Dragon

By Adok/Hugi


Dragon was a Polish diskmag edited by Aborygen. Its fourth issue also contained an English Corner. I'm going to review this issue.

All issues of Dragon can be downloaded from scene.org. Dragon #4 was leeched 1200 times so far. The mag works with DOSBox, although not perfectly.


Dragon #4

Dragon #4 was released in September 1998. It contains 1.7 MBytes of texts. From these 1.7 MBytes, roughly 150 kbytes are in English. When you start Dragon, you first see the title picture. Then comes the main menu. There are various sections: Scene, Coding Corner, Graphics Corner, etc. All the English articles are located in the Scene section. It's 32 articles in total. The headlines occupy exactly one page on the screen.

One of the most interesting articles is "The disintegration of the graphics scene", by Danny of The Black Lotus. He writes in detail why he left the scene. He tells us that he entered the scene when scanning was no business yet, and when scanners became cheap, less talented graphic artists started to scan pictures and edit them instead of creating new pictures on their computers from scratch. In order to prevent scanning pictures from entering the competitions, the compo organizers demanded work-in-progress steps to be submitted. Then the lame graphicians forged these steps. Another reason why Danny doesn't like the graphics scene any more is that there is a website called "No Copy", in which various respected scene graphicians are accused of having copied other artists' (e.g. Boris Vallejo's) works instead of having their graphics based on their own motifs. Because of this site Danny has also been accused of scanning and faking by various visitors of this site, and the people haven't accepted his statement that he is innocent. All of that sucks, and so Danny focuses on his professional life at Eidos.

There's also an interview with Danny, which partly is a repetition of this article. There's a party report about Rush Hours 1998, and tutorials about JPEG compression and Huffman encoding. That's all that is worth mentioning. The other articles aren't really interesting, they are often poorly written and about very trivial topics. One of them is even in the Hungarian language.

What sucks is that the engine doesn't really work. It isn't possible to view the pages with even numbers in continguous articles. In the articles with a two-column layout, the situation is better. Here, it's sometimes not possible to view the last page of an article if the article consists of an even number of columns. In some articles it works with a trick (moving to the last column, exiting and opening the article again), but in some others it doesn't. Very bad.

Credits: The code was done by Tuka of Dragon. The graphics were made by Kobold and Ural of 69. There are five tunes, the composers of which were Hornet of Dragon, Falcon of Pulse, Szudi of Ame, God of Prism, and Kinio.


Adok/Hugi