Welcome to the News In Brief Section. This page contains all articles from 1st - 15th February. Enjoy.

You may remember that Darkage Software's first title Alive was covered in a previous article, and at that time I said that you would get info on their second game which is going to be a Sega Rally type game, now I have obtained the following details.

At present it has no name but it'll have features such as various environments, textures and gouraud algorithms including images such as tunnels, mountains, animated backgrounds and so on. They are working at the moment on the IQ of the cars along with proper collisions between cars.

It will be CD-ROM only, requiring 4MB Fast Ram - in 1x1 320x256 it does 17/25fps on an 030/50mhz which is not bad.

Yep, thats right, it's finally available. After years of waiting you can finally get your hands on probably the best bomberman game ever. However, the best thing is yet to come, it's FREE!

The game was pretty much finished way back in January of 1996, however, another company then threatened Red When Excited with legal action if they released the game, saying it was too similar to their product and it would give the impression it WAS one of their products.

Now, 2 years later they have decided to release it AS-IS to the Amiga public for free.

The archive is currently available from the Red When Excited site and Aminet, to download click on the relevent link below:-

In December 1997, AMIGA International, Inc. received a first order from Indonesia.
We're looking forward to further orders coming in soon.

Within the global AMIGA distribution we are also about to establish new distribution channels in South Africa.
Distribution related talks are going on.

In future, we will have a strong OEM business in Australia.
BTW, Australian AMIGA dealer Megatron has moved.
With a horrible heat, 12 trucks and only five people they had a hard job to do...

Their new address:

Megatron Electronic Industries, Pty. Ltd.
46-54 Centre Way
Croydon South
Victoria 3136, Australia
Phone. +61 (03) 9761 6252
Fax: +61 (03) 9761 5144
URL: http://www.megatron.com.au
E-Mail John Barber: john@megatron.com.au

The World Foundary, have updated their web site and now have a new logo, which is given below.

ZhaDoom has been made by Steffen P. Haeuser and is a PPC version which has been compiled using H&Ps WarpOS Software. It's available at the Aminet and it's just been updated with it now supporting mouse, joysticks and joypads. A 68K version is also included in the archive but it's said to be slow.

There are many Amiga Doom's around, but for anyone who has a PPC board they should definitely try this out.

The DES capable Amiga client has finally arrived! At the moment, the Amiga RC5 Team is currently at 15th position, but now that this new client is ready, they should now be able to get back into the top ten, so download this client as soon as possible. A much faster DES core is under development (RC5-64 core same as before) and a PPC client is under development too, stay tuned.

February 10, 1998 - CUCUG is pleased to announce that the recent problems with the reliability of our main web server have been solved for now.

The main CUCUG web site in Champaign, IL went down on Thursday, February 5th due to a problem with a bad power supply. The current server which houses the CUCUG site had been in use for less than two weeks when it went down. This new server is about three times as powerful as our former machine and will allow us to handle the enormous amount of daily web traffic much better than the former machine.

Everything seems to be working properly and is back to normal.

Thanks to everyone who wrote us with their concerns and offers of assistance! A special thanks to National Amiga for allowing us to use their e-mail list announcing the status of the problem.

-Kevin Hisel
CUCUG Webmaster

I brought you news on this game earlier in the month of January, well, the author has been busily working on it and has released some new screenshots of the game.

As I'm sure you can tell, it looks quite a bit better then the earlier screenshots.

Since the last version that was released the engine has been totally recoded. It now has new features such as gouroud shading on top of texture mapping and translecent gouraud shading used for the engine lights.

The engine is still being work on, I will bring you updated news on it as soon as I have it.

Orion Wars is a new Elite/Wing Commander like game that is currently being developed. Details are quite low at the moment, however, I can bring you details on the engine used and a sneak preview screenshot.

The game will be using an engine called elite motor, at first glance it looks very similar to the Lambda engine, however, this is at a later stage of development.

The engine boasts many features, it supports texture mapping, gouraud shading, effects such as lens flare, reflections, debris and much more. The author is planning to implement support for AGA, CyberGFX and Picasso.

There will hopefully be some sort of preview available soon, as soon as I receive any more details, I will tell you.