Editorial

You'll be pleased (amazed?) to hear that there is still some space
on the hard disks after our recent upgrade. I'm pretty amazed
myself. Having an extra 100 MEG has certainly made a difference
and everything is (touch wood) working fine.  Unfortunately the
same can't be said for the scanner. Oh yes, it's working but it
can't cope with a lot of printouts. I had been rather optimistic,
I'm afraid. So if anyone is seriously considering getting a
scanner with OCR, I'd recommend you wait awhile until the
technology has got more reliable. As it is, I have to get light
printouts photocopied to make them darker, and even then it
sometimes won't read them - either not well or sometimes not at
all. Save your money!

The proposed section on TADS programming has started with a bang
this issue with contributions from both Neil and The Grue. They're
both forging ahead with it and doing all sorts of clever things.
I'm still trying to get the easy stuff to work! It took me long
enough to work out when you use the different types of brackets.
I've got that sussed now but a lot of it still escapes me. I've
put in a short file about AGT programming - now that I DO
understand (okay, most of the time).

Talking of AGT, my own game which I've been working on for the
last 18 months off-and-on has finally gone out for playtesting.
I've had great fun writing it but it's great to see it finally
finished, barring anything that surfaces during playtesting.
I know one playtester has already found one howler in it but
that's what playtesting is all about.  In some ways I get as much
fun out of programming now as playing games. However, I've still
found time to play a bit, mostly A-Train (darn complicated game
but great graphics), Might and Magic III (gonna take ages to
finish) and Spellcasting 301 (just as funny as its predecessors).

Last issue I put in my review of Lemmings which I'd been playing
as a change from adventures. This issue Steve McLaren has sent in
a review of Pinball Dreams. I think this would be a nice regular
section to run so if you have an 'alternative' game that you
enjoy, why not send something in on it?

Eventually I'd like to put the 'alternative' section into
'Features' but, as you can see, that section is full this issue.
Readers from way back will remember when there used to be one
special feature an issue. No longer! Of course it means there's a
bit less room in other sections of the magazine but there are
still plenty of reviews, solutions and hints.

It looks pretty definite that there WILL be a larger than usual
issue for Issue 23 in order to use all the contributions that have
been sent in. This will entail 2 disks for the 5.25" PC users. The
rest of you will just have the one disk but it will contain more K
than usual. So keep sending in the contributions, they will all be
used!
                                                Sue