Jonathan Nash

Undoubtedly the stupidest money-saving scheme thought up by Simon The Publisher was firing Kenny Grant, our coverdisk compiler, after AP43 with the idea of having one of the tech bods from Amiga Format do it.

The feeble justification went like this: Kenny lived hundreds of miles away and was notoriously variable at responding to frantic phone calls (hence the chant to the gods of "Kenny Kenny Pick Up The Phone") while Amiga Format was just around the corner.

His fatal error was this: Kenny was a professional programmer who specialised in disk loading routines. He could guarantee a coverdisk would work on any Amiga. Most importantly, were we to get a game with a custom loader, ordinarily meaning it would have to go on a disk by itself - sometimes a deliberate trick by a software publisher to ensure they would hog the cover - Kenny could hack the game and change it so we could fit more on for you, our lovely readers.

Conversely, Jason the tech bod on Amiga Format used Amiga-DOS itself to write a truly revolting front end and hadn't the slightest idea what to do with a non-standard disk except to hurriedly archive it and explain you'd have to awkwardly decompress the demo because of "technical reasons."

We were not particularly dispirited to see him leave the company after finishing AP47's disk.

Except Simon The Publisher hadn't arranged for anyone to take his place.

Leaving

me

to

compile

our

coverdisks.

The really dismal, bubblingly angering thing is, despite NEVER having tried to program an Amiga before, I was better at it than our sister mag's Technical Editor. AP48 and AP49's disks have no archiving, no purple-on-green text and pots of games. I remain proud of them.

Kenny was re-hired for AP50 (hurrah!) and stayed for six months until Simon The Publisher met a new tech bod from Amiga Format and decided to do it all over again.

New tech bod David gave his all and would scout around for small extra things to fill up any remaining space (SWOS Edit, for example) but we still missed Kenny's ability to, say, include the tiny, drivellingly simple Knockout without inexplicably making it A1200-only.

Amazingly, Kenny speculatively rang the office the same day the duplicators reported they couldn't even begin to understand the hair-raisingly complex copy protection on No Second Prize, and thus he returned for the last-ever issue just in time to be brutally slain.

Anyway, the point is, I've used Workbench to compile two issues' worth of coverdisks, so can say WITH UNASSAILABLE AUTHORITY that it is insufferably poor.