|The History of the AGA Slideshow... Freak of NFA owns up! Once upon a time I was in a tiny little group called "The Management", there were just three of us and we were hardly the most serious in the scene, in fact although we had a C coder, an artist and a mug to put everything together on disk (that was ME, that was!) we hardly released anything and people in general didn't even know we existed. One thing we did do though was release a few AGA slideshows when the A1200 was released, in fact we really had TWO claims to fame, we just never mentioned them to anybody! They were: 1. We were the FIRST all-A1200 group on the scene. 2. We released the FIRST AGA slideshows that got anything like widespread recognition. The name of that first slideshow was "Fit Chicks in 256" and it basically comprised of a few IFF's (Converted from GIF - ZGif hadn't been invented in those days!) that we managed to squeeze through a pirate copy of AdPro without running out of memory. People loved it and wanted more so we went on to produce II and III, I don't know where they are now or what they did for the scene when they were released, but I still see pictures in slideshows today that were used back in those very early first attempts! Eventually the other two lads went their seperate ways (i.e. they got involved with Work and Women - those two things long-since proved FATAL to the scene!) and I got a few contacts, one of which was the Wheelie Warrior of NFA, we got nattering and I joined, Deck the Ripper (the main man in NFA) got in touch and we were all happy people. I started collecting pictures from various sources, Citizen Smith (Neil from Scunthorpe) supplied a few that had come via Weird Science (Do you all remember those?), and I started work on another AGA Babe-filled slideshow, but was completely stuck for a name. I didn't want to use the "Fit Chicks" name because I thought it tacky in retrospect, and besides it belonged with the now-defunct Management group. It was while I was reading a motor mag that I actually came up with the name for the new slideshow, and not the Health & Beauty chain of the same name. I continued work with much more energy than before now that I had a working title. When it was released, everybody loved it! Remember that in those days there was nothing to compare it to and so it was considered the best, or rather, in a class of it's own! However I would be first to admit that perhaps the fact that 99% of the Amiga community being male had a little to do with it's success. And so life went on, and Bodyshop 2 came out, other people released disks full of AGA pictures, Weird Science crammed anything they could onto a disk, it didn't seem to matter if the pics were related or not, it was Boom Time in Amigaville! Then I met a guy called Dr. Spink and we toyed with the idea of doing a porno slideshow. He had a good video recorder and I had Vidi12 and the AGA software, so we sat down one night at my address in Crowle and did loads of disgusting piccies, crammed them onto disks and released them on the unsuspecting world. As it was we beat Blackhawk of Paradox by just a few weeks, and I don't mind admitting that his five-disk porno- rama extravaganza was WAY WAY better than anything we'd done, but still NFA were there with the first AGA Porno. If anybody still had a copy of "NFA AGA Hardcore", please don't send it to me! I used Dr. Spink's method in a few other releases, stuff like "Telly Pics", "Gladiators", and "Telly Pics II". One thing that remained constant through all of this was the Bodyshop series, I wanted to chuck them at five but people screamed at me not to and so I did "just one more". Bodyshop 6 was all finished and was waiting to be distributed when I was unfortunate enought to be burgled and all my floppy disks went walkies, along with several rather expensive items of electrical equipment, so I had to start it again from scratch, and I'm sorry to say that 6a wasn't as good as 6. Seven came out, it crashed after the last picture and we never did find out why, but 8 was okey dokey, and contained what are probably the best quality pictures in the entire series. This was a three-disker, the first and last in the series. The last few all used ZGif as part of the program, calling it do display the AGA Gif file as AMOS couldn't do. Big Girls was a 1-disk production back in the early weeks of 94 I think, and was later fixed to run quicker with ZGif (managed to get another pic on there too!). AGA Manga made an appearance, there was an awesome 4-disk one by Comax and a 2d by the Italian Bad Boys, Arkham have done one, and now L.O.C have got a little 1d floating around. Several famous faces have made Amiga appearances, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford, Pamela Denise Anderson and Phoebe Cates, Boris Vallejeo has had his art done a couple of times, Rosanne Arquette got her kit off, as did several famous faces in the Lifetyle slideshows by me old mate Scarface of TGB Manticore Inc. (Netherlands). Phil!95/Neř (although he was LSD then) sent me one called "Jolly Nice GIFs", which was essentially Big Girls AGA with better presentation (not difficult), Dengue released a couple of slideshow that strongly resembles early NFA stuff, "Tasteful" resembled both Big Girls and Bodyshop, "Faces" resembled Telly Pics 1/2. Several people pointed this out and asked if I was annoyed, the answer is usually "no", although there WAS a fake Bodyshop 8 porno version on two disks going round, good old Telescan (where would we be without you, eh Norman?) managed to flog it to a few unsuspecting people, but I don't think it caught on as most people could see it was just BS5 with different pics. I personally am aiming to get out of the AGA Slideshow thing after Big Girls III, there will be no more Bodyshop, and BG3 will be the last in THAT line because I can't see them going any further, at least not legally! I've had a damn good run with all the stuff I've churned out and so I'm going to let someone else have a go. I don't think I'm solely responsible for the state of this little corner of the scene today (Am I? You tell me!) But I feel I've done far too much work in that area and I'm in danger of becoming stereotyped, in fact on the trips to WHQ people invariably greet me with "I loved the Bodyshops, any more due?", so I'm quitting while I'm ahead. Have fun with the A1200, if you want any AMOS help then feel free to write to me at the addy at the top of this doc, I'll send you the basic source for an AGA slideshow if you ask for it, just send a disk crammed with stuff and your letter. All the best dudes... DiCK (Freak of NFA)