Tankard

By Adok/Hugi


Tankard was a Polish diskmag. Most of the issues were in the Polish language, but issue 4 also contained an English section. The main editor was Dee Kay of Grinders.

Tankard can be downloaded from scene.org (around 800 downloads so far) and browsed using the latest DOSBox emulator.


Tankard #4

Tankard #4 (from January 1999) features 1.6 MBytes of texts, but only 100 kbytes of them are in English. When you start the mag a video is first shown, in which you can see some people (probably staff members) spraying "Tank issue 4" on a wall. It's quite a low resolution but this has been necessary in order to distribute Tankard in a small enough archive. After the intro, you can choose between the English and Polish languages. Then you come to the articles menu.

Credits: Fiszi of Grinders coded everything, Forcer of Grinder made the graphics, and the music comes from Bartesek of Casyopea, Echo of Diffusion, Singer of Grinders and Szwagier of CSD. The articles were written by 70 different people, but in the English section you can find only a handful of them.

Tankard's layout is similar to Imphobia: two columns, fixed-width font. At the bottom of the screen there are some buttons for quitting, returning to the menu, setup, music selection and scrolling page-wise.

The English corner starts with the editorial, then come the charts. There are world charts and Polish charts. The categories are groups, demos, intros, magazines, coders, graphicians, musicians and swappers. There are two interviews, with Bartesek and Simon King respectively. The articles deal with topics such as GUS vs. Sound Blaster, whether demos are art, and what the future of swappers is. My article from Hugi #11 called "Demodiskmagscene today" has also been published here. There is a coding tutorial about the fire effect, and we also get to read some advice for graphics beginners. Also, there's an article about the famous writer Edgar Allan Poe.

Finally, there are two games: One is called "Scene quizz" and it's like a simple adventure game in text-mode where you select your next step from a list. The purpose of the game is to detect whether you're a lamer or not. The other game is "Russian Car Racing", it's a simulation of one of these little game computers from the former Soviet Union.

All in all it's not much to read. The presentation is good, although the music seems not to be working well. Too bad that there's not more content in the English language.


Adok/Hugi