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fleur was a really nice diskmag. i remember sitting in jabberwock's room with him and ezah talking about the new international demoscene mag called fleur. probably they don't know how much did they give to me when i was a newbie. thank you guys.

Fleur was a Hungarian diskmag that was published in the English language. It was released in 1998/1999 and was one of the most popular active diskmags of that time (6th place in the Hugi #12 diskmag chart, 2nd place in Hugi #16, 2nd place in Hugi #18, 4th place in Hugi #19, 5th place in Hugi #20). Nevertheless it got only little support from its readers and stopped releasing already after issue 3. Fleur then merged with the Shine diskmag, and Shine #8 contained all articles that had been submitted for the never released issue 4 of Fleur.

The first two issues of Fleur were edited by Ezah of Dilemma. For issue 3, D-Lee of Exceed took over. Until April 2008 the individual issues of Fleur were downloaded about 1000 times each from scene.org. Fleur is a DOS-based diskmag and can be run on modern systems using the latest DOSBox emulator.


Fleur #1

Fleur #1 was released in March 1998 as a co-production of the Hungarian groups Dilemma and Dinasty. In the editorial Ezah
writes that he started the Fleur project together with Shade and Dfj because he was of the opinion that the scene currently lacked decent diskmags in the English language released on a regular basis and he wanted to help solve this problem.

The code of Fleur #1 was done by Nap of Dilemma with help from Brix of Dilemma, who made the module player. After starting fleur.exe, you get to see a title picture by Xtro of Rhyme, while one of the two music tunes is played. (The music was made by Jabberwock and Ainu.) Pressing a key will bring you to the main menu. The interface of Fleur #1 looks a bit like a mix of Imphobia and the older Shine issues: The text is displayed in a contiguous layout just like in Shine, and in the menu there's a selection bar like in Imphobia. Fleur #1 uses a fixed-width font, and each text line has a width of about 60 characters. The controls are actually keyboard-based although it's also possible to move the selection bar inside the article menu by means of the mouse. Using the keyboard, you select an article by means of the cursor keys up/down. Scrolling is done using cursor left/right, both in the menu and inside the articles. On modern PCs just like mine scrolling occurs very fast, there seems to be no or almost no delay after the keypress, so you need to have very fast fingers in order to read the magazine without skipping pages. That's a bit annoying. Also, switching tunes, which should be possible with the F1 and F2 keys, doesn't work for me.

Fleur #1 is divided in the following sections: Editorial (plus general information on the mag), Common Stuff (PC news, C64 news, messages, adverts, upcoming events), Interviews, Reviews (stuff from various parties), Articles, Party Reports (Hungarian and other parties), Charts, and Party Results. In addition, there are a gallery of hand-pixelled images and a collection of party pictures. There's a nasty bug in the code which has the effect that after looking at a party picture, it is no longer possible to move freely inside the menu, and thus you cannot select every article any more. That's another minus.

The scene related articles have headlines such as: "Photoshop vs. Art", "A totally useless idea" (giving up all groups and creating a scene where friendship rules), "Where those swappers are?", "Craps in demos?", "Why are there so few diskmags?", "The short history of the Hungarian scene", and "Is the modem scene dead?". Interviews have been conducted with Andy, Jabberwock, Reptile, Net and Tradd.

The charts are based on an interesting concept: Apart from international charts, there are also sections where you can vote for the best demos, coders etc. of your own country. If at least ten votesheets from your country have been sent to Fleur, the charts of your country will be published in the next issue. In my opinion that was an interesting idea because it could also encourage people to ask some of their fellow countrymen to vote and thus increase the total number of voters.

As a bonus, the tool mxm2xm is attached to Fleur #1. As the name says, it converts .mxm files to .xm files.

Proofreading of the articles was done by Jabberwock. He did his job quite well, which makes the quality of English in Fleur good.

Overall impression: Fleur #1 contains some interesting articles and has a nice, though buggy interface. All in all, I like it.