Welcome to the News In Brief Section. This page contains all articles from 16th - 28th February. Enjoy.
From 15th February, a working preview of YAM 2.0 was available from the YAM web site, but at the moment it is a German only version.
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 15th 1998
The Amiga RC5 Team continues to make headway in the row of RSA Secret Key challenges, by participating in the Bovine Monarch/DES II challenge, now with the release of hybrid clients for participation in both the DES II and RC5-64 efforts. To prove the Amiga is both alive and viable, the clients come in 68k and PowerPC versions, the latter being one of the fastest amongst all platforms, reaching an amazing performance of almost 1 Megakey per second using the Motorola PowerPC 604e at a clock speed of 200 MHz.
These new levels of performance and cooperation have been reached thanks to Stefan Smietanowski's programming efforts and Steve Krueger's dedication to improving the SAS/C compiler for PowerPC equipped Amigas.
Since the DES II challenge is well ahead, we invite all Amiga fans with or without PowerPC accelerators to join us now and improve our ranking, perhaps find the key and win a part of the US$ 5000 award money.
The Amiga RC5 Team effort is also providing a mailing list as a forum for the discussion on above topics and the effort in general.
For additional info on how to participate and more in depth explanation, please visit the Amiga RC5 Team effort homepage at: http://www.cistron.nl/~ttavoly/rc5
Sincerely,
Team Coordinator for the Amiga RC5 Team effort, Thomas Tavoly
Contact E-mail: rc5@amiga.cistron.nl
The update to Myst has been released by ClickBOOM.
The original release was slightly let-down by a few small bugs, these have now been rectified by this patch. So any of you out there who were worried about purchasing it for these reasons have no excuse not to buy it now.
Most of the problems that occurred were in the CyberGFX version, however there were also some crashes/corruptions that appeared in both versions, all that were found have been fixed.
There have also been a few additions to the game including a ClickBOOM animation for the CyberGFX version and a prompt intro skipping option.
I suggest that all you people out there buy Myst as it really is a great game, if your still unsure about buying it, read my review which will be up soon :).
The Myst patch can be downloaded by clicking on the link below:-
The Diversia project is currently changing to totally new profile title, which will be officially announced soon!!!
You may not have heard much about this game, it is a Command & Conquer games in development by Desktop Corruption (The same people behinf Dafel: Bloodline). Anyway, I was due to be bringing you news on it a while ago, however, there were problems with the coder of the game. This has now been sorted so look out for news regarding the game soon.
You may remember this from a feature I done on it a while ago. For those that do not know, it is a Civilization clone, with a major difference, it can be played online. Anyway, there has been a new demo of it released recently and it is looking very good. To find out more about the game and to download the demo go to there webpage at:- http://gnn.gameshock.com.
This is a game that has already been released by APC&TCP and will soon be released by Islona in the UK. It is a Bomberman type game, as for if it reaches the heights that BlitzBombers has - we'll have to wait and see.
The DES II challenge is over! After 41 days and somewhere between 85-90% of the keyspace checked the right key has been found by a person/team wishing to remain anonymous. The Amiga RC5 Team completed almost 1 million DES blocks and reached an overall ranking of 14th (out of something like 20000 individual teams) with top keyrates around 270 Mkeys/s. A heartfelt applause to Stefan and everyone else supporting the effort. Final statistics for DES II-1 (as it's now officially called, since in about 4 months time the next RSA challenge will probably be 'DES II-2') will be available shortly.
We now return to RC5-64 (stats will be available when backlog clears) and work continues on the third generation of clients allowing other challenges on a 'plug-in' basis.
Please delete your DES buffers now and change your settings to do RC5-64 again! Although the latest clients will automatically switch to RC5-64 when they connect to the proxy, they will do DES if you stop and run them without settings changed (as long as you have any DES blocks left anyway).