In This Issue

By Dave E

Originally published in EUG #72

If you had said to me at the beginning of 2010 that I would put together four EUG issues before it drew to a close, I would have been sceptical about filling them. Regular readers will remember that, in EUG #62, I suspected there was little more than could be said or discovered about the BBC and Electron machines. But eleven of the biggest and best issues later and some twenty years since the publication of EUG #0, I proudly present EUG #72!

Articles

This EUG is, like many others, a product of its time. Over the past three months (July 2010 - October 2010), we have seen all the programs from Your Computer brought back to life and hence this issue is half given over to celebration of this alone. It has also been a quarter of 8-bit musical activity. Regrettably therefore, this issue is heavily weighted in favour of BBC owners. (We will ensure that EUG #73 redresses this somewhat!) There are not a lot of articles this issue, but we do have a few snippets of news for you, a re-print of one of YC's most fascinating stories and Dave E's top twelve BBC Music demos.

Demos

The amount of BBC demos on the EUG disc has been slowly increasing and this issue it has reached an all-time high with two brand new Master 128 demos. Tom Walker's Rainbow Islands Theme kickstarts proceedings and plays a funky version of the theme of the arcade coin-op of the same name. Closely following it comes CRTC's The Master Of Your Old School, a megademo which won the Sundown demo convention this year.

For BBC and Electron users we also include Kevin Boyd's Space Shuttle Demo from Home Computing Weekly.

Games

We present a new release for the Electron: Drunken Dan (reviewed as part of our looksee of BBC PD GAMES #11) and revive Marcus D. Bowman's Dominoes game. We also bring you one of the better Your Computer releases: Tanks, an overhead machine-code arcade maze game.

Reviews

The majority of reviews in this issue are devoted to all the new BBC and Electron software discovered in our recent Your Computer DVD compilation project (See KING BURGER pictured right). In addition, BBC PD announces a new compilation of goodies and Dave E also casts an eye over Mandarin's Icarus, a high-quality professional release that never got the recognition it deserved.

Solutions

We have raided the Classic Adventure Solutions Archive again with MP's Sadim Castle and the remaining adventures in the Robico catalogue. The original tapes of Robico's adventures are now surprisingly difficult to discover - with the disc-only Electron version of Enthar Seven almost impossible to find. It's the star of this issue's Solution section, but accompanied by Blood Of The Mutineers and the Realm Of Chaos: Village Of The Lost Souls which are also worthy little adventures, even if the Electron versions display with a lot of on-screen 'noise' around the edges of the screen.

Utilities

Jonathan Harston presents a short piece of machine code to allow screens to be shuffled into screen memory on a 64K Electron. Now we just need someone to write some 64K games to take advantage of all that spare capacity... Any takers?

Plus!

With Jigsaw's legacy sadly coming to an end this year, we thought it fitting to give Saw fans a bit of artwork to celebrate the movies that have made their halloween seasons complete over the past seven years. This image again comes from the Organ Grinder's Monkey's Ultimate Film Quiz, currently in production, and was created with Dreamland Fantasy's Image2BBC utility.