@2{Merry Christmas To One and All (Yuk)! @4}Craig (Hercules) Daines @5 Well, here we are again with another Christmas Issue of@2 THE CRYPT.@5 Call me miserable if you like but I hate Christmas. It's fine for the kiddies who look forward to Santa delivering their presses, but once you've grown older the magic kind of disappears out of it. To top that off you get Christmas forced down your neck all the time on television, on the radio and in the media. You can't even go Christmas shopping without going into Woolworth's where everybody is stressed out trying to think of what presents to buy and to make matters worse they play bloody Christmas Music in all the local shops: such as "I wish it could be Christmas everydaaay, when the bells start ringing blah, blah, blah (turn the damn music off now before I am forced to don my straight jacket please). Christmas songs are the last thing people want to listen to in the High Street shops when their rushing around and stressed trying to thing of what to buy and then having to queue in the process! @5 Christmas day you normally have a big Turkey. You stuff yourself silly and end up with chronic bowl wind. Chances are you always end up with quite a lot of Turkey left over and you spend the next week or so having Turkey for lunch, Turkey for dinner, Turkey sandwich... by this time you probably get sick of Turkey... so you feed it to your cat. What is the point of exchanging presents ? You only get the same useless presents every year such as a box of handkerchiefs, socks or undies. It's a far better idea to go out and buy your own Christmas present for yourself. At least then you'll know it's something you really want! Unfortunately I can't buy myself my own Christmas present yet, it's not available. I am of course referring to the AmigaOne (which is supposed to be released next year) and Sony's PSX 2. Sony have really messed up the stupid pre-order scheme of a 25 quid deposit then all 165,000 are sold out on the first day! To be honest, you would be best advised to wait unil later revisions of the PSX 2 arrive: a hardware fault regarding playing DVD disks using the standard Scart cable results in a green hueish screen. You can of course watch DVD moves via the television modulator cable but that defeat's the whole purpose! @5 There's one good thing about Christmas for us adults: New Years Eve is an excellent excuse to get well and truly plastered. The bad news is waking up New Years Day with a bad hangover and feeling like sh*t. The next morning you feel a little peckish:- @1Q1)@5 Hungry... No problem @1A2)@5 Why not have some left over bits of Turkey... No thanks I had that for Tea yesterday. What a brilliant way to begin the New Year! @1ARRGGGHHHH !@5 Amiga have surprised all of us once again with the announced arrival of OS 3.9 which is the last operating system upgrade for the classic Amiga range. Why bother? Amiga are hanging onto the past. Our 68k range of CPU's are hugely underpowered compared to 1Ghz Athlon PC's. Quite frankly the sooner we progress to the next generation AmigaOne machines and TAO's Elate Operating System and the concept of Virtual Processor applications the sooner the better. It's sad to say it but our machines are prehistoric dinosaurs. We have devices plugged into every orifice and back passage @1(oo-er missus)@5 possible which a standard A1200 motherboard was never really designed for, and constant instability problems with modified A1200 motherboards. @5 A recent survey was carried out regarding failing computer systems. 35 percent of people believe there are little Gremlin's running around in their computer's who bugger things up. The remainder of people believe this is caused by negative energies caused by a stressful environment?! I have had my fair share of those I can tell you. Due to various technical difficulties I am not able to provide many new articles for this issue of@2 THE CRYPT@5. However, don't worry: your all in for a real treat next issue with plenty of new reviews, hints and tips to keep you all informed. As I'm writing this I don't have much time until @4The Dungeon Master@5 finally puts the finally issue of @2 THE CRYPT@5 together (only a couple of days in fact). Most of yesterday afternoon I spent getting Professional FileSystem v3 up and running on my machine (look out for a full review next issue). I would of preferred if Amiga would start concentrating more on the Amigatized version of TAO's Elate rather than waste resources developing OS 3.9. The AmigaOne is to be released in the later part of 2001. Like many of us I won't believe this machine exists in any material form until I have one sitting next to my 'classic 68k' Amiga. @5 It is now up to Amiga to deliver what they have promised. The users are tired of broken promises. We have stayed with the machine all this time through thick and thin. Amiga owe the Amiga community a great deal. It's up to them to deliver it's promises to the users. The scheduled date of release for the next generation for AmigaOne has been scheduled for 2001. Amiga have stated @1 "We are not a hardware manufacturer. We are an OS company".@5 Just asking small existing Amiga suppliers to build the new machines is a recipe for disaster. For instance, Amiga have asked Eyetech to produce the machines to the specifications as detailed for the Amiga One. How is anybody ever going to be able to sell a machine that is just produced by a third party manufacturer that is advertised in the back pages of the last remaining Amiga magazine which is on sale in your newsagents? There will be many users who will want to buy the machine but unless people outside the Amiga community know it exists how do you expect to sell it ? If you market a machine this way, the only people who are ever going to know the machine exists is the existing Amiga community. This does not result in healthy sales. What's even more worrying is the press release on Amiga website of forthcoming games for the Amiga One: Mario 64 and Grand Theft Auto ? @1Heeellllooo?@5 I don't think so somehow... @1A Final Closing Note:@5 It's now ten years on since I was first introduced to the Amiga (thanks to my Business Administration and Information Technology course and would you believe it, despite being very naive and never bothering to do much work most of the time whilst studying for my degree, I still left college with my NVQ Level 2 in Business Administration and Information Technology and on top of that I've stayed with the Amiga ever since). As I just said, it's now ten years on down the line... and we are still stuck with prehistoric dinosaur Amiga's... It's time to put the pedal to the metal and accelerate the Amiga concept into the modern 21st century... @1Respects Fly Out To: @5 Many thanks to Steve our Webmaster for your kind comments regarding my technical articles. I shall indeed strive to produce some top quality reviews, tutorials, and hints`n`tips starting from the next issue. Also cheers to Ray and Ian for producing a quality publication: With hardly any @1'Disk Magazines'@5 left for Amiga users to read, it is thanks to special people like Ray, Ian, Steve, Francis and XLR8 that the relaunch has been such a success. Thanks also to our regular contributors and to Formatt Home Computing and Weird Science our official sponsors. @1 Support@2 THE CRYPT@5 It goes without saying that it is thanks to these above mentioned guys and our regular contributors who are willing to work their fingers to the bone to produce a quality magazine for the Amiga community that is both well put together, informative and witty and an enjoyable read. However bear this in mind: although these guys put the magazine together it is not a recipe for success alone. The Dual editors need contributors, so please support@2 THE CRYPT@5 in anyway you can. The more articles received the more diversity of topics we can feature which will mean we can cater for everyone's particular interests. The prior purpose of any disk magazine is to provide a sense of community amongst the existing user base and to provide a communication forum for our readers to express their views, something right now that is sadly lacking in the Amiga community right now. If anyone needs any assistance regarding technical queries, I am available via @2 THE CRYPT@5 mailing list on e-groups.com. I'm normally on-line every Sunday after 8pm. @3 Craig @1'Hercules'@3 Daines @5Technical Editor for @2THE CRYPT.