Originally announced 6th February 2025
Back in the 90s, there was quite an indie scene for magazines that were distributed on floppy disk with music, sound, images etc. There was a lot of geek and nerd culture involved here, and there were disk mags about all sorts of different topics, from science fiction to general entertainment, from programming to gaming.
It really was a special thing to get involved in.
Well, I had a few of the AMOSzine Disk Magazine disks back in the day on the Amiga, and I had some Computing With The CPC "tape mags" (pretty much the same thing, but loaded off cassette tape) and even back then as a teen, I always wanted to create my own, so I decided, I was going to give it a go.
No, I've not given up, I've hit many stumbling blocks along the way, including the following but not limited to:
I experienced some "hardware failures" with my Amigas, which was a bit of a problem, being as it's Amiga based - yeah, I could set up an emulator and carry on there, but it's not the same, it doesn't feel the same
I discovered a bug regarding how AMOS and Kickstart 1.3 handle disk buffering, this caused me to have issues where the disk mag would not work on a Kickstart 1.2/1.3 based Amiga - I've since solved this, but it was a head scratcher for a time
During the summer of 2025, I fell ill and was hospitalised - I spent 3 weeks in hospital with Pancreatitis and I wasn't sure when I'd get better - thankfully I'm alright now, but it was very frightening at the time, as, in my adult life, despite being in my 40s, that was the first time I'd ever been a patient in hospital
Once I came out of hospital, being as I was "between jobs" (not unemployed as such, but, I finished one job and had to delay the start of the other due being hospitalised) - but also, the timing of this meant I had to survive about 6 weeks off 1 week's worth of pay - this caused a lot of depression and anxiety, and I couldn't really concentrate on the disk mag at this time
Finally, all the above was over, then, I sat down to finish it off .................... then BAM! Creative Block .................... I felt like I'd ran out of ideas, or had suddenly run dry - I found that pretty hard to deal with being as I was so prolific and wrote so much for this disk mag when I first started it
Whilst I like the look, I'm unhappy with the operation of it - yes, the interface looks nice and it's easy to write for, especially as I'm using "Magnum Pro" which is an off the shelf "Disk Mag Creator", it's slow and cumbersome, and still seems that it takes longer to load on a 1.3 machine for some odd reason
So, I have a few articles, one or two Amiga things and a lot of "other retro" articles as well. The music is in place, the interface is working, everything is working, but the disk is half empty and there's still loads more room for more content.
The organisation of the articles isn't great, it could do with some work for it to flow better.
It also doesn't help that I have a bit of an ADHD brain, I seem to keep going on many side-quests and this gets pushed back.
I do fully intend to get this finished and released, but as I said, I'm not properly happy with it, I like how it looks but it doesn't operate well and feels like it's held together with bits of string. At this stage I've spent a lot of time writing the articles, although I could spend time writing my own interface from scratch, that's going to take some time.
So, I either keep it as is, release Issue 1 and see how it goes, or, I rewrite the interface/back end of the disk mag, which is quite the time investment, especially as I've already written content.
Things are considerably better now, thank you, but I'm not 100%, let's say 90%
Absolutely - I will be looking for contributors, but I'm not sure if I should get people to contribute for Issue 1 or wait for Issue 2 (depending on what occurs)