INTRODUCTION -------------- by Simon Plumbe ----------------- Another issue, another menu system! We've changed the menu again slightly this month to try and make a few more improvements. I managed to find an updated version of Menumaster which allowed me to have text-only entries without request buttons - it just looks neater on screen! (It also stops people from clicking on options that aren't there!!) Sorry that this issue is a month later than we originally planned, but my A2000 went off for a major repair job -- to Commodore, who promptly lost it, found it, repaired it, returned it and lost my keyboard and power lead! In total, they had my Amiga for 10 weeks so I've been struggling with my A500+ in that time and boy is it slow without any fast ram fitted!! I'd like to welcome a few new members to INFINITE FRONTIERS. First up is our regular contributor and well-known artist, Tobias Richter. When I asked Tobias if he was interested in joining, he jumped at the chance and immediately sent me another selection of contributions for this issue! Second is our writer, Tim Smith, who has been working on TFF since day one. Finally is our new writer/artist Sven Harvey. Sven originally wrote the models article on this issue. However, he soon wrote an update along with sending me some art so I felt that Membership to I.F. was the least we could offer him! Welcome to the group, guys! Anyone see the review in the January issue of Amiga Shopper? Great wasn't it! As a point of interest, THE FINAL FRONTIER is the OLNY article-based disk mag to have ever been awarded 10/10 in AS and it was only the third disk mag ever to do so! We also had a rather nice review in the February issue of Amiga Format, made even better by the fact that they made no mention of the mag's presentation!! We've made a few changes again to this issue (what would an issue of THE FINAL FRONTIER be without changes??)! First, the adverts section has now been broken down into three separate sections - a general reader's adverts section, a graphic advert section (not that there's anything there!) and finally a new section for our own mail-order service! We decided to offer this primarily to promote back issues of THE FINAL FRONTIER, but we have also recently become appointed dealers of Bjørn Lynne's music disk magazine, AM/FM, and we are going to be releasing a few new magazines of our own soon and we are considering the possibility of releasing TFF T-shirts (anyone interested?) and possibly a selection of other products such as animation disks (anyone interested in working on these? We will PAY royalties to all artists on these anim disks!). Also, we have dropped the intro for this issue. I decided to do this for two main reasons - first, there's no-one in I.F. that could code one for me (but we may be lining up a new coder soon) and secondly I don't have the time to produce one myself with the RSI demo maker (on top of that, as I said I've been forced to use just my A500+ for most of the production on this issue and the RSI Demo Maker isn't compatible with the Plus!). There is a title screen on this issue and one of the tunes loads up as a default, but that was by accident!! I only intended to have a picture/tune as a mini-intro! This issue also sees the return of the default background tunes! I just felt that it makes the disk look better and that our experiment to drop them from the last issue didn't really work out. I know the loading takes slightly longer, but at least you don't have to select a tune yourself! As well as the background tunes, we are also pleased to announce the return of the Reader's Charts! Following the increasing success of TFF through all the PD libraries stocking it, we felt that it would be a good idea to give this feature a second try at getting support. Please spend a few minutes to send us your votes. Thanks. Everyone who votes will be entered into a free draw and the first three names selected will get a free copy of the current issue (subscribers will have their subscriptions extended by 1 issue). Other improvements that you may not notice are that we have updated a number of the software packages that we use to put TFF together. I have now got a full-blown wordprocessor which is enabling me to add enhancements to text such as underlining, bold text, italics etc. far easier than ever before. I have also upgraded some of the other software including the software for the scanner. A couple of things to look out for in this issue is a couple of great pieces of fiction in our Bulletin Board Collection (these are slightly re-edited versions of the text files on the BBS's - we haven't changed the text itself, just the layout to make it more appealing and we've corrected a few spelling errors such as character names). Also we have a TNG story in our fiction section entitled "The Ghosts Of Yesteryear", which was actually submitted to Paramount for the show, although it was subsequently rejected. Unlike the BBS fiction, we have made NO changes to the layout to enhance its presentation as we felt that it was best to keep the layout in the format we received it in from the author. Anyone who has ordered this issue of the mag direct from us (or purchased it from an authorised dealer) will also have spotted that we have started using our own custom-produced disk labels (designed by Jason Brown and printed by Alphagraphics). We felt that it would just make the disks look more "professional" in your disk boxes! We are now dealing with a local print/ design firm who are also going to be printing the paper version of TFF for us (if that ever gets off the ground!), along with all our other printing requirements, so you should notice that all our printed material should be of a fairly high quality (letter-headed paper next?). A slight change to the promises we made in the last issue as well. I decided NOT to publish the convention talk with Richard Arnold and Guy Vardaman in this issue. The reason for this is to attempt to GUARANTEE that we would have a convention talk in EVERY issue. However, we have the talk with George Takei in this issue and I think that more than makes up for it!! (Also I didn't have enough time to type/edit the Richard and Guy talk as it was effectively TWO talks that need to be combined into one! Typing one of these talks takes up an INCREDIBLE amount of time which, unfortunately, I don't have.) On top of that, normally we only use about 50% of the material we actually record for the convention talks, for one reason or another, but in this issue we are proud to bring you almost ALL of George's talks from the weekend in Glasgow! Mainly because it's the first time that we are featuring one of the cast, but also because George had so much to say, especially his very moving memories of Gene. Hopefully we may be able to have the talk with Richard and Guy in the next issue, but we may have a surprise instead... As I said earlier, we are now official AM/FM distributors. Although Infinite Frontiers has been established to create the best possible original magazines, I have no intention of creating clones of magazines already in existance. For example, you will NEVER see a music disk magazine produced by us as I feel that the best music magazine is already available. The same also applies to "traditional" disk mags. However, to give you the best possible service we can, we are going to try and negotiate deals with some of the better magazines and become distributors for them. This way, you'll be able to get all the best magazines from us, even if we don't produce them! As usual with TFF, we've also had more than our fair share of trouble in producing this issue! I sat down on Sunday 11th October to start scanning all of the photos etc. only to find that my scanner had packed up on me!! I sent it back to Power Computing and I'd like to thank them for their swift service, returning my scanner to me within 4 days, in full working order, along with a free update of the software! However, it got worse after that when, on 17th October I came to use my now- revitalised scanner, only to find that neither the scanner OR a printer I was borrowing were working, although they both worked perfectly on my A500+! This lead me to the conclusion that the parallel port on my Amiga was faultly (or if nothing else, the Amiga itself), meaning a hefty repair bill! I sent it to one company, who charged me £30 for collection/delivery and to look at the Amiga, only to turn round and say that there wasn't anything wrong with it and who were quite willing to send an engineer to my house and charge another £45 to prove to me that it was working fine! However, the problem WAS still there so I ended up contacting Commodore and I sent it back to them (see the trouble I mentioned earlier) and that added another £140 to the total repair cost! So not only did I have to work VERY hard to get this issue out for a January release date, but I am also very broke! It doesn't help with the fact that I'm off to a convention tomorrow (29th January) and that's going to cost another £100-£200!! Oh well, at least I was still able to work on the mag using my "back-up" Amiga - an A500+! Still, I'm going to have to spend an extra £40 on that to expand the memory to 2MB so it can cope with my needs! Either that or I'll sell it and upgrade to an A1200. Alternatively, I'll keep the 500+ and get a A1200 anyway!!! With saying that, have you ever tried to cope with using a basic A500+ after you spend most of your time using a 3MB, 3 drive machine? Using the 500 was unbearable at times, espcecially when it came to scanning! When I scanned the DS9 cast photo, the software coped quite well, but I had to scan the photo at a 90° angle to be able to fit it on. Then the software decided to corrupt the image when I tried to rotate it! Eventually I sorted that out, only to find that DPaint III was ridiculously slow with just 1 Meg! To make things worse, crunching the final executable file was a nightmare! Using Imploder (which was more efficient) I started to crunch the file. Normally Imploder is quite fast, unless extensive graphic/sound data is involved and then files can take as much as 20 minutes. Not this time... to crunch a 119K file took Imploder 1 hour 45 minutes!!!! It wouldn't be so bad, but it only crunched it down to 108K! I then tried the same file on PowerPacker 3 (I'm still waiting for V4 to arrive at the moment) and this wasn't as efficient, reducing the file down to 111K, but the difference was in the speed. It took under a minute! Don't expect me to use Imploder again if I'm forced to use my A500!! Finally, a word about our next issue. Issue 5 is going to be a special looking at Deep Space Nine. I know we've tried to do specials before and the only one that worked out was our Trek VI special, but we've already got 4 stunning pieces of art (from Tobias) and 1 article, so I think it's going to be great! We're hoping to review at least the first 10 episodes, the novel, merchandise and much more, as well as a look behind the scenes. This mag was produced and edited by Simon Plumbe, Colin Gunn and Edwin Yau. Additional help from Tobias Richter, Bjørn A. Lynne, Alex Kerr, John Kitts, Gary Moffat, Tim Smith, Vince Hirst, Jason Brown, Sven Harvey and all the other guys at INFINITE FRONTIERS. Thanks! Editorial Address ----------------- To contact THE FINAL FRONTIER either with contributions (all text to be sent on paper or Amiga/Atari ST/PC-formatted 3.5 inch disks as 74-column ASCII files or on audio cassette as dictated articles!), donations, orders or just comments or if you are a software house or magazine interested in contacting one of our contributors then write to:- THE FINAL FRONTIER THE FINAL FRONTIER c/o Simon Plumbe c/o Colin Gunn 14 Rousdon Grove 26 Alfred Street Great Barr or Fenton Birmingham Stoke-on-Trent B43 5HN Staffs ENGLAND ST4 2HH ENGLAND Or you can call me (Simon Plumbe) on (+44) (0)21 358 1213 between 7:00 pm and 10:00 pm, Mondays - Fridays, or at anytime on weekends. Warning - if you call on Wednesdays between 6:00 pm and 7:00 pm you will get no answer - I'm not getting up to answer the phone while Star Trek is on!! Peace And Long Life...... Please note - we are NOT connected in any way with THE FINAL FRONTIER audio fanzine (is this still going?), the TNG fan club with the same name or the British Trek mag (why is it that everyone seems to take great pride in using our name?!). Still, we were around before ANY of the others, so this is the ORIGINAL TFF (not counting the film, of course!).