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Saxonia Issue 03 Part 018
What happened to the diskmags?
By Rumrunner/VOID
l
I have often found myself wondering what has happened to all the diskmags
that have disappeared throughout the years. Strangely enough I have found
something many of these have in common. And no, it's not just a lack of
support, atleast not concerning those who went out a couple of years ago.
If we consider the biggest diskmag ever to have hit the Amigascene, namely
Grapevine by LSD, we can take a look at what happened. This mag started out
as a little messagebox, with a rather simple user-interface. It all
consisted of a textscreen, a coppereffect in the background and capability
of changing textscreens back and forth with left and right mousekey. It
was presented by some images being shown before the "mag" itself started.
Then, with issue five or six, it became a diskmag as we know it today. The
code was a very stable one and had support for cliparts and other handy
features, including the wellknown "hidden message" thingy. When you pressed
escape, you could try to type different, let's call them passwords and
you got a little text when you typed a correct one. For those who have not
checked out this, I can reveal that passwords are usually such as pazza,
monthy python and torch, the handles of the men behind the mag. However,
there were no mousesupport, the mag was fully handled by the keyboard,
almost like one of the current mags, guess which one, hehe (although we
are most likely to have mousesupport for the next issue if I get around to
updating the code).
This code had some troublesome sides. It expected to find the files in the
correct path from the root of the disk or whatever you ran it from, thus
making it difficult to run from harddrive. Copying everything to ram: or
rad: solves this problem ofcourse.
In issue seven or eight, the code was much improved, it had search
functions, better/more graphics and mousesupport, although I must admit
that I never miss that when viewing the old mags, I sit in my chair with
the keyboard on my lap and have no problem using it (the keyboard, that is)
but ofcourse, it's nice to have a choice, after all mice are a part of
the Amiga, and has been so since the very start. Also, there are ofcourse
some tasks that are easier performed with the mouse. Anyway, in case you
didn't know the password-function from the old code is still present, but
you never get to see any line saying "type password" in this new code. I
have a feeling that there are many who are used to today's mags who have
pressed escape to exit the mag, only to find out that this doesn't exit
the mag, and you cannot navigate before pressing enter or return. This is
the "secret" function working. Supposedly, in this new code, there are
more articles to be found if you enter the correct code, but I must admit
that I have never searched for these. And while on the subjects of secret
parts or whatever you would like to call such a feature in a diskmag, I
know that atleast the old code had a function which was supposed to only
be available for members who had another password. This is the only case
where I have heard about a kind of internal newsletter included in a
mag spread to the public. Or perhaps it's just a kind of joke, I have never
looked for these passwords.
This new code was used for some issues before it was further updated, I
think that this happened for issue fourteen. This was not a big update
though, as most of what was changed was the topline and one thing that's
convenient on computers faster than the Amiga 500, changing articles with
the arrowkeys works better. The old code switches between articles too
quickly to be able to stop at the one you want to load most of the time.
LSD claimed that this code was all new, and for all I know it might be
true, however, these two changes are the ones a user would experience,
and I have never disassembled the code to see what is really different.
That's not important however, the code does it's job in a very decent way.
Some features were included into the code ever since Grapevine turned into
a real diskmag, and some of them were very much appreciated at the time
most people used disks, the mag loaded as many articles as possible to
memory, thus you wouldn't have to load in one and one, waiting for the load
to finish. I know only one other mag that for sure did this, more about
that later.
Right, that's it for Grapevine, I would also like to say a little about
another English diskmag, Stolen Data from Anarchy. As somebody most
certainly already know, this mag started out as a complement to a papermag,
the code for the first issues were very simple. A module played in the
background, you had some nice copperbars to look at in the background, and
you flipped through pages using the arrowkeys or the F-keys. F-keys only
directed you to a certain page, if for instance a coding tutorial started
at page 24, you could either flick to this page with the arrows or press
for instance F4. This system worked well until the issue where there were
more than ten articles. Then the system came up a little short. There were
more articles on each F-key, you had to select the nearest "shortcut" and
then flick to the start of the article. When many articles started to get
published, Anarchy even split up the mag in several parts, every issue
from the first one came with a menu, the first issues usually had some
demos you also could start from this menu, just like any other packmenu.
In the later issues with this first code, there were several mags to
start, this way the problem of too many articles in such a simple engine
was solved for a while.
Later, a very nice recode was done, at least I liked it. This code is
perhaps the one which reminds the most of Saxonia 1, you had ofcourse a
menu where every article was listed and you loaded the desired one by
entering the number of that article. Articles scrolled just like Saxonia 1,
but over a bigger part of the screen, and there was a backgroundpicture.
Long articles were split up, so I guess that the coders solved the scrolling
the same way I did, printed more than there were space for on the screen
and changed the bitplane-adresses as the user scrolled.
The mag was now trackloaded and the loader was fast, and is also compatible
with faster processors, so there's no cpu-timing in the loaderroutine.
One peculiarity is that even though the mag is trackloaded, you can also
access the files in a filesystem. There's a slight chance that only the
magengine itself was trackloaded and that the articles were loaded by
using dos.library, however I don't think so, as this system is most likely
to be very unfriendly on faster processors. So my best guess is that the
coder wrote a file allocation table where the system expects to find it
and put the real position of the file in question in. If somebody knows
more about this than me, they are welcome to make contact and tell about
this, or even better, write an article for next Saxonia.
Right, this magcode had it's downsides, there were no cliparts, and the
articles were poorly sorted by type.
Then came issue eight of the mag with a completely new code, similar to
Raw's code in many aspects, some differencies in the scrolling however.
The authors claimed that they had an advantage now compared to the previous
code, as the mag was now fileloaded instead of trackloaded. However, issue
nine had more or less the same code as issue eight, but was now again
trackloaded and stayed so throughout issue ten, the last one released.
What's interesting about all these changes are that trackloaded, fileloaded,
new/old code and whatever, there were always loadermenus in front of the
mag, sometimes also even an intro. There were in the later issues also
small slideshows and musicdisks (or rather musicboxes), which is the reason
why issue nine and ten came on two disks, quite out of the ordinary for a
mag that didn't have more articles than what was there.
There's one more mag I want to describe shortly before coming to the point
of the article, this is the mag Deadlock. It started out as a Dimension X
and Rapier production, then became a pure Dimension X-production, before
it ended up in the hands of Anathema. The code was mostly the same all of
the time, but trackloaded in the first issues and fileloaded in the later
ones. It was a nice code, and I liked that they had put the menubuttons
in the top-panel instead of in the bottom-one (although they changed this
in the later issues), like I always say, why follow the standard?
There was support for cliparts, and this mag too loaded as many articles
as possible into memory, atleast the last of the trackloaded issues did.
I think that the more common mags among sceners today, like Raw and
Upstream are known by most people so I don't need to describe these. The
only other mag that I can imagine perhaps need some description is
Oepir-Risti by Citron, and let's say that they had an excellent code,
except that article-splitting was done in a not to userfriendly way.
The pages scrolled and long articles were split up, upon scrolling past
the last page of first, second or whatever part, the next one was
automatically put in place, but you couldn't go back to the previous part
in any other way than starting from the very first page of the article.
Except from that, the code was very decent and a pleasure to use as a
reader.
Now, the main point I wanted to make with this article, is that all the
mentioned mags, and perhaps also those I haven't mentioned, like ICE and
McDisk, have something in common.
Let's start with a close lookup on Grapevine. This grew into the biggest
mag ever seen on the Amigascene, with over three-hundred articles in
every issue. The maineditor, Pazza, even wrote in a textfile following
one issue that he already had over 400k worth of articles for the next
issue 1 packed0 . Every maineditor nowadays must be drooling enough
to short-circuit the keyboard just by thinking of this. So, articles
were obviuosly not a problem, the mag came on three disks since way back
all the way until issue 21. This was not a small issue however. But what
I noticed in one of the articles were that the makers had big plans for
the next issue, aga-support, new crunchers and other new features. Pazza
also left his position as maineditor before this issue.
Think about what I already have said about Stolen Data and take a look at
what most editorials said. Sorry for delay was quite frequent. The mag
even had an editorial team as they called it, so it seems that something
must have been up, since even then they had problems.
When we take a closer look at Deadlock, it seems that there were problems
all along here. The mag started out as a Rapier and Dimension X production
before Rapier disappeared. Some articles reveal that the relationship
between the groups were not all too good. Anathema took over the mag later.
One thing that should be said about this mag is that the code stayed most
the same all the time, a thing I liked a lot since it the code worked well
and stood out from all the other mags. The sad part for me was when they
moved the controls to the bottom of the screen, but that's another story.
Right, take a look now, when did most mags disappear? It's quite clear that
the biggest chance of pulling the oars in is when radical changes happen.
Grapevine had plans, Stolen Data must have had lots of plans considering
all their changes, and Deadlock became the production of another group.
We can compare this to the first EuroChart issues which came from the one
and only Crusaders. When Dr Awesome quit his position as main-editor (if we
can use that name for the production back then, when it was almost a pure
chart), the production got problems and the only way of keeping releases
coming was handing the work over to another group.
Raw also experienced changes during the last issues. Lord Helmet quit as
maineditor and Astro took over. He had quite some work to do in order to
keep up the mag's fame which it got from Lord Helmet.
If there's one advice I can give, it must be not to do too much in one time,
as this is tiresome work, sometimes, one might not see an end to all the
work, and it's easy to say that there's no point in continuing. I have plans
for Saxonia but I prefer to do them one at a time, that way, I can also
spend some of my life on other things. And I don't get tired of it. It's
better to use a code that lacks some functionality than never completing a
new code. If you don't have any cliparts, it better to release the mag
without than waiting forever. And three articles are better than none.
