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One of the other points about Amiga icons apart from their animation and arbitrary size that several other posts have mentioned, was that people produced themed icon sets in the 80s and 90s, mainly because the default out-of-box theme was, uh, functional at best (it was designed to be clear on a crappy TV, though).

MagicWB was probably the most popular in the Amiga european heyday of the early 90s and widely imitated by third parties. Yeah, it looks kinda crappy now. But boy could it piss off a PC/AtariST/Mac owner back in the day (NeXT users presumably went "meh", not that cognitive dissonance would let them ever admit an amiga 1/10th the price of a NeXT box could hold a candle to their machines)

The later 90s NewIcons set was more about function than prettiness (they expanded icon images to a 256-color palette), but the "newicons style" (colorful isometric, think old KDE only drawn by artists with talent :-) ) had the most clearly distinguishable icons and wasn't bad looking anyway, and it was designed for long term use, not just initial wow factor. Countless icons were 2-style, with MagicWB native images and NewIcons style images embedded in the .info files (which stored icons for the associated applicats) where only OSes with newicons patches could see them.

NewIcons could still hold their own against some iconsets I see today, anyway, especially in the clarity stakes.

Exoticons were NewIcons popular with gamers for obvious reasons when you see the screenshot...

GlowIcons were a NewIcons set and characteristic style third-parties imitated that appeared in the sunset of Amiga era.

NewIcons and GlowIcons inspired clean, elegant default look of later niche-market AmigaOS releases in the zombie-living-death of Amiga era.

Psychonauts is also a nickname for those who are religiously following the band Motorpsycho. The Greateful Dead had/has Deadheads, Motorpsycho has Psychonauts.

Yes, this is totally off topic, I just thought it'd be fun with a bit of useless trivia.

I just have to say that as much as I loved my commodore 64, I still loved my amiga 500 more! ahh the games, the demo's! was amazing stuff. This article was great as it helped me remember some of my favourite games tunes.

My all time favourite is from the game "Lotus Turbo Challenge 2" and is the 'loader' music.

I just downloaded it from HERE

This is 'mod' / protracker format music as used by the amiga, so maybe not quite so groundbreaking as the c64 and its SID chip were, but it was still brilliant.

So what is your favourite music from the good ol days. ?

Speaking of the C64, have you come across the game called Cubby Gristle? It's just plain weird. You play a fat guy who's goal is to eat as much food as possible with the end coming when you reach a metric ton in weight. All whilst avoiding angry grandmas, annoying kids and shopping trolleys. So far as I could tell from my play time when I was 10 years old, and more recently with an additional 14 years of gaming under my belt, the game is impossible to complete.

They (Assembly, Dreamhack, TG) are all quality events. And with any party that large, there are bound to be circles of people you don't agree with; janitors, gamers, or otherwise.

Some party reports suggest that there were as many as 7000 visitors if you include the single-day participants at Assembly 2003. And a confirmed 6600 attendees at Assembly 2002. It's clearly a numbers game as you, Mr. AC, have already pointed out.

... because I remember playing and enjoying what may have been Core's first game (or at least oldest game in this list here), an entertaining Indiana Jones pastiche side-scroller called Rick Dangerous. Tomb Raider? What's that?

You're not Andy Smith from Binary Asylum are you?

I remember 4-Mat and Nuke and Jesus on E's very well.

You're not Andy Smith from Binary Asylum are you?

I remember 4-Mat and Nuke and Jesus on E's very well.

You're not Andy Smith from Binary Asylum are you?

I remember 4-Mat and Nuke and Jesus on E's very well.

Maybe not true?

-T

Norway is full of nomes allready. (Well it is really more like a -1 Troll, or -1 Flamebait, but whatever).

gnome mirror.

Search

Sorry

I doubt that any of the members ever saved those 5.25" or 3.5" floppies, which really is too bad. But what stunned me most is that I discovered the music that we created and used (using Rob Hubbard's Routine). For those interested, you can find some of our music here:

http://exotica.fix.no/tunes/HVSC/VARIOUS-S-Z-Selle s_Ward.html

You need a SID-player to hear it, and that's just what I'm going to do right now :-)

Man, I'm getting old....

If he starts his kids using linux, this is what his family portraits will look like!

The Linux Bunch

Linux can be downright harsh on the eyes at times.

And this doesn't?

http://exotica.fix.no/tunes/unexotica/games/Lotus_ 2.html

No. Dear Rob is a tribute to Hubbard composed by Frederic Hahn (who also did well-known covers of Enola Gay and Outrun, and the fantastic music from "Fuzzball". The ingame music sucked, but the title music is fantastic!)

Seems that Exotica actually mirrors the High Voltage Collection. It's here.

Download and check out music by old legends like Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Jeroen Tel, David Whittaker, etc.

then check out these:

High Voltage SID Collection which contains about 20.000 sid tunes, downloadable as a 32 mb file (seems to be down right now)

Exotica, lots and lots of vintage Amiga game music and suitable players for download (and check that lovely Team17 logo on their frontpage).

FIX was one of the first internet-based BBS's, and continues to do very good business. We have over 5000 registered users, with about 200 who are regular on a dialy basis (with hundreds or thousands more who swing by a couple of times each month).

We're currently developing some serious new software, as the BBBS software can't really handle what is thrown at it these days - FIX has performed some serious mods on the original BBBS code, but it's getting a bit flaky now.

Oh, and despite the "retro" look of the webpages, we finally decided it was time to update them :-)

But anyway, back to the point: Plenty of very good BBBS's live outside of the US. Hell, we even have regular US users at FIX!

Mong.

* ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

And more comments from FIX...

"This happens to me rather often. Sometimes, the problem isn't solved at all,and I actually have to shut down NS. But even then, the damned program keeps floating around in the background, invisible, and I have to manually shut it down with ctrl-alt-del.

Another thing that annoys me is that it closed itself with the message "This program has cused an illegal operation...[bla bla]". The program closes, but the message box just seems unable to bugger off! I then just move it down to the bottom of the screen, so that the start bar overlaps it when I make it inactive, and start NS again. It then works perfectly, but has a larger chance
of shutting down with the same message, refusing to go away, again.

I was hoping that NS would fulfill all of my needs as a browser, but now it's clear to me that MicroSoft actually has produced a superior product. It's sad but true, but in any case, I'll wait for the next version of NS too see if the
problems are fixed before I convert to the dark side."

Mo.

* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

Slightly offtopic...

On the FIX BBS I recently posted this:

"The problem has oocured in versions 4.6 and 4.7 on Win95, Win98 and NT.
Sometimes, Netscape doesn't allow you to follow links. Like, the pointer will change to the "hand" when you move over the link, but a click doesn't do anything.

The only way to solve the problem is to reboot windows. It's very strange. It's happened to me regularly for about 6 months, I can't be the only one?

I'm considering reporting it to Netscape.

Mo."

I got the following within a few minutes. Come on NS! I'm using IE5 now - it's better, a lot better!

"No, I experience the same thing. Except that sometimes, a click *does* do anything, even when the mouse pointer isn't in hand shape."

"I've experienced this with Netscape for Linux. It only happens when I have two or more windows open at the same time, and another one (than the one I'm clicking in) is trying to load something. If I cancel that load by hitting ESC,things usually "pop" back into working order. Usually, I say, but it's only happened to me two or three times."

"Have the same problem (Netscape 4.6 on Linux and also on Digital UNIX 4.0D), but: It even happens, when there's only one window. And it doesn't change back, only restarting of Netscape is a cure.

Seems to be a coded feature. :)"

Really NS - Can we have our favourite browser working properly in it's next release? You know? Links, that can be followed?

Mong.


* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

A *really* good BBS still exists, it's run by a group of Norwegians, and even has (fairly) regular visits from the author of BBBS, we have people from Freehive there, and people from GPhoto.org.

We also have MUDS there as well.

Check out the (dated)FIX pages for more info.

Sorry, I guess this was a blatant plug :)

Mong.

* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

The lack of positive response was disappointing. Maybe the pioneer spirit of the internet is disappearing?

I certainly didn't expect the personal, nasty emails I received.

Are we all growing comfortable with the commericalisation of our "toy"? After all, many of us helped make the .net and in particular, the WWW, as popular as it now is. Maybe people like me are relics of a bygone era...

I'm not screaming for any kind of "reclaim the net" campaign, I suppose as long as we have places like Slashdot, and our favourite BBS's ( FIX - shameless advertising!) then we'll always have our little corner. But why not try and make our corner a little bigger?

Mong.

* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

This was exactly the sort of article I've been meaning to write for quite some time.

As a user of a well know, linux-centric BBS ( FIX), I've become more and more aware of the benefits associated with running a Linux system.

I finally "bit the bullet" and installed RH5.2 - This was my first real experience of Linux other than a shell account (or 10!). I wouldn't say it was a disaster, but it wasn't a success. The installation required a phone call to a techie friend (about partitions) and my on-board sound wasn't supported, neither is the ancient SB16(clone). Oh, and even the cheapo S3DX wasn't quite setup properly.

But these weren't the problem. I instantly took to Window Maker over the other supplied Gooeys - but it wasn't configured, I needed to (and still do) configure the main menu, to display the programs that were installed upon installation. Very annoying, Win3.1 does it better! So, I switched to AfterStep, but find it a bit "fiddly" or "awkward". The documentation is not entirley comprehensive, or it's so poorly organised I can't find it. It's also aimed at experts, people who already understand most things - it's little use to me.

Anyway... after a while playing with GIMP, I realised there was nothing I really needed on my new Linux box. On my Win box, I have all the tools I need as a webdeveloper and IT Student (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Word, Apache, PHP etc) - basically, it does everything I ask of it, and it's pretty stable, despite what the general view of '95 is. Maybe this is because I use 95C (the final release), but it's fine for my needs.

I'm looking at the SUsE dist' as it looks more suited to me (and comes with KDE), but I'm considering waiting for the Corel release - it looks like it's going to be a whole lot more intuitive and generally "user-friendly" than anything currently on offer.

Bear in mind that I'm an IT student, so I'm fairly technically minded - with this in mind, how does the Linux community really hope to win over "John in Accounts" or "Sally in Admin"? If "Paul in IT" has problems...

I support a worthy cause, and Linux, OpenSource et al is just that... when are you gonna support me?

Mong.

* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

This goes out to anyone who has used or hasn't heard of gPhoto.

gPhoto is a free, GPL'ed Linux/Un*x based application that allows users to download,
view, manipulate, and save pictures from a large selection of supported digital cameras. It is now at version 0.1.2-DR, and has been known to compile run on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. BUT, it should run on any system that has the required libraries installed.

More information can be found at http://gphoto.fix.no/

As for the update, the devel version that is currently being worked on has
come quite a long way even from the most recent release (which was posted
2 weeks ago). Currently, the following library projects are being worked
on:

* Kodak DC-2x, DC-50 support
* Kodak DC-2xx support
* Ricoh support
* Fuji support

This will practically double the number of cameras supported by gPhoto.

On top of that, there is now an added HTML Gallery generator. This
"Plug-in" allows users to turn the thumbnail index into a full-fledged
web-gallery from themed templates that will come with gPhoto. Users can
make their own themes from scratch, easily, or use one of the themes
provided.

The Live Camera! plug-in will eventually support time-capture sequences,
and save to animated gifs, or movies; live video.