TITBITS - Quips from the recent mail at Newsflash UK.. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Well the mailbag has been active again recently, bringing allsorts of useless information to my hands. Fortunatly we're beginning to receive all kinds of press release information now and this can be found in the software/hardware section of the mag. I had another biggie letter from Bjorn Lynne over in Oslo,Norway, detailing all his latest exploits. Bjorn's Group RANDOM will be playing a couple of gigs in and around Strommen, so in you're around Oslo this summer make sure you catch yourself some hot action! (Was that ok eh?) Bjorn's also responsible for the music in a game called FIREBALL from a software company by the name of HotHouse - thats a new one on me and I hope to get a look at the game shortly. Bjorn commented that the MESSAGE BOX feature mentioned in Issue 11 was a very good idea.. so much so that it couldn't have possibly been my idea - well thanks mate! Well, actually it was Ron's idea... I received a letter from Dean Ashton of Brompton, Scarborough, UK with a tip for people owning the new Fatter Agnuses but wondering why they've only got 512K of chip-ram when they've a meg of ram in total. Here's Deans letter in most of it's glory.. 'If you have an A500 with the 8372A FATTER AGNUS chip installed, the you'll be wondering why you haven't an amazing 1Mb of chip memory when your A501 (or similar) is fitted. I certainly did. Which is why I wrote to CBM(Uk) Technical support and I recieved a photocopy of the ECS installation guide. ONLY ATTEMPT THE FOLLOWING IF YOU'RE OF A SOUND MIND AND HAVE AN A501 OR SIMILAR PERMENANTLY ATTACHED. [1] Cut the track between the bottom two pads of jumper JP7A. [2] Cut the track between the bottom two pads of jumper JP2 and join the top two pads with a solder bridge. This modification is for Rev 6a Amigas. Mine isn't a Rev 6a but it does have one of the new Fatter Agnusses. As my machine is still in warranty I haven't tried it out.' Any modifications are carried out at the owners risk and Newsflash UK accept no responsibility for damage caused by soldering buttons to the main circuit board and other such dangerous operations. Another stream of diatribe (boy do I like that word!) arrived in my hands penned by the hard work of Niall McGowans printer, over in Derry City, Northern Ireland.. Niall has got the new album by Jean Michel Jarre and is a bit perplexed as to the quality of side 2, same goes for my musical mate Al Brimble who reckoned it was something wholly disapointing and basically 's**t' (fill in the blanks missus). I haven't heard Mr Jarres latest works in full but to be honest gimme a good honest saxaphone/piano score anyday.. Niall reported an error with my Son-Tracker program, well it certainly seemed to work well enough for me and just about everyone else - I think you may have lost the support files, I don't quite know why it should have given you problems. If I get time I'll write a simple version that requires no external files, ARP requestors etc and I'll pop it on either this or the next edition of Newsflash. Niall also requested that we provide a black-background for him to read the text, I'll see what it looks like and maybe include it if all's well... By the way if you would prefer to read Newsflash with your own preferred colours as used on your Workbench/Workdisk then simply copy across the SYSTEM-CONFIGUARATION file as found in your DEVS directory. Please ensure that the text is set to 80 columns though or it will look a real mess. Niall was pleased to see his last letter mentioned on Newsflash, well we do aim to please, even though he was embarrased due to all his family wanting to have a look! Arf! He was also pleased that I didn't mention anything about him fancying Kylie Minogue... sorry Niall, shouldn't have reminded me about that.. He also asks how ANYONE can laugh at Frankie Howard.. well I can, I think he's great, oh no missus titter not... I got a letter from Thomas Landsburg (him with the nice vector-balls) and he mentioned that a new demo is on the way called 'A Trip to Mars!' which is yet another journey into 3D country. Hopefully we'll see this demo on Newsflash either this month or next. We also wish him well in the demo competition his work is entered, the first prize being an Archimedes. He also did the vector-ball demo in the game UNREAL by Ubisoft, which is previewed elsewhere in Newsflash. We also have a small interview with Thomas this month. Bon voyage for my mate Rico Holmes who's just headed off to Sunny Sweden for a month, to continue working on Team 7 software-titles. Best of luck to Peter Tuelby and Andreas Tadic too.. Toby Richters latest bulletin from Germany brought news of his turbo-board that he bought to speed up his ray-trace rendering times. Well poor old trekking Toby has had nothing but problems with his board.... first he discovered that the 32bit ram wouldn't work with his hard-disk - so he had to go out and buy a new SCSI hard-disk. Then his Amiga crashed. One of the chips in the expansion had developed a fault. Then the new SCSI hard-drive crashed, a PAL was scrapped. Then the old hard-disk crashed. Oh dear. Now at least most of it is working and functioning again... who said that life was simple? Tobias has promised some more fantistic pictures so I'll sit under the letter box waiting for them to arrive, hopefully it will be soon with his animations to follow in the Autumn. I doubt if his work is at all familiar in the states as he does most of it in PAL format. Having purveyed the winner of last years Badge-Killer-Demo Contest "The Sentinel" (3 megabytes) I am sure Toby would walk off with the first prize if he did a NTSC animation... there's food for thought eh Tobias? Another letter of insanity arrived from Rick Lemon (yes there really is a family called Lemon living in East Grinstead, UK) who says that to get the best perverted ascii face possible use TOPAZ font and your favourite eyes, the 'power' character [ ^ ] for the nose and ALT and T for the mouth/tongue.. Kinda like this 8^P but better he says. Hmmm.. thanks a lot Rick.. It must be a nice life down there doing nothing but rendering Ascii faces all day... Steve Marshall is drooling over the new 3000 and 600 models, more on those later but he also made a valid comment that by the time he's saved enough to trade in his old model and pay for a new one, it'll be 2years obsolete... never was a more true word spoken in jest.. or something like that. I got a letter from Geraint Preston of Henley-On-Thames, England who says that the 1.5Mb ram board from Power-Computing is well worth a look, being rather a cheap way to upgrade your Amiga to 2megs - Just 159.95 & 20mins of installation will transform your 512K Amiga into a vastly more powerful beast (or should that be vastly more usable?). The board does involve invalidating your warranty and fiddling with the GARY chip but Geraint reckons it's well worth it and reports that the unit works fine. That Scarborough stalwart Dean Ashton has since written again asking if anyone has produced one of those 'reset-monitors' which allows you to capture the chip-ram on reset and examine it afterwards. If I'm not mistaken there was a utility called MEGABOOT which copied the 512K chip ram to Fast Ram on boot. Very useful for examing code etc and also for swiping graphics and sounds before they got corrupted - not that I ever did anything like swipe a graphic or indeed a sound myself.. :) Honest.. So if anyone else was thinking the same as Dean, then get a hold of megaboot and away ye go... nuttin can stop you now... Enquiring minds such as Deans are perhaps best off investing in a cartridge that allows you to mess and peek to your hearts content - even though they were supposed to be banned in this country. I got a letter from Eric Holroyd down in Australia who's informed me that Mike Hansell has finished a commercial version of "KDV" (Killdavirus) and this should be available too. It's supposed to be the bee's-knees as far as virus control is concerned and currently keeps tags on 52 virii. I'm waiting for Mike to get in touch himself and then I can give full details on availability etc. Eric also mentioned that they were currently in the depths of winter and it can get as cold as 5degrees.. very funny Eric.. we have summers that can get as high at 6 or 7... A postcard arrived from Ian Knowles of Leytonstone, London and from the excessive use of the word "brilliant" I think our mate Ian seems to like Newsflash a little. He also mentioned that he'd love to hear someone convert (maybe even our pal Allister) the Delta/Hawkeye Mix-e-load music from the good old C64. Any takers? Allister has infact converted the music from both games in the past but never the loading music. Thanks also to Rick Lemon wo sent in a horrible piccy to be considered for "Reader of the month".. when the digitising gear is sorted a digital Lemon should appear in the rogues gallery we are planning. I had a nice letter from Alan Pascoe from Portsmouth who has been having a couple of problems with several programs, as ever we're glad to be able to help out. Alan points out that a few of the contents are a bit too technical for the new user and he'd like to see a few things for beginners. Feedback like this is important and we'll do our best to provide easy to use utilities and tutorials etc for beginners in future issues. If anyone finds something a little hard to follow and can't manage to get it working - don't hesitate to call or drop us a line! Alan also pointed out that he is 62 and his dad, at 84, has bought his first computer - needless to say it's an Amiga! Is Sam Pascoe of Waltham Cross the oldest Amiga owner out there? Is Sam a world-record holder ? Or do you know better? Sam apparantley goes into raptures about the power and quality of his Amiga which goes to show, Amiga IS the best.. just ask Sam. I was also sent some "Trabbi" jokes by Guido Coenen of West Germany, a "Trabbi" is the real low-quality and high polluting East-German cars now clutting up the streets in West-Germany since the border re-opened. "Trabbi" jokes are all the rage over there at the moment and are likened to "Lada" and "Skoda" jokes over here in the UK. Anyway here they are.. Q) How many workers do you need to produce a Trabbi ? A) 2, one for folding, one for glueing Q) Why are there no East-German bank-robbers ? A) You have to wait 10 years for delivery of your getaway car.. A proud Trabbi owner walks into a hifi shop and says "I'd like to get a new radio for my Trabbi" the shopkeeper replies "hmmm.. thats not a very good exchange.." More from the comic from Grevenbroich next month.. If you'ld like to express an opinion, give a hint, slag something off, just chat or pass comment then don't hesitate to drop a line to Newsflash, PO Box 13, Ossett, West Yorks WF5 OXA. England - Or call [0]924 265593. More amazing stuff from the mail next month... otherwise just the normal letters (grin).