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PsL Monthly 1994 July
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=====News & Views <psl_logo.pcx>
-----Games for DOS & Windows
-----CD-ROM Drive Deal
-----Quicksoft Closes Shop
-----Latest Quicken a Winner
-----DOS Programs Under Windows
-----Deadly Trojan Horse
-----$20,000 Tech Support
-----New Retail Products
Coaster ... design your own roller coaster
Eight Ball Deluxe ... exciting new pinball game
Pirates Gold ... challenging adventure game with great graphics
Funny CD-ROM ... people tell jokes in full-motion video
============================
-----Games for DOS & Windows
Each month we put a different section of PsL's disk-based library on our
Monthly CD-ROM. Last month (December) had over 2000 files of Programming
for DOS and Windows.
This month features Games: adventure games, arcade games, football,
baseball, soccer, chess, checkers, backgammon, bridge, poker, solitaire,
casino games, and every kind of word game, card game, and board game
imaginable. These are high-quality games, a great many with beautiful
animated VGA graphics, background music, and sound effects.
This is a far cry from how things were for the PC in the early years.
Pre-1982, there were tons of games for the Apple, and even for the TRS-80
Model I, which was anything but a game machine. People who "upgraded" to
the IBM PC found themselves with virtually no games, either in pd/shareware
or retail software.
What few games did come along were simple and had crude graphics, dictated
by the hardware available at the time. CGA graphics offered only 320x200
dot resolution with three colors, and not everyone had even that. Many
people had monochrome systems - no color and no graphics, or a
non-compatible type of graphics at best. Many systems also had 256k of RAM
or less and no hard disk, so games had to stay pretty simple.
In 1984, the hit game of the year was Jump Joe, a run, jump, and climb game
(of the old Donkey Kong genre) written by an ingenious high school student.
Even though it doesn't measure up to the top games of today in terms of
(VGA) graphics and sounds, it is still quite enjoyable to play.
The same is true of many of the old games, particularly card games and
board games, so we have included all of them on the CD. Some old arcade
games run too fast on modern machines, but CPU slow-down utilities, such as
the one in TSR Tutor Package on this month's Additions Disks, can let you
run them at slower speeds.
Perhaps the most noteworthy, and mysterious, board game of old is a game
called simply "Chess88". It is an extremely small program (9k!), yet it has
great graphics (many later chess games use ASCII characters instead of true
graphics) and plays a decent game of chess, if not tournament level.
The mystery is who wrote it. Chess88 has no title screens and no
documentation. While some other chess games floating around BBSs (and even
sold by some shareware vendors) have turned out to be hacked, pirated
retail games, Chess88 has never been seen outside of public domain sources,
with the exception of a major mail-order company, PC Connection, who began
selling it many years after it appeared in public domain. (When we pointed
this out to the company, they refunded the money to customers who had
bought it and quit selling it.)
One of the first quarter-arcade-quality games was Kung Fu Louie, a street
fighting game with character movements patterned after real martial
artists. The game was also one of the first to make use of emerging sound
card standards to play a custom written sound track and sound effects.
Conventional wisdom in the early years was that programmers could not make
money in shareware with games. The person almost single-handedly
responsible for turning that around was Scott Miller of Apogee Software.
Scott's early games were no threat to retail software, but at some point,
his adventure/arcade games surpassed retail games in quality and
playability and (to prove that it is quality and not crippling that causes
people to pay), shareware registrations have been pouring in ever since.
Apogee's Wolfenstein was the best selling RETAIL game of 1992, and it is
still shareware!
Other shareware companies now give Apogee strong competition in the
arcade/adventure area. Epic MegaGames is one; MVP Software is another.
Other prolific writers of high-quality games are William Soleau, who writes
mostly graphical puzzle type games, and Gray Design Associates, best known
as producers of the Hugo series of haunted house adventures.
Then there's a company by the name of Moraffware, which puts out weird
games with super graphics which are distinguished by being playable on all
types of monitors. Moraffware games are free, evidently used just for
publicity.
If you have a CD-ROM drive, be sure to get the January CD-ROM with games
for DOS and Windows. You will not find a better collection anywhere -
especially for the price - plus you get all of the 700+ programs which
passed PsL's testing during the last 30 days.
-----CD-ROM Drive Deal
We are still offering a deal on CD-ROM drives for those who want to get
sneak into modern day computing as cheaply as possible. For $66 per month
for 3 months (charged to your credit card monthly) plus shipping, you the
internal Mitsumi CD-ROM drive with 350ms access and 150k throughput. A
proprietary interface card is included.
For $99 per month for 3 months plus shipping, you get the external SyDOS
CD-ROM drive that plugs into your parallel (printer) port. No hardware
installation is required at all and the drive can be used on
laptops/notebooks.
With either drive, you get three months of PsL's Monthly CD-ROM for FREE!
(This free CD offer is valid for new PsL Monthly CD-ROM customers only.)
-----Quicksoft Closes Shop
Quicksoft, publisher of PC-Write, has closed its doors after struggling for
the last year and being unable to find a partner or buyer.
PC-Write, a powerful word processing program, was one of the three original
shareware powerhouses - the other two being a database program named
PC-File and a communications program by the name of PC-Talk.
Leo Nikora, president of Quicksoft, doesn't put the blame on the shareware
approach, saying: With more BBSs and the advent of CD-ROMs, shareware is a
better marketing method now than when Bob started Quicksoft.
Nikora blames computer software industry price wars, saying that
single-product companies such as Quicksoft can no longer compete. Blame was
also placed on not having the resources to develop a Windows version of
PC-Write while the DOS market continues to shrink.
-----Latest Quicken a Winner
Quicken 3 for Windows is a killer app. We hate to say this, but for a price
below many shareware checkbook programs and with features and performance
enhanced by implementing the feedback of millions of users, it is hard to
see how anything in shareware can ever compete.
It isn't a perfect program, since it still has annoying bugs, but it is
pretty darn close to it.
If you have a big-screen monitor (20" or more), Q3 is a program that puts
the extra space to good use. You can have several check registers open, or
view a check register and the account window and category window, all at
the same time. You also get to see more of reports on screen.
An interesting commentary on DOS versus Windows is the comment in a Quicken
brochure: Quicken 3 for Windows has all the features of Quicken for DOS,
plus exclusive [features] made possible by Windows' special capabilities...
We can't imagine even the most hardened DOS user preferring the DOS version
to the Windows version, especially on a large monitor.
-----Does Not Compute
SmilerShell was identified in December's PsL News as version 2.0. It is
actually version 1.2.
-----DOS Programs Under Windows
It has come to our attention that some Windows users may not be aware that
DOS-based programs can still be run in Windows by opening a DOS window.
Shareware author John Gallant writes:
Many users assume that only Windows programs will work under Windows. I
think users are missing out on some very nice software because they are not
aware that it will run under Windows. A note in your fine magazine would
help.
-----Deadly Trojan Horse
By Wolfgang Stiller, author of Integrity Master
Tremor is a Trojan Horse which, after about three months, will try to
create a "Tremor effect" by making the characters on your screen appear to
shake.
Tremor is a memory resident *.COM and *.EXE file infecting virus. It's one
of the most sophisticated viruses known to be in the wild today. It was
widely spread via a Satellite shareware broadcast in Europe. It was in an
infected PKUNZIP distributed to unzip a well-known virus detector which
could not detect the virus. (Integrity Master was the first to recognize
the virus.)
Tremor is dangerous because it uses so many different tricks to attempt to
defeat anti-virus products. It is polymorphic which means that a virus
scanner can't use a simple bit pattern to recognize the virus; it must use
a complex algorithmic approach.
Tremor knows how to turn off the resident virus protection provided in
Central Point Anti-virus as well as the anti-virus in DOS 6. Tremor also
uses what's called Stealth Technology to hide from anti-virus products. If
something tries to read an infected file, the virus will intercept the read
and return an uninfected image of the file.
This means that you can remove Tremor by copying infected files to a
non-executable extension (eg: COPY INFECTED.EXE INFECTED.TMP), then booting
from a clean copy of DOS on a diskette and copying the files back to their
original name.
Until recently most reports of Tremor came from Europe but we've now gotten
reports here in the US.
-----$20,000 Tech Support
If you have trouble with any Microsoft products, be sure to call within 90
days. After that, MS charges as much as $20,000 for tech support. Lower
rates include $95 for a single tech call or $2 a minute if you prefer to
have the clock running.
The best tech support we have ever experienced comes from Iomega, maker of
Bernoulli drives. You call an 800# for tech support and rarely have to
wait.
Framemaker's tech support is not bad. You are told that the average hold is
about 5 minutes, but that if you leave your name and number, you will be
called back. We have done that, but decided to try holding one time and a
technician picked up on the first ring.
Of course, before you get to that first ring, you have to listen to a
machine tell you the company's office hours, explain options to you, and
ask you to push buttons a few times.
We called Corel this last month when Corel Draw when bonkers, and their
machine warned that the average wait would be 20 minutes (on our nickel) --
no offer to call back. We hung up and worked around the problem.
-----New Retail Products
---Coaster #30420 $19.95
If you really enjoy riding roller coasters, you may have wished you could
design your own. Now, with Coaster from Disney Software, you can not only
design the ultimate roller coaster, you can also ride it, have examiners
grade your design, even get opinions from a team of roller coaster
evaluators.
Coaster contains 14 pre-built, ready-to-ride roller coasters that you can
try, including the legendary Matterhorn. Vivid 256-color graphics and
digital sound enhance these wild rides, making it almost seem like you were
riding the real thing. <COAST1><COAST2><COAST3> (1.44MB 3.5" disk only)
Then you can create your own thrilling roller coaster from the ground up.
You can make embankments, high loader ramps, loops, and turns. The 3-D
graphics of the design board allows you to move over, under and through
your creation, so you can examine it from all angles. Requires SuperVGA,
534K free RAM, 1.1MB disk space and a mouse. It supports Sound Blaster
compatible sound cards
---Eight Ball Deluxe #30421 $34.95 (3.5" disks only)
Step into the Pinball Cafe and play the Eight Ball Deluxe pinball machine.
This simulation looks and plays like a real pinball game, with all the
sound, flashing lights, and pinball action included. <PIN1.PCX>
The pinball machine is loaded with bumpers, drop targets, ramps, bank shots
and more. You can even use a little body english in this Eight Ball game;
just don't get carried away or you may tilt.
You can adjust flippers, bumpers, and the ball to make them more or less
responsive. The playing field is larger than the computer screen and
scrolls up and down as the ball is in play, just like the eyes of the
player on an actual pinball machine. Requires VGA and 1MB of RAM. It
supports (but does not require) SuperVGA, SB compatible sound card, and a
mouse.
---Pirates! Gold #30422 $44.95 (1.44MB 3.5" disks only)
As a pirate, seeking adventure and fortune in the West Indies, you hope to
amass great wealth and high status before you retire. You begin this game
by recruiting a crew of experienced pirates and few young scrubs. Select
the time period from a menu of infamous pirating expeditions. Create your
character by giving him a nationality and special abilities, such as
navigating, fencing, or gunnery. Then choose your skill level and begin the
expedition.
Along the way, you will have to fight many battles at sea, on land, and on
board your ship. As you win battles, you will take on more ships, weapons,
and cargo. You can sell these to accumulate gold. Pirates! Gold has several
splendid playing fields for each leg of the adventure. Play is enhanced by
many sound effects with the use of a sound card. Requires 4 MB of RAM,
18-20 MB hard disk space, mouse and keyboard, and VGA. It supports
SuperVGA, and SB compatible sound cards. <PIRATE1.PCX>
---Funny CD-ROM #30423 $29.95
Funny features performances of nearly 100 jokes told by over 80 funny
people in full-motion video. You can select categories that range from
doctor jokes, sight gags, and animal jokes to one liners, and funny
stories.
You can select jokes one at a time, or view the entire movie. Funny can
also be used as a screen saver module which displays jokes at random.
Requires an MPC-compatible CD-ROM drive, mouse, SuperVGA and Windows 3.1.