CFX News

By Adok/Hugi


CFX News was the newsletter of the Coders F/X BBS, which was a bulletin board system located in Ashkelon, Israel. It was edited by the sysop of this BBS, Civax of Moon Hunters. 34 issues of the newsletter were released. They issued in the years 1996-1998, the first issue being released on December 28th, 1996.

Like most newsletters, CFX News was text-only and did not have a coded graphical user interface. But the text was nicely formatted and contained good-looking ASCII art. Besides, a non-graphical text viewer was included in issues 26 and beyond, but it was not really handy. A common text editor such as Notepad is more suitable for reading CFX News.

The first issues of CFX News contained only announcements and statistics. Then birthday greetings lists, party dates and information about file base changes started to appear in "the Israeli DemoNews". The first article appears in CFX News #13. It's written by Civax and deals with the question whether parties should last 24 or 48 hours. The formatting is a bit funny because it looks like the text were divided into two columns although it is just one. A response to this article appeared in the subsequent issue of CFX News. Another topic the earlier issues of CFX News dealt with was whether the voters in the music compos at Israeli demoparties sucked - as you can read in the Israeli diskmag Luna #1, it happened at Movement '96 that the winner of the music compo was treated with hostility, and such a situation apparently occurred again in the subsequent year. In CFX News #21, we can find a review of the tunes submitted at the Ritual '97 music compo, and issue 22 contains an article about prizes at demoparties. CFX News #24 contains a review of soundcards.

CFX News #26 was released two months after the previous issue, and it was the biggest issue released so far. While all the issues before it had only one or two articles per issue if any, there were a total of nine articles in this issue. They mostly dealt with the Movement '97 party, with the scene in Israel and with converting IT tunes to XM format. In issue 28, we could find a short story and a statement about Linux. This topic was also to be found in issue 29, which, in addition, contained an article about design in demos, giving recommendations for "making the best demos". In CFX News #30, tips for Impulse Tracker composers were to be found, Kombat proposed making an all-Israeli demo, and DNA-Groove wrote about the evolution of games. The other issues also contained opinionated articles about Israeli demo parties, tracking hints and short stories.

All in all, most of the articles were quite short, and there was little content of strong interest.

Civax later founded a website called CFXweb, on which news and articles about game and demo development were published. This site was shut down a few years ago.

Adok/Hugi