30th October 2010Breaking News
No prizes for guessing what The Big News is this issue - the entire run (almost) of Your Computer collection, bringing a staggering new 210 programs to your Beebs/Electrons! Perhaps the most surprising thing about this find is that, although many people were avid readers of the magazine back in the day - and unlike Electron User or The Micro User, it seemed to have been almost entirely forgotten! This, despite the fact that every issue contained at least one spanking machine code game.
Many of these games are reviewed in this EUG for the very first time, and all of them are now included on both the Acorn Electron World DVD and the 5 (!) DVD set of Your Computer available from the DVDs page. A quick glance at 'missing' type-ins on the VIC-20, Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum also reveals that many of the type-ins featured in Your Computer for these machines have still not been archived. So if any more generic 8-bit fans are reading this and in need of a project to fill the long winter nights, why not create the games for the other machines? If the quality matches those of the BBC/Elk games inside the mag, it will certainly be time well spent.
You can order the Your Computer DVD set by clicking here. It costs £19.95 and is currently only missing Vol. 4 No. 8.
KE$HA And Katy Petty Battle For 8-Bit Supremacy
They say this life is a series of extremes - one of peaks and troughs - and that we pull away from something only in fact to return to it. Having seen the current spate of 8-bit music demos created in the past few months, they may well be right. 8 bit music demos are in vogue and YouTube is momentarily ablaze with 8-bit remixes of everything that's Europop, with the sound of new classics like Kesha's Tik Tok and Katy Perry's California Gurls just a few mouseclicks away!
The links here are to 'true' 8-bit versions, i.e. where someone has programmed the music into a Commodore 64 or NES - but a wander around YouTube also brings up versions with the artiste's voices dubbed over such 8-bit riffs! And, judging by the number of views of all of the 8-bit sounds, there are a fair tens of thousands of peeps who just love mixing up modern popstars with the computers of their youth! Oh, yes, and there are some brilliant versions of Eminem and Miley Cyrus too, if europop ain't quite your bag.
Announce - Then Abandon
The announcement of new software for the BBC/Electron followed by a few months of silence and then the news that the project has been abandoned is nothing new, but it is a curious phenomeneon nonetheless. Over the past few 'News' columns, we've given hopeful reportage of all manner of Work In Progress including Weird Dreams, Treasure Island, Rainbow Islands and Repton: The Lost Realms whilst, over at www.retrosoftware.co.uk, Dave M's "I'm thinking of programming..." thread reveals coders considering a whole host of others including Adventurescape 3.0, White Light and Hot-Rod.
Alas, it almost seems as if announcing a project in development is effectively the kiss of death to it ever being released. Of all those projects revealed, only Repton: The Lost Realms seems certain of a BBC/Elk release and anyone who has followed the story will be aware that it has c-r-a-w-l-e-d to completion over the past four years.
There is probably a psychological reason why this is the case - beavering away in a secluded room has, as its goal, the ability to unleash something perceived as unique upon the BBC/Elk community. However, once you announce what you are doing, the encouragement you receive is never as enthusiastic as you would like. Indeed, you may even get people telling you not to bother.
That said, over at Retro Software there have been some extremely interesting developments in the field of SID-music and programming discussions for the BBC Micro (The SID chip was originally shipped with the Commodore 64 and allows for a much greater depth and breadth of sound).
If Music Be The Food Of Love (For The Beeb)...
Play on, we say. Especially when Elkulator author Tom Walker has cobbled together a whole new collection of BBC Music Demos by playing around with his Atari ST, Amiga, C64 and Sega Master System games' collection and porting the sounds over. Now we too can listen to themes from games such as Great Giana Sisters, Lemmings, R-Type, Rainbow Islands and The Simpsons, to name but a few of the bouncy little demos he has produced.
Tom is also responsible for both the delayed White Light shoot-'em-up, and the hardware expansion BeebSID (both mentioned above) so clearly has a brain bursting with both programming and musical creativity. The only real sticking point with these demos is that they are memory-hungry, needing either a BBC B with Sideways RAM, or a Master 128, to operate. (They also take a while to get going and a few of them display nonsense all over the screen.)
The demos are currently available from Tom's own site at http://www.tommowalker.co.uk/music.html and also from our own PD section dedicated to Tom's Music.
The BBC Micro: Retro Heaven
For those of you who can't get enough of reading about the BBC, Eurogamer.net's Will Porter has written his own Retrospective on Repton, Exile and Imogen. It's nicely illustrated with screenshots too.
