ÿÿ00ÿ ÿ00ÿ01ÿ03ÿ01Who Rules the Land of the Dying?ÿ00 ÿÿ ÿ03ÿ02PUH / AGONY ÿ02ÿ01ÿ01ÿ00ÿÿ They do not understand why I stick to my Amiga. "How many MHz does it run on? 14? Fo-ur-teen? You're joking, welcome to the nineties, at home I do it on 75, and I goddamn think that is slow!" My explanations are for deaf ears only. A 75 MHz PC is fast, it is modern, and it certainly is not dead. As a matter of fact, it has never seen better days. You can do much on it that you cannot on your 1200. I bet it must feel nice to have things as dictionaries, maps, Doom and Works on your 580 Mb HD, it must feel nice indeed. Further on, there are few feelings greater than seeing those masterpieces of games that just won't work with less than 32 Mb RAM, 6 flip CD and 250 Mb HD. A 75 MHz PC, or any PC, for that matter, is a grey machine without any kind of personality. What you do with it is exactly what millions of others do with it every day. Its programs and games are brilliant, just fucking perfect, if it weren't for one thing: there is NO soul in a PC. There is an Intel Super Hero Wadda-Do-Dei Processor of 150 MHz with X-pencer Master Ultra Bios 3.36, supported by Cosmic Energy Stabilizer Rutilator Works 4.2b, and it can handle up to 32 million colours at the same time. There is but one thing it cannot handle, and that thing happens to be the most important of them all: the feeling. What is then feeling? I admit there is a certain charm over all those games, programs and even some of the demos, but have the authors of these creations ever seen the old 64-game H.E.R.O.? And Defender of the Crown, what about that? I can tell you, I'd rather play H.E.R.O. than Doom, despite of the first ones using maybe one sound channel and 16 colours whereas the other one boosts out with countless numbers of everything. Further on, I certainly prefer CLIMate to the shitty program delivered with every PC. The documentation of the PC crap tells us that the program "handles files easily and in a way never seen before... ...copy files is no longer a problem... ...a few buttons and you're on...". Hmm, and why is it that CLIMate has all that the mentioned functions plus a few more, and have had it since 1987, and that the 1.0-version (1986???) works better than the latest W95-version, released some ten years later? The authors of CLIMate might did not create a program comparable to say DOpus, but they showed two things, namely that it is possible to make a file-program without making it grey, slow and impersonal (demands the PC still does not live up to today), and that if you thought through what you wanted to do before you did it, well, then you would not have to see crap like Works. As I see it, the wrong computer won the battle. After all, the future of the Amiga is uncertain (to say the least), and I do not know if it will ever rise again. If it does not, I will always remember those days when we gathered in front of Polyfemos' screen, all youngsters of Askim, and played Garrison and Defender of the Crown. The Amiga is, and certainly was, something special, and I have so many nice memories (the SCA, the Byte Bandit, X-Copy 2.0, my first party (Light / Phenomena), the fear of getting caught, modeming with Polyfemos, drinking Falcon Bayerskt and writing OR articles, using General Portion in order to get that real ASCII-feeling you cannot possibly get no matter how many MHz you have on your PC...) I long there, I really do. At best, the PC of those days was a machine on which you wrote school reports; the Amiga games were better, the Amiga graphics and sound were better and most of the Amiga programs were better. Then evolution, the hunt, began as IBM started to hunt for more MHz, whereas the Amiga didn't really develop much. The Amiga productions, however, did; people started competing in order to see who was best and to what outer limit you could pull your 500. Copy parties were held, demos were released, immortal classics were established. I tell you, this was the Amiga, the unique Amiga. (If you've been to a PC copy party, you ought to know what I mean. Very strong atmosphere - very - but not of happiness, excitement and the thrills of competing but of all the ozone and propane needed to chill down their processors so that they don't burn up. They simply missed the whole thing.) And what you get when you try to explain? Cheek! "We done this and we done that and blabla. Copy party? Isn't that where all the companies meet and sell their programs? Oh yes, it is, well, we have had 10 000 more of that than your lAmiga, give it to Africa, their evolution has not come so far yet." The PC people mistook copy party for exhibition, and as they have never seen the real thing, they will never understand what I mean. Listen to PC music. I often find it hard to tell PC music from normal CD music. Now, is that good? When I load ProTracker, I want to hear some real work of art, for example Jogeir, not some sampled, plastic music. After all, a computer produces computer music, it has always been like that; if I feel like CD music, I put on a CD, but the hell I use a PC to do the same! Yeah, CD music on your PC "gives you a feeling of real life, of power and of control", and I guess you could need that, too, as that is something your plastic, artificial computer lacks! Look at the attitude of PC graphics of today: "hmm... that picture is so badly scanned, it almost looks like it drawn! Shit!" Except for a few people that got the idea of art, drawn pictures are on their way out of the PC world. All games are released with master-rendered, raytraced title pictures; nobody seems to appreciate Art any longer; what the human mind (read: DeLuxe Paint) produces just isn't good enough any longer. They are of course right about one thing; raytraced pictures are nice. That does dot mean that drawn pictures aren't, something every MHz seems to think. After all, we are just talking of the human mind, of eye's perception and of our personality, and why on Earth should we let those things colour you pictures? Welcome to the 21st century, man! Look at us today. The Amiga is dying. Well, when it is dead, I can assure you, my computer career is over. I rather accept its and my dying than surrender and buy a PC. It is, however, not over yet; I'll stick to my Amiga and Oepir Risti for many years still. Different from the PC, we don't give up on our older models. Have you heard the latest? A PC version of H.E.R.O. is to be released soon! It will feature... ÿ02* ÿ01200 Mb of scanned photos ÿ02* ÿ01400 Mb of real film ÿ02* ÿ012 music CD's ÿ02* ÿ0116 million in-game colours ÿ02* ÿ01real actors (Ed Harris, Tina Turner, Mark Hamill and Joe Pesci) ÿ02* ÿ01Over eight billion different missions ÿ02* ÿ01A separate nuclear energy source for power supply ÿ02* ÿ01A source code of 20 million lines, i.e. more than W95 ÿ02* ÿ01A H.E.R.O. T-Shirt saying "H.E.R.O. - PC is first again" That game will really kick ass, so I suggest you buy it the day it is released! Better save some money first, though, as it will cost some 4600 USD. ÿ01