˙˙00˙ ˙00˙01˙03˙01Nowhere - Now Here˙00 ˙02˙for the Ninth Time˙ ˙00 ˙ ˙˙02˙02"˙01...and we had to wait until 1993 to see something really new and fascinating. It was at this time, I think it was at 'the Party II', that a new magazine was released. Its name was Oepir Risti. I'm told it did not not raise many eyelids there, and that it wasn't until everybody got home and had a look at what they had copied that they realized what a blaster this mag was. At a time when we all thought that nothing could match RAW, Oepir Risti showed us that it was fully possible. Their code was far more advanced than that of RAW (Oepir Risti boasting off with full system friendliness, full support for clipart, including the scrolling of dito in variable text columns (something RAW was unable of), extensive support for real time rescaling text columns; and their coder even stated that the magazine worked on ALL Amiga models (again which RAW did not)), tremendous design and perfect language. Different from all other magazines, this mag was not coined by paragraphs of brawling stating how cool the mag was, how good the authors were and how much they wanted the reader to vote for their creation. You could not find a single reference as to what they thought of their own magazine. These guys were the best, and they knew it.˙02" ˙ - Timothy Anderson, CSA, May 23, 1997 ˙ ˙00˙01Both Puh and S.Duvan wanted to publish Timothy Anderson's text (above) in the editorial, but Tobias Jansson refused. "It won't look good.", he said. "They'll think we're trying to look cool and fancy. Stuff like that just ain't happening." He was right: it does perhaps look a little wild. After all, it does tell the reader how good Oepir Risti is. Both Puh and S.Duvan liked that, believing that everybody who would read the text would already know what they thought about Oepir Risti, and that they would hardly be insulted as they knew that whatever the Oepir Risti Staff was looking for, it wasn't fame. "I don't agree.", said Tobias. "It looks bad, and I mean really bad. Imagine what they will say in SeenPoint and Generation! I feel the headlines coming already..." Duvan, who hadn't read Generation for three years, and Puh, who had read every Generation for the past three years (but still wasn't much smarter), didn't think anybody would care enough to make an issue out of it. "Ah, knock it off.", Duvan said. "There's nothing to it." "Big deal. Let them write.", said Puh. We were at Duvan's place making the final arrangements for the ninth issue. As usual, Tobias was everywhere, forcing drawn illustrations one pixel up, changing colour of paragraphs, reading through and correcting articles and complaining loudly about the quality of his own design and graphics. The rest of the staff had been there before, so they know how to ignore the demands of this illustrious fellow. To the uninvited, it'd look as if Tobias Jansson was in charge. To the invited, it'd appear that Puh was in charge. The rest of us knew that Duvan was the boss. "Done is done. The editorial is finished, and there ain't a thing you can do about that. No changes in the editorial. Compiled is compiled.", he said. "Ha.", said Puh with a malicious grin. Well, that's a lie, anyway, that Duvan would be the boss. He might be the master, but he isn't the boss. The thing is that nobody is the boss of the Oepir Risti staff. It has been suggested that Puh would set the standards of Oepir Risti (well, every time it says "it has been suggested that", it means "FiShWaVe and / or RoKdaZone has / have said that") but that is not the truth. Puh sets the standards in the jogging track (all Duvan does there is follows), but Duvan sets the standards in his own house. Tobias is the first to break them. "For me, it's enough to follow the laws and rules that suit me.", he proclaimed a few years ago. For Duvan and Puh he could follow whichever rules he desired as long as they both had some FAST-mem each. Puh stole Tobias' Blizzard 1220, and Duvan borrowed Puh's DRK 1202. No FAST for the Electron. Then, when Tobias moved to Stockholm, he wanted his Blizzard back so that he would be able to watch Nexus 7 and eat pop corn together with Origo / C-Lous & Subspace (working as a (game?) programmer for Ericsson). Puh, badly needing his FAST for Miami, Voyager, and YAM, forwarded the question to Duvan, which, in Tobias' eyes, had no use for FAST memory. "All you do is playing games.", Tobias told Duvan over the phone. Duvan had not played a game since Phantasie III was released (spring 1987), but Puh used to bring some of his favourite shoot-em ups to the Oepir gatherings. Puh totally crushed the rest of the staff in SSW and MineField. Anyway, Duvan needed FAST for compiling Oepir, coding AROS and checking his mail, so he, too, refused to give his (well, Puh's) turbo card back to Tobias (well, Puh). "Ok, this is how we'll do it, then.", said Tobias. "You just..." Puh didn't listen. Duvan didn't listen. After all, Tobias had bough a Pentium not too long ago, so he could redraw his pictures on that machine, and he didn't really need any FAST on his Amiga, anyway. Besides, Brilliance runs perfectly without any high memory at all according to Puh. (Well, Puh did not understand anything in that program ("Are those panels weird or what!"), but if it starts without FAST, Puh argues, the whole thing works perfectly). It is nevertheless a fact that both Puh's and Duvan's computers work perfectly. Puh has a A1200 with 4 Mb. Blizzard 1220, 430 Mb SCSI-II, Dynalink 33.6, Canon BJ-200 ex., and a connected C64, and Duvan has a A1200 with a 5 Mb DRK 1202, 1 Gb SCCI-II, Dynalink 28.8 and an expensive, out-of-order Star-Jet. When they both started their higher educations (right now it seems like a long time ago, and do you know what - it is) they were told that their Amigas hadn't passed the test of time, and that they were to upgrade to mumbo-jumbo-PCs if they wanted to make it at the university. Both Puh and Duvan refused to listen, feeling that their loves still had much to give. It was an answered love, too, for that matter. Here we are now, three years later. Those who suggested that we buy a 486 DX have long since bought themselves at least two new computers (first a P75, then a P166 MMX), and we're still going strong with nothing new but some FAST (well, 14 extra MHz for Puh and a 68881 for Duvan). Sure, we can't play Quake, we must mix our PS3Ms, and we can't run IBrowse in 600*800 16 million (like Orchis / 3LE can on his A4060 (considering donating it, pal)), but we still have what those university folks lack. We have ourself a computer that will start every time it is launched, that will carry out what we want it to carry our without displaying any "General Failure" requesters, and that has a soul and life of its own. Moreover, those university folks say that "in fifty years, we will laugh at the computers of today, much like people nowadays laughs at the computers behind the animations of Jurassic Park". Both Puh and Duvan agrees: in fifty years, we WILL laugh at the sight of the computers of today. What's more, we actually laugh today; it is, after all, hard not to smile when you see a full-blown PC in action (it takes a computer worthy of its name to display failure requesters with such rapidity). On the other hand, the Staff finds it very difficult to laugh at D.O.C.'s "Balls and Demons" from early 1988 when displayed on Duvan's monitor. The PC dudes call such old demos junk, feeling that everything older than half a year is passe, but I guess the rest of us know better. We suppose you all can imagine the feelings that bubbled up to the surface when Puh went through Prowler's disk boxes and came up with no less than EIGHT demos from 1986, 1987 or 1988. What joy, what tears! The Staff stayed up long that night, watching and discussing. This, for example, is taken from a "Vortex 42 Pack" from 1987. Have a close look at it, cause you don't see things like this very often these days (the disk was, by the way, infected with the SCA virus): This is its startup-sequence (shrunk to fit screen size): ˙02 type s/Message ; Contact Vortex 42 (Galvan): ; Nypongatan 1 ; 671 50 ARVIKA ; SWEDEN ; ; ; ; See ya soon! - Zaphod ˙01 This is the s/message (shrunk to fit screen size) ˙02 -- VORTEX 42 -- Presents a collection of swedish demos! Put together in october, 1987 by Zaphod of V42. Choose between: < 1 > Pulstar / Vortex 42 < 2 > Paranoimia / Vortex 42 < 3 > Beyond all imagination / The Silents < 4 > Demo 2 / Computerbrains CCS < 5 > Front-demo / Northern Lights Orcdemo / The Young Ones < 7 > Mighty Copperlist / The Young Ones ˙01 This is the directory of the disk (shrunk to fit screen size):˙02 Directory "df1:" on Tisdag 25-Nov-97 front.dump 70606 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:38:16 4 127556 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:46:03 3 128700 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:52:42 2 54524 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 21:16:09 1 139852 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:48:36 S Dir ----rwed 24-Dec-87 22:22:30 6 135587 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 18:00:22 7 57984 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 18:02:36 r 376 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 18:00:23 type 2176 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 18:03:01 fonts Dir ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:38:52 system-configuration 232 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 21:43:33 5 84824 ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:38:32 Libs Dir ----rwed 28-Sep-87 17:38:32 11 files - 3 directories - 1590 blocks used ˙01September 1987 - that's ten years ago. The Staff wonder what Zaphod does these days. Is he still active in the scene? No, hardly. He must be like thirty years old by now. He is probably married and father of two. He has forgotten how to code assembler some nine years ago, we assume, and he has a 133 MHz Pentium for his kids to play Trollet Hugo on. Alternatively, however, he has kept his nosy computer attitude, still being something of a rebel. He could be, say, a BeOS developer or boss of the pOS. With a little bad luck, he could even be dead. In whatever way, we wish him the best and thank him for the times that were. We wish, Zaphod, that there were more like you out there. Anyway, as seen from the lists above, the longest demo (yes, "demo" was the correct terminology in those days) took up some 140 K of disk space. As you may recall, there were no real mega demos in 1987, and if you think 140 K is small for a demo, you should have seen what they meant by an intro. (Well, there actually were a couple of megademos produced in 1987. The first ever released were by Sodan and Magican 42, two Danish coders. The music was, as far as I can remember ripped and the graphics were pretty much nonexistent except for the ripped pictures from Defender of the Crown. That Sodan were the same guy who coded "Sword of Sodan", a game released somewhat more than a year later. Another classic was the Ian and Mic demo. /S.Duvan) Nothing much, let us tell you that. Despite that information, those intros are just so amazing to watch these days, featuring that old-style sound, those spotty pictures and such cool raster bars (before the days of SoundTracker, the music was often stolen from games or other intros (which is why you can imagine the tears on Puh's face when he found a demo featuring every tune from Bubble Bobble (Dave Whittaker's masterpieces, you know))). Having experienced that, every modern demo competition fades away. The Amiga demos of today, Duvan says, is nothing compared to what the scene once produced. Anybody wishes to add anything? As we moved deeper into Prowler's disk box, we found "Crash Disk 4" ˙02 Directory "df0:" on Tisdag 23-Dec-97 C Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:19:13 S Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:19:23 L Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:34 HAGAR Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:19:39 THE CONNECTION Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:20:12 --------------- Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:21:21 Thiele 468 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:43 1 26 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:11:41 system-configuration 232 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:44 Hope 131692 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:42 X-men 77096 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:23:01 2 26 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:12:07 D.O.C!!! 147800 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:20:20 Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:21:47 songs Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:28:52 Claps1 2300 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:11 3 37 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:12:34 DigDug 3100 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:15 DxTom 4000 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:18 FunBass 6500 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:22 genius 32768 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:29 HiHat2 2000 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:32 KorgBass 4000 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:37 KorgBeau 7000 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:40 len 40992 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:52 scr2 647 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:21:54 MetalKeys 9400 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:55 PopSnare2 4000 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:29:59 RichString 6900 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:30:03 TheEgg 9900 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:30:07 4 24 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:12:50 demo 6176 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:19:43 sanx 170720 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:25:12 5 24 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:13:06 SL 69344 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:25 screen2 1132 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:24 6 22 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:13:22 ols Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:21:11 libs Dir ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 00:22:49 scr1 553 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 01:50:45 7 19 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:08:03 8 15 ----r-e- 27-Feb-87 02:08:28 32 files - 10 directories - 1516 blocks used ˙01This is its start-up sequence:˙02 fonts cls prompt "Enter " type scr1 wait 16 cls type scr2 ˙01This is the scr1 message:˙02 Welcome to the party! Sit down,take a drink and relax. Just be cool and don't move,you are no longer a cat! Grrr! This is > CRASH DISC 4 < Slashed up by: HAGAR! of THE CONNECTION We have got a new member in THE CONNECTION,his name is THE BLOT. Welcome Mika! (He come from Finland) My special greetings go to: The others members of THE CONNECTION, GOONIES, THE GIGAFLOPS, THE SUPPLY TEAM. Get the right connection,contact HAGAR ˙02This is the scr2 message (shrunk to fit screen): ˙02 - CRASH DISC 4 - 18.4.88 e 1 = Sinners /Demo e 2 = X-Men /Intro e 3 = D.O.C. /Demo e 4 = The Scientific Frontiers /Demo e 5 = Sanx /Demo e 6 = Silicon Leagve /Intro e 7 = Greetings HAGAR PO.BOX 213 5863 Ferritstlev Denmark! ˙01This is the screen2 message:˙02 Greetings in A-Z, This is only HAGAR's contacts! Ackerlight, Alpha Flight (Shut Berlin & The Visitor), Amiga Power Team, ANC, Antitrax, Austriala Cracking Service, Axxess, Bamiga Sector one, Blue Dragon, Cas-Soft, Crackforce Omega, DCU, Defjam, Dexion, Doctor Mabuse & Co, Dominators, D.S.Compware, Excess, Fairlight, Gamebuster 1541, Ghostrider, Gigaflops, Goffy Crackingds, Goonies, GSC, Happy Cracking Service, IMP, Infinty, Interfox, Invisble Cracking Industries, Italian Bad Boys, Jewels, Jungle Command, LCS, Magnificent Force, MES, Nashau, New York, Ninja Force, Northern Lights, Oks Import Division, Oohoo Troops, Phr Crew, Pike, Radwar ent., Random Access, Ranger, Red Sector, Power Station, Shadow Software, Sim, Skyline, Softteam, Software Syndicate, Stack, Starion, SWS, TAC, TAU, Tetragon, The British Bulldogs, The Commodore Guys, The Fall Guys, The Fifth Dimension, The Final Suppliers, The Freelance Crackers, The Scientific Frontiers, The Supply Team, The Squad, TNM, The New Masters, THF, Thunderbolt Cracking Crew, Trazer, Triad, Trilogy, Tristar, TSK-Crew, Ultimate Cracking Group, Upfront, Vision, Vortex 42, Wupp, 7-Up Crew. If I have forgotten someone,then say it! Type: e 8 ˙01The Oepir Staff is really amazed by some of those names, like Gamebuster 1541, Gigaflops, Italian Bad Boys, Ninja Force, Oohoo Troops, and The Freelance Crackers. Moreover, we notice Vortex 42 amongst the greeted ones (see above). We can't help wondering how many of these guys that still keep their Amigas at home. We would guess that the correct answer in none, even though it is possible that one or a few of them still is active with their Amigas (hardly in the scene, though). What have they been doing since we last heard from them in 1988? Nobody knows. This list above raises another interesting question: Tristar and Red Sector are mentioned. TRSI, which stands for Tristar and Red Sector Inc., is still active today, which nobody hanging around possibly can have missed. Now, what Oepir Risti does NOT really know is whether any of today's TRSI members was a member of Tristar or Red Sector back then or not, but we suspect that the TRSI of today has nothing in common with Tristar or Red Sector as of 1988. If this is so, it would be ugly of TRSI to keep referring to their long past as successful Amiga activity. Nobody would argue that they are not successful - they are - but just how much do they really deserve the Tristar / Red Sector name? Unless there are any real Tristar or Red Sector members left, we'd say they are simply not worthy their game, no matter how skillful they are (and, as we said, we're not accusing them of being untalanted). The same thing goes for the Colorbird-messup and the Razor 1911 affair. Colorbird had not more in common with Razor 1911 than Puh has with FiShWaVe, and hearing him (Colorbird) referring to Razor 1911's long tradition with great pride just as if it was his own made the Oepir Risti Staff sick. Sure, he made us sick in other ways, too, but this was IT, this was the drop that filled the jug to its limits and made it flow over. By claiming to be a member of this old-school group, he actually pulled a veil of shame over it, neglecting its old values and traditions. Compare it to the Oepir Risti Staff suddenly claiming that Oepir Risti is a Bamiga Sector One release, us taking up that old group name again. How would that look? What would everybody say? Hopefully, everybody would know that we were fakes, just trying to be cool by picking up and reviving an old group's name. With a little luck, the scene would clean itself from such losers, and we'd be condemned. But, OK, things are a bit different with the TRSI guys. The way we see it, Tristar and Red Sector merged to form TRSI and have been active under that name ever since. New members have arrived and old ones have left, making the TRSI consist of new blood alone (and a warning: we don't really know if this is the case, we're just pretty sure it is). How much, then, does it deserve to defend the old flag and values of Tristar and Red Sector? We'd say that nops, the TRSI sure is a good group full of talented and productive members, but they should stop referring to themselves as the oldest, still old-school group in the scene (we had an interesting conversation about this with a TRSI dude at The Party IV, and he kept referring to himself as an old-school guy because he was a member of the TRSI, even though he had only been active since summer of 1993). What they CAN say is that TRSI has roots that reach a long way back in time, and that the TRSI has some old, fascinating traditions, but they can't (like the guy we met), claim to be the same Tristar / Red Sector that ruled the scene so many years ago, and they can't come and say that they defend the old-school style. What was, for example, so old-school with Insomnia issue 1? Virus Workshop, by the way, is an excellent program. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ It is a fact that a year has passed since the last issue of ours. We understand that nobody wants it this way, including ourselves. We had, as a matter of fact, planned for a ninth issue the summer that was, but a lot of unfortunate circumstances stopped Sweden's leading disk magazine (and Sweden's only disk magazine) from being released. Puh had to attend to a summer's course in faunistic and floristic at the university and was hardly at home, for one thing; Duvan joined the army and was not at home at all, for another. Tobias took a time-out and went to Egypt, coming back with spooky rings on his fingers and weird figures in his mind. He has promised the rest of the Staff to show them all those photos he took during his journey, but we have not seen a pixel. We almost start to suspect that he hasn't been anywhere at all (or, worse, what he could have been doing there that he does not dare showing us). He was, though, extremely burned by the sun when he got back, so he must have been somewhere. The first time Puh met him after his return home was at the annual VM-lopp of Gothenburg. It is a "runners' competition" of 10 km. in the centre of Gothenburg, and Tobias usually beats the crap out of Puh, year after year. For example, in 1996, Puh scored 59.56 min while Tobias made a good 45.34. Now, in 1997, Puh had decided to defeat Tobias once and for all. The year started quite bad with a nerving illness, and Puh could not hit the jogging tracks until May. When the summer left and it was time for the competition, Puh knew a whole lot of floristic but not much on running. Consequently, in 28 degrees centigrade, Puh did his very best and finished those 10 km. in shameful 1.03.12 while Tobias at least saved his face with 47.53. When Puh crossed the goal line, he knew that he had only minutes left to live. He survived, though, and was offered a small gold (yeah) medal (everybody gets them) and some Frödinge Ostkaka. Ain't life a bitch? Another race we simply can't hold away from you is the Hisingsrundan of 1997. Tobias, Puh and Frame formed a team that wiped out the rest of the competitors. Duvan was there too, leading the cheerleader team. He was supposed to have been in the race but due to an injured knee, he couldn't participate; that very injure was by running, by the way. It happened when he run Stockholmsloppet of 21 kilometres (1 hour 58 minutes). Then, at Mölndalsbroloppet, Prowler and Puh defended the honour of the nowadays well-known running team Oepir Risti Staff and were offered two cans of Pripps Plus and a hand-shake with Evy Palm. We are currently preparing our come back at Göteborgs Sylvesterlopp, a 10 km. race that will be held on the 31st of December 1997. Rumour has that neither Prowler nor Puh are that keen on the idea, but once in the hands of the Staff you just can't quit. Puh tried that "But I have not run for at least a month, I will N-E-V-E-R make it through ten kilometres!"-style, but Duvan forced him mercilessly down on his knees and told him to get the fuck out training. "You quit - you die", he said (much like the signs on his Gödel-Escher-Bach book: "Du rör - du dör"). ˙˙02* * * Bent cold sidewalk open the gate I may be late but I can no longer wait. ˙ ˙01(from one of Puh's favourite CDs, Tangerine Dream's "Cyclone" from late nineteen seventies and with vocals by Steve Joliffe. Anybody who has the full lyrics, anyway? Puh has never understood much of them, which of course does not stop him from taking the album to his heart. Cyclone is one of the few Tangerine Dream albums that feature lyrics and song, Puh tells us, and even though the rest of the Oepir Risti Staff is somewhat sceptic to this record, it's good to know that somebody finds comfort in it.) ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙As you may know, Svea and Alvar Andersson have been intimely associated to Oepir Risti throughout all these years. Both Alvar and Svea, however, are rather rusty these days, forgetting both Puh's name and their own language, but they still have much to give. However, since they maybe will have to move into a elders' service centre within the year, they are relieved from the burden of being responsible for the Oepir Risti fan mail, and Duvan and Puh grab that fine piece of responsibility instead. Duvan reports that he feels good about it, finally getting some mail (he quit swapping in 1989), but Puh seems a bit more confused, claiming he has a lot to do with his biology. According to the rest of the Staff, though, biology is an easy thing to study (Puh comment: but then, the rest of the Staff sucks, not knowing the difference between Sweden's top ten mosses when they see them). According to Puh, on the contrary, Duvan's studies seem serious enough, but toj's more like a joke (toj comment: that, I guess, says more on Puh than on my serious studies) (Duvan comment: no, as a matter of fact, it does not). In whatever way you prefer, the whole of the Staff has now collected over 250 Swedish university points (högskolepoäng), which means a whole lot out there on the market of jobs. Naah, just tricking you. ˙ ˙02* * *˙01 ˙Puh comment: I have heard that this issue of Oepir Risti is the one in which I will finish the "war" with FiShWaVe by apologizing and saying I'm sorry. I have been told that it is not mature to go on fighting like this, and that I really should cancel the whole thing right away. People have said that I, finally, ought to write a "FiShWaVe is right!" article. I have also been told that Elvis drives cabs in New York, that the Yeti lives in Nepal, and that milk does not exist. It is, of course, ridiculous to think that I'd cancel whatever argues that may be between FiShWaVe and me. It is left for the losers of the war to cancel and ask for peace (and maybe write poetry ;), so I'd say it's pretty much up to FiShWaVe to make decisions here. Let us just establish the fact that this issue is as full of FiShWaVe articles as ever. Oh, by the way, RoKdaZone has joined the party, too, so it's a two-against-one war now. I like those odds. As seen in the spandimerda award article in SeenPoint 6, Rocky is far from being as stupid and idiotic as FiShWaVe is, and I even feel that we might solve the argues if we meet at The Party (right now, I don't know if I'll go there). I suspect that Rocky is kind of a nice guy - which perhaps says more about me than about him as I have never met him (except for five minutes on IRC). I will never solve anything with FiShWaVe, though, and besides, he has told everybody that he'd wipe my ass when we meet. It's obvious that he has no clear view of the situation, and that he's not the master of his own domains. He claims to be a good writer, and yet he wishes to solve problems with his fists. How does that go together in your ears? ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙With FiShWaVe's harsh words on Puh ("Naah, the texts of this Puh fellow are of no good. He will never have anything published in real life, his a real looser. Not shall we talk about his real writings, either. Save me from'em!", FiShWaVe is reported to have said.), the Oepir Risti Staff denotes that since issue eight, Puh has had four articles published in national Swedish paper magazines ("Dyk!" 3/97, "Bygd & Natur" 1/97, SKTFs Aktuellt dec. 1997, "Spiggen Nytt" 3 and 4 / 97), earned his first money that came from writing, and that our German friend was wrong again. Puh says that the feeling of knowing that you can enter the local tobacco store and buy yourself (on the paper shelf) is totally beyond anything he has ever experienced before, and that he wishes that FiShY will experience it one day, too. As opposed to him, though, Puh is not the kind of guy to come with ˙02false accusations˙01 and ˙02ridiculous rumours˙01, and the Oepir Risti Staff does not claim that the SeenPoint staff never will make it to the paper shelves. What we claim, though, is that FiShY has to go through a great deal of improvement before anything interesting will happen, but that's another story. As some of you might have noticed, he has actually become better during these years. Anyway, getting articles published is not much to brawl about. Anybody could sell a text or two to one of all the hungry paper magazines around. Puh was happy, though, and so were the rest of us. That's where it all could have ended. One day in October, Puh got a special mail. Well, the truth is that he got four mails, three of which was from Polyfemos, and as Puh knew that Polyfemos letters were from out of this world, he started by reading them. After ten minutes or so, he remembered that there still was a mail to read, a mail the sender of which he did not know (or at least did not think he knew). He opened it (that's what you do with letters in YAM, anyway (excellent program, Marcel!)) and read it through. Thinking it must have been some kind of mistake, he re-read it. There was no mistake, however, and Puh noted that he had actually won the national Swedish short story competition of SKTF. Jesus! Puh vaguely recall dialling up Tobias directly afterwards. This is what Tobias has to say about the phone call: ˙ ˙02"...and around 16:00, somebody called me up. At first, I did not understand who it was as all I heard was a terrible howling. I thought that, Christ, somebody is being cut to pieces by Jack the Ripper right here over the phone. Then I looked down on my Anita, and I saw that the call came from Puh's place. (Silly me, I should have expected that...) When Puh had calmed down a little, he told me that he had wiped away the rest of the Swedish people in fair short story competition. At that time, he burst into screaming again, and I didn't really understand much of the whole thing until the next evening." ˙˙01What we'll do here is that we'll let Puh tell us the rest. Here he comes... ...and here I am. It took me quite some time to really understand the span of that very mail. It was my first serious "literature competition" (other than the poetry competition of Hvidfeldtska Gymnasiet, which yielded me 100 SKR ;), and, fuck me, I had won it! At that time, I did not know more than that the prize ceremony would take place at the annual "Book and Library Exhibition of Gothenburg", and that the winner was promised a thrilling prize. Boy, were the following days a dream! Apart from what you may think of me (again: apart from what FiShWaVe / RoKDaZoNe think about me), I did not go around telling everybody that I had won. (Sure, this is a text of mere brawl, but this, folks, is Oepir Risti - as opposed to my civil life - and Puh and Henrik Nilsson may occupy the same body, but they don't always share behaviour). Accordingly, those at the university who thought they knew me (judging my length of hair and taste of music) still knew nothing about the potential of that seemingly lost, harmless and perhaps ridiculous young man. (Well, that's at least what I tell myself that they think about me - and I'm not the man to ask, either.) In my mind, though, I knew that I was the king, and that I could defeat any of them (including the medical program high flyers) when it came to writing. Again: dunno if I really could, but then, why act rationally when you had won? I was the king, and they were merely my disciples. They did not know it, of course, and that's precisely where the charm was: I had won, and nobody knew it. True, though, that I told Tobias, Duvan, Frame, and Polyfemos, but then, how could I not? One week later, I got the jury's motivation. Let me tell you that it did not exactly take me down on Earth: ˙˙02(in translation) "With a deep insight in language and a fascinating knowledge of the actual subject, the author - Henrik Nilsson - leads the reader into a world far beyond that which he is used to. The jury wishes to give the prize to Henrik Nilsson partly for the untraditional and exciting choice of subject, partly for the vivid and fascinating language." ˙˙01It is often said that you have not won until everybody knows that you have won, but that turned out to be totally untrue (but then, a few guys did know). What that means in reality, I guess, is that you have not won until you have told all the beautiful women that you have won. I did not do that. How would that have looked, anyway? (OK, I lied: I told one ;) At this time, I gave the story to the budds around so that they could read it and say what they thought. I was happy to know that they seemed to like it, even though I was aware that if someone of them hadn't liked it, he would probably kept that to himself. That's the drawback of situations like that. You could say that I was a bit nervous when the big day - the Day of the Prize Ceremony - came closer, and I was not relieved to know that the Swedish Cultural Minister would attend, either. To tell you the truth, I was a shaking break-down, much like the role I accuse FiShWaVe of playing (now you see for yourself how brave the guy that so often condemned our German friend was when it really mattered: the Swedish Hero crawled on his knees in fear. Now, what does that tell us?). I was told that I was supposed to hold a short speech when I had received the prize. What should I say? What should I do? Would I break into that "Well, I ha-ha-have been v-v-very..." that I usually broke down into when I make important phone calls (again: guess this part)? Would I be struck by silence and forget all that I had planned to say? I just did not know. The guy that saved me from all this trouble was called Carl Gustaf Nilson, my father's grandfather, who had been dead for some 70 years. This is how: C-G was the man that set up the balloon ramp of the Andree expedition (that Polar traveller, you know). My father's grandfather went with Andree to the North Pole (well, not exactly, but to its vicinity ;) to construct the starting ramp for the balloon. I am told he even made a few shorter balloon trips together with Andree and the crew to see if the balloon worked OK. As you know, Andree and his two-man-big crew died during expedition, buy lucky for me, Carl Gustaf did not (he was not aboard the balloon during the last trip). A parenthesis: if my father's grandfather hadn't been a man of the hammer and the nails, there had not been any Oepir Risti today. Can you now see how the past is connected to the present (or, as Per Östh would have put it, a blast from the past)? Anyway, the un-edited diary of Carl Gustaf was released at this very exhibition, so all I needed to say was this: ˙˙02"...thank you... I appreciate... very funny... I recently learned that my father's grandfather's diary from the Andree expedition is released during this exhibition. For him, it took more than hundred years to be released in book-form. I hope that it won't take that long for you to hear from me again." ˙˙01Was that a tricky ending or what? I got my money (won't tell you how much ;), I shook hands with the Minister, and I met a few famous authors. I had a good time, as you might understand. I guess that's it about that. Now you know what nobody around here knows. You may of course think that I write this to brawl. You are right, I do, and it feels SOOO good, too. This is the scene, you know. A few weeks after the ceremony, SKTF told me that they were to publish the story in their magazine. I suggested that they use some kind of illustration, and I "happened" to mention that I knew just the men for the job. They (by which means SKTF) thought it was a fair idea, so they promised that they would use the illustrations unless they were of exceedingly low quality. (not having any scene knowledge, they did not understand that the illustrations of those I had in mind - Tobias Jansson and Prowler / Scoopex - were't exactly coined by exceedingly low quality. Accordingly, I called them up (they already knew about the competition and such, but not of about any illustrations) and asked them to draw a beautiful cray-fish for me. (The story actually was about cray-fish ("kräftor", a lake-living lobster relative) Both accepted. Need I say that I have never seen more frightening creatures in my whole life? The pictures will be around somewhere, but due to their size, it was out of the question to use them in this (or any, for that matter) issue. If you're interested, I suppose you can mail and ask. Latest news: It just so happened that the cray-fish picture turned out to be the title picture of this very issue. Now you see it, now you don't. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I was uncertain whether my story still belonged to me or if the rights to it now were acquired by SKTF. When I learned that I could use the story wherever I wanted, I knew that we at least had one article for this issue (that's early: usually, when a month is left to release, we have no articles whatsoever). Spiggen Nytt, the newspaper of the scuba diving society of which I am a member, wanted to publish it (together with the illustrations), as did Askims Hembygdsförening and - I better add "maybe" here - a major, non-commercial Swedish divers' magazine. Time will tell. The name of the story - as well as the article in this issue - is "Astacus neglectus". I'm sorry to say that there is NO Enligsh version provided, and that you only will be able to read it if you know Swedish. This is, as Jane Wrightsson suggested, unfortunate, but I am simply not good enough to verify its verbal quality in the English language. The text is highly connected to usage of Swedish language and "takes advantage of" some situations and opportunities that Swedish offers. Nothing fancy or "deep", of course, but still impossible for me to do anything about. I'm really sorry about this. What can you make out of this? Most of you won't even be able to enjoy (hm... ;) the story, so I figure you will have a hard time in trying to decide whether the decision of the jury was correct or not. Moreover, you can't really tell if the young man Henrik Nilsson as a person is worth winning. As for me, I think there are many people that write pretty good things but who, due to personality reasons, don't deserve winning even the smallest coin. Others - and these I admire - write good things AND are decent human beings, and I wish them the best. Still others write lousy things, win something and then go around telling everybody that they had won. I hate these guys. As you understand, I am dangerously close to that situation here as I actually have (in the previous kilobytes) told everybody how good I am. Now, I'm not asking you to judge or make any statements as there is not much to say or learn about me or my story. Those of you who can read it, I suggest you do. The rest of you will have to stick to the facts. Those are: ˙02*˙01 FiShWaVe said that I was such a lousy writer and shitty person that I would never have any success whatsoever when it came to writing. ˙02*˙01 I have recently had some success when it comes to writing. ˙02*˙01 Accordingly, FiShWaVe was wrong. I may still be an unpleasant figure and a bad writer, but I am not a simple liar and a carrier of false accusations as he seems to be. ˙02* ˙01Consequently, if there is just one thing you will learn from this editorial - just one - I hope that it has got something to do with "FiShWaVe" and "wrong". ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙Never having had any official spreaders, Oepir Risti feels that it now is about time to get the dice rolling. Accordingly, the official Oepir Risti BBS is from now on Warehouse, the 3LE world HQ, sysoped by Orchis / 3LE. Warehouse, being one of the finest boards Sweden can offer, will host all Oepir issues and intros free to download even for guests. The cosysop, Spot / 3LE, has by the way provided this issue with a magnificently cool drawn illustration (a fish, Puh noticed with pleasure), again establishing Spot as one of the leading graphicians in Sweden of today. Try it out at +46 (0)31-368324. ˙˙02* * *˙01 Ställ mig en fråga utan uppenbart svar ge mig en gåva som försvinner - men finns kvar ˙ ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ It has been argued that Oepir Risti does not change, and that we have a hard time keeping pace with the other disk magazines around. It is true that Oepir Risti does not change much, and that we don't even try to keep pace with everybody else. Our code, for example, has not been touched for three years, which we get to hear all the time by people interpreting that as a sign of bad quality (we'd say it's more like a sign of good quality, but you never know...). We are getting too old to care changing our design every third issue, and we're too lazy to try to collect six or even seven different modules per issue. Is that a sign of bad quality, is that a sign of Oepir Risti's decay? Yes, says FiShWaVe; no, say we. Some just don't understand that we're happy with what we are doing, and that we feel no need to top the charts and blast off every now and then with intros saying "Featuring NEW code!", "Now with MORE than 220 articles!", or "Articles by the LEADING writers!" ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ Well, what we wrote above was a lie. Oepir Risti has changed a little since the last issue. As you may know, our articles - as well as the executable file itself - have been crunched with this fine utility since issue six (or was that seven, or even five?), and the music has been played using The Player, another cool piece of artwork, for some time, too. You see, Mittag-Leffler's module was rather big, and the text constituted several hundred kilobytes, too, and we did not want to cut away and throw stuff. (Have you ever seen a Mittag-Leffler module that was short, anyway? (Yes, I have / Mittag-Leffler) It took some time for toj to understand that a title picture could not amount to "some hundred K's", as he suggested it would. In cognito, Duvan had to lay eyes on the code again when Puh and toj worked with the advertisements (their work resulted in Oepir Risti issue nine containing two advertisements, none of which are properly coloured). Duvan has no problem working with Puh, who demands that music be played during work. Puh and Duvan share, at least to a certain extend, an interest in SID tunes, Jogeir Liljedahl, Karsten Obarski, and Chris Huelsbeck, and they have no trouble keeping HiP busy for ten or twelve hours in a row. Tobias, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass for the others as he demands absolute silence when he works (not often that happens, though). "Hey, turn that SID off RIGHT NOW! I'm trying to focus over here. Do you want the title picture to turn out like shit or what?", he says. Neither Duvan nor Puh pay any attention to him. Somethimes, when they are in a good mode, they let him play his god damn Front 242 records, but the works of Ulf Lundell and all those jazz tapes are - forever - banned from the Oepir Central. The only other CDs that find their way to Puh's squirrel-SCSI (connected to Duvan's PCMCIA) are those of the Tangerine Dream and Vangelis. Puh adores Tangerine Dream and thinks Vangelis is OK; Duvan adores Vangelis and thinks Tangerine Dream is OK. Tobias rejects them both, believing he is in a higher state just because he has seen the pyramids, been to dirty hotels in Italy and taken a stand in the Palestina conflict. "If you went out and saw Europe, like I did, you wouldn't care much for that kind of music. It's kinda childish, anyway, and I suggest you leave that kind of life behind. Go for jazz or perhaps Palestinian goat horn flutes.", he says. When Mouse on Mars released their new CD this autumn, Puh was the first to buy it in Gothenburg (well, that's what he claims, but then, he claims a lot), and Duvan was the first to pull a veil of ridicule over it. Duvan usually does that, saying that Puh's music is "simple" and "too easy", arguing that no good comes out of such music. Puh, on the contrary, argues that Duvan's classical compact disks are no better, believing that a CD isn't good just because it is sold in the "Classical Music" section of the record store. There is no telling who is right and who is wrong in this situation, is Tobias' smart advice (who is first to brawl about how easy it was to take a stand in the Palestina conflict, and then does not dare to take a stand as for the internal music conflicts of the Staff), and he suggests that we let the whole thing be. About the Palistinian confict and other related topics, Tobias stated not long ago that he was, in all parts, wrong and Duvan was right. You know, Tobias claimed after his visit in the Arab countries that he knew everything about everything. However, he had no or ridiculous answers to the intricate questions posed by Duvan. Not so surprising though considering his lacking the information Duvan had on hand being a news addict since the age of four. Where were we? Compression, right. Well, the point here is that you will have to make sacrifices unless you want to end up like SeenPoint. When Puh first saw SeenPoint issue six (or was that five?) on Warehouse, he marked it for downloading. He could as well have marked it for termination, for the archive was 2.6 Mb big (again, he can't recall the exact number, but it was clearly over 2 Mb). In spite of his Dynalink 33.6, Puh had to wait for ages to see the magazine running. The primary reason for the length seemed to be the issue's several modules, as usually is the case with these new magazines. It is a generally held opinion that it's cool to have many different modules in a magazine in order to please the taste of everybody. It is, moreover, argued that if you are to spend two hours in front of the screen, it is quite annoying having to hear the same tune over and over again. (Well, this obviously does not go for SeenPoint; even if you read all their interesting articles twice, it would not take you more than thirty minutes.) The Oepir Risti Staff agrees, though, that it can be very nice to be able to chose music for yourself, of course provided that the enclosed modules are of high quality, which they usually are not. The point here is that ˙02SeenPoint is not a disk magazine˙01, it is a hard disk magazine. Unless you have a modem or a HD, you will face serious trouble trying to read the latter issues. Face it, guys: a disk magazine fits on a disk. That's it. The whole, unpacked and functional magazine fits on a disk (OFS or FFS, preferably OFS), else it is not a disk magazine. Consequently, the sixth issue of SeenPoint may still be a good piece of magazine, but their stating that it is one of the better ˙02diskmags˙01 around upsets us. To our knowledge, there are very few true disk magazines left. The only one we can come to think of is The Jungle (but then, The Jungle has always been a good magazine.). In spite of what is said on the net, the fact that the magazine archive fits on disk has got nothing whatsoever to do with the "disk magazine" designation. What good does a 800 K archive do when the magazine doubles during unpacking? Anybody without a HD will not be able to take part of that archive (other than when unpacking to extended RAM memory, which usually is pointless anyway). Even worse, as in the case of SP 6, you might have to split the archive onto several disks, copy the files to your HD, join them, unpack the archive and then install the magazine. This is ˙02not˙01 the behaviour of a disk magazine, it just isn't. Of course, it can be said that "hell, why stick to these old demands, it is 1997 / 1998 now, everybody has an Internet connection (either modem or ISDN) and a big HD, there are no users still playing that disk-only game". That's true. That is, however, not a reason to mess with the old definitions and traditions. A disk magazine must be able to run from a floppy disk, and that's the end of it. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ The other day we got a letter from Melfis / FABINESS asking us to publish some advertisements plus information on his group and upcoming productions. At first we thought that hell, no, we don't intend to publish any advertisements or member lists, but since he used such nice words on Oepir Risti, we figured that we could use his contribution here, in the editorial. Accordingly, here's the SeenPoint look: ˙02˙02 FABINESS news: -------------- - First Intro called (WIERD) finally released. - Second Intro soon to be released. - Chipdisk with Surprise Productions under construction. - Demo with Magic Owls also under construction. - Genetix joined from Vortex as Musician and Swapper. ˙ foR sWappIng aNd jOInIng wRIte tO thIs: meLFis/fAb! rINGGÅRDSV. 5 S-28139 HäsSLeHOlm sWEDen ˙ ˙Email: bjornjo@algonet.se ˙ ˙110% AnSWer if eXAMples Of wOrk aRE iNCLuded! ˙Group info: ----------- - Group was formed by MELFIS ex.Cider member! - Group will excist on both Amiga and PC scene. - The group need Coder's, Graphicians, Musicians, Traders, Sysops, Swappers. - SANTE and MAX joined as doublemembers from Magic Owls. - Wierd first intro got released. - Intro for Gap Pack soon released. - Chippack with Surprise Production under construction. - Genetix joined from Vortex as Musician and Swapper. - We are in deep need of talanted members who wants to work hard to get results and that does not just want to makes money on their products..... - Coders should use (C++) , (Assembler) or what you think is best. - Graphicians should be able to paint (aga) and on (pc). - Musicians - if you makes good techno music's you are welcome. - Sysop's your board must have atleast over 50 users. - Swapper's i dont really care about but a minimum of 20 contacts. - Equipment , thats up to you: A1200a , A500 , A4000 , PC ! 1997 MEMEBERLIST: Melfis.... Whq, ASCII Sante..... Coder,Swapper Max....... Raytracer,Gfx Tal....... Swapper Genetix... Musician,Swapper Greetings: Hellraisor/Fun, Dennis Sno, Korball/Dp!, HotStepper, Keldon/Gts, Elektron/Citron, Frame/C-lous, Syntax/Sardonyx, MadMan/Factor, Draw/Depth, Growl/vOid^aLIEns, wILDcat/Scania, Trasher/Artwork, The King/Erotic Design, Blaze/Floppy, Badboy/Gts, Hawk/Gts, Pepson/Opium, gOOfy/Nail (pc), Splatterhead/eLTEch, Dodger, Doh/Dreamdealers, Lenny Dee/Planet Core, Dvize/Led^Devious Design, Pantera/Balance, Norby/Trsi, Crl/p!d, Rogue/Darkness, mcWIlsh/Gods, Mr.Uhu/P303, Trendy Dealer/RamJam, Rolex/Apathy, Dr.Depth/Apollo, Edw/Pshycotrope, Swoop/Rebels, Ace/Bad ZOne, Rosque/Bomb, Sante/Mot... ˙00˙01That's it from Melfis. We quickly turn over to something completely else. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙Tobias Jansson wished to send his regards to the scene, and apologize for the fact that his contribution to this issue was somewhat thin. He says: "You need to focus on priorities here in life; at least, I know I do. Stefan & Krister movies, for one thing, mean much more to me than any scene maggy." ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙Having been classified as a magazine that would not last more than two issues, we're now on our sixth year (well, first plans were drawn in 1993 at the Hvitfeldtska Gymasiets temporära barracker in early June, and it's 1998 now. That's six years ;). Many of our competitors are, sad to say, dead and burried. We note Static Bytes' "Eurochart", Majic 12's "Top Secret" (one of Puh's favourites), Anarchy's "Stolen Data", Balance's "Magbox" (later "Upstream"), Ram Jam's "The Charts" and LSD's execellent "Grapevine" among them. We are, of course, the first to say that we miss them, as we feel that the magazines of today may be better coded but are worse written (btw: all of you that still have issues of those old Amiga magazines that are not on the Aminet, please upload them there. It'd be a shame to see them get lost forever. We know, though, that some magazines did it the track loading way, and that DMS archives are not allowed on the Aminet, so we strongly suggest that Urban Mueller take a good look at the situation and revise his plans as of now.). In the old days, it actually mattered what was written in the scene's magazines; remember, for example, the W.O.T.W. affair. That guy was burned for life after the harsh articles accusing him of sample / idea theft. Today, it does not mean a thing what we write here. Few people read it, and those who do are not the ones who care. In the old days, though, a release of an important magazine was something special, and it was a must to read the articles through as soon as possible. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ During the year that were, at least three of those "Oepir Risti is dead!"-rumours have popped up. Puh, experiencing the world from NComm with his new Dynalink 33.6 (new since January 1997, that is), has again and again been forced to write contra texts, claiming the opposite. What the Staff wants to know is this: why do these things keep popping up? Oepir has always been released at least once a year, and we have in no way whatsoever indicated that we're about to give up. Still, we have to see this ridiculous texts being spread on the bullentin board systems of Sweden. You have to wonder what kind of mind it takes to INVENT rumours like these just in order to be cool, to be the guy that always has the latest and hottest information. As for us, we'd say the latest information is of limited value if it is incorrect, but that does not seem to be generally accepted. No, the only thing that seems to matter is when the actual text file was written, which is why those texts always are properly marked with date. We suspect that if a text saying "NASA paid RoKdAzOnE to tell the truth in the 'aliens on Mars' affair" and signed with a cool date (preferably two days from the actual date as that makes it new, cool and very unreleased), it would be regarded as being true, and the uploader would be rewarded with (at least) 4*CREDZ. Let us, thus, give you this once and for all: Oepir Risti is not dead. Duvan and Puh agreed that they reconsider the whole situation in the year 2000, but until then Oepir Risti will keep being. With the same pace as now, you will be able to read our eleventh issue when clock strikes midnight the year 2000. (However, we suggest you don't do that as there must be more exciting things to do when the millennium turns new ;). Accordingly, when you find a Oepir Risti R.I.P. article, you can always check it out to see what FiShWaVe has to say, but there's no idea believing it; Oepir Risti will survive the millennium shift. Puh managed to trace one of those BBS texts to Poland, by the way. As opposed to most other Internet users, Puh has not really understood the whole deal. Let us hear what he has to say: ...and I still can't believe that what we do actually is taken part of by people all over the world. ALL OVER THE WORLD, taste that, fellows. I know for sure that Oepir has been to Turkey, Australia, the US, Brazil and South Africa, just to mention some. I can guarantee that none of my non-scene mates have ever been read in Brazil (mind my grammar there), nor have any of their creations travelled to Ireland. Well, here I am. I'm nothing special. I'm no better than any of my non-scene mates. Still, what I do is spread around the world just like that. It is uploaded to the Aminet, and within a couple of hours the hounds are loose. Those with hardened skin on their noses are fully aware that this is the way things happen, and they share no further reflections upon it, but me, I keep thinking about it. It happens, for instance, that I, during a lecture or a meal, starts thinking about all the places my texts are. I will probably never even see one eighth of those places. I say to myself: "I wonder how many people that have downloaded OEPIR6.LHA from the Aminet?", "I wonder which way that Oepir archive travelled when it was requested by that guy in Slovakia. Did it go straight there, or did it have to go through a server in Russia, or middle land in Belgium", and "How many copies of Oepir Risti #7 are there right now in Sweden? How many has read the editorial of our first issue? In how many countries have the tune of our fifth issue been played? Has Oepir Risti ever been to Tibet, Congo or Iran?". There are, of course, no answers to my unanswered questions (that's what makes them unanswered, I suppose), but I really wish that I one day would get that letter from Tibet saying "Hi there, Puh. You know, I really liked your last issue. Dunno if there are any other Amiga users here in Tibet, but hell, you have me, and I have your mag. Things could be worse. . . ". Guess I'm not really used to that Internet mentality yet, right? Anyway, a lot has happened since we first started talking about making a disk magazine of our own. When we did, we were in the second year of the Swedish High School (I'm not really aware of the terminology here, but in Sweden, you first go nine years of 'basic' school, then you're free to chose a suitable high school program (which last for three years). After that, you may, if your marks are good enough, start your higher education (e.g., university education)) that Duvan, Electron (that was his name at that time) and I got the idea of making a real disk magazine. Anyway, that was, perhaps, not the start of it. Please let me give you the story of how I met S.Duvan / Silents and Electron / Reflex. During my first six years of the basic school (of nine years, see above), I knew neither S.Duvan nor Electron. I knew Björn Törnqvist (nowadays known as Polyfemos / Agony), though, as he was one of the first in Sweden to buy a Commodore 64 (well, actually it was his mother who bought it...). Gosh, what cool games he had! The guys of my class (including me) used to go up to his place after school and play H.E.R.O., Ghost'n'Goblins, Green Beret, Paperboy, Muscle Man, Wizards of Wor (or was that "Wizards of War"? can't recall, I'm afraid), Spy Hunter, Jungle Jim, Delta, Blazer and all those legendary games (well, legendary to me. I'm not really keen of Bill Gates' definition of "legendary", anyway) and have a great time. He was one of the first to buy the "new" Amiga, too (i.e., roughly the first model after the Amiga 1000: the Kickstart 1.2 Amiga 500), and HELL, what cool games that machine offered! I remember playing Defender of the Crown so much that Polyfemos mother called mine asking her to come and get me. There was this shoot-em-up, too, that we played a lot, but I can't think of its name right now. Hybris was another of our favourites, as were Ninja Mission, Ports of Call, and Rolling Thunder (and, later, Shadow of the Beast I). Anyway, I knew Polyfemos, and he knew me. Demos, though, was something we did not care for much. We were too young, I suppose, to care about anything other than cool games. That's all right, if you ask me, as I think all serious Amiga users (i.e., those who have seen Rolling Thunder live) bought their computers ONLY to play games. At least, I know I did. Then, in the seventh grade, I learned who Johan Alfredsson was. He was not in my class (which was 9D as opposed to his 9B (Hovåsskolan)), and I did not know that he was an Amiga addict (and Silents member) (Well, I was actually a member of Mythos at that time / S.Duvan - ever seen Mythos' "Unoriginal Demo" or "Forgotten Realisms"?), but I knew who he was. It was a small school, and everybody knew of everybody. (Now, I know that he went to copy parties when he was in the seventh degree. Jesus, I would have liked to be there with him!) In the eighth grade, I joined Agony, and we released a utility disk (two, to be precise) and an intro. When the Phenomena / Light party was arranged in Alingsås when I was in the ninth grade, Phobos / Agony invited me there, and we had a great time. (I got drunk for the third time of my life, if you are interested ;) Anyway, what I did there (besides from releasing "Honest Utilities #1" (which I hope you still have - cause I don't) was copying games. If I'm right, Monkey Island II was released there (but it could have been the I, too) as well as Pinball Dreams. Silents had asked Fairlight not to crack their incredibly cool pinball game, and Fairlight had agreed, but still they cracked it and spread it. (Well, the story of Pinball Dreams and the cracking of which is quite a bit longer and not really as Puh described it, but that is another story. /S.Duvan) As a direct result thereof, everybody at the party played it. Apidya II was on the screens of many people, too, as were Elvira II and TurboRaketti. (People these days lack culture. Copy parties are, as the name suggests, gatherings when you come together to drink, have fun (pHuN), meet nice people (and some not so nice people, too (technotyskar, till exempel)), copy software (well, these days, that's impossible, but it was fully OK in those days) and watch cool productions. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that when I went around this facility looking for stuff to copy, I ran across Johan Alfredsson (he was wearing a black/white shirt and a pair of red Levis trousers, it's funny how you keep certain details in your mind). He knew that my name was Henrik Nilsson, but that was about it. We talked a little, and I learned that he was a Silents member. Wow, I thought, cool. The Silents - a legend. (He was, by the way, not too impressed learning that Agony was about to release a compilation disk of PD programs (including VirusX 2.0). That's that. We met, and then we separated, each of us knowing that the other had an Amiga. When we met at school, we said "Hi!", and that's the end of it. (A copy of Agony's PD disk was given to Christer Lundberg, another Amiga fan and also Puh's physics teacher. He appreciated it very much, he said, as he had had some severe problems with the BSG-9 virus, and our disk contained an effective protection program. Christer was, speaking of nothing, elected the best teacher of Gothenburg of 1997. You might have seen his picture if you have read GP Sydväst or Frölunda Nytt during late summer / autumn 1997.) Well, I finished my nine years of have-to school, and I chose to read three more years of natural science at the Hvidfeldtska upper secondary high of Gothenburg. I suppose you can imagine my surprise when I learned that Johan Alfredsson and I ended up in the same class together with a lot of people we did not know at all (well, except for Fredrik Persson). I don't know what we said to each other, but I suspect it was Amiga. Our class consisted of some thirty students, and it happened that one day, when we had been swimming in the Valhalla swimming hall, I went back to school with one of them. I did not know him, but we started talking. After a while, we realized that we were both into the Amiga business, me in Agony and him in Reflex. Without knowing it, I had met our Electron. I can't remember how the three of us got together, but we did. (It was an Amiga thing, for sure. People with a keen Amiga interest tend to form clusters, have you noticed that?) Johan (S.Duvan) was the coder, Tobias (Electron) was the graphician, and Henrik (Puh) was the swapper / writer. None of us liked the scene magazines of those days very much. Sure, we had respect for RAW, Stolen Data and Grapevine, but we felt that we had something to add to the scene. Already in the first grade, we started talking about making a disk magazine of our own. You know, we could do this, we could do that, it should feature this, it should feature that, we must not forget to do this, we must not forget to do that. In the second grade, we started to act. S.Duvan started from scratch with the code, Tobias with the design and bars, and Puh with most of the articles (they were not good, as opposed to the code and the graphics ("Shall we do it?", hope you haven't read that)). The first issue was released at the Party the very same year. Duvan and Electron worked day and night to get it ready, and Puh was back home for whatever reason. With the onset of the first issue, we kind of showed the scene that we're here to stay (buddy, read Timothy's text above ;). I can't understand that some people still don't believe us. The way it turned out, I have learned that not only I and S.Duvan were present at that Phenomena / Light party but also Electron. Without knowing it, the Oepir Risti Staff was gathered in the same building some two years before it would gather for real. Call it irony of life or act of faith if you like. Electron's picture "Castle and Bats" (or whatever it was called) was even elected for the graphics competition, and I voted for it. Can you believe that? The T2 demo was, speaking of nothing (again) released there, and the first "mod.DasBoot" was played in a loud manner during the graphics competition. Way cool...) The Oepir Risti Staff (or, at least, members of it) has been present at every "The Party" in Denmark. Duvan, visiting 1-6, is in the lead, followed by Tobias (well, he threw away his handle two issues ago and is now referred to as toj by himself) with five, and Puh ends up last with his 2 and 4. S.Duvan is, actually, a real old school party wolf, having been to more parties than most. Still, he wishes (like the rest of us, I suppose) that he had been there 1987, when the real action took place. At that time, however, he was only eleven years old and somewhat young to support a keen interest in the subject. The Staff wishes that some true old-schoolers would turn up and send us some party reports from 1987-1988. We would, for sure, dedicate them an issue of their own. Speaking of old times, Duvan has a very cool demo collection, featuring more 1987 demos than I have ever seen at one time before. I keep telling him that we one day must upload them all to the Aminet, and he keeps agreeing. Those demos are treasures too precious to be lost, and by uploading them to the Net, we hope that they will be safe for ever. Sure, they are nothing compared to the demos of today, still they are much better. Can you figure that out? You watch them and you say for yourself: "Oh my God!!". I have not taken part of Aminet's policy, but I reckon it is to be a complete collection of non-commercial Amiga software. If it is, I suggest we all do our best to make it complete, uploading what we can to fill up its missing pieces. That is, according to me (Puh, if you have forgotten) the main difference between the Amiga and the PC: the PC scene does not pay respect to its past. The Amiga scene, on the other hand, does. So please, have a look and see if the issues of Stolen Data that you still have correspond to the missing issues of the very same magazine on the net, and if so, upload them. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ It was Polyfemos who learned Puh how to make his own startup-sequences. Polyfemos has always been interesting in coding, and his first lines were, naturally, modifications of the Workbench 1.2 initialization. He showed Puh how to, for instance, force the startup to hold for a moment and then print "Falcon Bayerskt" on the screen: ˙02 WAIT 10 ECHO "Falcon Bayerskt" ˙01 Puh's 1.3 Workbench still tells him to taste this excellent Swedish beer. Polyfemos then started to work in AMOS, which lead him into assembler. We had some great times together, drinking people beer (folköl) and dialling pirate bullentin board systems. I really miss those days of the ninth grade when we happened to not be at school, ended up in front of his screen and played cool modules and looked on his new, amazing AMOS routines, I really do. We used to smoke cigarettes (Prince, mostly, but also Marlboro and Barclay) and use Swedish moist snuff (General (Puh) and Grov (Polyfemos)) until we dropped, and we did our best in order not to make our mothers suspicious (the basic problem was that when you have smoked, you smell smoke; we solved it by applying different perfumes (mostly Sergio Tacchini and Jockey) and chewing gums). What we could not cover up, however, was the phone bill, which grew extremely high. Even though Polyfemos had a fast modem (2400, as opposed to most people, who had 1200), the officials demanded several thousand SEK every month. Polyfemos said to his mother that she must try to make shorter phone calls, but somehow she did not buy that. I wonder why? Puh and Polyfemos are, by the way, the only members of the Oepir Risti Staff that have been active on the C64 scene (and then, Polyfemos isn't even a member of the Oepir Risti Staff). As stated above, Polyfemos ('s mother) bought his C64 VERY early, and what he does not know of old 64 games just is not worth knowing. It took Puh several years to buy a 64 of his own, and when he did, he copied games. Two years later, however, he joined Skylight under the name "London'89". Before that, he had called himself "EC", meaning "the Egyptian Cracker" - whatever that means (Puh was neither an Egyptian nor a cracker) in the two BASIC demos he had released (and they were *NOT* advanced, merely text scrolls in different colours). London'89 is found in some greetings scrollers here and there, but it does not amount to much more than that. I'm afraid to say that his name was not written in the pages of history in any other sense than that "this guy was there". That's good enough for me now, though. In 1995, Puh and Polyfemos got together to do their last Amiga project, a game called "MineField". Polyfemos coded, Mittag-Leffler / Nosebleed composed the music (mod.FieldofMines), Electron drew the cool icons (which were not used since the game needed a startup of its own. They are, nevertheless, included in the archive) and Puh stood for the text part (as usual). The game even entered the "Best Game" charts of Ram Jam's "The Charts" in 1995 (I have forgotten what issue it was, but check it out if you think I'm making this up). Polyfemos then bought a P75 and started to work on another game, TreD, which unfortunately was never released (Mittag-Leffler composed a GREAT tune for the project, a tune that still is unreleased. Some day, hopefully, he will release it to the public). Then, in 1996, he bought a BeBox and started to work on the Abacus Project, where he is still today. Puh and Duvan are weakly associated to this piece of code with their Swedish translation of the original manual. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ It has been suggested that the Aminet should go over to LZX compression instead of LHA. LZX is, after all, more efficient than LHA, which, according to some, represents the old way of doing things. Knowing that LZX shows fairly good compression rations even compared to archivers of other, newer platforms, the Oepir Risti Staff thinks that whatever method of compression that Urban Mueller chooses, he better make it ONE and not several. We believe in unity, not in sacrifice. We would, however, like him to make way for .DMS archives (or similar, like .DSQ) as there simply is no other way to upload some old trackloading demos and disk magazines that are still missing from Urban's cool collection. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ Puh has, by the way, figured out how to contribute to the well-being of the Amiga community. He has registered some shareware programs, sure, but this is different. His idea is that every time you log onto the Internet, you pay a visit at the major Amiga web sites. This will render them, in the long run, a lot of hits, making the webmasters understand that there is still an interest for the Amiga platform out there. By visiting cool web sites, Puh hopes to let the world know that he still cares for something as out-dated as his 28 MHz 020 Amiga 1200. (Besides, since he surfs from the university, it costs him nothing (except time, of which he has plenty)). These are Puh's favourite Amiga sites (no internal order): ˙02 http://ftp.wustl.edu/-aminet http://www.phase5.de http://www.prodad.de http://www.amiga.de http://www.be.com http://www.rebol.com http://www.vgr.com http://www.yam.ch ˙01 Pay them a visit, you too, to assure future development ;) Moreover, he usually visit some environment- and nature sites, just to let them know that there are people out there who care. One of Puh's favourites is ˙02 http://www.wwf.se ˙01 until it was closed half a year ago for re-design. It should be back by now, though. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ Speaking of smileys, Puh wants to know if it's OK to use then in normal articles, like this one. The answer, of course, should be NO; if the writer isn't able to express a ";)" in words, the writer isn't such a good writer, after all, and he should consider going back to swapping. Noting that Puh has used several ";)" in his parts of this text, one should ask if Puh is the guy to come with demands here. The answer, again, is no. Puh thinks it's fully OK to use smileys in emails and such (he does that all the time (after a weak start during which he rejected them)), but he still things that they do not belong in an article. After all, by using a smiley in an real-time article, the writer says that "Hey, this is a joke. I'm a joke. Don't take me seriously. I dunno how to write it so that you'll understand that it was not seriously meant, so I resent to this symbol." Göteborgs-Posten, Puh notices, should stay away from smileys, but they don't. But then, Puh is somewhat strict and conservative. According to one of Puh's temporary lab mates (a her), his sentences are all too long (she said that her boyfriend studied Swedish at the university) and his syntax is all to nasty. Puh, of course, cancelled the cooperation immediately, and he hopes that he never will have to meet that boyfriend in person. Puh was, by the way, the last person on the Oepir Risti Staff to get a proper homepage. In June 1997, however, Puh made it to the Internet with his "Hemsida 1". It is written wholly in Swedish, and it contains nothing but text, so if you know Swedish (and can read text) he strongly suggest you check it out at ˙02 http://users.one.se/alvar ˙01 It may not be the best designed homepage you have ever seen, but as Puh says himself (to Tobias' nuisance): "Design, to me, is nothing." ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙It has been said that it is a shame that Oepir Risti contains some articles is Swedish, and that we ought to put an end to this mixing of languages right away. For example, Jane Wrightsson wrote Puh a letter about how upset she was learning that she could not read some articles in Oepir Risti issue eight. She was right; the last O.R. issues have contained up to twenty five percent Swedish texts, most of which were written by Puh. We all agree that this is not in phase with our original goal (...only English articles...), and that the evolution seen is in contradiction to that stated in the rules of O.R. Here is the letter Puh wrote Jane W., who has given her approval of our publishing it: ˙02 Angenämt! Thanks a lot for your letter, I was really surprised to learn that we had a female reader who lived in the United States, and I understand the reason for your complaints. The articles in question are, as you correctly said, written in Swedish, and you were, moreover, right when you said that it is unfair to those not living in Sweden. However, even though you are basically right, also those in Norway, Denmark, and Finland understand Swedish more or less, drastically increasing the number of potential readers. Not many foreigners seem to know that if you know Swedish well, you can also understand Norwegian and Danish; and that you, if you know Norwegian or Danish well, also understand Swedish. Since I am born in Sweden and speak Swedish, I can very well call up a Danish person and talk to him, as can I enter a store in Norway and ask for Ringenes. What's more, I can read Danish and Norwegian, even though I by no means can write them. The same goes for people from Denmark and Norway. Finland is an exception, though, Finnish having its linguistic roots from a totally different weed (rätoromanska, I believe). Nevertheless, most (or is that "many"?) Finnish people are forced to read Swedish at school, giving them a fair knowledge of our language, too. Finland is, I think, a bilingual country. I know no Finnish whatsoever (except for "Ruotsi" - Sweden, and "hauki" - pike), and I can't even guess what they are saying behind my back. Even Icelandic is vaguely associated to Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, and I think that with a little help of my hands, I would have been able to communicate with a young, good-looking babe from Iceland. I have no idea if she would be able to understand my Oepir Risti articles, though. (If you know any young, good-looking babes from Iceland, please tell them to mail me so that we can sort things out ;) Anyway, those Swedish articles differ a whole lot from the English ones. If you read Oepir Risti and only know English, I'd say you get a wholly different view of the situation as compared to someone that reads it and know both English and Swedish. Indeed, I'm known as "crazy" over here. The point is that I am simply not good enough to verify those texts in any other language than that I was born to handle, which is Swedish. If I translated them, they would lose much of their charm. Many of them are, moreover, based upon jokes that can be carried out with the Swedish rules of grammar only, and they have no equivalence in English. I'm sorry to say this, but that is the truth. Some texts just are not meant to be translated. It is the same thing with some of the TV series from the US; some of them just can't be sold outside your country since nobody else understands them and appreciates the jokes in them. There is always - as will there always be - a language and cultural barrier between people of different countries. (For example, in Norway, they eat living rain deer every Christmas. I can't understand that). Finally, I hope you understand what I am trying to say here. I wish I could end this letter by saying that there will be no more Swedish texts in the coming issues of Oepir Risti, but there will be. I hope you'll continue reading them, anyway. (...) ˙01This pretty much sums it up as for this issue: there is quite a number of Swedish texts included, most of which were written by Puh, a few of which were written by Wonderpop 2000 / BMX Intruders and Rhoca-Ghil / Tunnelbyggers. We're sorry if you dislike this, and we hope you will understand that we don't think that the Swedish people goes for more than any other people. Indeed, Puh just told us that the primary reason for not translating his texts into English is that he feels that he simply isn't good enough. We - and not you - are the ones to blame for this. Yet, it is you that will have to take the blast. Life just isn't fair. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ The search for the substance that carried (i.e., was responsible for) the genetic inheritance started for real in the 19th century (1854 is a year from the 19th century). The German biologist Friedrich Miescher isolated DNA from salmon sperm during this century, and some scientists even suggested that the DNA might hold the genetic code. However, since DNA only consisted of four monomers (Cytosine, Thymine, Adenine, and Guanine), most scientist thought that this was way too little to account for the enormous genetic diversity seen in the biological world (compare, for example, an elephant with a tomato). The believers were declared idiots and made fools of. Early researchers suspected that it was more likely that some kind of proteins played the mentioned role, and that nucleic acids merely were there for structural support and for the making of the cell matrix, but they lacked means of proving anything at all. Between 1944 and 1952 a series of interesting experiments were performed pointing out DNA as the genetic material. Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod (listen to that!), and Maclyn McCarty found that DNA from pathogenic strains of ˙02Pneumococcus˙01 (a bacterium) could be transferred into non pathogenic strains, making them pathogenic like hell. Moreover, they found that this transformation was genetically stable as it persisted for generation after generation. However, it was a tricky experiment done by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase that finally convinced the world that this, man, was it. Hershey and Chase studied the infection of the bacterium ˙02Escherichia coli˙01 by a bacterial virus (i.e., a bacteriophage (this one referred to as the T2), a virus that attacks bacteria (see last issue of Oepir Risti for its complete genetic code)). Using the fact that the bacteriophage proteins contained sulfur but little phosphorus and that the DNA contains sulfur but no phosphorus, they labeled the T2 bacteriophages with the radioisotopes 35-S and 32-P. Then they showed that, when the T2 had attacked the E.coli, it was the 32-P (and, hence, the DNA) that had been transferred, and not the T2 protein shell. Thus, the inserted DNA served as some kind of template. The world was amazed, but by 1952, it was generally accepted that DNA was the key of genetic inheritance. However, it was still not understood how just four bases could account for that vast biological diversity; how could it carry the enormous amount of information every cell needed; how could it transmit that information within the cell; and above all, how could it be accurately replicated during cell division? In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick came up with the answer. Watson and Crick sought the answers to the questions above in the three dimensional structure of the DNA. The technique of X-RAY DIFFRACTION allowed the investigation of fibers drawn from concentrated DNA solutions, and using diffraction patterns from Rosalind Franklin, a researcher in the laboratory of Maurice Wilkins at King's College in London, England, Watson and Crick - working at Cambridge University, England - realized that DNA must have some kind of regular, repetitive, three-dimensional structure. Thus, a model of helical appearance would account for the properties mentioned, and they noted that since the layer line spacing was one tenth of the pattern repeat, there must be 10 residues per turn. Data on the density of the DNA fibers suggested that there be two DNA strands in each helical molecule. Watson and Crick, working with molecular models, realized that this double helix could be stabilized by hydrogen bonding only in a certain way, namely C-G and A-T, producing strongest possible hydrogen bonds. Each base pair is rotated thirty six degrees with respect to the next to commodate ten base pairs in each turn; the diffraction pattern showed the repeat distance to be three point four nano-metres, so the helix rise, i.e., the distance between the single pairs had to be about 0.34 nano-metres (this fits well with the van der Waals thickness of a planar ring). The model also showed that although the bases are on the inside of the helix, they can be approached through two deep spiral grooves called major and minor grooves. What's more, this model explained scientific data that had not been understood up to then (as always with successful models - that is, indeed, what makes them successful). The biochemist Edwin Chargaff, for example, who had measured the amount of adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T) had noted that A and T always were present in equal amounts, as were C and G. If DNA in cells were double-stranded, which Watson and Crick suggested, this Chargaff's rule would be consistent with the new model. If Chargaff would have been able to connect his discovery to the DNA structure, it would have been him, and not Watson and Crick, that got that Nobel Prize, but unfortunately, Chargaff didn't connect the two phenomena. If he had been smarter, his sorry ass would not have been forgotten today. The DNA copying mechanism involved unwinding of the two strands of a parental DNA duplex, with each strand serving as template for the synthesis of a new strand, complementary to and wound about that parental strand. You see, everything fell out so easily now that there was a true model to lean against. One accomplishment immediately gave birth to an endless number of other accomplishments, and a lot of thereto unexplained phenomena of biology got themselves an answer. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ It is interesting to see that somebody uploaded Mittag-Leffler's module to Oepir Risti issue eight to the Aminet, especially since Mittag-Leffler never spread it outside that Oepir archive. Somebody actually thought it was worth the trouble of unpacking the module and then upload it to the Aminet just to... ...just to what? We're not sure here, but these are the reasons we have concluded possible: ˙02*˙01 The guy thought that the module was so good that he wanted more people to take part of it. Thus, he uploaded it where a lot of people can fetch it. ˙02*˙01 The guy liked seeing his name mentioned everywhere, so he uploaded the file to get famous. ˙02*˙01 The guy needed to fix up his upload / download ratio, so he uploaded a bunch of module, and one of them happened to be Mittag-Leffler's Oepir Risti tune. However, this kind of u/d ratios are not seen on the Aminet (as far as we know, at least), so this theory seems a little vague. ˙02*˙01 The guy liked seeing the Aminet getting filled up, so he uploaded the file to make people see that there is still an interest for Amiga computing around the world. That's as many as we can think of, and we will probably never know which one that is correct. Not that it matters at all or means anything, but it would have been fun knowing the truth. We'll make sure that we upload this issue's excellent tune "Cantormängd" to the Aminet, too. If nothing else, it gives more hits when you search on "Oepir" with the associated search tool, and that's cool. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ When Puh scrutinized another one of Prowler's demo disks, he found this one: ˙02Directory "df0:" on Tisdag 23-Dec-97 Dual Crew 84360 ----rwed 09-Okt-90 02:09:25 Loader 1420 ----rwed 09-Okt-90 02:09:36 Anarchy 120568 ----rwed 18-Okt-90 21:56:06 Scoopex 266664 ----rwed 09-Okt-90 02:12:04 system-configuration 232 ----rwed 09-Okt-90 02:12:17 Strangers 153000 ----rwed 18-Okt-90 21:59:21 Heil 10632 ----rwed 18-Okt-90 22:07:34 Phenomena 168212 ----rwed 09-Okt-90 02:15:49 s Dir ----rwed 10-Jan-78 08:25:48 8 files - 1 directory - 1585 blocks used ˙01The name of the disk was Motala, which suggests that it originates from a copy party in Motala, Sweden. Notice the famous HEIL intro, with an animated Nazi flag, and the well-known Strangers Halloween intro with that cool tune ("Take a Rest") by Creator / Strangers, which remains one of Puh's favourite tunes of all times). However, this is what Virus Z 1.40 (29.9.97) revealed when doing a virus scan (shrunk to fit screen, colour codes removed): ˙02File Check of Motala: Performed on Tisdag, 23-Dec-97 at 16:53:40 Anarchy TetraPack 2.2 file Dual Crew Executable file Heil DefJam Cruncher 3.2 file Loader Executable file Phenomena Read() failed! Scoopex Read() failed! Strangers Titanics Cruncher 1.1 file Decrunching file... Executable file system-configuration Data file s (Dir) startup-sequence Data file File Check Results: - 9 files in 2 drawers checked, - 0 archives extracted (0 files in 0 drawers), - 1 files decrunched, - 0 files unlinked, - 0 files stripped, - 0 viruses found! ˙01Puh HATES seeing broken disks. Many of his older disks are simply falling apart. How could be so stupid as to buy cheap, fucking NO-NAME disks when he knew that this was a hobby he would stick to for a long time? It is fact that his expensive Maxell disks are still today in perfect condition, not breaking down on him. His NO NAME disks, on the other hand, have caused him some valuable losses of data (such as Stolen Data issue three). Sure, Puh has learned how to retake as much as possible from disks that are losing it (with the help of those salvage programs), but sometimes those programs just don't help. He figures that if somebody ever released a program that, by guarantee, could solve every imaginable program and untie every knot, the program in question would have sold a lot, and its author would have become very rich. Dave Haynie, for example, has made a good attempt with his DiskSalv (Puh has seen it in action a few times, but it wasn't able to help him the way he wanted). ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ When listing the twelfth issue of Top Secret, Majic 12's cool disk magazine, and focusing on the PAGES drawer, where all their articles are, we learn that Top Secret was coded pretty much the same as Oepir Risti, i.e., with all articles as separate files. This issue seems to be quite old, even though we have not started it to find it out yet. Puh and Duvan, buy the way, have agreed to steal Polyfemos A500 1.2 and spend a whole night going through Duvan's disk boxes of old demos. This is, anyway, the Top Secret disk: ˙02 Directory "df0:pages" on Tisdag 23-Dec-97 adds5 6668 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:21 adds1 6760 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:13 adds2 7044 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:16 adds3 6712 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:17 adds4 6548 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:19 answer 1144 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:24 assembly 1208 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:27 banana 620 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:29 beach2 1496 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:33 bridgeboards 1340 ----rwed Framtid 04:25:36 (etc) ˙01A disk magazine from the early ninetees, however, is nothing compared to some of Duvan's cool relics. Let's se what he has to offer in his boxes (and please, if you can complete his collection, please mail him). How about this one for a go? ˙02 Directory "df0:" on Tisdag 23-Dec-97 DEVS Dir ----rwed 29-Aug-88 00:56:33 S Dir ----rwed 29-Aug-88 00:56:51 Bonedemo 134268 ----rwed 20-Jan-88 12:04:28 C Dir ----rwed 29-Aug-88 00:56:35 PAGES Dir ----rwed 29-Aug-88 00:57:36 .fastdir 344 ----rwed 29-Aug-88 00:56:31 TEXT Dir ----rwed 29-Aug-88 00:58:08 TUNE Dir ----rwed 20-Jan-88 12:13:04 BootGirl.data 34698 -------- 20-Jan-88 10:32:51 : BootGirl.data ist nur ein Pseudofile! Bitte nicht loeschen!!! TECHTIMES 2972 ----rwed 20-Jan-88 06:45:28 4 files - 6 directories - 354 blocks used ˙01This is the first issue of TECHNOCRATIC TIMES by Digital Technology (Digitech), released in August 1988. This, however, is only the first disk out of two, as we actually lack the second one. If you have it (...and all that). The one we have, though, features a cool Batman picture and an awful lot of in depth articles, much better than the average article these days (found in, for example, ... ). Having tried to start it on the A1200, we can only establish that it does not seem to work very well. The second issue, however, works rather well, with its amazing (and amazingly short) chip music. It was coded by Sauron (also known as J.Lindahl or "Triangelmannen" due to his large muscle mass (fully comparable to Schwarzenegger if we remember the whole thing correctly)). We were surprised to see that the articles still offered much of interest to devour, and some of them even felt as if they could have been written today. Considering there being no Internet or modem (well, nothing much, anyway), these early magazines were the only true medias for the scene, holding together and strenghtening the feeling of living in a community of their own. We must not underestimate the importance of these seemingly low-quality magazines; they were by no means low-quality back then. The second issue worked, as stated, perfectly on A1200, which is more than you could say about some of the releases today. What's more, we'd say that today's magazines have lost their position as the only medias for the scene, there being a lot of other ways of establishing contact and supporting relations between the different parts of the scene world (which already in 1987 included Australia and the U.S.). Today, a magazine is more like a funny thing to read, lacking true meaning in scene other than amusement. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ A day this autumn (or was that late summer?), Puh got the following letter by email. I - Puh - have filled it in especially for the Oepir Risti readers:˙02 A survey to ALL people receiving & reading this txt ... Well , i am in the scene for about 6 months now , and despite ppl telling me that it was better in the good old days , i still have lotzzz of fun =) BUT! Bcuz i am so interested in the Amiga on its own , i am curious on the config of the average scener , this is why i made this survey ... If u feel like it , just fill it in , and resend it to zombie@glo.be by e-mail... If i get enough responses , i might compile a list of it , but that is NOT a promise =) This is the survey.: -------------------- 1 : What's ur NICKname on the scene ? ˙01 Puh / Agony ˙02 2 : Where r u from (Country etc) ? ˙01 Askim, Gothenburg, Sweden ˙02 3 : Since when do u own an Amiga ? ˙01 1988 ˙02 4 : Since when are u in the scene ? ˙01 1989? ˙02 5 : What is/are the group(s) u r currently an ACTIVE member ? ˙01 Agony ˙02 6 : What do u do 4 this group ? ˙01 Magazine editing, lazy swapping, lazy trading ˙02 7 : Do u have a board ??? Wich ? ˙01 No. ˙02 8 : If u have a board , how many callers do u have / day ? ˙01 - ˙02 9 : What is ur Amiga configuration ? Be honest plz ;) ˙01 A1200, 4 Mb 28 MHz Blizzard 1220, Philips CM8833-II (fixed by Orchis / 3LE), Dynalink 33.6, Canon BJ-200ex, Datatronics Discovery 2400, LineLink 144e, Squirrel-SCSI, a 90 Mb Macintosh LC (used for HD storage, connected to my Amiga through my Squirrel, which in turn is connected to the PCMCIA port), and an A500 transformator (my 1200 dito broke down). Then I have two extra drives (one DATIC, one no name), some thousand DD disks (bought my 1200 second hand), a matrix printer, six original games (one of which I bought myself), a bunch of original programs, and a weird box of cables the field of usage of which I don't have the slightest clue. That's about it, I gather.˙02 10 : U have other computers besides ur Amiga ? Wich + configs ? ˙01I have connected my old Commodore 64 to my Amiga through the Easy1541 system. My C64 is equipped with two tape decks, a 1541 II, a Final Cartridge III, Action Replay VI, and a lot of old tapes and 5.25 inch disks. ˙02 11 : Do u still like the scene it is nowadays ??? ˙01 Yes, kind of. I'm not as active as I used to be, but it feels nevertheless comforting to know that there is a place (a kingdom, if you like) where I can go when the real world is all too shitty. In that kingdom, some people even know who I am, and they let me do whatever I like. It is, perhaps, that feeling of knowing that the scene is there for me and not the scene itself I still appreciate, I'm not sure. I think there's no good reason to ask yourself questions you know you can't answer, so I usually don't. Of course, I'm not really associated to the scene anymore, and I think I have never really been, either. The answer to this question, nevertheless, must be a YES. ˙02I think that's it , so now be nice and fill this in :) Thanx in advance from a curious scener , Zombie! ˙01Well, that's it from Zombie. Hope he found what he was looking for, and that he will release his results to the public someday. In the meantime, you will have to read this. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ When the eighth issue of Oepir Risti was released, we decided that we'd try to release two issues as of 1997. After all, one issue a year seemed too little, and it would be fun to show the scene that we're still here and not out of business, as some sources say. The summer, however, turned out to be full of surprises. For one thing, Duvan went to the army in Stockholm, coming home only over the weekends. Second, toj went on a flower-power cross-Europe tour that took him to Egypt, and Puh had to read a summer course in faunistic and floristic. The Staff realized that there would be no summer issue this year (let's add "either" here), so we decided that we would go for the Party, as usual. For both Duvan and Puh, the autumn was a rough one, where the spare time minutes easily could be counted on one's right hand, leaving them with little time over for Oepir texts (or even other translations). (For toj, the autumn was a joke, being full "learn by drawing with coloured waxy crayons" and "trial and error by children's water colour" lectures and lessons. But then, if you chose to study in Stockholm, you have yourself to blame.) In early December, both Duvan and Puh were still busy with their respective duties, and they had not written a single article (well, Puh had some February articles on RokDaZone and FiShWaVe which were too good to be thrown out). Accordingly, they said to themselves that it would perhaps be best to release the ninth Oepir issue somewhere in January instead. That fact was more or less adopted, and they agreed that they would begin the full-time work when The Party was over (not that they would attend to it, but...). A lot of factors gave that the Oepir Risti Staff on the twenty first of December decided that they ˙02would ˙01release Oepir at The Party in some six days. Those factors were mainly: ˙02*˙01 Ghandy / Gods terror mailed Puh, asking him to show up and release Oepir Risti. At first Puh said no, almost calling Lars ugly names and things like that, but Ghandy was one tough fellow, not giving up that easily. The line that made Puh realize that, hey, man, this guy means it, was "Puh, you come to The Party or I swear I'll fucking kill you." ˙02*˙01 Orchis / 3LE gave the Oepir Staff hell, threatening to decrease their U/D ratio by a factor of four unless the issue was released. ˙02*˙01 Prowler / Scoopex has always been known to have the effect on people that in the end, they do what he tells them to do. It is a good thing for him that he uses this skill of his in good purposes alone. For example, he forces us to work with this issue instead of doing other things. Tobias was out of hand, though, claiming that he had to see all those Stefan & Krister movies his parents recorded while he was playing Quake at his "academic" studies before he could do any Oepir work. ˙02*˙01 Monica Nilsson thought that her school-boy had been all too serious during the half-year that was. She told her son to go and have some fun when he had the chance; who knew when the next chance would show itself? Who knew, perhaps the spring would be filled with even harder work than the autumn? You need to recharge your batteries sometimes, Puh. (Puh, knowing that whatever ETNOASTRONOMI was, it wasn't hard, suspected that the spring would be calm. With a little luck, we could read ten weeks of mosses and then ten of brachens) ˙02*˙01 Although Thiesen / Keso does not know what kind of support he has been to us, we'd like to give him a red rose and a dosa General Portion. You guys keep arguing out there who's the funniest and coolest member of the Swedish scene, giving friendship nominations to your own group members just to get famous or whatever. Well, no more of that. Here is not only a great candidate but also the winner: Thiesen. Long may he reign! Anyway, as of December 25, we know that Oepir Risti issue nine will be ready for The Party. What we don't know, however, is if we will go there, and, accordingly, if the issue will be released at The Party or not. The thing is that Prowler said that he could borrow a cool car (BMW) and take us down there on Sunday and back home on Monday. However, S.Duvan said that he won't go (he has, by the way, been on all "The Party" so far, including the first one), and toj first talked Puh into going and then declared that he would not go himself. Puh, nevertheless, is ready to go with Prowler and Marstrandsmannen on Sunday and release Oepir to the masses. Prowler is a rock, never giving away, never having any doubts, and Puh admires him for that. If I, Puh, go to the Party, I think it will be interesting to see the boys behind those names. I have been looking forward to seeing Ghandy for a while, as will it be interesting to meet FiShWaVe and see what he will do. As of now, though, it is not wholly sure if I will go there or not as it depends on Prowler's BMW access. It'd be a shame if I missed the chance now when it's here (as my mother said). Let's hope for the best. ˙˙02* * *˙01 ˙ With these few extra bytes, you have now read exactly 100 000 bytes. As you may understand, we have simply not had the power of will to re-read this text and look for errors. If you have read this far, you should have come across plenty of them. We apologize for that. We - as well as you - are walking on new ground. The smell of Puh's expensive Hugo Boss perfume lay thick in Duvan's room despite the fact that it was more than an hour since he left, and the window had been open ever since. That says more about Puh's perfume than about Duvan's room. In one hour, Christmas Eve will begin, Duvan thought as he finished this article, saved it using Amiga-S and thereafter shutting down his Amiga 1200. Another Oepir Risti issue was thereby completed. ˙01