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 Imphobia #3 by Imphobia
• Imphobia #3
  
  In Imphobia #3 (July 1992), page-wise scrolling was replaced by line-wise scrolling inside the articles. The title logo by Zorlock was very nice in my opinion. Like in issue 2, there was a music column. This time, there was also a concert calendar, but it
  featured only gigs in Belgium. There was an announcement of a new diskmag named Creativity, which was never released. What might be interesting is that the concept of what eventually became the Scene.org Awards was already proposed by Scorpio in an article in this issue of Imphobia. Imphobia #3 contained yet more nonsensical articles such as a happiness test. One article was about the Imphobia crew having purchased a fax; it featured a list of activities that could be done using it, such as sending jokes. The interview partners of this issue were members of the groups Cocktail, Cascada, EMF, Kefnet, Paranoid and TRC; all of these interviews were based on interview forms instead of actual chats. Every group representant was asked the same questions. There were also some graphics such as the adverts (just like in issue 2) and a rendered picture by Zorlock as well as Wizard's explanation of 3D transformations, a coding tutorial, so to speak. Overall, the amateurish, teenager style of the two previous issues was kept.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:51:10
• diskmag MS-Dos Imphobia #2 by Imphobia
• Imphobia #2
  
  Imphobia #2 (April 1992) did not differ much from the premier issue. The graphics looked quite similar, although there were some differences. For the first time the title logo was painted by Pascal Loef aka PL. There was a new font, which was far more legible than the old one, and there was also a new mouse cursor, which looked better than the previous one. New features that were unique to this issue (they no longer appeared in issue 3) were a background picture behind the text and a short intro scroller before the mag.
  
  The controls were a bit different from the previous issue: Keyboard no longer worked, and line-wise scrolling was no longer supported, just page-wise one. A new feature was that you could print articles.
  
  Content-wise, this issue featured the usual columns like reviews, as well as some new things, such as graphical adverts
  and a Front News corner. In the article "Boyz don't cry", Scorpio and a girl named Suzy gave tips for boys who want to get a girlfriend. There were an interview with members of the group Access Denied and a really simple logo drawing tutorial (how to calculate the number of pixels you can spend per letter). A member of the Dutch group Deca had written a reader's letter about the review of their demo, which had been published in the previous issue. Somebody was selling a collection of computer music he had recorded with his Sound Blaster.
  
  All in all, the magazine was still very amateurish and had the aura of a pupils' magazine.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:50:48
• diskmag MS-Dos Imphobia #1 by Imphobia
• Imphobia was the leading PC demoscene diskmag of the first half of the 1990s. Founded in 1992, it issued until 1996. In that period, 12 issues were released. Imphobia was never officially declared dead, but issue 13 has not seen the light of the day until now and it is safe to assume that it will never do so. However, the title picture of Imphobia #13 is available on an Internet server; read more about that at the end of this article.
  
  The main editor of most of the Imphobia issues was Darkness. He officially got into this position in issue 4. Before that, Wizard was the leader of Imphobia. Imphobia was not only the name of the mag, but also the name of the group that released it. The group was based in Belgium with some members from other countries such as Germany (Sam), Switzerland (Numerus) and Malta (Mop). Darkness belonged to the French-speaking ethnicity in Belgium (Walloons), which was one of the reasons why Imphobia was disliked by the editors of the Scenial diskmag, who were Flemish.
  
  All issues of Imphobia basically run in DOSBox, but in issues 6 and beyond the graphics are not displayed correctly, probably because of the use of an obscure video mode. Nevertheless it's possible to read the articles. All Imphobia issues are available at scene.org. The download stats (500-600 for most of the older issues, around 1200 for the latest issues) do not reflect the wide spread of Imphobia and can be explained by the fact that Imphobia was released a long time before scene.org went online.
  
  
  
  Imphobia #1
  
  Imphobia #1 (from February 1992) was subtitled "the one and only European review." Indeed Imphobia was the first European PC diskmag and the first diskmag like the ones we are now accustomed to in the demoscene. It was the first diskmag with VGA graphics and a similar structure like all the demoscene mags after it, the mags of the past and the mags of today.
  
  The original idea came from Wizard of Imphobia, the coder and, at the beginning, the leader of the group. It all started in September 1991. As we learn in the Imphobia #1 editorial, Wizard wanted to create a "review in VGA", which, however, should not be about cracks and that kind of stuff but rather about demos. He started coding and gathered a team consisting of his local scene friends from Belgium, which mainly were Darkness, Scorpio, and Zorlock.
  
  Compared to later issues, Imphobia #1 was of a very low quality. There were a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes, there were not many articles, and the articles were in a poor shape. Imphobia #1 had a BBS list, the usual things like editorial and credits, interviews, charts (but we do not know how these charts were made, as there is neither a voters list nor any other information), information on new scene groups, codes and cheats for games and some other lame articles (e.g. "About Lamers"), accompanied by a stably working but quite ugly interface drawn by Zorlock with a hardly readable font by Zorlock and Darkness. Even in mode 13h, you could have done better. But for that time, it was probably okay.
  
  The controls work using the mouse or the keyboard. You can scroll line-wise or page-wise. On today's computers, you can navigate reasonably through the magazine using the keyboard for scrolling and the mouse for selecting articles.
  
  At the end of Imphobia #1, when exiting the mag, a full-screen picture featuring a list of distribution sites was displayed. This feature is kept for some issues, but the picture changed and the list became longer.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:50:15
• diskmag MS-Dos MS-Dos/gus Hoax#6 by Epical
• Hoax #6
  
  Two years passed without a Hoax issue being released, then in August 1995 the mag that had been considered dead made a re-appearance. It featured an all-new interface with a two-column layout, coded by Mikki with (not so good) graphics by Kapsu and music by Mikki. The "Scene stuff" section is quite
  uninteresting, apart from the regular corners (adverts, messages and news) there were the stories of Epical and this issue of Hoax. The charts categories (35 voters) were groups, demos, intros, diskmags, musicdisks, coders, graphicians, musicians, BBS's, utilities and scene-related WWW pages. The more interesting articles in this issue were in the Interviews section. The interviews were conducted with Darkness of Imphobia and with Der Piipo of Orange. All in all, this final issue of Hoax was rather poor, just like the previous issue, and so it was probably a good idea to stop.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:49:01
• diskmag MS-Dos Hoax#5 by Epical
• Hoax #5
  
  Hoax #5 again was released more or less punctually in August 1993 although it was delayed a couple of days due to a harddisk
  crash. It featured a new interface coded by Feenix with better graphics done by Hega in a higher resolution (640x480 instead of 320x200). The songs were composed by Mikki and Blizzard. The charts featured more categories than before, the new categories were: coders, musicians and graphicians. Group articles were about Coders in Action and X-Pose. In one of the articles, Style of NMS, an Amiga scener, presented his opinion on the PC scene. He said that the PC scene was lagging two years behind the Amiga scene; except Future Crew, PC sceners had not realized yet that design was the most important thing in demos, and there were too many diskmags. But in two years from then the PC scene would take over the lead. That's basically the only interesting article in this issue of Hoax...
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:48:35
• diskmag MS-Dos Hoax#4 by Epical
• Hoax #4
  
  Hoax #4 (from May 1993) started with an intro that culminated in a nice title
  picture by Hega. The music was made by Blizzard. Inside the mag the engine and graphics of Hoax #3 were re-used. The group articles dealt with Eterno, Onyx and Surprise!Productions. There was an interview with Firefly of S!P. Darkness contributed an article about what he disliked about the PC scene. There was a C64 scene report by Rune of Hoaxers. Haze wrote an article in which he stated that there were already too many diskmags in the PC scene. There were also articles about the history and the future of computers and about piracy in South Africa.
• isokadded on the 2008-11-08 17:47:45
• 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