### The Hungarian PC scene - once prospering, now dead

Do you want me to tell you more about the Hungarian PC scene? Well, why not, I like talking about the subject as many ppl would be interested in the golden age of it.

The prominent personages of the Hungarian scene that were the first to join, or, more accurately, to found it, were Jones/ex-TSI and me. It was in 1990 that we met each other. Those times almost nobody used PCs as home computer and I was the constant laughing-stick of my Amiga-owner friends on account of my lame Turbo XT with a small CGA monitor - I've even written a poem in 1990, mocking and ridiculing the abilities of the PC, mentioning that IBM had only succeeded because their marketing was nice, while the machines were really lame. Indeed, in 1988, when I started using the PC, there weren't games on it, and even the ZX Spectrum offered better games, not to mention the C64 - don't forget, the late eighties meant the golden age of the sixty-four, and we, 'poor' PC-users did envy our C64-owner friends their games like Katakis, Uridium or all the Magnetic Scrolls-games. But the time has shown us that we were right - I woulnd't think even in 1992, when I was asked to write a book on the best games on the PC, that the usage of the PC will extend so fast. I even opposed the idea of publishing a book on PC-based games those times (of course, the money I got for it made me shut up, fortunately ;)). I wrote a lot on my favourite games, the Spellcasting-series (and later, Eric the Unready) from Legend Entertrainment. You, who may be a new PC-user, may not have heard of Spellcasting 101, which meant a real revolution on the PC - it was the first great adventure on this platform, offering beautiful Hi-EGA pictures and a great storyline. And Eric the Unready ws even better - it is the second 'Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail', there were even some speeches about making a film of it in the German mag 'PowerPlay', but it was, unfortunately, not to be.

So, the two above-mentioned guys were the founders of the Hungarian PC scene. We didn't found a particular group first, but we (Jones and me) were THE pioneers.

It was in April, 1991, that TSI, the most successful Hungarian group ever was founded by some ppl (TSC/TSI and Genesis/TSI should be mentioned, Genesis codes even nowadays) living in the country, quite far away from Budapest. Soon both Jones and me joined it and the golden age of the Hungarian scene began. Why? Because Jones was the coder. I certainly meant what I said - he spent all his time coding (he was even ploughed because he woulnd't learn anything) and I have to tell you that he was indeed a brilliant coder. It was in April, 1991, that he started writing his Module Player, named

SPlayer

, which soon became very famous - it was considerably better than Cox's MP, which was the only other player those times. In TSI Jones did the coding. I (and the others in the group) also coded, but not so well as Jones - I was a trader, a cracker and a mageditor/writer, too, which was really time-consuming. TSC founded the second mag of the group in February, 1992, called Freestyle. He also coded a bit. The groupp was not only the coder & diskmag group, but also the trader group in Hungary (I was by far the best ULer on all the Hungarian Elite BBSes in 1992/1993), the best cracker (I cracked TFX or HyperLock 386 first in the world, for example). And, of course, our diskmags weren't bad - you can have an idea what kinds of diskmag they were by browsing through this one. Of course, there were game walkthroughs and scene news / pardey reports in it, noot to mentin the literature (Douglas Adams, Monty Python, the most interesting underground literature - e.g. in Scanner 5 I've published some 200 kByte long articles on the anarchic movements in Hungary, a real must to read if you know Hungarian). I even became the editor of the coder page of a papermag called CoV (Commodore Vilag), which was really famous both in Hungary and Finland.

I've just mentioned that I used to be an editor. Yes, and this is the point where we get known to the first Hungarian diskmag on the scene, Scanner.

In Oct, 1991, the pre-release of Scanner was published by TSC/TSI. It was a relevant and very promising occasion, because I had written a lot of articles before and I both liked and knew to write so I decided to devote myself to writing - it was economically much more promising than cracking and trading just for fun, because I was the first in Hungary who (a bit later) was asked to write dozens of books on programs on the PC and programming languages (as you probably know, I've just finished a new book on Java - ok, Java is not specifically PC-based) and the money I got for my books and articles allowed me to make both ends meet quite easily. So I soon took over the editing of the mag, Jones has produced a far better mag-code (in Nov. 1991, entirely in Assembly) and, as I was very well versed in virus-related subjects (just check my Intromaker Toolkits to see what tricks I could do!) linking the first issue of Scanner on any games (I imported them so the entire country played with the games with the Scanner on them) didn't cause me any problems. So, Scanners were spreading very fast (everybody had to read our mag that wanted to play and it coulnd't be removed from the games as I linked the EXE of the mag onto the original game EXEs and encoded/protected the entire thing, making it impossible to remove our mag from the 'infected' EXEs), and the feedbacks were quite good - I paid a lot of attention to releasing quality articles, even (original) game walkthroughs.

The Scanners we have written can be downloaded from my homepage at http://fok.hu/~dirk or from ftp://master.fok.hu/pub/Scanner, but I don't really recommend it as it's in Hungarian and it's only the MOD that would interest you in case you can't speak it (anyway, if you want to listen to the coolest MOD (written by Valentine/TSI) ever released in a Hungarian diskmag, Scanner 2 is the best choice). And -it also should be mentioned- these old Scanners used a very strange system for 'allocating' memory: they didn't allocate memory at all, they just dumped some 300k data (the MOD, the background pics, the charsets etc...) into the memory just after the code. It causes most of the newer DOS-versions and machines to reboot - while it worked on older machines, under older DOSes quite safely. Not to mention the language - of course there were original English articles in those Scanners as well but they sucked like hell, due to my bad English, except for the scanned stuff - Douglas Adams, Fred Pohl's Gateway etc... There are some very cool Hungarian articles, and mainly, poems in those mags, but I don't really think I could attain the same impression with an English translation of the most famous and even nowadays widely recited poem 'Damn lamers!'. I may translate it, but not in the near future (in the meantime, check my Finland-homepage, there are some not-so-rude translations of mine and I think they really rule :))

Hungarian readers did enjoy Scanner and Scanner was also the mag that made a lot of ppl found their own dismags. It was in 1992 that a lot of other mags were also published - I'd say 1992 was the golden age of the Hungarian scene. TSI was the clear No.1. group in everything - we had not only Scanner, but also an other diskmag, Freestyle, edited by TSC/TSI and both mags were very respected. Also, Jones/TSI, the most prominent coder on the Hungarian scene, was at his best. There were other, very cool diskmags in 1992 as well, I think Majic 12's Post Office 12 was the best of them (I know that I'm quite biased because M12 has also published a lot of Douglas Adams-stuff :). Also, Runtime should be mentioned from this age, and Terror News, which lives even nowadays. This is an entirely different question that I don't really like mags that don't turn down lame articles written by teenagers - TN is really full of articles, but they are, in general, lame (I don't want to bash its editor, anyway). Terror News can be dowloaded from some Hungarian WWW servers like dlux.sch.bme.hu - you can find other diskmags there, too. I don't know which to recommend as they're all in Hungarian, and, their contents are quite lame - they can be read in half an hour.

1993 meant the death of the scene. Jones stopped coding and I got tired of writing diskmags because I was offered many contracts to write books and articles, and, furthermore, I didn't feel I could produce a better mag than Scanner 5, which is IMHO the best Hungarian language diskmag ever released. I won't translate it into English as I don't feel being up to the task. Sorry. Finnish is an entirely different question as learning Finnish if possible even for an American and I also recommend learning it as it's still very handy on the scene (if you become a serious student of Finnish, I can send you e.g. Finnish casettes e.g.) - just look around on my Finland-homepage, it contains dozens of E-books on/in Finnish so you could achieve a good command of Finnish in, say, two years.

TSI died, most of its members had to join the army. We hoped there would be other Joneses on the scene, that there would be other fanatics, but it was not to be. Without such ppl it was quite clear that the scene in Hungary would die and it happened. I have to say that the Hungarian scene died when Jones stoped coding and since his retire Hungary hasn't produced anything interesting on the PC (except for some, very rare successes - Wish/M12, Petroff/Absolute!, Abaddon). There are some so-called 'coders' on #magyar, but they are far lazy to do anything (I beg for pardon right now, I'm quite rude to the coders on the Hungarian scene, but they really lack the guts and persistence that Jones had. And without them a coder will never become famous).

What about Scanner 6 and 7? Are they missing? Not really. I stopped working on Scanner 3 years ago but Basq/TSI (basq@master.fok.hu) continued my task. Frankly, I could never read his Scanner 6 due to its ancient code, which has caused locking my machine all the time, but it is sure to be full of swearing :). I like his style very much and I also recommend reading them - he does know how to swear and how to be infinitely blunt. He is going to release Scanner 7 soon - so don't be confused when you hear that Scanner 8 was released before releasing Scanner 7. Nevertheless, only Scanner 8 is full-English. I may put the MODs of the old Scanners on my page - they are worth listening to.

Some words on this mag: the official languages are English and Finnish. If you can't speak the latter, I recommend you to check my Finland-page here and download all the English E-books on Finnish.