor changes since, such as 80-columns-wide-text, which was used in adverts, party invitations and some articles, or coloured text (since Imphobia #9), which was scarcely used though, but nevertheless suited the atmosphere well.
Since this issue, Imphobia had its own music player for Soundblaster, and each issue had 3-4 modules from various composers on the PC scene from all over the world. In this issue the music came from Zodiak of Cascada, Redor and CC Catch of Renaissance.
From issue 6 on, Pascal Loef - aka PL - painted most of the graphics of Imphobia. He was, and still is, an excellent graphician whose pictures contributed a lot to the overwhelmingly good atmosphere of the mag.
Now about the contents of Imphobia #6: The main menu listed the sections Edito, Charts, Articles, Interviews and Credits. This structure of the magazine remained unchanged until the very last issue of Imphobia. The Charts were based on the votes of 101 sceners and had the categories groups, demos, coders, gfx-men, musicians, tools/utilities, movies, music groups and games. In the articles section we could find the Front News as well as reports of Cebit 1993, Assembly 1993, stories about the groups Witan, Renaissance, Cybernetic Dreams, Anarchy and Ultraforce, reports about the USA and Australian demo/art scenes, texts about IRC and IRC addiction, various random fillers such as "Are You Cool?" and "A thousand ways to fuck up", the (text-based) advertisements, messages, list of distribution sites and greetings.
The interview partners of this issue were representants of Triton, Avalanche, Extacy, Xography, BlackRain, Epical, Faic, DarkZone, Dust, Onyx, Virtual Visions and Extreme.
All in all Imphobia #6 was the first issue of the Imphobia as we know it: the leading PC diskmag of the early 1990s. It was also the first issue for which Aap of Acme wrote articles.
Wiz/Imphobia typing...
The graphics mode was indeed 640x480. But I used a trick to actually split that screen in three parts. On each frame, I set up a timer IRQ right after the top logo and another one right after the main text. This way I was able to reset the palette 3 times on the screen (one on top and 2 at the IRQ). So basically, I was displayong 48 colours on a standard 640x480x16. The whole problem was to have a very accurate timing so that the IRQ were triggered at the right position. I achieved that by timing the screen when starting the diskmag. This way I was independent of the speed of the CPU and this guaranteed almost 0-glitch display. A difficulty was that most of MOD players were using the timer IRQ as well, conflicting with my display. SO i had to find a solution, but I don't remember it, it was basically 13 years ago... gettin' old... Although PL didn't use all the colors (for the sake of "clean&cool" style), one can see those in actions when the text area fades in & out. It took me 2-3 weeks to get the whole thing right and stable (stability was our prime concern)
Problem with this way of handling video is that it's pretty difficult for emulator to cope with it... Sorry about that...
The scrolling part was also using a VGA trick, that is, reset the frame buffer adress. This way I could move the text-area without using much CPU power.
Another detail was the size of the mag. Basically we had to crunch everything so that it fitted on one floppy disk. Unfortunately, I was quite isolated at the time and finding an LZW compressor/decompressor was very hard for me, as well as learning the VGA tricks.
The graphics mode was indeed 640x480. But I used a trick to actually split that screen in three parts. On each frame, I set up a timer IRQ right after the top logo and another one right after the main text. This way I was able to reset the palette 3 times on the screen (one on top and 2 at the IRQ). So basically, I was displayong 48 colours on a standard 640x480x16. The whole problem was to have a very accurate timing so that the IRQ were triggered at the right position. I achieved that by timing the screen when starting the diskmag. This way I was independent of the speed of the CPU and this guaranteed almost 0-glitch display. A difficulty was that most of MOD players were using the timer IRQ as well, conflicting with my display. SO i had to find a solution, but I don't remember it, it was basically 13 years ago... gettin' old... Although PL didn't use all the colors (for the sake of "clean&cool" style), one can see those in actions when the text area fades in & out. It took me 2-3 weeks to get the whole thing right and stable (stability was our prime concern)
Problem with this way of handling video is that it's pretty difficult for emulator to cope with it... Sorry about that...
The scrolling part was also using a VGA trick, that is, reset the frame buffer adress. This way I could move the text-area without using much CPU power.
Another detail was the size of the mag. Basically we had to crunch everything so that it fitted on one floppy disk. Unfortunately, I was quite isolated at the time and finding an LZW compressor/decompressor was very hard for me, as well as learning the VGA tricks.
Thank you very much for these interesting pieces of information, Wiz. I admire your (and other sceners') coding skills back in the days when, due to technical limitations, it was much harder to make the computer do what you wanted it to do than it is nowadays and to gather the necessary know-how, without easily googling it up, as we can do nowadays.
Does anybody know why Chrome and Firefox say that this is a malicious download?
maybe because of some google shit
2Adok, my Chrome downloads without warning.
PS: The first diskmag I saw! It was cool!
PS: The first diskmag I saw! It was cool!
About 30 years later, I found this diskmag. Had a read to some articles on this diskmag, gotta say that I like reading these. Also, good music selection is offered while reading.
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