MC DISK ISSUE 1          47                MULTI   !
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MC DISK                                   loading speed was average-good.
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PUBLISHER: COMA
ISSUE:      # 1                           LAYOUT:
                                          Now  we  are  facing  the  menu.  It's
                                          split  up  in  two kind of menus.  One
LOADING:                                  drag-bar  menu  where  you  can choose
Ok,   lets   begin   right  down  from    your  article  with  the  mouse.   The
loading.  This was not a good "start",    second menu is the usual one that most
due  to  background  tasks  and  other    magazines    are   using.    A   panel
operations  it took about 3 minutes to    displayed at the bottom of the screen.
load  the  magazine.   But  I tried to    It  consisted  of  some  normal  arrow
make  a new copy of the disk-validator    functions and an info page.  There are
and  it  showed  to  be the fault.  MC    also  a printer function but it didn't
DISK now loaded much faster.  The page    want  to  work.   The drive started to

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load   and  then  a  guru  appeared?!!    A big plus goes for the cool animation
Maybe  MC  DISK  can't  handle  2,5 Mb    routine   that   are   used   in  many
internal memory?!                         articles.     The    animations    are
                                          displayed  in  white  colour  on black
The choice of colours are good and not    background!
irritating.   MC  DISK uses 4-bitplane
MED-RES   format   and  has  up  to  9    MC   DISK  also  uses  a  lot  of  gfx
flashing  colours.   Coma  claims that    digitized for various articles.  Which
there are 12 (8 * 8) fonts and 4 (16 *    made,  especially  the CD-reviews more
16) fonts but I did only notice two or    interesting to read.
three  different fonts.  And they were
ok,  nothing  special.   Maybe the gfx    A  new  feature was a real-time voting
font  that  was  used  in  almost  all    system  that is unique so far.  Unique
articles  became a bit boring to watch    for  being  the  most laughable voting
as you read the articles!                 system   I   ever  seen.   Maybe  they

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thought it was a cool idea.               Good   if   you  want  to  search  for
                                          articles  where  you or your group are
If  you want to vote 50 times for your    mentioned!!   But  I would like to see
favourite   group.Then   just  do  it!    this  feature  on  the PANEL from next
There  are  also  a  save function for    issue.   It  was quite hard to find it
this system!!!                            in the first place.

I think you get my point!!                ARTICLES:
                                          The English was good not to many slang
Another    new   function   that   was    expressions(my  English  is  far  from
introduced   with   this  function  is    perfect but my knowledge in English is
SEARCH.    You   click   on  a  SEARCH    good  enough  for judging this.).  The
commando  that  is  displayed  in  the    nice gfx was a good compliment to some
drag-bar  menu and then you write down    of  the  articles  that maybe wouldn't
the  word that you want to search for.    have catched my interest.

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When  you  reach the interview section    USER-FRIENDLINESS
you  are  used  to serious interviews,
but   some   interviews   wasn't  even    + Sharp   layout of the menus, easy to
"interviews"!!                              find  in   the  menu.(Except  SEARCH
                                            function!)
MC  DEAL  also offers a varying supply    - No load function on  the RETURN key!
of articles for the readers and covers    - Couldn't  view  the  drag-bar (main-
all  kind  of  interests  and probably      menu) via  the  keyboard-arrows, you
pleases  most of the readers.  We will      are  entirely  directed  to  use the
surely  see  an  improvement  on  this      mouse with the drag-bar menu.
section in the coming issues.  Keep in
mind that this is only issue one.
                                          OVERALL

                                          For  being  the first issue of MC DEAL

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it's  quite  good.  I would have liked
to  see  that  they had made some more
tests  before  releasing.  It's better
to  release  a  good magazine then one
half-finished on release date!

The  real  time voting system is not a
fair  voting system so I would suggest
MC DEAL to drop it!