This page contains a selection of earlier news stories.
Brief news stories up to 4/6/98
In-depth news stories up to the end of June 1998
Acorn Southeast Show 1998 games and show round-up - 2/7/98
Acorn World 1997 games and show round-up - 1/1/98
Click here for the latest news stories
Earlier
4/6/98 |
MESS, the "Multiple Emulation Super System", has finally been released - now you can play Megadrive, NES and other
console games on your Acorn computer! Available for download now. It's disappointingly slow on my Risc PC 700, however - the NES emulator runs at about 2 frames per second, and the Megadrive one runs at between 1 and 3 seconds per frame! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4/6/98 |
Andreas Dehmel's excellent Doom It Yourself has been upgraded yet again! (See earlier stories below). The new version has various speed-ups and tidy-ups,
as well as improved support for DeHackEd (which allows you to alter how the game behaves), extra cheats and also a few fixes for minor bugs | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
25/5/98 |
R-Comp now have Syndicate running successfully on A5000s | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
22/5/98 |
Screenshots and more news on R-Comp's port of Syndicate are now available - the demo I have plays smoothly on my Risc PC 700 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
22/5/98 |
TBA's Quake driver for R-Comp is nearing completion - the final optimisation stage is now almost complete, with a recent improvement making it 40% faster on complex scenes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
22/5/98 |
An ARM710 version of TBA's Brutal Horse Power now looks more likely, with possible NetStation-related interest shown in the game. TBA are also
working on the specification of an as-yet unnamed 3D game which will begin development soon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
22/5/98 |
Robert Templeman's Destiny failed to make its promised release at the Wakefield Acorn Spring Show. Despite having a stand booked, Rob did not attend the show and his stand remained empty. Apparently he telephoned the show organisers to say that his car had broken down, but this does not explain his complete non-appearance and subsequent lack of announcement as to the reason for his absence | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
22/5/98 |
R-Comp have announced that there is a small bug in the ARM3 versions of Acorn Doom sold at the recent Wakefield show - to fix it simply uncomment the first line in the !Doom.!Boot file (delete the '|' character). Copies sold since do not have this problem | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15/5/98 |
R-Comp have announced that they will be publishing an Acorn version of Syndicate, the well-known action and strategy game. If you can imagine Cannon Fodder viewed from a different angle and with lots of added complexity, then you're on the way to Syndicate. The game will be demoed at the Wakefield Acorn Spring Show this weekend, but won't be available for purchase | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15/5/98 |
More news from R-Comp is the first public confirmation from them that they will be publishing the official Acorn version of iD software's seminal Quake, developed by TBA Software (see news of 23/4/98). R-Comp have also announced that they will be publishing the full version of Abuse. Both of these will preview at Wakefield but not be available other than to order | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15/5/98 |
Some new screenshots of Kindred Software's forthcoming new game, Skirmish, are now available | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
15/5/98 |
Also from R-Comp comes the announcement that Wakefield will see the release of an A5000-compatible version of Acorn Doom, and that the price of Doom will be cut by £5 to £30 at the show | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 |
Andreas Dehmel's superb Doom It Yourself has been upgraded.
A superb Acorn version of Doom which you must compile yourself, the upgrades
add network support and high-colour screenmode support amongst other improvements and bug fixes. Unlike R-Comp's Acorn Doom, DIY also runs on A5000s | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 |
The fMSX and xNes emulators have been updated and can be downloaded. xNes now
supports lots more games, and has various bug fixes as well as joypad support, whilst fMSX now has a fully integrated desktop front-end. The author of these ports, David McEwen, has also ported Stella, an Atari 2600 emulator, and AdamEm, which emulates the Coleco ADAM | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 |
A regular comp.sys.acorn.games poster, Nathan Atkinson,
has announced that he has obtained Fednet's level designers for Stunt Racer 2000
and Star Fighter 3000 and will be releasing these 'soon' | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 |
Budget games company Generation Design have announced that their 'Generation Collections CD' has had another game added -
'The Gold Run'. Registered owners can get a free upgrade | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 |
Stephen Scott has upgraded his simple point'n'click firing game, Jaw Wars | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 |
The multiple arcade machine emulator, MAME is now on version 0.31 and supports
lots more games - you can download it from the official Acorn MAME site | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 | Acorn Bomberman-alike game, MarsQuake, is now on version 1.10, with stable support for multi-computer games connected via the serial port | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/5/98 | The Datafile have massively cut the price of puzzle-game Wizard Apprentice to £14.95 - previously it had been hugely over-priced at a staggering £34.95 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
23/4/98 |
TBA Software and R-Comp Interactive are teaming up to release iD Software's seminal Quake
for the Acorn platform. This will be a properly licensed full commercial
release which will include the original level files for the game. It is very unlikely that it will be possible to purchase the
player without the level files - indeed, there are obvious
commercial reasons why this must be the case, as for Acorn Doom | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
23/4/98 | Kindred Software have given permission for 32-bit Acorn Gaming to publish some exclusive screenshots of their forthcoming new game, Skirmish | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17/4/98 |
Robert Templeman's Destiny will now
definitely be released at the Wakefield Acorn Spring Show 1998. Rob has booked a stand, and it turned out that the only
free space was next to the rival TBA Software stand. This will probably be rearranged by
the show organisers, however. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17/4/98 |
Work on Kindred Software's forthcoming Worms-type game, Skirmish is coming
along well. Some screenshots of the latest version will be available soon from these pages. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17/4/98 |
David McEwen is working on a new 3D engine - the Java release will be on his web site soon, but the Acorn version will be vastly superior. Planned demos include a Quake-style demo with portals, and a car racing demo. Features include dynamic coloured lighting and shadows. Apparently the Acorn version already runs at an impressively high frame-rate, despite the current lack of major optimisation. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
17/4/98 |
New versions of the Colem, fMSX and Xnes emulators have recently been released. New features include pause/restart, reset, extra screen modes and speed increases. The author, David McEwen, is also working on a ports PC Dragon, VICE, Stella and AdamEm - more details on these soon. Work on porting the latest version of Macintosh emulator vMac has also been started. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
21/3/98 |
A demo of Artex's brand new point'n'click adventure game, Ankh, is now downloadable from 32-bit Acorn Gaming | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
20/3/98 |
A brand new Sega Master System emulator, Miracle, has just been released by Richard Talbot-Watkins and Matthew Godbolt. This runs at full speed even on slower Acorn machines, and has full sound - download it now! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
20/3/98 |
Destiny is in the final stages of production now - the desktop front-end has just
been completed and the first batch of packaging has arrived (apparently in a 1m x 1.6m
box!). The author, Robert Templeman, has not
yet decided whether to take a stand at the Wakefield Acorn Spring Show 1998 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
20/3/98 |
Artex inform me that the demo of Ankh is now complete but still contains a few small bugs which
they are in the process of ironing out - so keep an eye out for this next week! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
18/3/98 |
R-Comp have announced the availability of an Acorn
port of DeHackEd, freely available from their web site. This allows you to make changes to how their Acorn port of Doom runs, altering such things as weapon damage and monster attributes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
18/3/98 |
R-Comp have also announced an upgrade to version 1.01 of their Acorn release of Doom. This fixes various sounds and graphics
problems which apparently only affected first issue Risc PCs. Contact R-Comp to obtain the upgrade | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
18/3/98 |
The copyright-infringing game Bubble Impact is now available for purchase in the UK,
despite some graphics and sounds lifted without modification from original Taito games.
The game costs £4.50 from Owl-Art Un-Ltd | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/3/98 |
The demo of Ankh will shortly be downloadable from the Stuttgart University FTP site (Germany), which is
mirrored at Imperial College (UK) - if it's not yet available try again in a day or two's time (still not available as of 18/2/98) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/3/98 |
Anyone with the free C compiler GCC can download and compile their own Acorn version
of Doom now, thanks to Andreas Dehmel, who has released an archive containing patches for the freely downloadable LinuxDoom 1.10 sourcecode for Doom. Installation is claimed to be almost fully automatic - all you need to
do is download the requisite bits and pieces and then run them. The port claims to use
lots of assembler optimisations to "speed things up enormously". It even works
on A5000s, and will take advantage of a ColourCard if you have one. Have a look at http://www.forwiss.tu-muenchen.de/~dehmel/DIY.html for all the details | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12/3/98 |
A demo of Artex's Exodus can be downloaded
now from German dealer ACE's web pages,
although it should be available from a UK site soon too (Artex are in the process of
changing their web pages service provider) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10/3/98 |
The promised demo of Artex's eagerly-awaited graphical adventure game Ankh has just been confirmed for release within "the next few days" | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
6/3/98 |
With the latest round of casualties of the involuntary redundancies at Acorn including
the driving force behind Acorn's recent interest in games development, Kevin Lingley,
it is now unclear what the precise status of projects such as WipeOut 2097 is; it
is also likely that some other games-based projects under development may now sever
their direct connections with Acorn | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4/3/98 |
Psygnosis's world-famous WipeOut 2097 is being ported to Acorns - this superb, futuristic 3D-racing game, in which the vehicles hover above the track, looks like being the first product of Acorn's new commitment to games | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4/3/98 |
Original Acorn Doom-clone Destiny's revised release date puts it less than one month away, although it has resolutely failed to meet earlier release dates | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1/3/98 |
The superb Exodus is now available in German
as well as English - German distribution is by ACE. Also, if you bought the game at Acorn World then you should download
a minor bug fix upgrade from Artex's web pages | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
26/2/98 |
Christopher Joseph recently mentioned the existance of a brand new Worms-type game called Skirmish in comp.sys.acorn.games - having seen a preview of this game, I can honestly say that it is graphically the most impressive game of its kind I have seen, so let's hope the final game lives up to its promise! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
25/2/98 |
TBA have announced that their full commercial verion of Quake entitled, TBA-Quake, will be available to buy at the forthcoming Wakefield Show. A player-only release, current plans are to charge £14.99 to receive a copy by email or £19.99 on floppy disc. You will need to buy the original PC Quake separately in order to get the level files. See below | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
25/2/98 |
A classic 16-bit era game will be available "soon" in a superb, pixel-perfect Acorn port which is playable on all Acorn machines | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
23/2/98 |
Aleph One are progressing well on their implementation of VESA 2.0 and DirectDraw
for Acorn PC cards, which when complete will allow newer PC games to run - and much
faster than earlier games, too | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
23/2/98 |
Artex have announced that they have completed a large (3.5Mb!) demo version of Exodus | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
23/2/98 |
Psygnosis's WipeOut could be on the way from R-Comp Interactive - R-Comp have neither confirmed nor denied this story [also see story dated 4/3/98 superceding this] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
23/2/98 |
Acorn MAME is now on release 0.30.1, with a beta
0.30.2 also available14/2/98 |
|
A new emulator called MESS is in progress - this emulates various consoles, such as the NES and others | 14/2/98 |
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A full official Acorn release of Doom is now available, and R-Comp say they are now starting legal proceedings against the supplier of a free port of iD's public source code | 13/2/98 |
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A dedicated Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator is also under development - a port of xnes. As announced on these pages last year, Megadrive and SNES emulators are also on the way, but these last two are being developed for Acorn - the former will be freeware | 13/2/98 |
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All versions of Elite are now available for free, legal download, including the 32-bit Acorn version - go to http://people.netcom.co.uk/i.bell/elite/ | 13/2/98 |
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A Macintosh emulator is under development, although whether it will be fast enough to play one of the (few) Mac games I wouldn't like to say! | 13/2/98 |
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New MSX emulator and new ColecoVision emulator released - play classic games from the 1980s | 29/1/98 |
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ArcQuake now supports multiplayer games via a direct machine-to-machine serial cable connection | 29/1/98 |
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Jack Parkinson is working on an Acorn port
of the fully 3D (and therefore a bit confusing!) game Descent | 23/1/98 |
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Soft Rock Software have released their five previously commercial Acorn budget games as freeware, avilable for download from their web site - Escape from Exeria, Drop Rock, Floopy, Guardians of the Labyrinth and Switch | 23/1/98 |
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Artex Software, developers and publishers of Exodus, are working on a new realtime strategy game entitled TEK! and a new graphical adventure called Ankh | 21/1/98 |
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A classic 16-bit era game will be available "soon" in a superb, pixel-perfect Acorn port which is playable on all Acorn machines | 21/1/98 |
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TBA are finalising the details of their free add-on pack for Brutal Horse Power, giving extra tracks and other improvements - a bug-fix upgrade for the basic version has been available for some time | 21/1/98 |
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Paradise have confirmed that, despite various lifestyle changes for their members, development is continuing on Overload and Pocket Money, and another very exciting project is at an early stage | |
Click here for much older news!
Click here for much older news!
£500,000 game from Insomnia Studios
Insomnia Studios, a part of the Oregan group, are currently developing a game
with a total budget that is well in excess of £500,000. This may not be a
particularly
large budget on most other
platforms, but for an Acorn game it is exceptionally high. The game is being
developed under contract for use on large installations of StrongARM Network Computers within a corporate environment.
The game is a fully 3D racing game vaguely similar to WipeOut in style, but more freeform, and features stunning artwork and many 3D special effects. The company version of the game will have a networked multiplayer option. The head of the development team, Andrew Docking (author of The Fourth Dimension's Drifter), says that the game combines elements of Tomb Raider 2, MDK, Metal Gear Solid, G-Police, and "a number of other unique touches". So they're obviously not aiming high, then...
A PlayStation release of the game now looks likely, but Oregan have stated categorically that they will not be publishing a native RISC OS Acorn version themselves. They are very happy for it to be published by another company, however - Acorn are aware of the situation and perhaps they might even publish the game themself under their newly resurrected AcornSoft guise, or alternatively help find someone else who is willing to publish the game. Such a version, however, would certainly come on a CD and would probably require a StrongARM. If no native RISC OS version appears then you'll just have to go and stay in various hotels with suitable intranets to play the game - or buy a PlayStation and wait a bit...
Destiny is an original Acorn Doom clone that has been under intensive development for two years. The first release will require a reasonably high-end machine, but a version suitable for lower-specification computers may become available soon after - see the Destiny web pages for more details. Early impressions based on the two demo versions released to date (one on an Acorn Clan CD and another with the December 1997 issue of Acorn User magazine) have been mixed, however.
To Be or Not To Be?
Martin Piper (a partner in TBA Software) has made various comments about 3D graphic cards in the
Acorn newsgroup comp.sys.acorn.games - in particular a 3Dfx one, but there has been no announcement of official 3Dfx support. Martin says he will write a driver if necessary, however. See the
Acorn World 97 show report for full details. However,
and completely separately, I have heard that an American company called Tritech will be
releasing a set of PCI
drivers for the Acorn for their Pyramid 3D graphics accelerator card. Such a card would
connect to the PCI bus on the forthcoming Risc PC 2 (see the Acorn Stand part of the Acorn World 97 report for details on Risc PC 2, and also see the TBA Stand report for 3D graphics card discussion). This is one of the latest, potentially best 3D graphics cards - the timescale of the possible Acorn release is not yet known. No official announcement has yet been made about an Acorn release, however.
Acorn has been developing hardware and software for a new children's games/education machine to be sold by Samsung. See the Acorn World 1997 show report for more details.
From the Acorn Cybervillage comes a story about Acorn's investment of a "substantial" amount of money in a number of new games programmers in order to encourage the development of original games for the Risc PC. I haven't verified the truth of this story for myself, but it is known from several sources that Acorn are keen to encourage the development of entertainment software that could be used on the NetStation platform. Whether this has any relevance to this story remains to be seen. Acorn have in the past lent development hardware to certain Acorn games developers, such as TBA (allegedly), so perhaps they have simply decided to step up this campaign. They are also involved with Artex Software's (of Exodus fame) next game, TEK!.
Recent Releases from The Datafile
The Datafile recently published
Fantasia's Wizard Apprentice (review on these pages),
retailing at the rather excessive price of £34.95. However, they ran
a special offer through until the end of January 1998
whereby they were selling the game for £24.95 plus £1
postage and packaging. (If you order now at £24.95 maybe they'd pretend the
special offer was still on!)
Another recent Acorn games release by The Datafile was GEK's two game pack, Flying High, consisting of the games Euro Blaster and Joust, the latter being a 32-bit version of the classic arcade game of the same name. More details are on The Datafile's web pages. A review will follow on these web pages soon. Priced at £13.95 plus £1 P&P if the compilation was of the same quality as Emotions then this would be a bargain buy, but I wasn't too impressed with Euro Blaster, a demo of which can be downloaded from The Datafile's web pages. Joust also seems to have some severe problems, so I don't think I can really recommend this package. It is far too slow on my pre-StrongARM ARM710 machine, which seems to contribute to some of the problems.
Preceding these releases, also from GEK and The Datafile, came the superbly funny and well designed platform game Emotions, which must surely rank as one of the best original Acorn games ever - and not over-priced at £20, either. At the moment there is a special offer whereby if you buy Emotions you get Flying High free - well worth taking advantage of!
Acorn Gamers in the Industry
Certain well known ex-Acorn-games-programmers, such as Tom Cooper and David Jefferies, work at Psygnosis, publisher of top Playstation and PC games. Last year it looked likely that David Jefferies was going to be involved in porting a few Psygnosis games to Acorns, but sadly the brakes were put on the project when Psygnosis realised exactly how much time the conversion work would take. It isn't known whether this has any connection with the
unconfirmed-but-not-denied story about R-Comp being involved in an Acorn port of WipeOut (see above).
Acorn users can be found throughout the gaming industry. Famously, Eidos has in the past developed video compression software for Acorns, and they now own and publish Core Design's work - including the world-famous Tomb Raider, but, in the balance of probability, it seems a pretty safe bet that no Acorn release will ever be made. The majority of Acorn users who would have bought the game probably own PlayStations by now, anyway, so any release would pretty much need to be targeted at the Network Computer. Krisalis, now no longer publishing but doing development work for others, also have one or two Risc PCs which are sometimes used for prototyping work due to their ease of use.
Other Things
For those who fancy something a little more cerebral, a demo version of Tiles, a desktop word game, is available from Brain Games's web pages. The game is now StrongARM compatible and
includes eleven boards in five languages with four sprite sets.
Those interested in writing their own Acorn games but who aren't confident of their programming ability might consider checking out Grasshopper Software's Games Suite 2, a regularly updated development suite which claims to let you write fast arcade games with ease. The sprite plotters which come with it run up to 19 times faster than those built into the OS, and the core engine is 100% hand-written ARM code. The suite is regularly improved - reports on the current releases suggest that it may have some annoying limitations, however. The addition of 3D graphics capabilities is intended for future versions.
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