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PsL Monthly 1994 September
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PSL Monthly Shareware CD-ROM (September 1994).ISO
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news9401.vws
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1993-12-01
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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 missi