Editorial
SCENE+ is published by:
L.C.D.
Prager Str. 92/11/12
A-1210 Wien
Österreich
Tel: (02) 272 34 63 from within Austria, or +43 1 272 34 63 from abroad (outside Austria).
All classifieds and advertisements are completely free of charge, as long as they are related to the ZX Spectrum or SAM Coupé. They can be submitted in any form: text, screen, animation, etc.
What? A whole month gone already? It feels like I do nothing else these days except put together SCENE+!
New games arrived from Russia and had to be tested inside and out — that is, if games actually have internal organs. On top of that, a lot of Public Domain software was copied at the SPC club meeting in Cologne — a road trip of 910 km, no less. While there, I copied the game Supremacy, which my brother and I ended up "testing" for three whole days straight. Although it has a few bugs (for example, when downgrading a planet) and each game takes several hours to finish, it is still intensely captivating.
At the meeting in Cologne, I also recruited a few new SCENE+ readers, who will hopefully contribute articles soon.
A week later, I took a trip to the Czech Republic to visit Jaxon Hollis and Omega to pick up the MB02 interface. Unfortunately, my HD drive doesn't work with it — probably because it doesn't provide a READY signal, which prevents it from booting. Jaxon had warned me that this might happen, but I naively assumed that if a drive works fine with the +D, it wouldn't cause any trouble on the MB02 either.
In the previous issue, SCENE+ received some cosmetic improvements, and this process will continue until we reach an optimal result. Suggestions came from J. Koning from the Netherlands, the head of SGG (their organization is truly exemplary). Still, there is a long way to go before I am 100% satisfied. In any case, J. did the right thing: he simply reprogrammed the parts he liked least and let me know exactly what changes he had made. This made it much easier for me to integrate them with the new features I had already prepared. At the meeting, I presented the revised version, and it looked much better to his eyes.
In this issue, besides a new font, I am also using a faster text-rendering routine. Unfortunately, the difference is rather minimal — depending on the text length, only about 1–2 seconds faster than the old version, and that at the cost of 2 KB more code!
My latest demo, Not for Children, caused some confusion. Everyone was enthusiastic about it, but people suggested I should have given an earlier warning that it isn't meant for kids. But the truth is, I don't have any readers under the age of 16 anyway. Besides, putting a warning label on it would only make kids even more curious and practically tempt them to load it.
This time I have included two Russian demos; both also run on a standard Speccy 128. Take note of the fantastic sound in Galaxy 3 — it matches the audio quality of the MQM Team (who have, unfortunately, partially moved on from the Speccy).
Hopefully, I will receive more software from Lithuania in the future, as it is usually programmed exceptionally well.
Which of you has Internet access and could download Spectrum software and news for me? Personally, I have sworn never to touch a PC again (I used to sell those machines once — pure horror!).
There is also allegedly a server in Spain or Portugal that can translate between all languages. I would be delighted if someone could "test" it out for me. It would be a huge advantage, as I could then publish articles simultaneously in German and English, reaching a much broader audience.
That's it once again for this month. So Long!
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