Restless

By Adok/Hugi


Restless was originally a North-American-based international diskmags released by the US group Opiate. The first issue was edited by jmX of Opiate. In issue 2, however, Goblin of Xtatic from Australia took over editorship. Both of these issues are available at scene.org. They have been downloaded 300 to 600 times. Both issues work with the DOSBox emulator.


Restless #1

Restless #1 was released on June 19th, 1996. It was coded by jmX and featured a title picture by Frost and music by Khyron, Basehead, Phoenix and Skie. The handling of this diskmag was a bit unusual: You could scroll with the cursor keys, and in order to enter the menu, you had to press space. The menu featured the sections Scene, Code, Music, Art, Charts and Misc. The Scene section contained mostly party results and invitation, but also some articles. In "Life Before Demos", Trixter dealt with what creative things were done with the IBM PC in the 1980's, before the first demos appeared. It was about coding, graphics and music. It was a very long article; the author, Trixter of Hornet, went deeply into detail. There was also an article about the Latin American demoscene written by Sexton of Quasar.

The Coding Section contained quite a lot of tutorials, about topics such as compression, 3D cameras, fractals, radix sorting, 3D shadows, bootloaders, protected mode extenders and textmode scrolling. The Music section mostly consisted of interviews with Sidewinder, Deathjester and Necros. The Art section was empty. In the charts (about 50 voters) we could find top 15 groups of the world, groups in North America, demos of the world, demos from North America, intros, coders of the world, coders from North America, musicians, artists and top 14 songs. Furthermore, there was a Misc section with a funny article about a "Thought Composer" and some other texts, which were less interesting.

Overall this first issue was very good.


Restless #2

The second and last issue of Restless came out in April 1998. It had a new interface, which was coded by Phoenix of Hornet using Quick Basic. When you started the mag, you could first see how all the font characters appeared for a short while. This was

probably necessary due to Quick Basic in order to store the characters in arrays which could then be displayed (GET and PUT). The very nice title picture appeared with a cool effect, which was however working quite slowly on my PC. You then came to the editorial, which you could exit to the menu with the right

mouse button.

There were far less articles in Restless #2 than in the first issue. The list of articles occupied just a single page. The most interesting articles were a report about the Russian scene and a tutorial about designing transitions in demos. There were also a text about the "tracker's block", about the lack of greetings in recent demos and the "future of the demoscene" (demos for Windows and Linux). Moreover, there was Phoenix' list of hidden parts in demos.

It was a small issue, but the articles included were quite interesting and well written.

Adok/Hugi