Eurochart

By Adok/Hugi

The Official Eurochart is actually an Amiga diskmag. But its 48th issue was released as a cross-platform magazine. It features engines for Amiga, PPC Linux, x86 Linux and Windows. So it can also be read on PC without an emulator. The main editor is Darkhawk of IRIS.

What's also worth mentioning is that the group Talent released one issue of a magazine called Eurochart PC. It was an online magazine and it was available under eurochart.org.

Eurochart #48 can be downloaded from eurochart.dk.

Eurochart #48

For Windows users, Eurochart #48 (released in March 2006) comes with the Panorama engine by Chris Dragan, the engine that was originally coded for Hugi. Therefore the sequence is: opening picture, actual mag, closing picture, back to Windows.

The opening picture (which also serves as the closing one) was created by Dr. Doom of IRIS. The panel graphics were created by Darklight of Veezya. There are five tunes, which were made by Nutman of IRIS, Ijon Tichy, KAM_ of IRIS (two tunes), and Myx of Dream Merchants.

Inside the mag, first comes a menu where you can choose between the three parts of the magazine: charts, (actual) mag and gallery. The charts are Amiga-only, the categories are coder, musician, graphician, writer, demo, 64k, 4k, mag and group. Most of the categories are top-20s. Unfortunately the editor forgot to use the "nopush" attribute for the links inside the charts section, so it can happen that you have to click the right mouse button several times after browsing various charts categories in order to return to the main menu.

The gallery features a couple of photos from demoparties. Now about the actual mag part: There are 730 kbytes of articles. First comes the Editorial Zone, which features an Editor's Log where you can read about the making of this magazine. Then comes the News corner. There are a Danish and a Norwegian scene report in this section, with lists of Amiga groups and information on who's the best known members of them. Furthermore, there's an article about the demo division of Deviance, and the reviews are also included in this section: They deal with Sceen #1 (papermag) and various releases from the Amiga demoscene.

The next section is called "Around the scene". In it, the editors take a closer look at the charts and comment several categories. Zerox comes with an article about what the scene was like 10 years ago. The next article is about the group Ram Jam, it's pretty short. Then Wade admits that he is a member of Fearmoths and talks about what productions he has been involved in. Xeron writes about the making of the C64 version of this Eurochart issue. Zerox announces a quiz competition and poses five questions; they can be easily answered with some research on the Internet. The final article from this section that is worth mentioning is "An Inquiry into the Scene", a long academic paper about the demoscene. The other articles can be regarded as fillers (and one of them even deals with the topic "fillers").

After a short section about AmigaOS 4, the primary article of which is the review of AmigaOS 4, the Debate section follows. Two articles from this section are "Fun equals Crap" and "Patching Demos?", both written by Darkhawk. There's also Wade's "Life without the Scene", which was previously published in Pain. It is followed by an article by Darkhawk with comments on Wade's article.

There are interviews with the following people: Azzaro of MAWI, Zenon, Hirasawa (a Japanese Amiga musician) and Frequent of Ephidrena. The Party Corner contains several reports and production reviews, of course from an Amiga perspective, as well as results.

Then comes the Mag Corner. In it, there's an article called "State of the Diskmag Scene", in which Zerox interviews the Amiga diskmag editors Browallia, Rumrunner and Darkhawk. Darkhawk then reviews various Amiga diskmags from 2005. There's also a story about the online mag Grapevine, which died again, and two fillers.

After the Mag Corner, the menu lists the Music Corner. This one contains primarily reviews (GooGoo #10, Hacks for Tracks). Finally, the Closing Zone calls for support and the diskmag ends with the Last Words.

All in all it's a good issue with quite a few articles that are worth reading. It's also in a good engine, but some formatting errors are quite annoying (e.g. some ASCII logos are displayed incorrectly as not a fixed-width font has been used for them).

Adok/Hugi