{fb1000000Wondering which magazine to buy? Well here are some of our personal views on the Acorn magazines we've read.
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This magazine is my personal favourite. This magazine boasts a stylish interior and the best cover disc. It has columns for everything you could possibly need ... News, PD, Business, _Education_"Regulars.Education1", DTP, _Comms_"Regulars.Comms", _Letters_"Regulars.Letters", regular programming courses (C at the moment) and reviews of all of the new software and hardware. I can't think of a down point! Highly recom- mended.
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{fh200bb00Archimedes World
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{fb1000000Arc World has two discs on its cover, the only Acorn magazine to do this. This often means that they can have an exclusive demo of a commercial package, and have reader's submissions and other smaller offerings. One of the best sections is "out of the darc"; this provide cheats and passwords for Acorn games. Another good section is the "nearly free" column. This is able to review more public domain per month than all the other mags put together!
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{fh200bb00Acorn Computing
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This magazine is quite good, not as good as Acorn User but usually worth the money. I must say the disc content is a bit crap; they put !System, !Scrap and !SysMerge on every cover disc which is a waste. It fills up about 100Kb of disc space so you can see why they put it on! I would say 99% of Arc owners have !System already and it is no good at all to RISC OS 3 users who have the modules in ROM! As most users will have RISC OS 3 and the fact that a lot of new software requires RISC OS 3, what's the point? On with the magazine content. I would say the content is good, the letters and technical help with Mike Cook are very useful and the odd programm- ing feature they have are very good. The reviews are good and the news is spot on. If they scrapped the second disc it would be worth £2.95, but an extra £1 for a "free" disc is a bit expensive! In the end it's up to you, but I buy this magazine. {fb1c00000(By the time you read this, Acorn Computing will no longer exist - Mike){fb1000000
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{fh200bb00RISC User
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Well first off, there is no way I'd buy the disc that goes with the magazine! At £50 for a year's worth discs alone it's a rip off, and then they only have readers submissions (which aren't usually that good). But still, at £22 for 10 issues it's not that bad. Although a bit small it's usually quite good.
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{fh200bb00Archive
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The thing that makes Archive different is that it's not written by journalists, it's written by Acorn enthusiasts. Most of the articles are written by the readers who {fb1c00000_don't get paid for it_"Regulars.SRInfo1"{fb1000000. Therefore you tend to get the honest opinions of people who use the software serious- ly, and almost zero hype. The content occasion- ally gets rather technical, because few of the people who feel confident about submitting articles are beginners. Product reviews often appear later than other magazines, but nothing gets reviewed until it really exists, but news can be extremely topical because Paul has the ability to make changes quite late in the editorial cycle. Among the Archive readership there's tremendous technical expert- ise, and there's a facility to tap into that resource for technical help.
