All Systems go for Issue Two!

With work on issue one of the magazine completed towards the end of November, and the final release ADF images uploaded to both our Facebook group and the almighty Aminet, work is now underway on issue two.

We expect this second issue of A-Mag to surface some time in March. If you'd like to contribute please contact us via Facebook group or drop us an email at psiq.tfia@gmail.com.

Many thanks to everyone who has already downloaded issue one of A-Mag. Thank you also to those who have sent us feedback. It really is appreciated and has given us the nudge to crack on with the second issue.

A Few Screenshots

Using the excellent Disk Magazine Creator software to design and build the zine meant that once we'd got to grips with the formatting syntax and a few design quirks here and there, creating pages for inclusion in the mag was fairly quick work. By far the most time consuming part was ensuring text was lined up correctly, or making sure paragraphs didn't span multiple pages. That required a lot of testing and re-editing.

Although the plan was to do as much of the work on real Amiga hardware as possible, due to our limited spare time this wasn't always possible. In the end we had an emulated expanded Amiga 1200 and 600 running simultaneously. The Amiga 1200 was used for the editing and mastering of each version of the disk image while the Amiga 600, with floppy drive set to accelerated, was used to test that everything worked and that text was displayed correctly.

Below are a few screenshots from early versions of the magazine. The full published version even has a magazine cover which you'll have to load the disk in for yourself to see.

ASCII art displayed while the issue loads

One of the numerous index pages displaying links to the articles

Disk image displayed once loading is complete

A-Mag is Here! Long Live A-Mag!

After a few long months, work on the first issue of A-Mag is complete! It's taken longer than expected due to work and family issues, but we got there in the end.

Created using DMC by Andy Gibson, articles have been submitted by community members, written by ourselves and a few snippets have been borrowed (and credited) from online sources. We have tried to acknowledge everyone who has contributed in some way to this issue.

It has been tested on a real A1200, A600 and an A500. It's also been successfully tested on an emulated Amiga 1200 and 600.

The magazine is completely free and we hope you enjoy it. Check out the downloads section for links to the ADF.

Enjoy the read!

Matt and Rob