february 1999

25/2/99

Richard Wilson's NoDisc utillity, which makes many old 4th Dimension and Fednet games work correctly on StrongARMs, is now on version 0.06. It works by fixing the problems with the protection system on 4D games which are caused by assumptions about the behaviour of earlier machines Another utility from Richard Wilson is PixDouble, a patch to force games to run in a pixel-doubled VGA mode if they normally run in a low-res mode - this can make games look better or with some monitors it allows games which couldn't be used before to run. Also available on Richard's site is SyncCtrl, for slowing down StrongARM screen refreshes to try and make games which run too quickly more playable If you bought Heretic and Hexen on its immediate release then you'll probably need to get a patch from R-Comp to fix some beta-test code left in. Versions on sale now are fixed - full review coming soon!

 

21/2/99

Werewolf Software have cut the price of Shuggy and Tanks to £10 for one or £15 for both. These prices last until this Thursday, the 25th of February Alex Macfarlane Smith has updated his Doom WAD editing and examination tools - take a look at his web site If you like shoot'em'ups take a look at the Moving Pixels site - Xylon 2 is a fun (albeit fairly challenging) horizontally-scrolling shoot'em'up with quite pretty graphics. There's also a version of Columns, an interesting sprite demo and more

 

18/2/99

Tau Press, the publishers of Acorn User magazine, have now officially released the CD version of Robert Templeman's Eternal Destiny. New features over the disc-based version include auto-turning so that you can run up spiral staircases without having to worry about steering, plus lots of extra graphics and improvements to the levels, with the enemies also slightly more intelligent and better animated. But besides many minor improvements the one massive major addition is the ability to look up and down, which really does help transform the whole game, although unfortunately there's no mouse-look button so you must either have it turned on or off. Installation can be a minimal 13Mb or the full 110Mb game; Destiny requires a Risc PC with 10Mb RAM, and a StrongARM is recommended (in my opinion it isn't worth playing on anything less). The Destiny website has also been revamped R-Comp's Acorn versions of Heretic and Hexen go on sale this coming weekend at the Acorn Southwest Show in Bristol. The combined set will cost £32.50, and will also include Death Kings, an extension pack for Hexen. Multi-machine play via a serial cable is built-in to Hexen Artex Software have sent me a demo of the current state of their graphics engine for TEK - you can now click on and drag-select your vehicles and cause them to move and attack things, and they're all quite neatly animated. It's looking like it will be a very polished, professional product when finished. Meanwhile, Botkiller 2 is due out soon Angband fans will be pleased to hear that Thomas Harris has produced an Acorn version of GW-Angband 2.8.3v1, including various patches. He's also compiled Kangband 2.8.3j. Both of these are available from his web site. Also at that address is Musus Umbra's new port of Pziband 2.1.0e, whilst at Henry Helliwell's site you can download his port of Pern Angband 3.0.9 . Musus's website also has new versions of many other Angband variants on it

 

january 1999 news

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