by Mogwai of The Force
Things are alot different in Australia compared to Europe, especially in the Amiga scene. There are very few groups that are not lame, and thousands that are. In fact most are so lame, they give a new meaning to the word LAME! Australias most prominent group would have had to have been ACU, notice how I use the past tense - thats right ACU is no more. At least two members have been visited by the Australian Federal police who issued them a warning saying to stop pirating software, one was Pirasoft and the other was Microchip who have now stopped all activity. It is rumoured that Pirasoft is going to be working for 17bit software as an Australian distributor. ACU did a reasonable amount of importing almost entirely by modem and they were closely followed by The Fire Starters (TFS) who also did a fair amount of modem trading. Mike of TFS was also visited by the federal police and has now sold his amiga and quit the scene. There has also been quite alot of BBS busting aswell in Australia. AOFCF's BBS in Sydney was raided and an independant BBS in Perth called Treasure Island was also raided by the police.This has come as quite a shock for us Aussie's as this is the first time the police have acted against piracy in a big way.
Now that the two main modem traders are gone, it leaves room for a few other up and coming groups to make themselves known. ACU lacked a great deal of coding ability as did TFS. The other main groups in Australia like Dawn, The Force, Amiga Industries and Freedom Force, and Factor 4 all have some good coders, especially The Force, Factor 4 and Dawn who all have excellent coders. There isn't a great deal of musicians in Australia but plenty of grafix artists. Amongst the few musicians is Kreator of The Force, who was voted top musician in Australia by all the top Aussie groups and whose musical talent rivals the best in Europe. Australia has only 16 million people and is approximately 5 million square kilometres in area compared to the huge population of Europe whose entire area is only slightly larger at 6 million square kilometres (correct me if my Geography is wrong!!). For this reason it is extremely difficult to get the top groups together for a copy party and so far there has not been a very successful Australian copy party yet. The Australian scene is changing though, and it is rapidly getting better. There are more and more demos and products being released and the quality in general of groups is also getting better. The scene is not too bad,but it sucks that we live too far away to get to any European copy parties!!!
This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #5" by Brainstorm 1990.
Some content may refer to activities that are illegal in some countries. BitFellas does not support such activity.
Addresses and other contact information were only valid when this magazine was originally published, in june of 1990.
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