www.woodycool.uk

Home

This is another one of those magazines where I only ever had one issue of back in the day - I always found that being on a restricted budget, some months I could only afford one mag, and often CU Amiga or Amiga Format won out based on the coverdisk, but, let's have a look at the one issue of Amiga Computing that I had.

Amiga Computing - Issue 73 - May 1994

The Magazine

The biggest thing that attracted me to the magazine was the "Brave new world" as we all know, the Amiga had a quite an uncertain future around this time, and I really wanted to know what the future of my awesome computer really was. The article itself had quite a lot of optimism about it, but of course, we all know what happened.

There was a cool feature about FMV Video, a brief look at how to use AmigaDOS 3.0 (the latest and greatest at the time), reviews of some big hitters from both serious applications and games.

I also liked how it separated into separate sections for ARexx, AMOS, Music, Video etc. etc. and made the mag flow really well.

Coverdisk #1 - the serious applications

I was actually quite interested in this disk because of "Personal Fonts Maker" as despite not being very talented at the whole computer art thing, I did like messing around with paint programs and graphics programs - I really liked the idea of creating my own fonts, so having PFM thrown in for free as a full app on the front of the magazine, well that grabbed my interest. SPOILER: I only ever made ONE font with this thing.

Epoch Master: I didn't have a lot of phone numbers or addresses to store in this application, so it didn't really do anything for me

DTree: this is basically the Amiga's version of the Tree command from MS-DOS, and I liked this command as it gave me a pretty view of the contents of my disk in a CLI, yeah, this ended up on the copy of my Workbench disk

Spooler: I hadn't quite got my printer yet at this stage, so I had no use for it at the time - HOWEVER, when I did get my printer, I'd totally forgot that I had this app, and ended up writing my own Spooler program in AMOS 🤣

Coverdisk #2 - the "Legacy of Sorasil" game demo

Now, I was dawn to this because I'm a fan of isometric adventure games, having come from the Amstrad CPC and played games like Batman and Head Over Heels, however, this was nothing like those.

Graphically it's great, but I just couldn't work out what I needed to do, and it wasn't for lack of trying - maybe I should've read the magazine pages for this one a bit better.

I did enjoy it somewhat though, but I'm not in to RPG games in general. I quickly forgot about this coverdisk after a month or two.

Conclusion

So that's my look at the the only issue that I ever had of Amiga Computing. I liked the mag, the disks were ok, but often I found CU Amiga and Amiga Format offered better coverdisks, and often reviewed software I was more interested in. It also didn't help that in the town I lived in, it was much easier to find the other magazines, often finding that my local newsagents, and even the likes of WH Smiths, did not stock Amiga Computing with any regularity.

In the current day, I have quite a few Amiga Computing coverdisks, and they're all pretty decent, some of which I wish I'd got back in the day.

So that's my take on Amiga Computing, specifically Issue 73 from May 1994)

Home

Google Sites

Report abuse