Announcement regarding Amigaville Issue 4

[zerohour1974]

Hi...

This is Brian here of Amigaville... Now I have after a long hard process of decision making I have decided that Issue 4 I am going ask for a fee of £2 an issue. Now I know up to this point Amigaville has been free to download and some will not be happy with my decision.

I will now explain why I came to this decision.

I am working completely on my own. I have no team to call upon to do the writing or compilation of the magazine. Now this does take up quite a lot of my time, it is also quite a bit of work for one man.

I am now having to host my own website, pay for bandwidth, hosting etc. That unfortunately is not being supplied to me for free. Now I tried using services like Dropbox to begin with, so I could supply the files for free but that failed.

Now I admit several would be able to just shake that off. However I will openly admit this is my only job at the moment, so I can't supplement it by other means.

I believe that £2 is not a harsh price... It's the price of an average cup of coffee. Surely the time and effort I put in is worth that. I do try to provide a reasonable quality of content.

Also I may be able to provide better or even larger amount of content. I have tried asking for submissions or reviews but no response. I understand some writers may want payment. I can only do that with your help.

Hopefully this seems reasonable.... I will announce methods of payment closer to the time...

Thanks for reading this and I hope you will stay with me and Amigaville.

Issue 4 scheduled for release (if all goes to plan) ... February 6th 2016


Brian.

[LuMan]

Hi Brian

It's a brave decision, and I hope it pays off. Personally, I'm happy to pay £2 per issue - it's a fair bit cheaper than other Amiga magazines that I'm happy to pay more for, but I think the price is fair for a digital-only copy.

So, whatever your target is for subscribers, you're one subscriber closer

Good luck
LuMan

[roberthazelby]

Sounds reasonable to me. I've got the other issues downloaded. I've just not had time to do more than quickly flick through them at the moment.

It was only today that I was thinking that I may get in touch with regards to submitting some content. Don't hold your breath, though. It was hard enough to get me to submit some content for the Ultimate Guide to Amiga PD Games.

Keep up the great work.

[Havie]

Another subscriber in me!

[shaf]

It's a reasonable price of a downloadable Magazine, I happily pay for it. I'd also be willing to write an articles on repairing Amigas.

[TenLeftFingers]

£2 sounds reasonable to me. I hope you get enough subscribers that you can enjoy the process even more. Good luck!

[Daedalus]

Hi Brian, I haven't heard of your publication before now, but it does sound fair to me! If there's anything I could help you with as a means of support (e.g. Web hosting, some coding perhaps), let me know. I'm not sure if I could find the time to contribute, but if I did find it, I'd like to help out maybe with a tutorial or something.

[TenLeftFingers]

A coding tutorial would be amazing!

[Daedalus]

Been thinking about this a little bit over the past few days, and I reckon I could offer a Blitz Basic coding tutorial... I was thinking along the lines of building a simple game like Connect-4 or something, which could include things like simple Intuition, graphics, file access and AI topics. I'll talk to Brian privately about it and see how that might go

[Havie]

Forget the basic WB friendly stuff and go into detail on screen, bobs and sprites. That's what we need to get more BB2 games...

[Daedalus]

Maybe, but I'm not the best with the more advanced graphics programming. Also, system-friendly stuff is one of the main benefits of using Blitz over Amos etc. I'll have a think about it...

[TenLeftFingers]

I think it's better to include some workbench stuff. I think we need app capable devs more than game ones at this stage. But of course it's your choice

[LuMan]

How about a type-ins section? Readers can submit sub 1k (excluding graphics) games that we can type into Blitz, with the graphics being made available from a web-drive, or something.

Keeping the gams to sub 1k (or 4k) means we're not spending more than an hour or so typing it in

Or is that a little too 8-bit??

[zerohour1974]

Sorry for the delayed response, been sorting out Issue 4...

Have sent the appropiate PMs about.

So what would people like to see in Amigaville?

Articles or tutorials or something else entirely like a demo section?

[zerohour1974]

Type-ins are a nice idea but are notoriously problematic to typeset even in DTPs.

[Daedalus]

I think type-ins might be doable for very small listings, but explanations of segments of code might be more useful while offering the full code to download from an accompanying page on the website might be a better idea if it's more than a few lines.

Of course, a retro-retro section for type-ins on C64 or Atari XL emulators could be interesting too.

[zerohour1974]

I could give the general idea I guess and allow the full code to be available from the website I guess.

As for other machines ... That could possibly happen if I get my arse in gear on my secondary project

[LuMan]

Wow. I thought that the idea would be shot down in flames, what with this being the age of (almost) limitless content that can just be downloaded and save all that tedious typing....

Looking forward to the next issue

[roberthazelby]

Originally Posted by zerohour1974

As for other machines ... That could possibly happen if I get my arse in gear on my secondary project

I reckon you should stick to the Amiga rather than covering general retro systems. That's only my view, though.

Perhaps in this latest issue you could review the new Google Drive software that's been released for the Amiga, and interview the developer to see what he has planned.

[zerohour1974]

Yeah the second project I am working on is a separate magazine entity that would be multiformat so it would be a completely separate thing to Amigaville