=============================================================================  UGA EDITORIAL ============================================================================= Hello out there, Another issue of Europe's favourite diskmagazine. From the heart of Holland we bring you another collection of news, utilities, art, demos and music. As always we selected the very best from the material we were offered by contributors to give our readers a valuable diskmagazine. For sofar the positive part. In issue 24 we already mentioned the pirate problems we face at the moment. The last two months the situation has only become worse. Sales of our most popular products Powerpacker and Newsflash has dropped. We seems to be victim of the popularity of these products even with low prices and great press reviews. But pirates don't give a damn about it and spread our new releases so fast (within 8 hours after release) that we get no chance to sell our products. The last months several distributors who sold our products to dealers in countries like Holland, Switzerland and Finland decided to stop distribution of AMIGA titles. Reasons: piracy and 500+ problems with older software that couldn't be sold anymore to new users. So we are not the only softwarehouse that will lose money because of these problems in the AMIGA market. Many AMIGA developers already went out of business. Luckily for us we always have a PC market waiting for a good diskmagazine and payable utilities but we keep trying on the AMIGA as long as possible. The hard facts force us to speed up our PC plans. If the situation will not change the coming months we will be forced to take drastic steps. We can continue at least till the end of this year but if the AMIGA public will not buy originals of our products and use pirate copies we will stop some of our most timeconsuming AMIGA activities. The first product that will be in danger is our magazine. You have to know that we put a lot of time in this magazine and we have to live too. I founded Newsflash 3 years ago and it would be the most horrible thing for me to do if I would have to stop it but if the AMIGA public doesn't support us by buying original copies then don't blame us if this would be the last year of your favourite magazine. I really have worked my bud off the last 3 years (often till 2-3 AM) and I am tired of all the energy I have put in the AMIGA business to see now the AMIGA returning to the games corner. Probably the major interest of many AMIGA users is still games which is'nt really our market. On the PC the situation is totally different and I have had more success with the first issue of Newsflash PC than 3 years Newsflash AMIGA. Don't understand me wrong. I still hope to continue Newsflash AMIGA in 1993 but I need your help. For the moment we will release some products that are still under development but will not start new developments or other activities on the AMIGA. If Philips and Pioneer will push the Interactive CD hard enough this year it can be the killer of Commodore's CDTV system because ICD works with digital pictures instead of computergraphics. I have really no idea who will win this battle. Both machines have a big potentional but Commodore is not known for really promoting / advertising of their machines on a big scale. Philips however has built up quite a market in the USA and has just start an invasion of the UK. For the average computeruser it means even harder choices when it comes to buy new hardware, some choices: - Neo Geo, the superior games console (50 MB games on 1 cartridge) - MS-DOS PC (386, 486), Super-VGA and CD ROM - AMIGA + CDTV - AMIGA or PC and interactive compactdisk - AMIGA or PC and Laser Disk games (LP format >> 400 GIGABYTE!!) - SEGA 16 Bit, a good alternative for AMIGA games. - Nintendo Famicon. This month we have 3 new products on the market. Powerwaves, Powerbase and Rattlecopy 5. All great products and value for money so I hope we get more support of AMIGA users this time. Please keep in mind that we now have more tools on the market than any other AMIGA developer. And all under US$ 50.00 which is quite unusual for utilities. So the coming months you can expect Newsflash as usual. The only thing that changed is the release scheme. Instead of 6 weeks it will now be 2 months because we have to spend more time on the PC market. But after issue 29 we will take a decision about the future of Newsflash. So it is up to the AMIGA community now...... Thanks for watching our channel. Best regards, Ron Fonteine =============================================================================  UGA EDITORIAL =============================================================================