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.:. .:. . .::. . .:. .:. .:. .:. .@@@.@@@. .@' .@@@@. .@' .@@@.@@@. .@@@. .@@@. .@''@@@''@. .@' .@''''@' .@' .@''@@@''@. .@.:.@. .@'''@. .@' '@' '@. .@' .@' '@' .@' .@' '@' '@. .@'@@@'@. .@'..'@@. '@@' : '@@''@@''@@' '@''@@' '@@' : '@@''@@ ''' @@''@@@@@@'@. ''' '' '' '' ' '' '' '' '' '' '':'''.@' '@...@' '@@@' ''' "I feel like Mini Mag Tonight! Mini Mag Tonight!!" E d i t o r i a l . . We're back, after a pause which feels as long as a middling custodial sentence at her majesties pleasure, which is kind of what happened to the editorial staff of the mini-mag, errmm. It might only have seemed like a casual nipple tweak, but I warned the others that the authorities could still get positive dna samples from it, and of course they take those things *very* seriously in Islamic countries as well! But would they listen to me? would they hell! Still, we're back, even if we're a little unsteady on our feet, and bright lights, loud noises, and sudden movements caught by our peripheral vision frighten and disorientate us... S c e n e - N e w s . . Atari Forum BBS stays working.. Amid scenes of total amazement, the Atari Forum BBS continued working this week. Veteran Atari botherer and real-ale fan MUG UK observed "It's been days now since it started working. I've been able to login and post, and read replies without problems. Whatever happened to the good old Atari Forum BBS, which was always offline due to hacking attacks?!" There was no official response from the admin team at Atari-Forum, but Requiem was overheard muttering an apology, and promising that they would be offline without warning again shortly. Heftig Diary updates.. 15.4.05 - Ultra. "Held Cream meet over the weekend. Very good results all round. I decided to rework the diary entry where I go on about coding the reset part so it is eight percent smaller and 1.5 seconds quicker to read. Agent T will come up with some new excuses for delays over the next weeks. I am motivated to do more diary entries, with new forms of words in them, but let's see if the heavy clubbing will take its toll?" Hugi goes tabloid.. In a move which surprised no-one, the PeeCee diskmag 'Hugi' has announced a decision to go for a populist tabloid press format. Hugi editor Adok says, "People, especially me, got tired of that endless miserable whining that goes under the title of 'Scene Philosophy'. So from the next issue on, we decided to drop all of that, and bring you reams of mindless upbeat trivial shit instead!" We are looking forward to the new disk, which will be distributed with a red top label, and the new features, such as the page three naked scener, which takes a candid camera eye view of silicon- enhanced drunken demosceners out on the town. New compo for Outline '05.. Times change, and so do priorities. With increasing maturity, many people are now caught up in the whole home ownership deal. To take this into account, the organisers of Outline '05 announce a new competition. This is the 'Home Beautiful 96k' competition. The challenge being to design the loveliest kitchen in a file size restricted 96k format! For extra points, this must be done without a computer, which must be hidden in cardboard boxes for several months. We expect some strong entries from pre-compo favourites Cyclone and Sh3! C o m m e r c i a l N e w s . . Microsoft patent the "Unngh!" sound that people make, when something destined for the gastro-intestinal tract, goes into the lungs instead. Microsoft intend to police this newly acquired intellectual property fiercely, so anyone who chokes to death may find their estate being sued for patent abuse! Microsoft's attempt to patent the act of 'breathing' was defeated in the US Supreme Court yesterday. However, their ongoing attempt to make people pay for fresh air is still ongoing. STOP PRESS! Microsoft counter-sued by Apple Corp over making people pay for fresh air case, "That's our job!" huffed an aggrieved Apple Corp press officer. G a m e R e v i e w s . . All formats game charts 1. 'Harry Potter and the stolen burnt-out car..' - Nintendo Warlock. 2. 'Codename Brown Foreskin..' - Sony Yob, Sinus laptop, Sega Dreamcrust. 3. 'Turbo Bottom-hunt 20th anniversary remix..' - Sinclair ZX95. 4. 'Encarta Encyclopaedia Ritual Killing add-on pack.' - Every bloody thing. 5. 'Chuchu Socket..' - Powergen and compatibles 'Firewall Updater of Doom!' (Polyplay '060) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is the first new game for the Polyplay Arcade machine, the former East German manifestation of 1960s technology in a 1980s setting. "Firewall Updater of Doom" is a arse-rending simulation of the average Western Wintel PeeCee user's struggles to keep their system virus and trojan spyware-free in the face of ever increasing attacks. The game logic seems to be ripped wholesale from the immortal "Catch the drips in a bucket or drown" game. There are minimal graphical changes, as buckets are redrawn as system patches and service packs. But it does accurately convey the existential futility, which is the whole point. Honnecker (Un)Interactive - 17 old style ration coupons. 'Escape from Guantanemo Bay!' (Rumsfeld 500) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So you've been saving all your money, to catch the Marrakesh express, and wear flowers in your hair? Well it was bad luck that you got captured in a US Special Forces anti-terrorist sweep, out there in the Sahara Desert. Now armed only with a purple boilersuit and a shoeful of plastic explosive, you have to break out of the feared maximum security and deniability holding camp at Guantanemo Bay! Pick up razor-sharp legal arguments why you shouldn't be held there, and watch the fearsome blundering guards ignore them all! The endgame part hasn't been written yet, and won't be for decades.. Ministry of Fear Developments - $17 billion 'Jet Set Jahinder' (ZX Thirdworld) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Here's another golden oldie, given a dusting off and corporate makeover. Miner Willy has been kicked out of his job, and this has been given to Jahinder. He can work much more cheaply, and in worse conditions than Willy could ever manage! There are some improvements over the original Speccy classic. You get many more lives to carelessly squander. But some classic bugs, such as the 'repeated deaths through unsafe working practices' glitch are happily kept in! Minutes of life-expectancy for all the family. If they can walk, they can work! Transglobal Mining and Entertainment Software Corp - 1.17 Rupees (per hour) D e m o R e v i e w s . . The Onion Megademo! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (Self-reviewed by solo2) Hola! This is the greatest demo on Atari ever! No more simple dumb screens, but a whole lot of them collected together in a mega demo. We call this the "Onion" mega demo, after my favourite vegetable! It has a walk around menu, and a user controlled sprite called "Kylie". We are looking forward to guest screens from Deltic Force and the all time coding legends, The Uncaring Bears! Derivative? Not us! Music demo special! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The ST-Connexion modfile/YM replay routine has been brought up to date. It now features in the latest CT60 music demo. it now replays at 500khz sound quality through the previously poor YM chip. Playback is across seventeen audio channels, five of them only audible to Pipistrelle bats and dogs. All cpu time is used, apart from some left for the orange indicator bars. In this issue, we also bring you the YM Rockers debut into CT60 demo making. Their rather aptly named "Broot Force" demo features a simulated YM soundchip, of 128 channels (sixteen of them dedicated white noise), 3-D sound imaging, and 24-bit square wave sound quality. Using this fantastic new system, there are some great ziks by all your favourite zik artistes, Pongo Snodgrass, Scheme, and Dwayne Dibbley... 'Increase yr sprite pow4r, day upon day increase, or yr $$$ back!' With Dr Leonard's miracle sprite booster potion, increase your self-esteem and sexual attraction to the oldschool coding community. Our easi-pay low cost instalment plan, at 17.99 per month, can soon have you incrementally increasing your sprite record attempts, and annoying the hell out of the rest of the scene! It also makes your penis grow... Order from www.wishfulthinkingandtwisteddreams.com U t i l i t i e s . . "File Brothel" v1.5, by Chosneck Productions Inc. The latest in hard disk file management software for the heavy internet "specialist" user. It can take the typical male internet user's disorganised adult picture collection spread across their hard disk, and place it automatically into neat and logical easy-to-follow directories. Typical examples might include folders for 'Boy/girl', 'girl on girl', 'girl on labrador cross-breed', or even 'Michael Jackson's day on the beach'. (Caveat, this final option can run only with "Nonce 1.3", and "Beat me up in prison v2.0" service packs installed.) '5peek and 5pam' - The easy to use tool, to duplicate the spammer's strange way of talking to you in email headers. You too can tell the world of "vifourgra for yr penones", or even learn to talk in a pseudo machine-code like they do... "&(*DkLDŁ(!2", as they say in Florida! aNywaY, 1t 4ll l@@ks a 2ny b1t '7337' 4nd str33t and c00l, so it must rool da house, right? C l a s s i f i e d A d s . . Thinly renamed former pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap outfit wishes to sell a rare collectible Atari 'ST-Book' (R@RE! L@@K!) Asking price is 1500 UKP, shipping to the corner of the street is free, anywhere further is extra. Sensible offers only please. We've been severely let down by time-wasters, aka 'window shoppers' on Ebay previously. No pointing and laughing please. Contact Gas(teiner) Computers.. (Oh Bugger!) A n n o u n c e m e n t . . There is no poverty in Africa. The reason that there is no poverty there, is down to lots of relatives of rich princes and ex-government ministers who can't get their money out of the place. The net worth of these people is estimated to be $340 trillion, the 40% of which they are so keen to share with you, will buy every village in Africa a diamond encrusted clean water supply and goat feeder. This happy state of affairs would come about tomorrow if they were inclined to be more generous to their own people, rather than just emailing random westerners and pleading to them to take this cashload off their hands... Unless it's all just some sad fool of an exchange student, sitting in a Cybercafe in downtown Rotterdam who's making this stuff up? H a r d w a r e . . We feature the latest development from Apple, the Mac Pico (Very mini!) This is the smallest home or personal computer ever made! Many years ago, back in 1985, Steve Jobs gave an interview for "Big Pow!" magazine, in which he stated that his ultimate goal was to get a Macintosh into a shirt pocket. Now with the recent release of the Mac Mini, he has almost got there, albeit you will still need a very big shirt pocket. Now Minimag likes things that are named after us, sort of, and we are pleased to take an exclusive first look at the next generation even more mini system from Apple,the 'Pico'. When Steve Jobs said "A computer for every thumbnail", he wasn't joking.. The Mac Pico features a scaled down but perfectly functional version of their PPC and MacOS combination. It has a tiny processor, an even tinier hard drive, and a special keyboard which can be worked by tweezers. It's not as if Apple have skimped on their famously good build quality, as we are reliably informed that each Mac Pico is carefully handmade - On the wing of a gnat! It comes pre-loaded with the world beating 'iShrink' and 'iGetaLife' software, and is priced at an amazing 0.30 Eur, or a candy bar from Lidl. This unprecedented price breakthrough comes because certain economies to the basic design have been made. You will need to add a monitor, keyboard, mouse, cpu, memory, hard drive, and a suitable box to take them all. The range of uses that such a compact design can be put to, outside of the traditional home/office environment, is mind-boggling. Some dedicated hardware modders, have even set up a micro-minature webcam on a Pico, and swallowed it whole, with the live wireless video feed being relayed in a fantastic voyage fashion down the digestive tract, right the way from first swallow to final excretion! Truly the future of computing Apple style, is minature, and accidentally trodden on.. P r o b l e m C o r n e r . . Ask our Hardware agony aunt Madam Stimpy! My CT60 keeps tripping out, approximately ten to fifteen minutes after first switching on. I suspect an overheating problem between the cpu and the SDdram, what do you think? Tripping out young man? Well it's what comes of letting your CT60 have access to drugs in the first place! A liberal 'do as you please' policy always backfires. True, the majority grow out of it, but there is a minority who get truly addicted, and before you know it, the CT60 is stealing money from your mum's purse to fund its nasty habit. You'll soon be knee-deep in EtherNat, revision 6 cpu, and ultimately the hard stuff, like Supervidel! F i c t i o n . . (From the Tymewarped Readme file, the version of tYMewarp that got made in a parallel universe!) The YM-Rockerz, Lotek Style, Tao, 505, Crazy Q, Exocet, gwEm, drx, Damo, Nemo and Dma-Sc, were enjoying one of their rare meetings at a seedy cafe in Hamburg. While Lotek Style and Crazy Q were busy setting a high score on Sega Rally, Tao, gwEm and Damo were pointedly arguing over YM optimisations. The sky outside grew darker and darker as clouds went across the summer sky, rain started to fall and almost simultaneously the rumble of thunder reverberated through the grim locale. "Bloody Hamburg weather", cursed gwEm, "its worse than London here..." But his bitter complaining was cut short by a blinding flash of electricity as lightning struck the Sega Rally machine simultaneously with Crazy Q hitting 88mph. Lotek Style was thrown from the machine, hair energised into an afro bigger than Bootsy Collins when he was still playing for James Brown. But something had changed! The storm had gone, the passers by had different fashions, the furniture in the bar was different, and where the Sega Rally machine once exisited a strange arcade console loomed. Slowly, our heroes became aware of a small group of strange looking people cowering in the corner. The source of their trepidation was standing just a short distance away from them, and drunkenly slashing the empty air with a knife. "Look, it's CiH, Mr Pink, and some other people we don't know!" exclaimed Damo. 505 looked thoughtfully at a nearby calender on the wall. "It's Easter 1996!" He muttered, "And if I'm right, these are the guys that came from the UK to the Symposium 1996 party!" he added. "And it's right about now that they had the run-in with the drunken knifeman in the Hauptbahnhof cafe!" Nemo helpfully reminded. Clearly his recollection of events, described in the Symposium party report in Maggie 20, was spot on. At this point, the 1996 Team Atariscene noticed the new arrivals... "It's MC Laser with a funky afro bigger than Bootsie Collins!" Yelled Tat. "But I'm Lotek Style!!" "No, you're definitely MC Laser! So is that afro part of a new image then?" "Erm no, the afro is accidental, and we're coming from the future, the year 2005 actually." The 1996 party chose to believe this frankly unlikely turn of events, and of course, they were bursting with curiousity to find out how the future had turned out. "I'll bet pc's are still as lame then as they are now!" Kev "Taff" Davies spoke for all the 1996 party. Tao nodded in silent agreement, not wanting to give away the fact that for most day-to-day things, they were now heavily dependent on that despised platform. "How's the Centek Phenix doing?" queried Mr Pink. "Tell us about all the cool stuffs that were written for it!" The 2005 Atarians giggled uncomfortably, and quickly changed the subject. "We're the YM Rockerz, we make cool demos for the ST and Falcon, with some wicked YM scorching tunes! It's where we're at in 2005!" gwEm declared. The 1996 party were very surprised by this news. "I imagined that the future would be bright, and made of 64 channels of sampled sound?!" Taff grumbled. "Oh but wait 'till you get to try some of our new ziks!" Dma-SC retorted. The knifeman spoke up, perhaps a little unhappy at being ignored. "Hey, I'm German and you're not!" The reply was swiftly forthcoming en-masse. "Oh piss off, you sad lamer!" He sulked off to the cafe exit, seeking more attentively considerate prey. "And what else happened in that time?" asked Arnel. "We're dying to know. Anyone got any lottery numbers?" gwEm responded firmly and to the point. "Well we're not really supposed to tell you anything. It could cause all kinds of problems with the timestream and stuff, hell, we're not supposed to be here! But tell you what, I'll give you a clue for a really big scary happening that kicks off in a few years." He grimaced, drew his hand across his throat in a cutting motion and uttered the fateful words, "NINE-ELEVEN!!" The 1996 posse looked around blankly.......... **Directors cut!** Alternative ending follows! gwEm responded firmly and to the point. "Well we're not really supposed to tell you anything. It could cause all kinds of problems with the timestream and stuff, hell, we're not supposed to be here! But tell you what, I'll give you a clue for a really big scary happening that kicks off in a few years." He grimaced, drew his hand across his throat in a cutting motion and uttered the fateful words, "PRINCESS DI!!" The 1996 posse looked around blankly.......... I n t e r v i e w . . We bring you this exclusive off-the-record chat, becoming on the record again which is naughty of us, but I think you'll find the end-result is worth it! We talk to Hank Wangstrangler III, the CEO of Boybandexploiter Records, about their exciting new range of anti-piracy technologies, shortly coming to a marketplace near you, whether you want it or not... Hmmm, MM - "Hank, I guess you're pretty concerned about the impact of online piracy on your revenue stream, right?" H - "Concerned isn't the word for it, pissed off is! Those communistic freeloading downloading scum are denying me my American birthright of making money hand over fist for minimal effort!" MM - "Your attempt to introduce Texan style legal penalties for worldwide copyright infringements failed. Even with the presence of several USN carrier groups hovering just off the continent of Eurasia, was there ever any realistic prospect of their national parliaments being panicked into accepting proposals for vigilante knee-cap shooting justice as a minimum sanction?!" H - "George Dubya is a good ole' boy, and he had the muscle in place and ready to go. It's those whiners in Congress who blocked us, claimed it was "unconstitutional", whatever the hell that is?" MM - "So having been thwarted in making favourable situation changes in the geopolitical sphere, you turned to technology for an answer?" H - "Yeah, we developed a new range of anti-piracy techniques, to apply directly to the media itself. Our digital encoding uses a special encrypting technique that prevents any kind of reproduction from it." MM - "You believe that your system is the most secure on the market? How good is it really? H - "Well if you try to copy from an audio CD protected with our system, you will fail totally. Whether you try to grab tracks digitally, or even using old fashioned analogue copying techniques to tape, none of it will work. Hell, we've even got it covered, so that if people listen to it, and try to freeload by 'remembering the tune', all they will hear off the disk is a white noise slush!" MM- "Err, thank you, and good night!" H - "Wait, don't you want to hear about our "Shut your gob" initiative, where public spirited volunteers take cash payments from the recording industry to have their lips sewn shut, preventing them from accidentally whistling a copyright protected hit tune..." Fades into the distance... T r a v e l . . Why not try this refreshing alternative to the usual run of coding parties. Dr gwEm's awesome time travel demo party excursion! We all go on a trip, in our big blue Eurolines bus, fitted with a laws of physics defying gizmo. This was made from a lightning-damaged Sega Rally arcade machine, and has been successfully tested, according to gwEm! A time travel trip back to 1945 is planned. This will be a nostagic visit to Alan Turing's first coding party. Boggle in amazement as he unpacks and sets up the newly launched portable version of the Colossus computer, from several heavy lorries! Smile wryly as he runs out of power sockets. Stumble over the inevitable misunderstanding when he fails to understand that you aren't a nazi spy. And finally, watch the very first wild competition when Alan shows off effortless fancy sineous tape loop scrollers, from behind the window bars of an authentic period prison cell, shortly before your execution! T e h E n d . . The fat lady DOESN'T sing! "If she's singing, she's infringing copyright!" A record company executive declared. , . \ / ____ .#####. .-- - - ----- '`. ## #### .'| UH OH! . | ######### | | Game over! |.' ######### ' | ____' # ## # # `-__________ __ # # # # # # # # CiH, for Alive Mag,Various '05.. |
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