Skyhigh 10 ch03 About Magazines

             about magazines




      about the sense of diskmags
      ---------------------------

while reading "nitro #14" i've found the
chapter "cruncherreview". i got interes-
ted and loaded it into the memory.
this chapter was edited by cat/excess,
who quitted swapping some weeks/months
ago.

they've tested the following tools, i've
written a short classification behind
the name

name                 - status
----------------------------------------
abuze-cruncher  v3.2 - cruncher
softcrunch      v4.0 - cruncher
powercrunch     v7.1 - cruncher
byte bonker     v1.4 - cruncher
exploding faces      - cruncher
imp. exp. faces      - cruncher
exploding faces v2.0 - cruncher
fast crueler    v4.0 - cruncher
unipacker       v2.0 - packer
cruelcruncher   v4.0 - cruncher
sledge hammer   v2.0 - packer, linker
sledge hammer   v3.0 - packer, linker
timecruncher    v5.2 - cruncher
byte compactor       - packer
protect cruncher     - cruncher with
                     - protect function
----------------------------------------

well, if you've read the previous lines
very carefully you've found out that
they have reviewed packer and linker as-
well. therefore it's not possible to
make a kind of ranking like cat did. he
ranked them into speed, there were the
packer and linker ofcoz the fastest and
the packing result were the crunchers
have been ruling.

the source file that has to be crunched
was a 88 blocks long notefile edited and
packed with cadgers noter v4.3. as you
can see, the source files already has
been packed and cat wondered about the
packing/crunching results of the packers
coz they added some blocks (their depack
routine). he complained aswell about the
time that the crunchers needed to shor-
ten the file (e.x. powercruncher v7.1,
time required: 22 minutes). after the
time and quality ranking he made another
ranking called overall ranking. he was
calculating the amount of blocks crun-
ched per minute and the cruncher/packer
with the best result came on the top.

basicly i've to say a ranking like cat
did is a ranking from his point of view
and shouldn't be released in a magazine
as there could be somebody outside who
believes into these words. this chapter
should have been devided into a cruncher
and a packer category, if you're not in-
formed about the difference i'll explain
it:

a packer is a tool that packs an unpak-
ked file, for example the packer built
into "facenoter v0.1" back the area bet-
ween $0801 to text end, maximum $c000
and saves a packed file onto disk. you
can enter a monitor and save the unpak-
ked area by hand and later on pack the
file with "unipacker v2.0", "bytecompak-
tor" or "sledge hammer" and you'll fi-
gure out that the result is similar to
the packer built in the various note
writers (difference can be between 3-4
blocks, it depends on the packer). a
packer starts normally packing when the
source file was loaded.

a cruncher is a tool to crunch the pak-
ked file. ofcoz you can crunch an unpak-
ked file aswell if you've too much spare
time left. best packing results can be
realised with a special combination of a
packer and a cruncher (e.x. pack your
source with "zipper" and crunch it later
on with "cruel cruncher"). some cruncher
check the file first after loading, af-
ter checking out they start to crunch.
that's the reason for the time required
to crunch a file.

a linker is a file that allows you to
merge various files. if you've e.x. a
charset at $0800, a scrolltext at $0a00,
a music at $1000, code at $1800 and
screen $2000 and logo at $2400 you start
choosing the files in the following or-
der: files with a lower memory must be
loaded infront of higher ones, so the
loading operation should look like this:
1. charset, 2. scrolltext, 3. music, 4.
code, 5. screen and 6. logo. a linker
packs normally all files after loading
to one "big" file.

okay, the results of the cruncher are
acceptable. i think the best cruncher
should be the cruncher that crunches
most and needs less time. to explain my
idea have a look at the following table
(imaginary file "x" 90 blocks long)

name        - crunched - lenght - time
----------------------------------------
cruncher a  - ./. 50   -     40 - 05:04
cruncher b  - ./. 50   -     40 - 16:15
cruncher c  - ./. 49   -     41 - 09:37
cruncher d  - ./. 48   -     42 - 01:15

that's the kind of ranking i would pre-
fer. i would devide the different forms
of the compactor into the subjects "pak-
ker" and "cruncher" and not merge them
as you can't compare these tools.
if you want to test the packers please
use an unpacked source file, not a pak-
ked file.

this chapter has disqualified "nitro" to
be taken as a serious scene magazine. in
my opinion a mag editor should have any
kind of knowledge and the main editor
should read everything infront of relea-
sing a magzine with that kind of false
information.
mostly beginners are reading mags and
they're interested in that kind of ar-
ticles to see what kind of tools are the
best to be used. if they believe to the
article written by cat they might never
use the so-called packer and linker as
they've learned in "nitro #14" that
their packing results were that worse.

this might be taken over for another
subject, the mass of magazines being
spread these days.
most of the mags are without any doubts
quite lame. no kind of fair journalism,
no ideas and background information if
these mags are edited by newcommers, a
not acceptable outfit, to come to an end
most of the mags being released nowadays
aren't worth to fill the space on the
disk.

so i'd like to ask all magazine editors:
handle only subjects when you know about
what you're talking. we don't like to
read unqualified texts written just to
fill up your magazine. don't try to fill
your mag with texts when you're not 100%
sure that the facts were proved, i'm not
talking about news'n rumours here, i'm
talking about that kind of professional
articles like the try in "nitro" to re-
view cruncher for the masses.
if you don't understand what i like to
explain here please read the last four
issues of "the pulse". here you can find
professional texts with journalistic
background.

do you remember the good old times. only
a few diskmags were released like the
legendary "sex'n crime", "fatal news",
"mamba", "magic news" and "relax". i can
not remember to have seen four or more
chapters about music, music news, music
charts or songtexts in it. today most of
the top voted magazines like "a-head" or
"splash" contain chapters like that. is
this is the sense of a scene mag, to in-
form the reader about the top ten music
hits in various countries. a lot of the
"new" magazines adapted these chapters
so most of the magazines contain about
50 or even more blocks of music informa-
tion. that's not the right way of fil-
ling a scene related diskmagazine.

editing a chart chapter is a hard work
in my opinion. but is there any sense in
a chart that contains more then 200 po-
sitions just again to fill memory to
hide the few real scene text blocks very
carefully.
a scene magazine is the mirror of the
readers. you can acknowledge while re-
garding the charts what kind of readers
like to support this magazine. when you
can find rather unknown persons/groups
in the top ten/twenty you can be sure
that a lot of newcommers voted here to
support their friend/contact.
at all, these so-called mega-charts are
the the most fair charts these days. you
can be sure that a mega chart with re-
sults from more then 20 magazines is
more fair then a megachart from 10 disk-
mags. the mega charts reflect most times
the top ten/twenty is these so-called
elite mags.
the dutch magazine "flashback" has found
it's own way how to handle the charts.
the guy/group with the most plus votes
per month gets the top position. for ex-
ample the group "x" had last month 100
points, this month 120 points and the
"y" had last month 1000 points and this
month 1001 points. in "flashback" the
group "x" will be on the first spot as
they got 20% more votes then last time
and the group "y" that had a lot of more
point but only 0,1% more then last time
so they only got on the second position.
i don't like this system very much but
it's an interesting idea how to solute
the problem charts.

news should be new, therefore the chap-
ter got its name from new. to avoid has-
sle the chapter got a second name in
addition called "rumours". now you're
allowed to print all kind of news and
rumours even if they're not proved. sad-
ly the magazines have big delays these
days (except "the pulse") so that the
vote sheets with news, addresses etc.
are not up-to-date so sometimes you can
only laugh while reading several news
printed in the mags.
it's better if a mag editor or a close
friend has access to the major board to
pick up the latest news around to update
the news in the mag. it's worthless to
live only from the news written on the
votesheets, nobody can be that stupid to
think that the news on a vote sheet are
that new. remember that x spreads the
sheet to y, y fills in the brackets and
returns it after one or two weeks, then
x has to send it back to the editor and
again one or two weeks are lost. now the
news are around 4 weeks old and the mag
will be spread in 4 weeks and then the
content of the news is 8 weeks old and
uninteresting. got it?

the address chapter is a chapter that
can't be handled wrong. it's a kind of
advertisement to get some more contacts.
some dudes sort the names and groups
from a-z and that's the way it is. this
system is really nice but a hard work if
you got more then 100 vote sheets sup-
plied. it's your decision how to make
the best out of the source.

a "did you know..." chapter is sometimes
interesting and was invented by "mamba".
it's nice if you can read some facts or
funny things about sceners but absolute
useless to print facts about countries
or anything else what is in no way re-
lated with the scene. if you add some
other stuff here don't do it in a scene
mag.

a mixed chapter is something like free-
style. here you can edit everything. you
can inform the readers about new equip-
ment or new groups or whatever else but
please don't add a story about techno
music or uninteresting not scene related
facts.

please think twice about what you write
and release into your mag. a mag can be
a very powerful medium to present any
form of propaganda. there are many dudes
that believe in texts written in your
magazine. the dudes that believe into
your texts are mostly newcommer that
started some weeks/months ago. they are
not that well informed like for example
people who belong to the scene for more
then 2 years and they might get a false
point of view after reading false/use-
less texts.

the cbm 64 is one of the most beloved
machines on this machine and it's very
simple to handle if you've ever worked
on a pc or an amiga. try to do any kind
of serious work combined with a lot of
fun and don't edit any kind of fake-mags
like "popelganga" and similar crap maga-
zines. please check out your magazine
and think twice about the content and if
you think your mag can't compete with
the rest please try to code some demos
or games but please don't waste your
time with editing a magazine. the majo-
rity of the readers will be very grate-
ful to see a boring mag disappearing
from the scene.

i'm very interested in your reactions
about this text.

yours sincerly,
                rrr/oxyron
                   /alpha flight 1970


                            january 1994