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- <f1><c000> Oh Grazey!
- wot a scorcher!
- <f0> Psycho Hacking Force Ultimate Muzak 8730 demo review
- by Saulot/Chosneck Team 2002
- ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- - --- ----
-
- On your knees, you yammy-tormenting lowtech perverts! Here comes the ultimate
- music demo from PHF. A paradise of funky squared sounds, syncbuzzers,
- digidrums and SIDs. A full 28mb music orgy, cut, squeezed and packed into a
- cute 7mb archive. All this wonder comes in two versions: one for disc juggling
- perverts and one for the steady, balanced HD owner.
-
- As I consider myself to be of the steady and balanced persuasion, I leeched the
- correct stuff to my falcon's hd. Firstly, I launched the intro which worked
- fine, despite that this cool thingy wasn't tested on Falcons at all. The
- message wasn't well synchronised to the graphics that show up to complement the
- story. To see the compilation, a good old ST/STE is a must, because some of the
- various music drivers are very hardware sensitive, the result 4 bombs as in
- case of my Faclon666 (but I received them sometimes even on STE).So, as you see
- I hadn't much choice, and the launch of my old granddaddy STE was inevitable.
- An ancient artefact in the shape of an 80mb Seagate scsi hard drive begun to
- work with the characteristic sounds, very similar to a low-moan of an aircraft
- taking off. Many disk-swaps later, the archive in all its glory landed safely
- on the HD.
-
- I relaunched the intro, which now worked flawlessly. And what I can say? Praise
- the Lord !!!! I haven't seen a 21 minute intro ever (No one has seen this
- before, I think...). During this intro we can read about the ST's music
- history, musicians and
- their most significant and most important achievements.All this in the words of
- chip music veteran maniacs Grazey/PHF and McLaser/TSCC.As we step forward in ST
- history, we observe the effects and screens characteristics for the given
- timeline. The same with the music (Tao's masterpiece). On the bottom of the
- screen we can see a graphical calendar and an arrow indicating the times. A
- great idea and prefectly realised. I was totally sucked into the screen. A few
- times I caught myself wiping a tear here and there. Those were the good times!
- And think that the whole twenty minute intro was produced by only one man (look
- in the readme.txt!). But let's stop this nostalgia and turn to the main part -
- the music compilation itself. We are presented with a nice, colourful
- interface of STSurvivor origin, containing three windows. First off, silence
- attacks our ears. We have to choose... but what? In the upper left corner we
- have the alphabet letters. The composers are sorted alphabetically (as any
- normally sane person should notice). By (c)licking the letter, you receive the
- list of yammy wizards corresponding to chosen letter. You can scroll up and
- down the list with arrows attached firmly to the box. Additionally, you can see
- a small piccy with some suspicious guys and their real name/nick and a flag
- indicating their nationality. When you successfully manage to choose something
- (the list is quite impressive), its time to select the tune from a second,
- larger box (also with "twisted" arrows), which is sometimes no mean feat (there
- are so many possibilities, you literally don't know what to choose). Click on
- the tune and off we go! While we listen to nice chip sounds, in a black box
- between two loudspeakers, we are presented with a nice spectrum analyzer.
- Sometimes, near the song names, strange numbers are given (noooo! It's not Top
- Ten or another The Best of ST Music charts!). These numbers indicate the
- numbers of the subtunes, and by clicking '+' we can switch between them. In a
- small box near the composer name we can see the current subtune number of the
- music being played.
-
- Shortly after playing around with the interface, I realised that the interface
- is the weakest point of the production. I don't mean the graphical side (which
- is ok) or the goodies contained (it deserves maximum respect), but the program
- design. The interface itself could have more functions which after a short
- time of mouse tormenting are asking (or even screaming!) to be included. I
- refer to the random selection and playing of tunes and the option for changing
- subtunes could be selected in a more visible place (there is a lot free space
- left), I also missed a quit button (after a few tries I managed to quit by
- pressing SPACE). The random function, as far I remember, worked fine in one of
- AnCool's music demos (mysteriously, any ym player known to me doesn't feature
- this option... shame!). The end product results in a smash hit release and
- really ultimate ST tunes jukebox (even if it was intended or not :] ).
-
- This is 1.00 release and I hope that someday we will receive a bugfixed falcon
- version with re-worked and improved interface. Content of this kind,
- representing two years of hard hacking, really deserves it... don't you think?
-
-
- -- - --- -- -------------------------------------------------------------------
- CHOSNECK team contact us:
- growin' up with atari community greymsb@poczta.fm
- ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- - --- ----
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