![]() The cover of the final issue of Amiga Format (May 2000) | |
Former editors | Bob Wade Damien Noonan Marcus Dyson Steve Jarratt Nick Veitch Ben Vost |
---|---|
Categories | Amiga, Video games |
Frequency | Monthly |
Circulation | 161,256 (Jan – Jun 1992) |
First issue | July 1989 |
Final issue Number | May 2000 136 |
Company | Future plc |
Country | United Kingdom |
Based in | Bath |
Language | English |
ISSN | 0957-4867 |
Amiga Format was a British computer magazine for Amiga computers, published by Future plc. The magazine lasted 136 issues from 1989 to 2000. The magazine was formed when, in the wake of selling ACE to EMAP, Future split the dual-format title ST/Amiga Format into two separate publications (the other being ST Format ). At the height of its success the magazines sold over 170,000 copies per month, topping 200,000 with its most successful ever issue.
Amiga Format can be thought of the "mother" or "big sister" magazine of Amiga Power , which it both predated and outlived. Whereas Amiga Power was strictly games-only, Amiga Format covered all aspects of Amiga computers, both hardware and software, both application and gaming uses. A further spin-off was Amiga Shopper , which dealt purely with the hardware and "serious" software side of the Amiga scene.
The magazine was published on a monthly basis [1] and offered various multi-issue tutorials on different application software, such as C programming or LightWave graphics rendering. The last tutorial was cut short in the middle because of the cancellation of the magazine.
Amiga Format pioneered the concept of putting complete application software on a magazine coverdisk as a response to a moratorium on complete games titles being cover-mounted.
Amiga Format was the second-to-last regularly issued print magazine about the Amiga in the United Kingdom. The last was Amiga Active , which ran for 26 issues from October 1999, although Amiga Format was the only such magazine after CU Amiga Magazine's closure in October 1998 until the launch of Amiga Active.
A notable regular feature in the later stage of the magazine (introduced by then-editor Nick Veitch) was Readers' Games. Here readers of the magazine could send in games they had programmed themselves, and the magazine staff would then publish a brief review of them. In the CD-ROM edition of the magazine, all the Readers' Games were also included on the covermount CD-ROM. Most of the games were written in AMOS BASIC or Blitz BASIC.
In one issue a competition was run to find the best game developed by a reader using a previously covermounted version of Blitz BASIC. A game called Total Wormage was entered by Andy Davidson.
Although Total Wormage was disqualified as it was not submitted with working source code, Acid Software introduced Andy Davidson to Team17 who would go on to release the game commercially as Worms .
While the continuing uncertainty about the Amiga platform's future slowed software development, there was an increase in the interest surrounding emulation software. Longtime contributor Simon Goodwin contributed one of the longest running series to the magazine, which broke down emulators by target platform and went through the mechanics of getting them working
Introduced in issue 129 and continuing until the final issue, Just the FAQs consisted of a single page each month containing an interview with a prominent figure in the Amiga community, with the exception of the January 2000 issue (published in December 1999), which instead explained the limited effects the Year 2000 problem would have on the Amiga. [2]
Interviews were conducted with Chris Wiles (managing director of Active Technologies), Neil Bothwick (founder of the Wirenet ISP), Alan Redhouse (of Eyetech), Wolf Dietrich (head of Phase 5 Digital Products), Andrew Elia (of AmigaSoc), and Ben Hermans (of Hyperion Entertainment). [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] In the final issue, a special interview was conducted with Eric Schwartz's cartoon character Sabrina. [9]
Backstage was a four-page newsletter sent to subscribers with each issue. The tone of the newsletter was less formal than that of the magazine, and it would often provide behind-the-scenes information on the activities of prominent members of the Amiga Format staff. Backstage also gave details of the contents of the Subscribers' Superdisk (an extra floppy disk sent to subscribers, whose contents were also stored in a password-protected archive on the cover CD), and featured special offers for subscribers.
Blitz BASIC is the programming language dialect of the first Blitz compilers, devised by New Zealand-based developer Mark Sibly. Being derived from BASIC, Blitz syntax was designed to be easy to pick up for beginners first learning to program. The languages are game-programming oriented but are often found general purpose enough to be used for most types of application. The Blitz language evolved as new products were released, with recent incarnations offering support for more advanced programming techniques such as object-orientation and multithreading. This led to the languages losing their BASIC moniker in later years.
UAE is a computer emulator which emulates the hardware of Commodore International's Amiga range of computers. Released under the GNU General Public License, UAE is free software.
Commodore User, later renamed to CU Amiga is a series of American and Britsh magazines published by Commodore International.
Amstrad Action was a monthly magazine, published in the United Kingdom, which catered to owners of home computers from the Amstrad CPC range and later the GX4000 console.
The Miracle Piano Teaching System is educational software which uses a MIDI keyboard to teach how to play the piano. It was published in 1990 by The Software Toolworks for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Macintosh, Amiga, Sega Genesis, and MS-DOS compatible operating systems.
PC Format was a computer magazine published in the United Kingdom by Future plc, and licensed to other publishers in countries around the world. In publication between 1991 and 2015, it was part of Future plc's Format series of magazines that include articles about games, entertainment and how to get the most out of the platform. Despite the occasional mention of alternatives, PC Format takes the term 'PC' to mean a Microsoft Windows-based computer.
The One was a video game magazine in the United Kingdom which covered 16-bit home gaming during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was first published by EMAP in October 1988 and initially covered computer games aimed at the Atari ST, Amiga, and IBM PC compatible markets.
It Came from the Desert is a 1989 action-adventure game by Cinemaware. It was originally released for the Amiga, but later ported to MS-DOS, as well as released in distinctly different forms to consoles. The TurboGrafx-16 release is distinctly different from the computer versions, in terms of gameplay and presentation. An expansion set Antheads: It Came from the Desert II was released in 1990.
Covermount is the name given to storage media or other products packaged as part of a magazine or newspaper. The name comes from the method of packaging; the media or product is placed in a transparent plastic sleeve and mounted on the cover of the magazine with adhesive tape or glue.
A disk magazine, colloquially known as a diskmag or diskzine, is a magazine that is distributed in electronic form to be read using computers. These had some popularity in the 1980s and 1990s as periodicals distributed on floppy disk, hence their name. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s caused them to be superseded almost entirely by online publications, which are sometimes still called "diskmags" despite the lack of physical disks.
Amiga Disk File (ADF) is a file format used by Amiga computers and emulators to store images of floppy disks. It has been around almost as long as the Amiga itself, although it was not initially called by any particular name. Before it was known as ADF, it was used in commercial game production, backup and disk virtualization. ADF is a track-by-track dump of the disk data as read by the Amiga operating system, and so the "format" is really fixed-width AmigaDOS data tracks appended one after another and held in a file. This file would, typically, be formatted, like the disk, in Amiga Old File System (OFS).
Gateway to the Savage Frontier (1991) is a Gold BoxDungeons and Dragons computer game developed by Beyond Software and published by SSI for the Commodore 64, PC and Amiga personal computers.
Antic was a print magazine devoted to the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and later the Atari ST. It was named after the ANTIC chip in the 8-bit line which, in concert with CTIA or GTIA, generates the display. The magazine was published from April 1982 until June/July 1990. Antic printed type-in programs, reviews, and tutorials, among other articles. Each issue contained one type-in game as "Game of the Month." In 1986, STart magazine was spun off to exclusively cover the Atari ST line.
Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer, and were not ported from other platforms.
Worms is a 2D artillery tactical video game developed by Team17 and released in 1995. It is the first game in the Worms series of video games. It is a turn based game where a player controls a team of worms against other teams of worms that are controlled by a computer or human opponent. The aim is to use various weapons to kill the worms on the other teams and have the last surviving worm(s).
ST Amiga Format was a computer magazine that covered the Atari ST and Amiga computers. It was published by Future plc to cover the ever growing market for the, then-new, 16-bit home computers. Issues were equally balanced with coverage for both Amiga and Atari ST systems. Issue 1 included a main feature 'ST or Amiga? The Choice is Yours', where the pros and cons for each machine was examined.
Paragon Publishing Ltd was a magazine publisher in the UK, which published computer games and other entertainment titles from 1991 to 2003.
Miggybyte was a free disk-based magazine for the Amiga range of computers, published by Pickled Fish Software and edited by Ben Gaunt. From 1995 to 1997 twelve issues were published all being on a single floppy disk only.
Microcosm is a 3D rail shooter video game developed and published by Psygnosis in 1993. It was originally developed for the FM Towns, and also ported for the Sega Mega-CD, Amiga CD32, 3DO, and MS-DOS. Microcosm featured realistic FMV animation, with the graphics being rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations. The game is either in first-person or third-person view depending on the gaming system.
Fun School is a series of educational packages developed and published in the United Kingdom by Europress Software, initially as Database Educational Software. The original Fun School titles were sold mostly by mail order via off-the-page adverts in the magazines owned by Database Publications. A decision was made to create a new set of programs, call the range Fun School 2, and package them more professionally so they could be sold in computer stores around the UK. Every game comes as a set of three versions, each version set to cater for a specific age range.