Editorial It's been a hectic two months in the Medley household since last issue, just for a change . Alan worked in India, of all places, for a week at the start of August and I've been keeping busy with SynTax, Red Herring and PC Mart, plus little things like housework ... Talking of PC Mart, as well as doing the regular general PD/Shareware column, I've recently starting doing one purely on text adventures ... and this is where you come in. If you've reviewed a suitable text adventure for SynTax, such as an AGT one, and would be willing to let me reprint your review in a future issue of PC Mart, please will you let me know next time you write or ring? You will, of course, get full credit for your review(s). A few people have already agreed but as the magazine is out every two weeks, and each column is about 2000 words, the more reviews the better. I've had a good response to the column after just two issues, so it shows that there IS still an interest in text games, in the PD/shareware sector, anyway. Of course, because of the personal contact with shareware authors, rather than the anonymous big companies, it's often through the independent authors that you get the most after sales support. Ron Rainbird's letter in the Letters section shows the bad experiences he has had recently and, unfortunately, he's not the only one to have suffered in a similar way. It seems that, with some of the larger companies, once you've paid your money, you're on your own. I have a friend who is having some bother sorting out problems with Ultima Underworld. Origin used to be distributed by Mindscape, which was the situation when he bought Underworld, now they're with Electronic Arts. Neither company wants to know about his duff disks. Mindscape say 'we don't deal with Origin any more'. Electronic Arts say 'we didn't sell that to you'. He can't win. The only people who have won are those who got a cut of his œ40 in the first place. It's a situation that annoys me intensely. One shareware author who gives good support to his registered players and has been very busy with some back-up for his program is Peter Hague who wrote The Obscure Naturalist, reviewed recently in SynTax. He wrote to me recently, making me a member of the Obscure Naturalist Fan Club, enclosing a beautifully produced (and humorous) certificate and membership card, plus the first two newsletters. Each newsletter is an A4 sheet, giving hints, fantastic facts and a 'location of the month' from the game. See what Boney Cottage really looks like! Membership of the fan club costs œ6.00 and will entitle you to all the above including a full year's newsletters, one a month. Peter tells me that if he finishes the follow-up to Obscure Naturalist, then the newsletter will cover that too. If you've played the game, I'm sure you'll find the fan club of great interest too. The contributions have been flooding in again so apologies to anyone whose reviews or whatever haven't been used this issue. I just plumb ran out of space! I have a sneaking suspicion that I will have to do a double issue some time to use them all up. I'll probably wait until the middle of next year, when the end of year prizes are awarded - it'll come round quickly enough. Please don't stop sending in your contributions, they are all very welcome. There's another new section this issue, a film and video slot. As with the books section, this is for SF/Fantasy and related topics. I think the two sections will mesh very well together so, again, contributions for that will be appreciated. An interesting letter came through the post recently, from Philip Harris of Words & Pictures, First Floor, 8 West Bar, Banbury, Oxon., OX16 9RP. They are launching various ranges of low cost PC software (RRP œ7.99), fully packaged and supported. Three ranges are already available (multimedia, arcade and utilities) and they are aiming to add a range of strategy and adventure games so are looking for interested authors. There are two ideas in mind: 1. The author would allow them to distribute some or all of their adventure. They would package it and sell it, paying the author/company a percentage of the sales. As they work entirely on the PC, this would only be suitable for PC adventures. 2. The author would provide them with an adventure to convert to the PC and then add to their range. Again they'd pay a royalty. This would be ideal for authors with adventures not on PC format, or for people writing on the PC who would like graphics added or other changes made. The author could buy copies of the program at trade price from them to sell themselves, and can also continue to sell their own original version. I dropped a line to Philip, asking for more details and it all sounds pretty good to me. I am thinking of passing Oklib across to him; it sounds as though they would start off selling the game as it stands and, if it sold well enough, maybe do graphical and Windows versions at a later date. I still have a few questions to ask, such as could I playtest the final version and what control would I have over any changes they might make to the game? I'll let you know what happens. The sample advertising leaflets sent to me look excellent and the whole plan seems well thought out. I like the idea of still being able to sell the game myself too. If you're interested, drop Philip a letter or ring him on 0295 258355. Finally, I had a bit of a spend up yesterday (I'm writing this on Sept 7th), and purchased a CD ROM drive. We'd been dithering about getting one for quite a while and, for various reasons, yesterday was the day. I rang Media Magic in North Finchley and the guy on their technical sales line couldn't have been more helpful to someone who doesn't know her SCSI port from her ISA lead! Anyway it came today so I am frantically finishing SynTax so we can take the lid off the machine and install the card this evening. That way, if the machine goes 'bang!', at least the mag is safe. I'll let you know next issue how I get on with it, but I ordered 7th Guest at the same time (we-e-ll, you have to have something to test it out with, don't you?) so I am looking forward to seeing how the PC copes with its graphics. Maybe next time I'll be telling you that we've just upgraded to a 486 ... Sue