EDITORIAL
So what the F*ck Happened?!
I'm going to try to keep this short, if not sweet. Firstly, don't get me
going on the subject of Easter. I've only just stopped screaming from the
last time someone foolishly mentioned it, which was on the day after Easter!
In fact, my views on the somewhat mixed blessings of the Mekka Symposium
party can be read elsewhere in this issue, and this isn't the time or place
to go into them.
The blessings have been mixed for the activity level on the general scene
too. Most meaningful new releases in 2002 have come from the non-demo part
of the scene. Large pats on the back and general rejoicing are aimed in the
direction of people like New Beat Developments, for their release of the Ace
softsynth, and the Reservoir Gods, with two new game for this first half of
2002. The other growth area for activity, strangely enough, has been the
enhanced turnaround of disk magazines apart from ourselves, with issues of
Chosneck, and a revived (and reviewed in here) Undercover Magascene. This
revival might be down to a lucky coincidence of release times after long
production runs, but it is still good to see them turn out in force, even if
that is the case.
But what will fill the tracks and sectors of future issues? Apart from the
nice and unexpected releases at Mekka from the Spice Boys and Ephydrenia,
the activity level for the demo scene has stagnated. No-one seems to be
putting their work forward, coders seem to be more reclusive than ever,
happy to leave their sparkling routines to turn into digital compost when
the next hard drive crash comes along? Not enough of the right kind of party
perhaps? It could get to the stage where we're all reviewing each others
competing publications to an inanely intense degree, for simple lack of
anything else to go in them!?
And we're still awaiting the hardware event of the year, at time of writing.
The long, long tale of the CT60, its birth and development has been nearly
as long as that of the Eurofighter, and like the Eurofighter, it's in-
service date keeps getting continually put back. Just when it seems it is
finally shipping, a final bad-taste glitch farts in our face, as the newly
made CT60 boards come back from the factory as faulty! So you won't see this
until the next issue, or possibly the issue after that, with the current
rate of progress?
Will the stagnant deadlock be broken? People are making hopeful noises,
there may be another online competition inspired by those oldschool single
VBL antics, sixteen colours may rock, and the Unconventional Party may
suffer from crowd control problems in the nicest possible way. An awful lot
of people would like to reconvene Error in Line next Easter, although there
is nothing official there yet. But these things are for another time. Right
now, we're stuck with what we've got, which isn't a great deal for what is
normally a busy part of the year.
One last thing before I hand over to Seb for his bit. I see that the menu
shell for the Alive/UCM shell has now been made open source. If people are
interested, I've got a few simple things for my personal wish list.
Such as, giving an option for different text fonts. I'd like to use a
cleaner sharper font for my ASCII stuff, the current default font isn't
really that good at ASCII art. Or how about breaking the two picture per
article limit? We could do a nice gallery concept, especially if this is
combined with my next suggestion, making the shell able to display picture
formats other than .PI1. Something like .GIF would be nice, and then those
pictures to be displayed taking advantage of any enhanced graphics mode
available to the host machine. Yes, I am thinking of the Falcon in
particular.
Okay, that's what I came up with, thinking about it for five minutes. I'll
be interested to hear what other people might suggest?
Okay, I'm all done for now, see you next issue, when you've all given me
lots to write about ;-)
CiH, June '02
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STS HAS SOME WORDS FOR YOU TOO
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Alive F*I*V*E isn't completed yet and work is still going on fiercely here.
Unfortunately CiH is so right : people still enjoy reading ALIVE but can't move
their ass to shorten delays between issues. And we should call ourselves lucky
since some people joined us at the last minute and wrote stuff, painted gfx or
coded an intro. BUT WHY COULDN'T THEY HELP IN THE FIRST PLACE ? What happens
then is that we are ALL pressured to get things wrapped up before June 26th. I
hope we can make it on time, since I just WON'T be able to do it later. Today
is the Day of Music in France and there are free concerts almost everywhere but
guess what ? I need to sit here more hours and write these articles no one else
could or wanted to handle ! I'm not even angry you know, just a bit sad but I
KNOW I want this magazine to stay alive and will do my best to achieve this
goal with or without extra help.
Many thanks have to fly to our many collaborators but such list can be found in
the Greetings section. However I really feel sorry for both Grey and Moondog as
they get even less support than us. Why again ??? I perfectly understand Eric's
attitude and issue delays. I have to say that I REALLY admire his work and
motivation, working almost alone on a magazine isn't piece of cake ! Don't tell
me about mags wars or competition, write for Chosneck, UCM or Alive, who the
fuck cares ? But DO SOMETHING ! It's not different from crap talking on IRC if
you see what I mean...
Now what ? Well don't expect ALIVE6 before long if support doesn't get more
intensive... Do you really want us (I mean ALL main editors) to publish a
single issue per year ??? You decide...
Anyway I hope you'll enjoy this issue. Due to few releases, it's been hard to
fill in the blanks and we had to have 'new' ideas, hope you like'em ! Btw have
you noticed we opened a forum at http://alive.atari.org ? We expect some
feedback in a near future (thx to Evl for putting up this forum !).
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