About the 32-bit Acorn Gaming WWW Pages

[Old logo] These pages are the 32-bit Acorn Gaming pages which used to be available at http://www.doggysoft.co.uk/gaming/ until Easter 1998 when Oaktree Internet Services kindly offered to sponsor these pages through the provision of my own domain name and space on their server. Oaktree offer some extremely competitive deals on the privision of web space, so if you're interested in setting up your own web site then I'd thoroughly recommend contacting them, or checking their web pages for a quote.

Prior to their DoggySoft existance these pages were stored at the University of Warwick at http://www.csv.warwick.ac.uk/~csuod/ until the summer of 1996. They left that site when I stopped being a student at that University. A small version of the original title page logo is shown here!

These pages first "went live" at the end of 1994, and have since been through two major design revisions, reaching their current design at the start of July 1996, and their current site in April 1998. The news format was revised in January 1998. All the pages are 100% hand-written (that is, I don't use any utility programs to help with the HTML tags), apart from the Database pages which are created using a program I wrote in C++.

A few things on these pages will be formatted better on more capable web browsers (such as ANT's Fresco). The 'old logo' above, for example, has the text 'correctly' formatted alongside it by most browsers, but some Acorn browsers are very primitive and so display only one line of text alongside it.

I have tried not to make excessive use of graphics on these pages, and I have attempted to minimise file sizes wherever possible, which is sometimes a tough task since I also want the pages to look attractive. The main graphic on the contents page is a good example - I wanted it to be significantly larger, but in the end I cut it down to its present size to save download times. After all, if I make the graphics too large then people will just turn off 'image loading' and then the pages will look even worse! This is less of a problem now than it was as little as just over a year ago.

The fixed-palette 256-colour modes of 32-bit Acorn computers cause some interesting problems - I have to choose colours which fit this palette if certain graphics are not to look rather strange for many users. The background texture I designed for these pages is a good example - it took me literally hours to produce a texture which was a pale colour and yet didn't turn to grey or lose its pattern when converted to the standard palette.

Whilst these pages are written in my spare time (not that I have much), I am always trying to improve them, and welcome constructive suggestions. Please feel free to email me (Gareth Moore) with your comments - in fact I would go so far as to positively encourage you to do so! :)

Thanks

Throughout the past couple of years several people have helped me by providing information or review copies for these pages. These include (in no particular order) Warner Interactive Entertainment (Fire and Ice), Andy Southgate (Oddball), Kevin Bracey (Zip 2000 and Angband), Matthew van Delden (Pinball), Max Palmer (original PC games compatibility list), Daniel Shimmin (current PC games compatibility list), Ian Jeffray and the rest of the Paradise team, Tom Cooper (DarkWood and lots more), Peter Otterman (Proposal), Steven Singer (Bloxed), David Jeffries (Stryker's Run III), Martin Piper (TBA), Geoff Holland (Generation Design), Billy Kotsias (Fantasia games), Dane Koekoek (Werewolf Software), Graeme Richardson (Nevryon, Spobbleoid, Enter the Realm etc.), The Datafile (Emotions, Flying High and Wizard Apprentice), The 4th Dimension (Drifter etc.), Chris Jones (Kindred Software and Drifter review) and Jan Klose (Artex Software). Thanks also to Craig Brown for updating my !CPC information once, and an absolutely huge amount of thanks to Alex Card for providing me with very comprehensive StrongARM compatibility information and answering all my resulting questions! Thanks also to Stuart Halliday for introducing me to 'hspace='! Apologies to anyone I have omitted (and I know there must be some) - contact me and I'll add your name to this list if you like.

Thanks too to the hundreds of people who've emailed their comments on the pages. Those who've contributed specific items (sadly very few, but special thanks to Chris Joseph for the Drifter review) are credited where those items occur. I would also like to thank Steve Mumford and Graham Nelson for their complimentary coverage in Acorn User magazine, and also Ian Jeffray for his superb WebGif2 utility used for many of the images on these pages - it's an excellent application. I've also used Peter Hartley's wonderful InterGif (now on version 6), which lets you create optimised GIF animations. I am also indebted to Andrew Clover for his kind provision of webspace free of charge on the DoggySoft website for almost two years, and of course also to Jon Ribbens and James Ponder at Oaktree Internet Services for the free provision of the web space the pages now use, and not least for them kindly paying for the domain name for me! (acorn-gaming.org.uk)

Last but not least, thanks very much to you for reading these web pages! You are one of hundreds of thousands!

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