Dare you enter... the Nostalgia Pit?
Herewith, a site with a reasonably complete archive of scans of old Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (back to the Commodore Review days, up to the Amiga Review days) and Professional Amiga User magazines.
I can’t remember when I started writing for ACAR. January ‘92 might have been my first issue (sound sampler review, page 16), but I suspect I did a piece or two before that. After a while, I was the Assistant Editor, and stayed in that job until the publishing company went broke.
(Entertainingly, I was listening to this, one of the few MODs lurking in my large MP3 collection, when I turned up my review of ProTracker in the March ‘93 ACAR.)
The article in which you conclude that "black computers go faster" is still one of my favourites.
Comment by Jonathan — August 31, 2007 @ 8:08 pm
Oh, lordy - that was originally a PC Review piece, wasn't it?
(I say as much in the Web version.)
Yes, I do have a stack of old PC Reviews, and yes, I'm aware that the maintainers of the archive would like me to scan them.
Comment by Daniel Rutter — September 1, 2007 @ 1:53 am
Why did the person who packaged that MOD file feel compelled to put the file extension at the start of the file name?
Comment by ex-parrot — September 1, 2007 @ 7:29 am
In the linked Wikipedia article, it states:
Comment by bruzie — September 1, 2007 @ 7:58 am
ex-parrot:
As bruzie said, that is the naming convention on the Amiga. I believe it might have started with NoiseTracker, and after a while, people started renaming music files from other programs to include a format prefix. Then a new generation of trackers / music editors came out, and an unofficial standard was established.
The more "formal" standard was, of course, not to have extensions at all, but instead icon files with the relevant information. Too much of a hassle for many programmers, it seems. (And those .info files tended to not get distributed along with whatever they were supposed to describe anyway.)
Comment by magetoo — September 1, 2007 @ 10:01 am
Sadly, pack rat that I am, I have stacks and stacks of old Commodore magazines of various types. Byte magazine as well. Before I packed them away I would reread them now and again. I always got a twinge of nostalgia looking at the Commodore program listings full of Peeks and Pokes and strings of zeroes and commas that I would invariably mistype and then have to "debug" for hours.
I also recall reading the ads for powerful new 386 systems at the bargain price of a kick ass Falcon or VooDoo system today.
Comment by RichVR — September 2, 2007 @ 8:01 am
I still think many of the tunes in my mod collection are better than a lot of todays MP3s, and of course the samples in the original MOD format were losslessly encoded.
Plenty of good tunes here if you're interested -
http://mody_collection.tripod.com/#MOD
I play them in WinAMP mostly mowadays, heck it still plays my CMF files!
Comment by UnderLord — September 3, 2007 @ 7:30 am
[reply to comment 2]
I've never owned (or even touched) a copy of PC Review and I have definitely read the article in dead tree form...
Comment by Jonathan — September 3, 2007 @ 9:08 am
Excellent timing! I just moved and forced myself to chuck my small collection of ACARs (I kept the one in which I had an article published, of course).
I also kept my two "Megacomp" mags (never found a copy of the first edition). What the hell happened to those loonies? That was a great mag for the times...
Comment by ratkins — September 23, 2007 @ 8:29 am