User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Dec 29, 2021 11:46 am

Some of you may know of K&A Plus Magazine are members of Amigalove.com. It's a relatively small circulation high-quality print magazine based out of Poland. They cover the entire Commodore scene, which makes reading it a total pleasure for those of us (that is, most of us) dedicated to 8 and 16-bit computers.
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From a design perspective, I love everything about these mags except on occasion the covers. I do think if they offered more professional photography and screenshots/logos rather than hand-drawn illustrations, they'd potentially grab more eyeballs (and dollars). But they do offer a very hand-crafted approach that can be quite charming, and I do appreciate how they present their own unique style.


From their website:
Komoda & Amiga Plus, or K&A+ for short, is a paper magazine dedicated to Commodore's range of home computer systems produced between 1977 and 1994.

All of these 8 bit machines were popularly known in Poland by the affectionate name of “Komoda”, a word also used to designated a certain piece of furniture which eventually became the first half of our magazine's name. The second part, Amiga, comes from Commodore's range of 16 and 32 bit computers, manufactured between 1985 and 2004.

K&A+ puts out 4 magazines per year, 1-per season.

They come in fairly thick and very high-quality full-color "magazines" that honestly resemble more of a graphic novel package: nice thick covers and glue-bound pages, not stapled.
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The thick book-like magazine looks great on a shelf, too, with easy-to-read spines.


They really are worth the very low purchase price, even for those of us here in the US. Massive bonus: you can get a 5.25" disk / mag combo. On the disk are C64 games, some old and some new. I love that I get a floppy disk the likes of Loadstar with my subscription.

And these are simply a joy to sit down and read on a weekend morning when everyone else is asleep. There are almost no advertisements (due to the low circulation numbers, which hopefully will go up over time) so the books are filled cover to cover with game reviews, interviews and special features.
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And guess what? The AmigaLove Community's fascination and support of OS 1.3 made it into the mag! There's a beautiful multi-page spread covering many of the programs for Old Blue folks have shared this year!
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Very cool to get the special shout-out!


The magazines come in various flavors: Polish, English, print or download. If you buy the print version you get the PDF download for free. The PDF is emailed to you when the magazine is published, which I store in my Dropbox. I will scan them to see what the content offers but generally wait until the print version arrives before really settling down to read them. That's just the way I prefer to do it. And it's not like the content is highly time-sensitive, so all in all I'm not missing out to wait until it arrives. I do like to read these the way I do. It's quite comforting and relaxing. I even use little Post-it strips to mark the pages I want to refer to later in case there's a game I want to buy or download.

The English version is translated from the Polish, so sometimes you need to keep that in mind. But it's still very well done most of the time.

If you can support it (even just the digital downloads to give it a test) I think you won't be disappointed.

:commodore: <3

User avatar
Wavemaker
Poland

Posted Thu Jan 13, 2022 11:11 pm

Very happy you came across that article! Finding this forum encouraged me to become a 1.3 user again and I never looked back so I tried to spread some love for the system among our readers. It's worth noting that Poland is a bit on the opposite side of the C= timeline in regards to the US as Amiga (and C64) became popular only years after the fall of communism and when it was already on its way out of the mainstream market elsewhere, so most people here are running either heavily tuned or Raspberry based machines.

I'm now working on a directory of 1.3 software as a companion to it, which will also include an icon, wallpaper and dock image gallery :)





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