Hello once again, since it's been soooo quiet on the sam front lately, time for my little ramble. Not quite weekly as scheduled, but life does get busy at times :(. I'm glad the little mention of random programming got everybody into a chatty mood. One thing which I couldn't help noticing is that everybody went about calculating how many possibilities there were. What if, just imagine, you had a masterpiece on the first go! Ok, so the chance of winning billions with the lottery is larger, but the chance is there! (camera view: everybody runs away from there terminal gets behind there SAM to see if they are a winner).
A nice little message from Ian, hmmm putting p(rivate)-mail on p(ublic)-mail??? (That message was meant to be to Andrew anyway and was one of my first "lets test this e-mail thing" attempts. Note the way that it was constructive. Anyway, I'll try to be nice to you from now on Ian (problem is that I couldn't find any nasty bits from you to quote). Don't take it all too personally - I wouldn't call it laying out the bait... Right, what's been going on lately then? I think I'll do a reviewy type of thing of Fred 57 (btw is everyone on the mailing list subscribed to FRED?). So we're back to Ian (kind of). I very much liked the SAM mines game - I'm sure it has stopped people from writing that type of game. There are a lot of very nice features in it (more than my Windows version anyway). Of course I do have a few niggles (which is just my way of being constructive - it is not a direct assault at you Ian (since you only did the samples anyway)). When you move the playing field around the outline is not totally displayed, it's got this ugly scan line running through it - it can't have been that hard to move an outlined box around within a frame???? I liked the clarity of the samples (nice 5 bit thingies me thinks) how about some support for other devices (ed/samdac, blue alpha, quazar? - if you need specs let me know). The choice of samples is rather humourous - nice touch. I hate hearing the "wrong, wrong...." one everytime when I hit a mine with my first move though - an auto first move may have been nice. Apart from those small points I think it's a great game, well done! Next up came another mailing-list dude - Tim's Eggbum. Very nice and professional looking game. I enjoyed playing this one, although being a very simple concept (the best games usually are) it is very nicely polished. It is a bit hard though - ALL of that massive level in one go???? Has anybody completed it?? I'm sure that there are people out there who found the SM -> Etracker converter handy (me not included!). At first I thought woah, what kind of kinky program is this, but I was soon proven wrong. SIL 5+, cool, a speccy demo. Apparently my 128k music player got into the Czech Republic somehow - glad it has helped. It must be pointed out that I ripped it from Cookie's Toxic Elephant conversion and improved it a bit. Cookie ripped it from someone else I believe. As to the demo, ummm, WHAT do all those keys do?? Sure I can read, but that doesn't really help me much... Anonimity is back! plus he reveals his name - oh noooo! The end of being anonymous for our very own Graham Goring!!!! Once again, I enjoyed the read Graham. I'm going to jump straight on to your Hang-SAM game - very cool graphics - I loved the animations!!! Shame on you for working in mode 4 though!!!! ;-) (have you finally been cured?) Next up came the dross E-Tunes - tell Andrew that his player looks quite nice with the new screen! Hmmm, finally my old tunes have been put out. Colin mixed up the converted midi and mod though. Just another day was the converted midi, Silkworm was a converted mod. Keen E-Tune spotters would have noticed this already though. Sorry Colin Piggot - I'm not using your convertor for these, I wrote my own since machine code is somewhat faster (1 second conversion time plus volume changes and speeds converted and ornaments added to make adding chords somewhat simpler). Right, a nice little module by The Code Blasters was next, I used there Whacker Tracker in the early stages of my mod player to get the file format worked out. This mod does of course sound better with version 2.01 of the SAM MOD player (a demo version should be on FRED 58!). Surface Raider is another nice SCADs game (whatever happened to the compiler - since SCADs works with basic this could mean a BASIC Compiler???) Rachel is starting to get beyond my comprehensibility - but I still enjoy the read (this bit's are getting short aren't they?) The adverts - right! Beautifully drawn Fred adverts shoulder with an ancient Format ad, where's a Sophistry ad???? ;-) And that covers, that. I could tell you about some good things which should be on the next Fred (I partly already have) but I won't. I think I've typed my bit for this week. Over to you lot.... (have you all had a week's holiday or something?) Bye, bye for now..... Solar Flare of Entropy (aka [EMAIL PROTECTED])
