Chosneck Issue 1
And here we are at last, the first issue of the long awaited Chosneck Falcon
diskmag, from the rather silent Mystic Bytes, has landed, and hit people's
hard drives, with a resounding thump, or six resounding thumps, if you
choose to count up the individual floppy disks involved in transporting this
from Nicky's erratic but occasionally amusing WinBox, to my Falcy tribe back
home. Was it worth all that waiting for?
About a year ago, Grey had this idea to spice up a forthcoming music
compilation, by bolting on a preview version of his new diskmag. What was to
become 'Chosneck', or Garlic, was first seen as an add-on to the "Edge of
the Abyss" music compilation. I remember it very well, being roped in for a
large part of the pre-preparation, even sneak previewing a lot of the
articles, as the spelling and grammar checker. When 'Abyss' appeared, the
Chosneck part was clearly half-complete, but even then there were several
fascinating ideas in the prototype stage. Such as use of a high resolution
menu shell and equally high resolution screengrabs and pictures in the main
part of the shell.
Another interesting departure, not seen for some years since the last issue
of the DBA/Fun magazine, was that Chosneck was a Falcon only production. And
one new feature, not seen anywhere before, meant that it would only run on
the 14 megabyte 'Fat RAM' Falcons. This attracted some initial condemnation
from die-hard 4 meg traditionalists, and at last year's Error in Line party,
quite a bit of sneaky cheap memory upgrading in order to see what they were
missing! 'Abyss' may have done the Atari scene a big favour, by finally
taking the steam out of the "Four meg good, fourteen meg bad!" arguments
that pointlessly raged on the Dead Hackers BBS for months beforehand. Mystic
Bytes, for that simple service alone, our deepest gratitude flies in your
direction!
Now, some months after the first proper issue was due, I remember that last
summer was suggested as a likely release date? It finally arrives.
First impressions are of a bulky file download from the internet. In fact,
we are talking a similar file size to the original Abyss music compilation.
This is around 7 megabytes(!) So what do we get for this prodigious
straining on the part of our modems?
After splitting the original download, copying it to disks, loading them
onto a waiting Falcon, and rejoining the archive, we are ready to go.
Clicking on the first likely clickable proggy thingy brings up a nice GEM
option menu at the beginning. This gives you settings for screen type and
hertz options, music replay khz rates, the option to run it with or without
the demo intro supplied by Remo, and a nice warm feeling that this is going
to be a more professional and well thought out experience than average!
Of course, this first time out, we select to run with the intro. This is a
good effort by GFA Basic and Falcon loving EIL newcomer Remo, of Coffeine
demo fame. In this production, you get to see a twirling of 3-D voxel
landscaping. This comes across as slightly sluggish on a standard Falcy, but
it runs perfectly well, and quite quickly on accelerated machines, in this
case, the CT2 Falcon. There is a neat transparent swirly tunnel effect,
which shows off the credits receding into the far distance, and a final
message from Grey, confirming his new marital status!
Swiftly into the main part now. This continues the overall look and feel
from the preview issue. So you get a high resolution menu shell. The menu is
located on the left hand side of the screen, with a lovely high resolution
'Chosneck' logo occupying the remaining two-thirds to the right hand side.
Accessing the eight menu categories uses a point and click web page style
system. Whilst waiting for one of the sub-menu's, or an article to load,
more eye-candy, in the form of a lovely rendered 'Please Wait' screen floats
in front of you. Possibly the smoothest onscreen cappuchino ever to grace
our Falcons?
The other menu controls are pretty simplistic. There is the 'Undo' key to go
back at any point. There seems to be no back links this time around? But
they were barely visible before, to be fair. There is also the 'Escape' key
to quit the mag altogether. We also get some music changing controls at the
bottom of the menu part of the screen. The high resolution looks better on a
VGA screen, but is okay on RGB too. The text font for articles is a lot more
readable than before, a criticism of the preview issue which must have been
the first thing to be put right! There may be a problem with some RGB
screens, especially TV's, as the overscan text displayer fills the whole
screen up. In those cases, you tend to lose a small part of the text. The
text displayer uses a white font over a textured background. This is
reminiscent of the system used in the Falcon editions of the DBA mag (issues
11-14.) The other 'surprise' is that you can click on underlined words or
titles in the text to get to the screengrabs and piccies. These are
generally high resolution too, and must account for a large proportion of
the 7 megabytes used?
There aren't that many options for the text displayer. You can scroll down
using the mouse pointer, or a step at a time with the arrow keys. There is
no text colouring, linking system, word search, line search or any other
options. On the other hand, there is a much more generous display area or
text window than is usual.
It tends to be sluggish on standard machines, so any extra speed you can
throw at it is helpful. The displayer seems to keep nothing at all in
memory, so it has to reload each and every screen, even the main and sub-
menus. Chosneck does respond well on an accelerated Falcy, so maybe this is
the first CT2 diskmag? It seems to unpack from within a zipfile used as a
linkfile, which is interesting. Maybe this is the most efficient means of
storage? It just means a compromise on the overall speed. There is a choice
of modfile music, with a couple of good modfiles from the not so bad
composers 505 and Seabrush. We would assume that many different music
formats, including multi-channel ones, are available to this shell. There
seems to be no selector to turn the music off?
Some people reported problems with earlier, less bugfixed versions of
Chosneck. Mr Pink seemed to suffer in particular? For this review, I'm
working from the second and final bugfixed version, and I can report that it
works fine on both my CT2 box, and my normal Falcon. These are running the
TOS versions 4.04 and 4.01 respectively.
Now we turn to the contents. These are divided into eight distinctive
sections, accessible from a sub menu. Starting at the top, the first section
is called 'Let us entertain you.' This has about five articles in all,
mainly editorial in nature and with some heartfelt greetings from Grey.
There is also some readers feedback for the preview version of Chosneck here
too.
The next section is called 'Unforgettable Gatherings'. This concentrates on
scene parties and the like, with a larger section of eleven articles to
choose from. So we get to read reports from the Paracon 3, with Oliver
'Paranoid' Heun talking from the organisers viewpoint. There is quite a bit
of material from the world famous Error in Line Part 2, which is nearly a
year ago now, but only seems like yesterday! We get reports from Felice and
Saulot, each offering their own viewpoints on the matter. There is also a
realtime diary of the event written as it happened by various people, some
drunker than others! Other EIL related texts, include a dispassionate
comparison between the first and second parties by someone not a million
miles removed from the writing of this textfile. There are even more greets
from Grey. We also get to see some advertisments for events to come.
Unfortunately, due to the delay in release dates, these tend to be just a
bit too late for the events concerned. The 3rd Alternative party was
happening, when Chosneck hit the streets. The advert for the Last Party 2001
suffered from a technical glitch, as it didn't load, and the shell quit
entirely at that point. This was the only article that did that though.
Within the EIL articles in particular, we get to see lots of very revealing
pictures from the event. There are one or two of these that the author of
this text would be very happy if they got lost again!? The pictures in
general make use of the higher screen resolution for a nice 'collage'
effect, where several images are combined into one big one.
Third down the main menu, is something called 'Famous Bodies Get Naked'.
This is the interviews section, with lots of people spoken to, their
personal and private bits prodded around, and answers given. This was
perceived as one of the best textual components of Chosneck,and who am I to
disagree? There are ten interviews in all, with famous scene personalities
such as Winio of Cobra, Ear-X of Fun, Remo, Strider of Supremacy, Moonwalker
of MSB, and a 'live at EIL' intervioew with myself among others. There are
also a couple of interviews with the authors of the STEEM and STew
emulators. In this case, I get the feeling that the STeem interview was
carried out somewhat earlier than mine!?
'Scene Community' is given over to the more speculative or polemic side of
discussing the 'scene'. This shows the way with nine articles. There is an
interesting and intelligently written viewpoint on the use of extensions
such as CPU acceleration, RAM expansion, and use of the FPU within the Atari
demo making community by Paranoid. Nice one Oliver! We also get to hear
about such novelties as recording Falcon demos in DivX format, to give those
unlucky PeeCee owners a peek, this one written by Spiny of Torment. We get
another viewpoint on this by Trophy, who supports the use of a PeeCee as a
form of very powerful 'Falcon add-on'!
'Power without the price' starts off a demo scene history, right back from
those early cracking and menu making days. More to follow in future issues?
There is a revealing piece from Grey about Mad Buscher's stroppiness at the
issue of C64 demos being shown at EIL. There is a piece written immediately
post EIL, in a hazy glow of happiness about the scene revival called
'revised expectations'. We also see some gradually gathered 'scene news'
from Grey. So we get to hear about a possible revival of the XM Tracker
'Growl Tracker' on the cards. Remo joins tSCc, International Karate Plus,
the classic C64 game is on its way at last to the Atari 8-Bit? Most
interestingly, an item going back to the latter part of May 2001 discusses a
new Mystic Bytes megademo called 'Nile', with a summer 2002 release
suggested? Better get going folks! To end this bit, there is a small but
nicely formed 'hidden screen surprises in classic demos' text, which
includes a couple of well stashed away Easter eggs in some relatively recent
Polish releases.
'You Won't Believe it' follows hard on that. Handily subtitled 'Extracting
Juice from Dry fruit!' This is a smaller section, with just three articles.
These concentrate on some of the latest developments for various 8-Bitters.
Such as the appearance of 'Doom' on a Speccy. Not one version, but two? Or
perhaps a Windows-like GUI for the Atari 8-Bit. It's not a wind-up, the
screen grabs are all there, you can see for yourself! Also, you can IRC with
your Atari XL, if it is linked as a linux terminal to something else,
apparently. Next issue, web browsing with an Oric?!
'Letting us Survive' is a fancy title for an advertisments section. We see
three in total. One deciding it is worthwhile to subscribe to the print
magazine 'ST Computer'. Another is for various hardware add-ons to the Atari
8-Bit, and lastly, we hear of a revival of a previously defunct software
producer for the 8-Bit called Sikor Soft.
'Cocktail' means a riot of general miscellany. This is the biggest section
of Chosneck, with thirteen articles in total. The style of the thing is
somehow typified with the kicker-off article, a cooking section by Trophy,
where Fuji-shaped cookies are lovingly baked, then eaten... Mmmmm!
Alternative gaming follows from Saulot, this is a lengthy and enthusiastic
piece about fantasy roleplaying games, and tabletop models. A history of
computers takes a look at a book written in 1974! 'People of the Microworld'
is a translation of a Polish article on the first (or farce) family of
Atari, and is chiefly memorable for the ultimate scary hairy family
portrait. For people with weaker stomachs, and unable to face the original,
Leonard Tramiel is the one that looks most like Jeb the Hillbilly.
The Big Atari Story follows that excess of facial hair, with some
interesting personal recollection by Trophy on how he got into the whole
Atari game. This article possibly contains one of the killer comments in the
mag "I've learnt to hate the communists and why... They were colour
stealers." A little piece on the Lynx from Grey follows that, and a quick
review of the album I'm listening to at the moment whilst writing this
review, 'Exciter' by Depeche Mode. Mr Byte seems to like it, and I do too,
even to the extent of letting certain lyrics from it contaminate the 3 Alt
realtime text. (We're in the recycling ideas room, heh heh!)
A speculative "what-if" piece about a PS2 Linux add-on kit, written by some
amazingly talented bloke, never heard of him before, is next. Then something
about the Atari Source Code Central Project. If it takes off, then never
will demo coders have to create so much from scratch again. Fear Factory
follows with more music. In the home straight now, and we get to see
Trophy's take on Western Culture in the computer age, and a follow up to
that last article simply called 'Culture' Finally, there is an inverview
with the organiser of the Last Party 2000, which was a bit of a lowly
attended washout. Still, he remains optimistic for the future.
'Till the Next Time', is the final sub-menu, and consists of just a single
article from Grey along the lines of "It 'ain't over until the fat lady
sings!"
There is a good selection of articles, written by a number of enthusiastic
contributors. There are gaps in the overall coverage, as Chosneck tends to
miss out on software reviews, apart from one very brief review of Alive!
Which was nice. Maybe there might be more reviews for the next time? This
would also reflect a wider spread of contributors, although Grey seemed to
be purposely avoiding putting in reviews, to avoid being like other
diskmags!?
Bearing in mind the time elapsed, there could have perhaps been a few more
textfiles? However, we hear from Grey that they were let down by the 'empty
promises' of other wannabe contributors, who then didn't. That sounds
disturbingly familiar to my ears! For a strongly pro-Falcon diskmag, running
on fat RAM Falcons, there is a surprising interest in the Atari 8-Bit scene.
This strongly reflects the Polish perspective on the scene, and it makes for
some interesting reading. Maybe there should be more in that vein in future
issues, say, a history of demos on the 8-Bit, showing lots of lovely screen
grabs, and where it is all likely to head next? This inspired me to switch
into Sinclair black box loving nostalgia mode, from a time even earlier than
these guys got going, for my part of this Alive! editorial.
There are other issues to consider. I'm still uneasy about the overall size
of the thing. There is probably a good explanation as to why it has got as
big as it is, and I'm sure Sqward and Grey are doing their best to see that
it fits together as tightly as possible. But my own diskmag editor's gut
instinct still feels that Chosneck could go on a crash diet in relation to
its filesize, and not lose any quality from the final production? An old
diskmag editor remembers a time when "diskmags" were so called, because they
fitted onto a disk! Even Maggie, with the most provocation to 'go large' in
later years with its over the top textual sizes, managed to resist the
temptation to go hard disk only until the 10th Anniversary issue.
On the other hand, no-one seems to have complained about the downloaded
filesize, and everyone seems to love the epic high-res grandeur, that is the
overall look and feel of Chosneck, so who am I to complain?
Another, almost incidental issue, is that Grey and company seem to have
opted for a high-profile 'Flagship' Falcon only diskmag. I feel that surely
there is scope to reproduce the articles, which I think are worth more
widely seeing, in an ST-friendly format, or licensing someone else to do so,
or maybe even setting up a web friendly version that everyone can see?
We look forward to further issues, and hopefully at shorter intervals than
the long wait between the preview, and this first full issue.
In our final assessment, nice issue one, Chosneck team, keep it up!
Pro's:.
Ambitious, glossy, and professional look and feel.
Offers a genuinely different viewpoint from the "usual" diskmag.
There's a wide range of good articles.
A nice selection of interesting pictorial material as well.
Does justice to the concept of Falcon diskmags as a higher end production.
Con's:.
File size very large in relation to the contents?
Menu shell and text displayer sparse on options.
Tends to be slowish loading and formatting on standard Falcys.
Many of the contents worth sharing with the wider Atari community, no plans
to do this at present, which is a shame.
CiH, for Alive! Mag, Feb '02
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