Autark

By Adok/Hugi


Autark was a diskmag released by the German group N-Factor. Its main editor was Diskhawk. Only one issue was released. Then Diskhawk's harddisk crashed and he didn't have any contact to the scene for almost a year. Moreover, since too few people participated in the diskmag, Diskhawk gave Autark up.

Autark runs on modern PCs even without DOSBox, but there's no music playback as no EMS memory is detected. With DOSBox, music playback works, but it slows down the magazine a lot. Autark #1 (and the small preview issue released two months before) is available at scene.org, from where it has been downloaded approximately 450 times.


Autark #1

Autark #1 was released in August 1996. Its interface differs from the interfaces of other demo scene diskmags in a refreshing way. The code comes from Prodatron, the graphics from CiDER, and the music is from The Rew of Nostalgia, KB and C.O.N.S. of N-Factor.

The interface runs in the mode 12h (640x480, 16 colours) and has a remarkable graphical quality for only 16 colours. After a short intro (zooming Autark-logo) you get to the main screen. In the upper half of the screen the editorial is displayed, on the bottom there is an Autark-logo. From the bottom, the article menu scrolls upwards by split screen till about the half of the screen height. In the left window of this article menu you select the section (General, Charts, Scene, Politic, Music), in the right, vertically scrollable window the article headlines and the authors of the selected section are listed.

As soon as you have chosen an article or quit the article menu by pressing the right mouse button, the article menu scrolls downwards again, and the selected article (or the article that was active before exiting the article menu) gets displayed. If you move the mouse downwards to the Autark-logo, the Autark-logo gets replaced with a list of commands like Print or Quit. You can select these commands either by clicking on them or by moving the mouse on them and then moving to the bottom of the screen. Inside the articles, you scroll like in Imphobia. Keyboard support is available, too.

A background picture is displayed beneath the articles. The text display features multiple colours, several fonts (including fonts with a non-fixed width), various formattings, graphics inside the articles and links. Furthermore, articles can be printed and saved to the harddisk.

Autark #1 is bi-lingual; while the scene corner is mostly in the English language, the politics corner is almost entirely in German. About 25 people have written articles, among them also some non-sceners. In total the mag contains almost 600 kbytes of text in a bit less than 100 articles.

Apart from the usual charts (top 15; categories: groups, demos, intros, parties, coders, musicians, GFX-artists, mailswappers, BBS's, homepages, diskmags, beers; number of voters: 50), party-invitations, party-reports and results, news, messages and adverts, the topics are mainly mailswapping and the 8 bit scene. The interviews partners of this issue are Fuzzel of Masque, and IronEagle. There's one coding-related article, which deals with 2D bitmap waving. The scene section also contains some reviews. The politics section is mostly about the Transrapid (very extensive report!) and various concepts of society forms. Furthermore, there's a music section with e.g. a report of the Loveparade 1996.

All in all it's a good first issue and it is a pity that it remained also the last one.


Adok/Hugi