Magazine Menagerie Redux

The latest issues of two Amiga mags landed on my doorstep last week and both are worthy of comment.

Amiga Addict issue 5 continues the great work of previous editions and provides an informative and entertaining read for Amiga fans past and present. The highlight of this month was the focus on UFO: Enemy Unknown, a sci-fi strategy title that was released in 1994. Also called X-COM: UFO Defense in America, this became an instant classic upon release and still has a major following today. A recent crowd-funding drive by author David L Craddock for a "making of" book was extremely successful and it was great to see a bit more coverage in Amiga Addict. 

The piece on Vista Pro was also a great read. A 3D terrain generator, it was most famously known in the early 1990's for creating the Mars-scapes for Arthur C Clark's The Snows of Olympus. Not a package I could afford back then, nor the Amiga capable of getting the best out of it, Vista Pro disappeared a few years later. However, modern day users can get hold of Terragen 4 by Planetside Software. Whilst the full package costs $299 for a perpetual licence, you can pay a subscription fee (ranging from $12 p/m, $33 per quarter and $120 per annum for the Creative version) or download a free version with limited features but enough to get you into the package and maybe spend some cash. That's something I shall be looking at soon.

The greatest thing, however, about this issue was the cover disk! Yes, they have had a disk lineout on the front cover since issue 1 but this time, there is actually a demo cover disk image to go with it! No, not a physical disk, after all, not sure how many people would be able to use that, but a quick download of a three-disk set of ADF files and you get a demo of Bean verses The Animator. A fun shooter with a great soundtrack, the full game is due for release in July. It also supports lightguns to really take you back to the 90's! Hopefully, the publishers will be able to include more "cover disks" in future issues. 

The other magazine that landed was issue 150 of Amiga Future, which was also the first issue of my subscription. I bit the bullet and subbed for a year because I enjoyed the copy of issue 149 that I'd bought as a one off and they are having a drive to increase the page count of the magazine. To do that, they need additional subscribers. At present, they are 13 new subscribers away from adding four additional pages per month. 

Published bi-monthly, the latest issue had some cracking articles in it, including a good review of the Raspberry Pi 400, Amiga Forever 9 (you can read my thoughts about that here) and Apollo OS. There was, of course, the regular column by Trevor Dickinson and the usual high number of news articles. A good range of games reviews were also included and the overall package is very much worth the €7 cover price. There is also a cover CD available if you wish to pay more (the cover price per issue goes up to €9.90) and this caters for the multiple OS options Amiga currently supports - AmigaOS4, AROS, MorphOS and Classic. 

Amiga Addict and Amiga Future offer different takes on the existing Amiga market and that is a good thing for both them and the market in general. Much like the Amiga magazine scene of the early 1990's, where there were multiple titles appealing to a wide range of users, these two magazines compliment each other and should, in my humble opinion, be subscription options for every fan of the Amiga. As it stands at the moment, I would not hesitate to renew these subscriptions when the current ones run out. 

You can find out more about Amiga Addict here, and Amiga Future here.

Magazine Menagerie - Part Three - Amiga Addict

The third and final part of the Magazine Menagerie and we come to a review that I had said I wouldn't do. When reviewing the second issue of Amiga Addict, I'd said I wouldn't post another review of the magazine unless there was something to say. With my post on the latest issue of Amiga Future here, I decided that it would be worth adding a few comments about the latest Amiga Addict. If you're expecting a face off between the two, sorry, you're not going to get that. Spoiler alert: if you can afford to get both English print Amiga magazines, do it. They have different approaches and styles and, as I said yesterday, are great companion pieces.

The overview - another great issue. The new Across the Pond column was intriguing and should offer some good tales in future episodes. The Amiga Ireland 2021 report was interesting and gave rise to thoughts of attending next year (maybe, who knows, what with costs, travel and COVID). The first part of a series on the legacy of Commodore promises much and I hope it delivers in future instalments. There's an amusing tale of attending the World of Amiga show in 1994 and believe me, war games shows can be kinda similar, especially the Sunday ones after say 1.30pm... though we never leave kit behind. The second part of the Memories of Dave Needle was suitably funny and poignant, and the multi-page feature on the Amiga and the Jungle music scene was both eye opening and bewildering - it's not my favourite music genre by any means but it was an interesting read. Two pages are dedicated to AOZ Studio may be of interest from a developer's point of view, though I would check out the subscription costs before deciding anything - the free version contains adverts, the monthly sub is €9 and a two year license is €89 - not extravagant by any means but something to be wary of. The games reviews were varied (I remember playing Transarctica and, from vague recollections, think the review is spot on), and I particularly liked the review of Flink, a CD32 title that had previously escaped my attention. The interview with the designer/graphics artist was icing on the cake. Naturally, the regular sections were also worth reading.

I did get a huge dose of nostalgia reading about Games-X. Although short lived, it was a regular pick up from the post office/newsagents my mates and I passed on the way to school. After all, what else was dinner money for??? The magazine, as I recall, was a fun read and more akin to a comic than a traditional games magazine in its price and paper quality, though it was 30 years ago, so I could very well be wrong here. A good magazine at the time, and one that should be remembered for doing something a bit different. 

The highlight of this issue for me was the long awaited Unamiga review. After unforeseen postal delays, here was a take on a piece of hardware that I had no idea existed back when I did my Alternative Computing, but at what cost post a few months back. Basically, an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) recreation board, the Unamiga can be one of several computers depending upon the "core" selected. From an Amiga point of view, it is equivalent to a Motorola 68020 with 2MB of Chip RAM and 20MB of Fast RAM - a pimped out A500/A2000 is you like. Other "cores" can include the Spectrum NEXT, the original Spectrum, the C64 and the MSX amongst others. This, for the princely sum of €152 (about £131) for the A500/Checkmate 1500 case compatible board. Sounds great, doesn't it? The review is gushing, which it has every right to be - I have seen enough on the Unamiga elsewhere to consider it a lovely piece of kit, though if you're not in possession of an A500 case or suitable peripherals (keyboard, monitor, case, power supply etc) then you're going to spend a tad more than €152. Still, cheaper than a Vampire and anything available or promised by A-Eon. Sadly, getting hold of one is likely to be be a probable as a lottery win, as these are produced in small batches on an as and when basis. After all, a hobbyist group in a niche market. Such is the way of things. 

Anyway, cracking work and more of the same for next issue please! You can order a copy (or subscribe) at the Amiga Addict website. As for me and my ideas of running the Amiga Classic OS, there's always Amiga Forever.

Magazine Menagerie - Part Two - Amiga Future

Welcome to the second of the trio of recently received publications. In today's post, I'll be looking at an Amiga magazine that's been going for absolutely yonks. Yes, now up to issue 149, this is the March/April 2021 edition of Amiga Future.

Published in both German and English editions, it is the latter that I paid about £7.90 (€7.00 for the magazine, €2.20 for postage, exchange rates decide the actual amount in GBP) for and it arrived bang on the date the pre-order email said it would. 

The magazine is in the A4 format and of high quality. It is 56-pages in length and in full colour. For an extra €2.90, you can also get a cover mounted CD that includes games, demos and utilities for the various flavours of operating systems classed as Amiga - AmigaOS 4, AROS, Classic and MorphOS. 

The layout is clean and straightforward, and there are plenty of advertisers - ten in fact, spread over 15 pages. The most stylish of these has to be the Vampire Accelerator add in the centre-fold. Images are sharp and, overall, I have no negatives to say about the physical quality of the magazine. 

As you can see from the contents page, there's quite a bit in here, with a news section, a couple of well thought out and interesting interviews, numerous reviews (including a piece on the latest update to AmigaOS 4 and two articles on hardware, one of which (the MiSTer) has been on my "would like/can't justify" list for a while now. There is also a two page piece from Trevor Dickinson which is a nice way to get updates from the main source of commercial hardware in the OS 4 market. 

There is a good mix of content here, and that makes this an accessible read for anyone new to the Amiga. Yes, you might get a bit tied up in some of the technical stuff but, on the whole, my passing familiarity with the current market was more than enough to get a lot out of this issue. Complete beginners shouldn't have much of a problem finding their feet either. In that sense, Amiga Future is very similar to Amiga Addict.

My personal favourites were the MiSTer review and attached interview, the comparison between the adventure game Dune and it's board game equivalent and Trevor's Soap Box. I did, however, read this issue from cover to cover and have had a bit of a gander at some of the advertisers websites, just to see what they offered. 

I enjoyed reading Amiga Future and if you can, give it a try. There is much to recommend here. Will I be subscribing? Possibly. There are six issues a year and a subscription for that works out at just over £46 including postage (excluding the cover disc) for the year. In the meantime, it is easy to decide whether or not to buy on a per issue basis as the publishers post details of every new issue on Amigaworld.net and on their website, so it makes it very easy to check if there is something of interest before you buy an issue. Indeed, Amiga Future is a great companion publication to Amiga Addict and I hope both continue to be successful. You can buy Amiga Future from this website here. 

Magazine Menagerie - Part One - SAM Revival

Over the last week or so, a trio of computing magazines have dropped though the letter box and each one deserves a thorough read and, in my humble opinion, a bit of promotion. In this and the two following posts, I'll be looking at each magazine in turn and giving you my thoughts.

Let's start off with what many would consider to be the most obscure of the trio, SAM Revival. If you're not aware, the SAM Coupe was a British 8-bit computer originally released in 1989. Sadly, it was not commercially successful although it did gain a decent fan base over the years and, as I related in my review of Archive 25.2 here, I really liked the look of it. Off the back of Colin's article in Archive, I remembered that at some point, I had bookmarked the SAMCoupe.com website ages ago but then (to my shame) had forgotten about it. Rectifying this brought me to the SAM Revival page and, having had my interest piqued, I ordered the most recent issue, No 25.

This arrived a couple of days later in a rather sturdy cardboard envelope containing within a neatly bagged copy of the magazine, a thank you slip, an advertising slip and two floppy disks. Yes, SAM Revival ships with cover disks! If you don't have an actual SAM Coupe, Colin will send you the disk images for use with an emulator. As for the magazine itself, it's a full colour A5 publication with a sturdy cover and using high quality paper totalling 56 pages. A note on the date, yes, it says September 2015. SAM Revival is not a regular publication and this highlights the hobbyist nature of the magazine. This is published as and when, and speaking of which, the next issue is due out later this month. 

Priced at £9.99, money hasn't been skimped on the printing, nor the postage. But is it worth spending that money on a five and a half year old issue? For me, yes. I wanted to see what the magazine had to offer, get an idea as to what SAM Coupe's were still used for and to decide if I would buy future issues.

The contents include a four page editorial, ten pages of news, a few developer profiles and regular box outs with web links for further information, various SAM projects, help on running B-DOS, SAM rarities, a great developer diary piece and a highly detailed section on the cover disks. Some of this was easy for me to read, other pieces (like the SAM Snippets) made very little sense at all based on my lack of knowledge. Here is the thing, this has given me resources to learn more and get to understand how the SAM works as a computer. I am impressed how Colin is keeping a semi-regular magazine going and also providing additional hardware and upgrades that permit the SAM to be used today. What I can say is that I enjoyed reading everything in the magazine despite its age. 

The cover disks, for which I have nothing to use them on but they will be kept in a safe place, contain a couple of games, some demos and utilities. This brought back memories of my Amiga days and the huge collection of cover disks from various magazines I used to have. A nice touch and a good way of keeping software distribution alive for the SAM.

SAM Revival is the very definition of a niche publication. Yes, the SAM market is small, even compared to the likes of the Amiga and RISC OS, but that does not mean to say that there isn't the need for SAM Revival. Will I be buying the next issue? Definitely. Will I be picking up any of the back issues, which vary from £3.99 (Issues 1-8), £6.99 (Issues 9-23) and £9.99 (from Issue 24)? Maybe. Would I like to get my hands on a SAM Coupe itself? My heart says yes, my head says no - and that's mostly a space and cost issue. I can get an emulator though, so when time permits, that'll be something to look into. What I can say is that SAM Revival is well worth checking out for those that it interests and, given the nature of the articles in this issue, the information from previous issues (detailed on the website) would build up to quite a knowledge base on the format.

All in all, great work and I look forward to the next issue!

You can find out more on the SAMCoupe.com website and keep up with the latest goings on via their Twitter handle @QuazarSamCoupe.