Atari Diskmag Reviews
The Atari scene has always been rather mysterious to the scenes on other computer systems. Most PC sceners nowadays, unless they have directly started with PC, come from Amiga or the C64. The number of ex-Atarians in the PC scene is minute. Wide connections exist between the Amiga and the PC scene; most of the best graphicians and musicians are or were active on both systems. Amiga and PC sceners regularly meet at scene parties like The Party or Mekka & Symposium, which are dedicated to both systems. The Atari scene, by contrast, seems to be pretty isolated. Atari compos are not held at the large parties of the PC/Amiga scene; instead, the Atari sceners have their own parties. Through this isolation, the Atari scene has kept some special habits: For instance, demo makers are often also game makers. Also the cracking scene, led by the groups Vectronix and Elite, seems to be still active and connected with the demo scene, unlike the PC, where the warez and the demo scenes are completely unrelated nowadays.
Lately it has become a lot easier for PC sceners to explore the Atari scene. Emulators allow to run Atari programs on MS-DOS based systems, and it works pretty well. In this way we can dive into the secrets and mysteries of the Atari scene by watching its productions and reading diskmags, and can re-establish contact between the two scenes.
Actually what we call the Atari scene is mainly split to two computer systems: the old Atari ST and the modern Atari Falcon. Still the Atarians regard themselves as one scene, although individual groups may focus on individual systems.
Unfortunately, at the moment we can only emulate ST computers on the PC using the free emulator PaCifiST by Frederic Gidouin, but that does not matter so much because the diskmags work on both computer systems. The latest version is 0.49beta, and it's available at http://www.pacifist.fatal-design.com. You also need a TOS image, which can be downloaded at http://ldg.fatal-design.com. You will find a guide how to install it there as well.
The most recent scene productions, including diskmags, are available at the excellent homepage of the Dead Hackers Society, which is located at http://dhs.atari.org. All issues of Maggie, one of the oldest disk magazines that is still active, can be also found at the Reservoir Gods' homepage at http://rg.atari.org; the current issue is #26 (August 1998).
Apart from Maggie, the only international diskmag of significance is Undercover Magascene (UCM). It was originally a German magazine, but it switched its language to English some issues ago and quickly found worldwide supporters. The latest issue is #14 from January 1999. Most other diskmags, such as the French Toxic Magazine and several Polish diskmags, are of local range.
If you are interested in learning more about the history of the Atari Scene, read N.r.t.h.'s article The old Atari (Demo)Scene in this Hugi issue. Here, I want to introduce you to the latest issues of Maggie and UCM so that you get a little picture of the Atari diskmags.
MAGGIE #26 BY MAGGIE TEAM - RELEASED: AUGUST 7TH, 1998
This magazine is distributed in two versions, an ST version and a Falcon version. The Falcon version is said to have a very innovative and sophisticated interface. I could not prove that, of course. The ST interface, by contrast, has basically stayed the same for a couple of years. It was lately redesigned by Tat/Avena, one of the leading coders in the Atari scene, though.
You can see a screenshot of the main screen on the right. Using the mouse, you can click on the individual buttons, which causes a window with the article list to pop up in the center of the screen. Often more than one section 'hides' behind a button, so you have to try out all buttons if you search for a certain section unless its name is equal with a button. Hence it does not allow such a clear view as the Undercover main menu.
Having selected an article, you get to the text viewer, which, albeit looking simple and sterile, is useful. The main part of the screen is occupied by the text window, which also features bold, italic, underlined and dark fonts, which however are not so well readable because of the low resolution. Nice feature: A window in the top left screen corner indicates the number of pages and the length of an article in bytes. Besides, there are buttons for scrolling, saving the texts to files and displaying a related graphic (one per article), if existant. You can also change the colours of the text viewer, which does not make it look nicer though. Music is missing in this ST interface, too, except a tiny sound effect after starting the mag.
In this issue, the Maggie staff has slightly changed: MrPink of the Reservoir Gods has become the new deputy editor. Despite that, CiH (Chris Holland) is still in charge of the mag. MrPink starts his main-editing career with a long editorial about the current development of the Atari scene and future predictions. It is written in a clear, humourous, good English, just like the whole mag. No wonder - its makers come from Great Britain.
In general, Maggie has, compared to other Atari disk magazines, a slightly 'upperground' feeling. That mainly comes from the fact that parts of the articles are devoted to non-demoscene topics, such as computer games, stories, music, and satire. The bright, joyful graphics with the big-headed persons contributes to this impression, too. We also find many realnames in the mag - obviously non-sceners. Therefore we can assume that unlike UCM, Maggie is not only a scene mag, but made for all people who are still true to their Ataris.
While being humorous most of the time, the magazine seldomly trespasses the borders to childishness. In my opinion this is an indication of a high journalistic level.
In total this issue contains slightly less than 100 articles, making up 1.1 mbyte of text. After "The Usual" (stuff) - editorial, contact info etc. -, the section "Newsdesk" follows. It starts with miscellaneous scene news, called "Rumours and Lies". Unlike other mags this newssection is not sorted by groups, but mainly by the relevance of the news. Neither are the news written in the common brief style of news sections, but they are written in the style of articles, including the hidden jokes that are typical of Maggie. Hence it is no wonder that the news column has a size of 30 kbyte. Besides, "Newsdesk" contains some party results, information about Atari.ORG and a column by CiH called "Dirk", containing miscellaneous news about topics like the soccer world-cup. Next come a few letters by readers; then the content of the button "Editorial" in the main menu is finished.
Clicking on the button "Demos" reveals some in-depth reviews of party releases, mainly written by MrPink and CiH, and two articles dealing with non-party releases, namely a GEM Demo and several 128-bytetros. Funny fact: with two exceptions, all 128-bytetros are from Reservoir Gods, the group which is on closest terms with Maggie. Yet they are judged fair.
"Various" leads us first to the "Maggie Mega Charts", heavily commented charts with many different, sometimes weird sections ("best diskmag shells", "biggest IRC addicts"). This charts section is a real bomb; all entries that have been voted for are listed, with no exception, and at the end a "Super League" Table comes, in which all points all mentioned groups got have been added together. When the reader has finished making his way to this huge charts section, which makes up almost 100 kbyte, he will be a little disappointed, though: There were only 45 voters. But I guess that is very much in this small scene.
Miscellaneous articles follow, about topics like Arcade emulation, Five years of Falcon scene, and the story of how Toodeloo/DHS was bitten by a snake and cured. Finally there are some "Programming" articles about MIDI programming, the DSP M-registers, splines, and a tracking tutorial (how is that related to programming?!).
"Utilities" contains reviews of utilities, such as alternative desktops, as well as some "Adverts". The "Games" button is not much of a surprise either: It leads to game reviews, both native Atari ST/Falcon games as well as console games, i.e. Gameboy/NES games that can be played on the Falcon using Reservoir Gods' emulators and games for the Atari game-console Jaguar.
A 'highlight' of the magazine is the large Humour part. There are 15 joke articles in total, among them very entertaining, caustic satires of the Dead Hacker Society's news-page and the Undercover Magascene ("UCM job offer"). The latter one is especially amusing when being read after the other definate highlight of Maggie #26: a review of Undercover #12 with a lenght of 80 kbyte. MrPink describes every detail of the zine and presents his opinion of every single article in the mag. He even concludes the mag review by reviewing and rating the individual authors of UCM #12. Wow! That is a masterpiece of a review. However, after reading it, you actually get quite a negative impression of Undercover #12. MrPink critizises many points, such as the bad graphics and the editors' lack of enthusiasm for the scene and writing, which can be seen in reviews with a long header and an actual text length of 3-5 lines and the heavy usage of many four-letter words and phrases like "can't be bothered" or "don't know".
That is why this review has not got down well with all readers. Some people, like new UCM co-editor pAranoid, accuse Maggie of taking advantage of its quality and position in the Atari scene in order to butcher its main opponent UCM, and therefore they think it would have been better not to publish this article. Indeed a kind of war between the two mags has preceeded the writing of that review. But as Undercover #12 already contained lots of attacks against Maggie, I think the review in Maggie is justified, especially as it is reasonably-based in contrast to UCM's emotional attacks. From a journalistic view, this is the hardly attainable prototype of what a diskmag review should look like.
Furthermore, Maggie #26 contains some other (way shorter) diskmag reviews, a film review, some music reviews, the story of Reservoir Gods' upcoming game Republic, interviews with Kevin Callahan and Draco, articles about the Internet, and a last highlight - the Alternative Party Report, again with a length of more than 100 kbyte! It was written by CiH, partly live, partly after the party. Phew!
Indeed it seems as if the Maggie editors love writing long texts. Well, what editor does not love it? However, in Maggie the articles get sometimes even too long. The news section, for instance, would make more sense if it were written in a briefer style. Sometimes the texts are also too funny for my taste, and funny articles are mixed with serious ones in one section. I would separate them more. Some details here and there do not correspond to my notions either. For instance I do not like CiH's extensive use of ending sentences with ".."; it gives a slightly sad touch to the atmosphere, which simply does not fit Maggie's general style. If I were an editor of Maggie, I would also concentrate more on miscellaneous articles instead of reviews. The discussion forum articles which dominate PC diskmags like Imphobia hardly exist in Maggie at all. But objectively judged, Maggie is a good magazine; it's certainly not only one of the leading Atari diskmags but also one of the best active scene mags globally.
UNDERCOVER MAGASCENE #14 BY POETS OF DECAY - RELEASED: JANUARY 3RD, 1999
This zine is Maggie's direct opponent as it claims to be the leading magazine of the Atari scene. While Maggie has the already mentioned upperground feeling to it, UCM is truely underground; it entirely deals with the demo scene, apart from a few game reviews, a music and a 'hardcore' corner (erotic stories).
The mag is shaped by its main editor Moondog, who advocates a kind of Atari 'patriotism'. He is strongly opposed to people who leave the scene or move to other computer systems, such as the PC. Slogans like "UCM - the voice of Ataririsistance" and "No retreat and no surrender" underline his attitude.
He also shows a very critical, pessimistic attitude towards today's Atari scene and its new trends, like the increasing number of fakedemos, and keeps comparing it with the "good old days", when the German scene was still bigger and dominated the Atari platform. These views were especially expressed in Undercover #12 (the issue that was reviewed in Maggie #26); due to a large number of negative feedback, Moondog slightly retrained himself in UCM #13, trying to show that he still has some enthusiasm, but fell back to flaming and destructive criticism in his reviews in Undercover #14.
Interestingly, he has given up some of his old prejudices at the same time: As Moondog writes in his editorial, he has lately bought a PC in order to surf on the Internet and play games. In this way he really discovered how important the Internet is for the Atari scene, by checking hundreds of group-webpages during a few days. But when he logged on IRC the first time, his euphoria even increased: "With the time I checked that the real interesting stuff is going on in the IRC... yep! That's the so called scene life! I met a lot of people in this time and this is much more addictive than just surfing around!"
It seems as if Moondog has finally realized the advantages of the Internet. A little late for the editor of the 'best' Atari diskmag, eh?
But let's start from the beginning... In contrast to Maggie, only one version of UCM exists, namely the ST version. While older issues partly had nasty bugs, the interface works almost perfectly on PaCifiST since UCM #12. The only little obstacle is that the intro of UCM #13 does not run, but renaming SHELL.BIN in DOS to SHELL.PRG and starting it helps. UCM only crashes sometimes when you move the mouse too fast. Therefore it's better mainly to navigate by keyboard and use the mouse only when needed.
The quality of graphic, especially the main menu background, has also vastly improved since the previous issues. You can see a screenshot of the title screen on the top left. After pressing the space key, you get to the main menu (right). It resembles traditional Amiga and PC magazines very much; you can smoothly scroll upwards and dowards by using the buttons or the cursor keys. Clicking on a headline takes you to the article. In contrast to Maggie, graphics are directly embedded in the articles, the text is in various colours, and there are several fully-working background music tunes.
A peculiarity of Undercover's writing style is the extensive use of poems or song-lyrics in front of the actual articles. Apparently they are supposed to help create the right atmosphere. Usually articles also end with short English or German slogans, such as Moondog's infamous "no retreat and no surrender", "forward ever - backward never", or "affen sind die, die davon tr„umen, ein mensch zu sein" ("monkeys are those who dream of being human"). As the makers of UCM are not native English speakers, the level of English grammar is not as high as in Maggie. In spite of that, the articles are well readable, although Moondog's steadily repeating basic mistakes such as "don't had" instead of "didn't have" is quite embarrassing.
But Moondog is not the only editor of UCM; the mag also has some good writers, such as 505/Checkpoint or the pAranoid/Paranoia. Other members of the regular writers posse are the newsmaster MC Laser, Earx/FUN (the coder of the interface), and UCM's Polish correspondent Grey of Mystic Bytes. Besides, Mad Butscher and Requiem contributed to this issue with articles. In former days also m.O.d/.tSCc. belonged to the staff. Not only is he the best Atari graphician at the moment, but he also was a good writer. However, because of unknown reasons he decided to stop writing for UCM after issue 12.
This Undercover issue is overshadowed by a very sad event: Tommy/Avena, one of the best Atari musicians, has committed suicide. Moondog comments in his editorial, after a song-text that is related to that topic ("Eternity" by Syntec): "I think it's time to look forward, we have lost TOMMY, but we still have his musix, and besides the thoughts to the dead, we shouldn't forget the living ones! [...] Ok, it's another thing if a young guy loses his life, but anyway, we shouldn't fall into deepest mourning because it doesn't help us." I find this a little callous, because it awakens the impression that Moondog just cares about Tommy's music and not him as a person. For me, it is the most depressing thing in the world if a young human being, especially if I know him or her personally, loses his life. A little bright spot: MC Laser has also dedicated an article to Tommy, in which he writes down his thoughts about the tragic suicide and some short interviews with Tommy's group-mates from Avena.
In total, this issue of Undercover Magascene contains about 630 kbyte of articles, which is slightly less than in the previous issues. An interesting text named "The internal UCM writers charts" shows how many articles and kbyte each of the writers has actually written. That is a very nice feature, although it would be hard to count in mags which have more contributors than UCM.
Besides editorial and writers charts, the "Regular" section contains the usual stuff, such as credits, greetings, contacting info, feedback and a preview of the next issue. Next follows the "Scene" section. The "News and Rumours" have a size of 28 kbyte in total, but as they are in a rather brief style, they contain more information than the Maggie "Rumours and Lies" corner. The actual scene section starts with party stuff, to be precise party invitations of Error in Line 99 (German and English versions) and IMParty 8000, furthermore party reports of Unity'98 and Milliways II plus a "realtime article" written at the Milliways II party. Those realtime articles are typical of UCM. If a UCM staff member visits a party, he usually installs a computer somewhere at the party place in which a text editing program is constantly running. Everyone who happens to bump into that machine can write something in the file. These realtime articles usually turn out to be very long but do not have very reasonable contents: in addition to that, people often write in other languages than English. This particular realtime article is a little exception because it is only 12 kbyte.
The next two articles are reports about the Polish and the German scene. Medium size. We learn what happened within the individual groups in the year 1998. The conclusions are quite pessimistic: The Polish scene does not seem to be growing any more, and the core of the German scene consists of no more than 20 people. These articles are followed by Atari Scene Email and Homepage Lists plus new information about Atari.Org.
Furthermore, there are several interviews, based on standard questions such as "Tell us about your life" and "What is your current equipment?" with a little number of personal questions. UCM's scene section also contains Vectronix Newsletter #21 (published by the cracking group with the same name), the FUN News (another newsletter, but about the group FUN), an extensive overhaul of 505's Atari Tracker Scene Report, the first edition of which was published in UCM #12, plus some reviews of tracked music by the same author, an announcement about the ST+ Fanzine, and a review of the highs and lows of 1998.
In "Is there a reason to quit the scene?!", which has the meaningful internal filename "LAMERTAT.TXT" (as you can see after pressing the save button in the main menu and viewing the file in a text editor), Moondog rambles about TAT/Avena, one of the top coders on Atari, who has recently left the scene. This article fully corresponds to his attitude: Moondog is very upset because he think TAT's leaving will also cause other people to leave the scene, such as m.O.d, one of Moondog's best friends, and that will be an even bigger loss for him. The angry main editor calls "TittenTAT" a lamer. He cannot understand at all why one should ever leave the scene, because even the fact that his own father died did not disturb him emotionally so much that he would have left the scene. In this tone, the article goes on for 8 kbyte.
I have some serious fears that Moondog himself might end in a catastrophe. Sooner or later the Atari scene will vanish or at least become so small that you will not be able to speak of it as a scene any more. What will Moondog, who has always sworn to stay in the scene till the very end, do then?
Finally, pAranoid writes almost 16 kbyte about his personal history of computing with Ataris and why he likes Atari computers more than PCs in "10 Years having an Atari". This is a very nicely written article, typical of pAranoid's texts; it stands out against Moondog's articles in a positive way. Probably this is the best essay in UCM #14.
Now after the "Scene" section, we get to the "Demo" corner. This one contains reviews of the latest Falcon and ST demos, intros, chip-tune packs, diskmags, etc. - in total 21 articles. Fortunately the length has improved since UCM #12; the reviews do not just consist of a few lines but usually at least two pages. The reviewed diskmags are the French Toxic Magazine #16 and the Czech Narsil #28.
Next come reviews of Falcon, ST and emulated games, 10 texts in total, followed by the "Mixer" section, including the review of a hardware accelerator for Falcon, world news about computers and "Mad Butscher's Mixer", which contains two game reviews and a report of an Atari user meeting.
In the end there are six music reviews and the already mentioned hardcore stuff.
All in all Undercover is also quite a nice magazine with a special underground feeling to it. Compared to Maggie, the style is totally different. This shows that the Atari scene, though being small, is not homogenous at all.
What Maggie and UCM have in common is for one thing the large number of demo, diskmag, game, and music reviews, and for another the low presence of discussion articles like we are accustomed to them in PC magazines. It is always interesting to see diskmags on other computer platforms and compare them with the ones we are used to. Sometimes they may contain interesting ideas that are useful for our diskmags, too. And it can be fun to explore a new, unknown scene, with an unoverseeable affinity with ours, but breathing and developing mostly independent of us.
- adok^hugi
"adok hugit! piekna panienka! haista vittu!!!"