Showtime

By Adok/Hugi


Showtime is the name of a chartsmag that was first released on the Amiga platform. 17 issues were released for the Amiga in total, in the years 1996-2002. The responsible groups were Ram Jam and Darkage, and editors included ACBS, Vega, Magic, Ghandy and Kaosmaster. After six years of silence, Showtime was resurrected on the PC by the groups Scoopex and Ram Jam. The main editor is Kaosmaster. Co-editors are Sir and Fishwave (the former main editor of Seenpoint on Amiga). Showtime #18 can be downloaded from the Scoopex website.


Showtime #18

Showtime #18 was released in September 2008. The magazine is based on Chris Dragan's Panorama engine, which was originally developed for Hugi, so it works under Windows, and you can also download BeOS and Linux ports at Chris Dragan's website. There are some slight differences to Hugi, such as that the "/setup" command line switch has been disabled (thus you can't switch to window mode, can't disable fading and can't select external music to play instead of the regular ones) and that music is looped an infinite times and you have to switch between the tunes manually.

What you get to see first is a sequence of intro pictures - Scoopex logo, "presents", then the title picture without the Showtime logo, finally the same picture with the logo. The intro

sequence is well synchronized with the music. The music of the magazine is very good, just like the graphics - the melodies remind me of video game music, but the sound quality is better.

Then you enter the menu. The screen is divided into three areas: At the top, there are buttons for printing, switching

music, searching and displaying the help text. At the bottom, there are buttons for switching between Amiga Charts, PC Charts, the Gallery, the Menu, and quitting the magazine. In the central area, the article menu is displayed. It's a two-column layout, and the fonts and images are nice.

When you switch sections (charts, gallery etc.), the background music is changed. Because of the limitations of the engine, the music isn't changed back when you leave a section by pressing ESC or the right mouse button, but you can switch music with the mentioned button anytime, anyway.

In both the PC and Amiga charts, we have the following categories: demo groups, coders, musicians, graphicians, demos, 1k / 4k intros, 40k / 64k intros, group homepages, article writers, musicdisks, slideshows, and diskmags. In addition, there are so-called alternative charts, which there's no button for but which have to be selected from the article menu. The categories in these charts are: wild demos, demo tools, web designers, crew organizers, spandimerda, parties, video games and mascots. Moreover, the results of the "referendum" about what charts categories should be removed and what new categories should be added are published, too. Apart from the results, comments on some of the charts categories are published as well. The number of voters is quite low: 28. Apparently, 11 points have been given for place 3, 22 for place 2 and 33 for place 1.

Inside the articles, the formatting doesn't look quite as good as in the menu: The starting lines of new paragraphs are indented too much, and leaving a blank space after every paragraph contributes to making the whole article look torn up. In the interviews, the Courier New font is used, which looks strange since it is a fixed-width font - usually such fonts are used for code samples and ASCII art only.

About the contents: The news items deal with both Amiga and PC, and they are sorted by groups. It's mostly a list of releases and ranks at parties. Maybe that will be interesting as a historical archive once a few years will have passed since the release of this magazine.

The interview partners in this issue are Mice, Skan, Pantaloon, Louie500 and Maxon. Some of the questions are interesting, e.g. what their parents think about their demoscene hobby.

The more interesting articles deal with the history of Showtime, Strider (the ex-cracker who is now the chairman of the Republican Party of San Diego, California, USA) and a demoscene presentation at a university in Scotland. There are also reviews of the Planet Hively musicdisk, Savage Charts (Kaosmaster criticizes Savage Charts because of its low number of votes although Showtime #18 has had even less voters than Savage Charts), the Bitfellas website and the demos from the 3rd Annual Intel Democompetition. A feature that has also generated some positive feedback is a collection of photos of disks that were exchanged in the editors' mailswapping activities. Furthermore, there are some articles on hardware, crack intros, the new demogroup SuperGroup, and a music competition is announced.

Credits for the music: Mr. Death of Scoopex, D Fast (two tunes each) and Keito of Alcatraz (one tune). The large number of songs is probably the reason why the archive is such a big download (33 MB). The title picture, which is also displayed when you exit the magazine, was drawn by Dr. Doom of IRIS, and the Scoopex logo is Viruz666's work.

In the last words article, we learn that a port to the Amiga platform is planned as well. The code is already done, but the staff needs help converting the articles to the format the Amiga engine uses.

All in all Showtime #18 is very well done technically. It doesn't have much content, but some of it is interesting.


Adok/Hugi