News

Grubbing for Gold (SAM Coupé) is a new quiz game that has just been finished. It offers plenty of British humor. Your task is to earn your vacation through a quiz. Thanks to the increasing difficulty level, boredom never sets in, and as if that weren't enough, there is also a custom question editor. The game is available from FRED Publishing for £9.95 (£9.00 for FRED subscribers).

SAM Sprite (SAM Coupé), on the other hand, is a sprite editor packed with special features and running in a WIMP environment. Animations are now a breeze. Only the price tag is a bit high for a sprite editor (£9.95, or £9.00 for FRED subscribers).

Nev Young, who is developing a hard disk interface for the SAM, has confirmed that the price will be around £150, though cheaper models will be made available. In this context, an extended version of SC_WORD PRO is also planned, designed specifically with a hard disk in mind — finally turning the SAM into a professional DTP system. SAM Paint and other applications are slated to follow this trend if enough hard drives are sold.

Spectrum programmers haven't gone extinct, but most of them are flirting with other platforms — take Mike Singleton, for instance, the man responsible for Lords of Midnight. His most famous unfinished works are probably Eye of the Moon (Lords of Midnight III) and Star Trek: The Rebel Universe, but now he has turned his sights to the PC and rewritten Lords of Midnight. The verdict: Power Play magazine remarked it was great that the original Spectrum version is included on the CD-ROM, as it is apparently better than the new PC remake.
Another classic getting the CD-ROM treatment is Tir Na Nog; whether it will enjoy the same "success" as Lords of Midnight remains to be seen. Curiously, software that once fit into a meager 48 kilobytes is now only distributed on 650 MB CD-ROMs! Have developers become that wasteful, or is it the operating systems?

A Spectrum programmer coded Worms on the Amiga, specifically for Bitmap Bros [sic]. It's a shame that such capable coders end up working for the rival camp, but there is still hope — after all, he admitted that he used to code on the Spectrum.

ASC has secured access to Fountain PD, a market leader in the UK, which means Sample Tracker and many other utilities will soon be available to order directly from ASC. The first shipment has already arrived! Additionally, Fudgepacker has promised to produce some Sound Tracker and Sample Tracker tunes for my next project.

During my visit to Jaxon Hollis and Omega, the two showed me a "Doom Demo" — and not the one circulated as an April Fools' joke in SPC and SUC, but a brand-new engine featuring real-time 3D graphics with mapped textures. It looks very impressive, although right now you can only walk around inside a tunnel with nothing else happening yet. Jaxon also has several other intriguing demos and 128 remixes, and I plan to stay in touch with him.