Realtime: A Czech Diskmag
Realtime is a legendary Czech diskmag about computers, games, music, literature, quizzes, airplanes and many things more. A special atmosphere is added to the magazine by the section Underground, in which the Great Emperor (Biges) fights against the consumation society.
What's worth mentioning is that the Underground section also contains an articles series called "League against spring and temperatures above 15 degrees" and Realtime-Humour. Of course these activities are supported by the Imperial Secret Service that regularly writes articles for the "Rumours" section.
Myths and Legends
The history of Realtime started in 1994 when the first issue of Pazeniste was released. This magazine was mainly about games, there were 40 issues in total and it was famous for its beautiful graphics and the high level of its articles. The big break came in the year 1998 when Pazeniste ceased to issue as a diskmag due to internal conflicts. Half of the staff left for the Internet issue of Pazeniste, while the other half founded Realtime. Realtime started with issue 41, continuing the tradition of Pazeniste.
Realtime was founded at the same time as the paper edition of the gaming magazine Gamestar and it was distributed at the cover CD that was attached to the paper magazine. In this way Realtime acquired quite a good way to present itself. Since it was released as an addition to a paper magazine, it was released on a regular basis. Each issue of Realtime had a size of about 30 MByte, which was a great difference to Pazeniste with just 2 MByte per issue. A lot of this space was occupied by graphics; this was typical of this diskmag. Nevertheless the staff of Realtime had to fight for every kilobyte on the cover CD, and more than just once, the editors of Gamestar wanted to limit the space for Realtime. But the Realtime staff and its fans did not give in so that in the long run, more than 100 issues have been released so far, and the magazine is already considered "cult". The last issue I read before writing this article was number 105 (September 2004).
Deus ex Machina
is a unique engine with a built-in editor by Dement. It permits production of hypertext presentation, which is mostly relevant for diskmags. The pages created using Deus ex Machina can contain sound, graphics and animation in many formats. The scripts can be written using the internal language ParLan. But the most exciting thing about it is that it supports omni-directional hardware scrolling. The engine uses a lot of tricks in order to make it work with old and weak video adapters, too. Dement spent a lot of time making Deus ex Machine run not only under DOS but also using Windows and Linux (Dosem).
After about two years, the Gamestar staff made so much pressure that Realtime had to start using a new Windows engine based on HTML.
If you want to learn more about this engine or even download it, visit Dement's homepage at dee.cz/machina. The audio systém RAIN is located at dee.cz/rain.
Realtime website: rtmag.net