26/8/98		News has been accumulating over the past few months of various Acorn gaming projects which are under way, but which I'm not allowed to name yet - but it's fair to say that if all goes according to plan then we'll be seeing a top-quality home-grown 3D game based on a classic of yesteryear (this might even be free), as well as a similarly home-grown tactical combat turn-based RPG game; both of these projects are from people with successful track records. Furthermore, work on Insomnia's huge budget game (see an old news story) is apparently continuing (Andrew Docking, author of Drifter is in charge of the project), and Artex are currently working flat out on something other than Tek...
26/8/98		If you're an owner of Artex's excellent point-and-click adventure, Ankh, then keep an eye on their web site for a bug-fix upgrade due out soon
26/8/98		Kevin Bracey's free and unbelievably good 'interactive fiction' game player (ie. adventure games!), Zip 2000, has been upgraded again (to version 1.32). The source code is now also freely available, too
26/8/98		R-Comp Interactive have announced that work on their Acorn version of the freely-moving 3D shoot'em'up Descent is now nearly complete, and it will run in varying numbers of colours at resolutions up to 1600x600. The initial release will only work on StrongARMs, and is expected to be on sale within three weeks. R-Comp have also (in a round-about way) announced that they are working on an Acorn port of Heroes of Might and Magic 2, a PC fantasy strategy game
24/8/98		Prolific emulator-porter David McEwen has produced a new version of his ColecoVision emulator as well as a new Atari VCS 2600 emulator. David is also working on a new NES emulator which runs considerably faster than xNes (and its derivative in MESS) - it's being improved daily and it should be on the forthcoming Acorn User cover CD-ROM 4. An improved version of MasterGear (an 8-bit Sega emulator) is also on its way from David, with pre-Risc PC and full sound compatibility. More coverage
19/8/98		Artex Software have announced a sequel to their popular freeware platform game Botkiller. Imaginatively entitled Botkiller 2, the successor has been completely recoded and now features large, scrolling levels, higher-quality graphics and sound, and many new gameplay features. Also added is a price, however - this new version will cost £10. Botkiller 2 is due out in "about" two months.
19/8/98		Acorn MAME now emulates 702 arcade machines, and Acorn MESS, the games console emulator, has been upgraded to version 0.02 beta 4.1
17/8/98		A full review of Eternal Destiny is now available on this web site
16/8/98		R-Comp Interactive have announced that they intend to develop a Risc PC 2 (Phoebe) driver for the Voodoo 2 3D accelerator card. These cards provide hardware assistance with the display of 3D models, allowing much more life-like 3D graphics - with such a card the Phoebe would have better graphics performance than popular consoles such as the PlayStation or Nintendo 64
16/8/98		A demonstration copy of Robert Templeman's Eternal Destiny is now available from his web site (but is nearly four and a half megabytes big and requires a minimum of 16Mb memory). 32-bit Acorn Gaming has written a full review of the game, which has now been released, but has decided to withhold it temporarily to give Robert a chance to improve many of the criticisms of the game
12/8/98		Martin Piper and Robin Watts have developed a completely free 3D engine which all programmers are entitled to use. It is available from http://www.pinknoise.demon.co.uk/3dEngine.zip and offers many facilities, including full model management and support for 8, 16 and 24-bit modes
12/8/98		Catching up with the past month's news, because I've been on holiday: Games development group Visions of the Impossible (VOTI) have released a new 2D space game called SunBurst - a full review will appear on this site shortly. You can download a demo of the game from VOTI R-Comp have finally released Abuse, having bought the rights direct from the original developers, Crack Dot Com Acorn MAME has been updated yet again, and now supports 628 games Acorn SNES9X has been updated to version 'test 03', and Richard Cassidy has released a desktop front-end for it Doom It Yourself has been upgraded to version 3.2, and now supports palette FX on static palettes, will play all PWADs without WAD merging, and has several bugfixes as well as compiling on Acorn C R-Comp have asked people to stop buying Quake from them, because they have no idea when it will be ready for release Buy two games from R-Comp during August and you can get a third for free
12/8/98		Kevin Bracey has released version 1.31 of his superb Zip 2000 interactive fiction (adventure game) player, now completely free - see the review on this site
12/7/98		Full review of Ankh now available from 32-bit Acorn Gaming
12/7/98		Play Super Nintendo games on your 32-bit Acorn! A superb port of SNES emulator SNES9X is now available, thanks to Gareth Long. More details
4/7/98		The Fourth Dimension's Super Snail is now available for purchase by mail order - see preview report
2/7/98		Peter Teichmann has updated his free Acorn Quake player, ArcQuake - it is a little bit faster and now supports multitasking in a window, so you can even run two copies simultaneously on the same machine! You can download this from rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~teich-p/acorn.html
2/7/98		Check out the Acorn Southeast show photo report on these pages!
25/6/98		Following recent upheavals at Acorn which saw various key staff leaving the company, including Peter Bondar and David Lee, Artex have refocussed their work on forthcoming strategy game TEK in order to concentrate more on the NC (network computer) release. The game will now be redesigned to use a slow modem and just 4Mb of RAM, as well as being playable in high resolution and with up to 8 human players over a local network or the internet. The Risc PC version will still use film clip cut scenes because work has already been done on them, and Artex intend to include special features for high-end machines (both to take advantage of extra memory and faster processors)
25/6/98		Shareware bomb game Marsquake has been upgraded to version 1.11 - the latest version fixes some bugs and has improved serial link code
25/6/98		Anyone who bought Artex's graphic adventure game Ankh prior to a day or two ago should download a patch to upgrade their game to the latest version from Artex's website
25/6/98		MAME, the multiple arcade machine emulator, is now on version 0.33 beta 6.1 for RISC OS, supporting 604 games! MAME now also supports zip files natively (so you don't need to decompress game archives)
25/6/98		R-Comp have released TCPIP network drivers for Acorn Doom. Also new on R-Comp's site is a port of Deth for RISC OS by Lee Noars - this is a full level designer for Doom
24/6/98		Andreas Dehmel continues to amaze by regularly updating his wonderful free Doom It Yourself port of Doom! (See old stories, including 4/6). The latest version has various improvements, including support for compressed WADs, armDeu 1.10 and an improved frontend
22/6/98		Descent, a 3D maze exploration and shoot'em'up game, has now finally been officially confirmed for Acorn release by R-Comp. Careful readers of the comp.sys.acorn.games newsgroup might well have deduced some time ago that this was due for release. Jack Parkinson (of Artemis fame) is handling the port. Earlier this year he also produced a free version of Doom which R-Comp requested him not to release (and he complied). Following this announcement, public announcement has also been made of a freeware port of Descent (by Matthew Bloch and Rik Griffin) in progress. R-Comp have attempted to stop work on the freeware version, although so far unsuccessfully. Read more on this story
21/6/98		Syndicate Plus (the Acorn version of Syndicate) and Artex's Ankh are both now on general release, and both are available in the UK from R-Comp or via UK dealers such as Desktop Projects
21/6/98		Robert Templeman has announced that Destiny missed its latest release date because of a major bug that was suddenly discovered. He hopes to complete it "soon"
21/6/98		Freeware RPG Angband, which makes clever use of normal ASCII graphics for its display, is now available in version 2.8.2 for Acorns from http://www.swallows.demon.co.uk/angband/
21/6/98		R-Comp have blamed the lack of network drivers for Acorn Doom on Justin Fletcher, but say they now have a beta version. DIY Acorn Doom already supports network play.

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