Insight

By Adok/Hugi


Insight was a Dutch diskmag in the English language. Its main editor was Quicksilver of "Image!". The two issues were released in late 1995 and late 1997. They can be downloaded from scene.org (about 800 - 1000 downloads per issue). At least issue 2 works using DOSBox.


Insight #1

Insight #1 was released in December 1995. I was unable to move the mouse below the center of the screen, so I was unable to select most of the articles, to scroll inside the articles and to exit back to the main menu. Therefore I cannot say much about the contents of this issue. In Insight #2 there's an article about the contents of Insight #1, in which we can learn that Insight #1 contained interviews with Aap of Acme, The Rew of Nostalgia, Soundwave of DS, The Councellor of Spirit, Tim of Success and Harlequin of Success, and coding articles about optimization, light sourcing, environment mapping, fake truecolour and shading techniques. The code was done by Russian of "Image!", the graphics were from Unique and Wolverine, and the sound was from Diablo, Cygnes and Heretic. Before the actual mag there was an intro, which was not too special.


Insight #2

Insight #2 was released two years after the first issue, in December 1997. It consisted of the sections Editorial, Articles, The Sofa, Party Groove, Code Zone, Small Talk, The Ratings, The Charts and Credits. The interface of Insight used the concept of links and an index article that mainly consisted of links to the other articles. In contrast to e.g. Hugi, not all the articles which were included in the mag were listed in a table but rather only the main menu was a table like we know it from Hugi. The section menus were normal articles that sounded like editorials and had the links to the various articles among the text. In my opinion this was a pretty cool idea. The disadvantage is that it doesn't allow such a clear view as a "normal" table of contents does.

The level of the demo scene related articles - most of them were written by Quicksilver or Vision - was about as high as the level of average Imphobia articles. The "sofa" section contained interviews (Jace of TBL, Riplin of Infuse and Nix of TBL), the section "small talk" news, adverts and messages. What was really good compared to other mags was the coding corner. The codezone of Insight #2 contained articles about 3D bump mapping, Vesa 2.0, Protected Mode coding in Pascal, tunnels and some info about how to program the MMX processor. The charts were divided into global and Dutch charts. In the global charts the categories were top 10 groups, demos, intros, coders, musicians and graphicians. The categories of the Dutch charts were groups, demos, intros, 4kbs, coders, musicians, graphicians, diskmags and parties.

A good issue all in all.


Adok/Hugi