Editorial & Scene News

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Hello, SCENE+ readers.

I could hardly keep from laughing when I read on VIVA Teletext that the Pentium II also suffers from a calculation bug. It seems to me that Intel can't get anything right anymore. Well, that's why I ordered an AMD K6 200 MMX—with it, I could also produce SCENE+ in English. I've already bought a translation software package for that. During breaks, I can even pop in a game CD. The only thing left for me to do is write a new text viewer program that can provide both the English and German versions simultaneously. Since the text can be up to 20 KB, I still need to improve my compressor so it doesn't spend two hours crunching away at it. My current version compresses a 20 KB file in just one hour, but that would also mean the text viewer itself becomes slower.

Experimenting with my raytracer has yielded its first results, and because nearly all surfaces are uniform, the animation compresses much better than digitized footage. The intro animation for "Legacy" is barely 14 KB. In the last issue, I showed a few pictures of digitized spaceship models (made of paper), and in comparison, some raytraced pictures as well. However, when the rendering time takes an average of one hour per frame, an animation of 28 frames can take days to calculate. I must admit, though, that I've already designed images with calculation times ranging from 20 minutes up to four hours, and there's really no upper limit. Yet Spectec's raytracer, which he wrote for "Magic Balls", was just as fast as if you had rendered the image on an Amiga. Now I'll probably buy Reflections 4.0 for the PC, where raytracing is supposedly calculated very quickly.

I keep noticing typos in SCENE+ because I type very fast and rarely reread what I've written so far, except in the case of Vortex. In any case, I hope to get a spellchecker on the PC. I already have a scanner with OCR software and hope that both will work.

Another thing: just because I bought a PC doesn't mean at all that I'm switching over to such a machine—quite the contrary, the Spectrum simply needs a work slave for tasks previously handled by the Amiga. I mean, above all, translations, graphics, and a few other things. I will always stay loyal to the Spectrum and will write several more interesting programs for it.

Lately, unfortunately, fewer and fewer new demos and games are being developed for the Speccy, so I ought to do something about it. A coding competition with valuable prizes or something similar—I'm still thinking about it.

If anyone takes the trouble to come to the Spectrum meeting in Cologne, they will get an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the fabled Pentagon; it should arrive at my place soon.

So much for that topic, enjoy the issue.

Tiger's Claw.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SPECTRUM

The date for the SPC club meeting is finally set, and like the last SUC meeting, it will span two days. Mark the following dates in bold on your calendar: 16 and 17 August 1997. This is a mandatory event for all Spectrum and SAM users! Whoever misses it has only themselves to blame.

The WoMo team has moved—again! The new address is mostly the same, but instead of Penningsfelder Weg 98a, the address with the same postal code is now: Im Tannenforst 10. It is valid starting immediately.

For the SAM, WoMo is offering Helpseries 1 and 2—two disks packed with articles, tips, tricks, explanations, and much more for the SAM. Unfortunately, it's all in English, but anyone interested who has 2 DM in stamps and blank disks to spare should grab it.

The article about the Pendragon 64 in the last issue was merely an April Fools' joke, but apparently someone is developing a 3D card for PC based on the Nintendo 64 console via an 8-bit ISA slot connection. That way, one could have a 3D accelerator card even for the oldest PCs that would otherwise end up in the trash.

Theoretically, such an interface would also be feasible for the Spectrum, exactly as I described it; someone just needs to sit down and tackle it who understands both the Spectrum and the N64. Perhaps Datel Electronics could do something in this direction, as they have recently been working with the N64 and still have plenty of Spectrum experience to show.