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There's no real update today, except that I put yesterday's updates on the newsfeed, something I had forgotten. In spite of my slack lately it has been a productive month: I added 33 game pages, and added/updated 185 pages in general, 171 of them in the games section.
After the seven meager days (actually a bit more, but never mind) there is a biggish update again today, with no less than seven new gamepages. I have started organizing my computer collection by buying small computer tables on wheels for them. There was a nice surprise in store for me when I noticed that the CD-ROM drive I had long ago installed into my favorite 286 had suddenly started to work correctly. This is as inexplicable as its former refusal to do so, but I won't look a gift horse into the mouth, and I'm in a far better mood today than I was in the last week. On to the updates. First, there are three Tetris games:
As you see, these are newer than most of the Tetris games I previously had, the last two are even Windows games. You can either download them here, or there's a link to the developers homepage. Then there are three German Shisen-Sho games:
The first two are Atari ST games, but have been ported to the PC. The last is actually a Windows remake of Sarakon by one of the original developers. The seventh game is the first French DOS-only game in my collection:
Finally there are a few updates of existing pages:
Well that's it for today. I had been a bit frustrated lately. Things were going wrong. The server King Svatopluk's Court is hosted on has chronical log problems lately, I have no access log since 25th. I have now signed up for a reseller account somewhere else. Having a reseller account also means that I van have multiple domains. Things are looking up.
I'm sorry for the chronic lack of updates lately. There is not very much today either. I experimented a bit with some of my Apple displays, and I updated the games list for the IBM PS/2 50. That's about all.
Small update for Transarctica regarding the crack: it does not remove the manual check. Don't know what it does at all.
I'm still playing Transarctica; there's a small update regarding the best DOSBox CPU cycle setting and an as yet untested crack removing the annoying manual check.
I got an email by Miroslav Vrlik who pointed out to me that Turbo Gomoku got its name because it was one of the sample programs distributed with Borland's Turbo Pascal 3.0. So it originally came with the source; maybe I'll find that yet.
I started playing Transarctica again, this time in DOSBox. The game has always fascinated me, but I never got very far. Now I'm getting along fine. This is my first experience with DOSBox, by the way. It runs fine, only battles are excruciatingly slow. I added the one official cheat and some info about version differences.
After all these Amiga games I put up lately I somehow felt an urge to go back to my roots, which after all is the IBM PC and nothing else. I have always taken a special liking towards games using ASCII graphics, and today I've added no less than five of them:
Tiles is certainly the most uncommon game among these five. I don't think there is another Mah Jongg game using ASCII graphics. The last two are Pac-Man clones. You can download them all with the exception of Queen of Hearts. There's no particular reason I did not put up Queen of Hearts for download. I may add it at a later point. Meanwhile you can get it from Home of the Underdogs if you want to.
Two of the games I added today are Gomoku implementations or variants, and I have added this as a new category. I'll try to get rid of generic categories like "board" or "puzzle" in the future and replace them with something more descriptive.
I added some links for Amiga ports of Duke Nukem 3D. One of these ports was made by a member of a German demo group, Oxyron, and another member of this group had created two games:
So here there were two more entries for my collection of late Amiga games, not that I don't have a sizeable backlog of yet-to-add games of this category already. Anyway, here they are.
You can never have enough lists, now can you? There's a reason I was always rather proud when I became citizen of Vault City or maybe even Captain of the Guard. So, in the hope of pleasing Lynette, I have added the following lists:
Now that I have a list of BBC games, I looked out to find some more, since there were only two. One that I found is Acheton, an interactive fiction adventure that was originally programmed on the Phoenix mainframe in 1978, but commercially first released on the BBC in 1984.
I have played Ishido on a few more Macs and have added a section about technical stuff. I have changed the date to 1990, since the color version is from then and the black & white version from 1989 has more or less vanished. I have updated the game tables of the following Macs to include Ishido:
I have corrected a few really wild typos for Turbo Gomoku, guess I was very tired when I wrote this page. Finally there's an update for StuffIt archives, since I dug up MindExpander and tested it.
There are three new games today. First there's Ishido, a fine board/puzzle game for the Macintosh, which was soon ported to several other platforms. Then there's Shogatsu, a clone of the former using ASCII graphics (been a while since I last posted one of those). It could have been a fine game, too, but the programmer was a bit lazy and so it wound up being more painting by numbers than a game. Anyway you can download it if you want. Finally there's Pipeline, an Amiga game about which I know very little, but which was the direct model for MacPipes.
Browsing the games with female protagonists on MobyGames, I came across a curious little arcade game that must have been added recently: Lorna, featuring a comicbook heroine of the same name by Alfonso Aspiriz. There is little about the game on the Internet, and next to nothing about the comic, but I did find a sketch someone had scanned in and posted to a board. Lorna was released among other platforms on the ZX Spectrum, so I took the occasion to finally add a list for this platform.
I'm still on this late Amiga game thing, today I've added a page for onEscapee, an action-adventure from 1997. At the same time it's a news story, for it has recently been ported to Windows and released for this platform only two days ago! On the Amiga, it was quite a hit back then. Let's see how it fares on the PC now.
I gave SimCity 3000 a big update, since I noticed the page is quite popular. It is within the first 30, and it gets more hits than the other SimCity pages. It's now at least three times as big as it used to be, so people will actually have to read something. In the course of this there were some updates on the other SimCity pages too, and I added one Streets of SimCity, which is one of these curious by-games or add-ons everybody is always too embarassed to talk about.
Finally I added screenshots for Marble Madness and The Sentinel. When I took my pick among those I had taken of the latter, I noticed that this is a genuine VGA game: Some of the screenshots had up to 51 colors. I still decided on one that had only 15 in the end, it was easier to process.
Just a few small updates and corrections today:
And I forgot to mention that there's now a list of all relevant games on the Atari ST page.
I completely rewrote the Capital Punishment page. I'm glad nobody took a look at it yet: it was not only incomplete, it contained some serious errors. Now everything should be okay. Further updates:
I cleaned up some more of the premature uploads from yesterday's update, but that's hardly worth mentioning in detail. BTW yesterday's update changed more than fifty pages!
After a whole week without updates, there should be a big one, shouldn't there? I guess you could say there is.
First, a few corrections. A good number of the games published by neo software were developed by someone else, as I now found out, usually meaning they weren't Austrian Games at all. Black Viper, for example, was created by Italian developers. Good news is that I have now enough Italian Games to give them a seperate page. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was available for Amiga and Commodore 64 too. The history of Block Out is a bit more twisted than I thought. There was a Coin-Op by Technos (Japan), and the PC version was created by Polish programmers. I have now listed it as a Polish game but might have to revert that again.
I revised the list of Games not on the PC, and added one for Games not on the Amiga. Then there are no less than seven new game pages:
So much for the new stuff, there are a few more updates:
A lot of all this is somewhat half-finished, but if I don't upload now, I don't know how long it will take.
Today's updates are all about Constructor. On the page here I added a paragraph about the rumored original, unreleased Amiga version and the fact that Studio 3 claims they developed it for the Mac, too, and most of the pages on the sub-site have been updated as well. I got an email from someone who has been busy deciphering Constructor's file formats; on his website, The Gadget Factory, you can download a FIL extractor, which I have already used to get the graphics for the Maps. A map editor is in development.
I've replaced the Get Paid! links on all the pages in the Games section with Newsfeed links. I quit most of the PTR programs I was a member of in December. It just wasn't worth it.
Today, I added a page for Gloom, an FPS for the Amiga, from Germany. Both these aspects make it uncommon: there were not that many FPS for the Amiga, and even less from Germany. In the course of this I updated Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D II, adding screenshots.
There's an update on the Abandonware page: I found Bunny Abandonware again, and I added The Gaming Depot.
Yesterday's update was a bit hasted, I had to leave early and wanted it to get done with. And I did want to start the year by adding RSS to my site.
I have to admit that I'm pretty new to RSS and newsfeeds. A couple of days ago, I had only a very foggy notion of what they were at all. Then I read this article by Jeffrey A. Tucker. I don't know if he's right that sites without RSS will slowly slip off the face of the Internet, but now I knew what it was, and it sounded like a good thing to have in any case.
If you are already using news aggregation, than all you need is my Newsfeed link. Here it is again. If you are as new to RSS as I was, read on.
You can make use of RSS with a seperate program called a news aggregator, or from within your browser. If you are using Firefox, you should see a little microphone icon in the bottom right. Clicking on this icon will add a "live bookmark". This is just a folder with the name of this site containing bookmarks for all the pages I put on my newsfeed. It will update automatically, you do not have to get rid of the old ones yourself.
If you are using Opera, you have to click on the Newsfeed link. This will lead you to an unformated, useless page, but more important it will add a menu item to your Mail > Read menu called "Newsfeeds". It is as if I were sending you an email for every new or updated page, but I'm not. It's useless to ask me to stop. You have to manage these newsfeeds just like emails, deleting the ones you don't want any more.
If you are using Internet Explorer, you have to get a seperate news aggregator. Internet Explorer does not support RSS. At least the version 6.0 I have doesn't. Maybe there is an update I don't know about.
As I said, I'm new to this. It may take me some time to get a good feeling of what to add to the newsfeed and what not. In any case I promise I won't flood you with useless updates.
And of course, I'll still post the updates here the old-fashioned way. Today there is a new page for Bantumi, a Swiss (first Swiss game in my collection!) Mancala game for Windows that uses no graphics, only default GUI elements. There is a screenshot gallery for Escape from Hell. There are a few minor updates on the Constructor site (not the page here on this server).
To give this year a good start, I've decided to add RSS to this site. If you wish to, you can keep yourself updated on the changes on this site. How does it work?
If you are using Firefox, you should see a little icon in the right bottom corner, next to the security padlock. This icon lets you add a "live bookmark", a new sub-folder within your bookmarks that will contain all the changed pages on this site.
If you use Opera, click on Newsfeed here or in the navigational bar on the homepage. This will open the RSS sheet, which is pointless to look at, but more important it will create a new folder in your mail, newsfeeds, with a subfolder, Theodor Lauppert's Homepage. It's as if you were getting an email for every page that is changed here.
If you are using Internet Explorer, you should get a new browser.
Of course I'll still keep on announcing changes the old-fashioned way, too. Today, there are new game pages for Stones and Stones II, two Mancala games for the Macintosh. There are screenshot for Caesar, Cleopatra and Zeus.
