Amiga Power now available

It’s been (almost) 5 years since the last update to this blog. So if you’re surprised to see this update, that’s nothing compared to the level of astonishment I felt when I remembered the password.

But the good news is I’ve finally got around to finishing off Amiga Power, overcoming a lethal combination of apathy, prevarication and laziness, all on my part. Add into this the lack of a seemingly-complete set: missing pages, missing issues and misnamed files all mean that it’s been the digital equivalent of raking about down the back of the sofa to cobble things together. Unfortunately, this means there’s an obvious difference in file size of some issues, and the very occasional page that’s not quite as good in terms of image quality. However, I now believe that this is a complete Amiga Power collection (and maybe the only complete one available – although I’m way out of touch with the scanning Gods so apologies if there’s much better sources already out there).

Amiga Power, as everyone will know, was a sister mag to Amiga Format, and an excuse for some of Future Publishing’s best writers to be honest and/or sarcastic about Amiga games (and the games industry in general). The gang of hacks included the pre-Reverand Stuart Campbell, who continues to be as wonderfully chippy about most things (and even some mad things), and despite storming out of forums at the drop of a perceived insult will always have a high placing in my Top 10 People I Like Who Wrote For Computer Mags. Come back Stu, we miss you.

So pour yourself a tin of lightly sparkling fish drink, grab the torrent (14Gb!), share and enjoy, and I’ll be back again in less than 5 years. Probably.

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BEEBUG now available

Two posts in a few days? Yes please. Two Acorn magazines in a row? Go on then.

It’s time for BEEBUG, a wonderful newsletter/magazine for the BBC Micro and family. Lots of technical detail for the serious Beeb user; it’s the kind of magazine I would have loved back in the day, if only I didn’t have a Spectrum and was born into money. The only time I got to play around with a BBC was when it was our turn with the computer-on-a-trolley in primary school … BBC B with 5.25″ disk drive and a chunky power switch … Microvitec CUB monitor … that game where you had to get the fox, chicken and grain across the river … *sniffle* …

So for those with a predilection for red function keys and excellent BASIC, grab the goodness here, and SHIFT-BREAK into seed mode when you’re done.

Electron User now available

Yes, an update at last, and I’m as surprised as you. But with Christmas looming, a couple of weeks of unclaimed annual leave and an aversion to the sounds of presents being wrapped means I’ve got no excuse not to try and catch up with the backlog of magazines to be crunched.

So here’s the first of hopefully a few releases: the wonderful Electron User. A tidy 3.2Gb across 82 issues of 80’s goodness, perfect for those whose parents couldn’t afford a BBC Micro but were told the Elk was “just as good”. Grab it
here and seed like a seed-y thing.

ST Format now available

Here’s another Future Publishing “Format” title, this time ST Format. I was never an ST user – I didn’t have the right shape fingers for the function keys – but had many a robust discussion with some Atari aficionados back in the glory days of the ST v Amiga wars, when things like blitter chips and multitasking mattered.

You know the drill – download the torrent here and seed from now unto eternity. I’ll try and squeeze out another bundle before the end of the year, but no promises!

Commodore Power/Play now available

Ahoy there retro lovers/data hoarders (or, if you’re like me, both). Apologies for the long silence, but you should all know by now that doesn’t mean that I’ve disappeared – just that far less interesting things are taking up my time. But I’ve got a few days annual leave to burn up before the end of the year, so let’s get some of the backlog sorted out.

Just to get things rolling (and to help me refamiliarise myself on how to compile a torrent file without buggering it up) we have “Commodore Power/Play”, published in the good ole US of A by CBM themselves. Grab it here.

I should have another bundle or two to get out there in the next few days, so keep coming back for more. And just in case you’re wondering, yes – Amiga Power is still on the cards, as is New Computer Express, both thanks to the generosity of some truly exceptional people. I’m working on it, honest.

Sinclair Programs now available

I’ve had this one hanging around for ages, but for some reason (probably incompetence) it never got uploaded. But here it is now: to be honest, a magazine that’s mainly type-ins isn’t exactly the best “fit” for OCR’ing, but it’s only 700Mb.

Grab it here, and relive those many frustrating afternoons tapping in a thousand lines of mis-printed BASIC, in the pursuit of a substandard Space Invaders clone with “machine code sound”.

Personal Computer News now available

Ah, the weekly computer magazine – we shall never see your like again. Here’s Personal Computer News, a sister title to the monthly Personal Computer Games. It disappeared in early 1985, at the same time as PCG, so we can only assume that someone at VNU decided those computer thingys were just a fad after all.

Get it, and a whole lot more beside, at the usual page.

Now, a plea: does anyone out there have Amiga Power issue 51, either physically or scanned? It’s the only one I’m missing, and it’s the one mag that everyone asks for. We’ve got Amiga Format and Amiga Shopper, so AP would complete the Future-Publishing-Amiga-magazines set. Please mail me if you can help!

Amiga World now available

At last, the first update of 2016. Amiga World was a US mag, devoted to the Miggy in the country that gave birth to the wonder machine but never really took it to it’s heart. It’s got that peculiar American look, with yards of white space in the editorial pages, as opposed to the UK cram-as-much-as-you-can approach.

Grab all 6-and-a-bit gigabytes of it here, and let’s all agree not to leave it so long next time.

Acorn User now available

I’ve had this one hanging around my hard drive for ages, and for some reason never got around to finishing it. So here it is, Merry Christmas, everybody’s having …. the chance to grab 20Gb of Electron/BBC/Archimedes/RISC nostalgia, over an impressive 267 issues. Grab it here, and remember seeding is not just for Christmas.

Amiga Shopper fixed!

The first update in quite a while, and I’m afraid it’s nothing new (like everything else here, ha!). The Amiga Shopper collection from a couple of years ago had a bit of a problem – quite a few of the issues had corrupt metadata, which meant that the actual text wasn’t searchable or copyable.

The cause of this is a nasty (and still unfixed) problem with OS X’s “Preview” application: changing anything in a certain type of PDF corrupts the file – it looks OK visually, but the underlying text (technically the “glyphs”) is broken. Unfortunately fixing them hasn’t proven easy: the original paper issues have been consigned to a remote and damp corner of my garage, where they’re now providing a cosy winter home for nostalgic 90’s-loving spiders.

Anyway, after much fannying around with pdftk, Adobe Acrobat, C#, and a couple of family packs of Scruttock’s Old Dirigible, I think I’ve got them back to normal. Grab them here; just download them over the original archive and it should update only the affected issues, probably. Drop me a mail if there’s any problems.

So now I’ve remembered how to upload a .torrent file, there should be a few more released over the next few days – including a monster 20+Gb one I’ve had hanging around for a while, so batten down the hard drives.