his recently by secretly stashing a whole extra
game on the Greenrunner/Redrunner/Retroskoi+cartridge! To load Venus Express (PAL only) from the main menu, hold down and left on the joystick and press fire. There will be more little surprises hidden on future cartridges - see if you can find them before they're announced! :)

CALLING ALL BLOGGERS/REVIEWERS!

So, you've got a blog, YouTube channel, or maybe write for a magazine? Would you like us to mail you FREE review copies of our game cartridges prior to release? You would? Well, it just so happens that we are currently looking to expand the number of 'press' cartridges we send out, so if you'd like to get involved drop us a line introducing yourself, your site/channel/mag and give
an indication of your current readership. Obviously we can't give cartridges away to everyone, but we will take every request into careful consideration.

FORTHCOMING RELEASES!

Finally, you might be interested to hear about these forthcoming releases from RGCD:

* Sub Hunter (64KB C64 Cartridge) (Mid November 2012)
* Trance Sector (64KB C64 Cartridge) (December 2012)
* Woolly Jumper / Sheepoid DX (64KB C64 Cartridge) (TBA)
* Spike / Minestorm (64KB C64 Cartridge) (TBA)

More game release dates will be confirmed soon!

Thanks for reading!

James Monkman / Heavy Stylus


*************************************
SKETCHBLOCK VERSION 1.7 RELASED
FOR AMIGA OS
*************************************

This the seventh release of the maturing paint package for AmigaOS called SketchBlock. SketchBlock supports layered images with variable opacity, and supports graphics tablets. Thanks to "TommySammy" for the icon set and Martin "Mason" Merz for the fantastic AISS toolbar image package

REQUIREMENTS

* AmigaOS4.1 Update 4
* AISS 4.12
* PROACTION 1.4 - for script GUIs
* PIL 1.17 - for export script

DOWNLOAD

http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=graphics/edit/sketchblock.lha


*************************************
AMIGAOS: GADTOOLSBOX 3
HAS BEEN OPEN SOURCED
*************************************

github.com/thom-ek/GadToolsBox

GadToolsBox v3 is a powerful GUI generator for AmigaOS. It uses gadtools.library and some other external gadgets. With GTB v3 You can highly expand your GUI with a lot of features like toolbars, tree list views, page gadgets, clipboards. GTB v3 is something like resource editor, You can create here almost everything using all of OS features. You can draw pictures, mouse pointers, edit locale strings, create menus, windows, toolbars, version
strings and much more, everything with one program.

Generated source code is similar to very well-known source code generated by old GadToolsBox by Jaba Development. So, turning to new GTB is very easy, but programs need to be reworked (there are a new functions and there is other naming convention). Of course GTB v3 can load old resources from GadToolsBox
v2 (all #?.gui files), but you cannot load GTB v1 resources.


*************************************
HOME TAPING IS KILLING GAMING
*************************************

When hope taping was prevalent back in the day, many ways evolved for getting
a copy of the game from a friend onto a cassette so you could have a version for free; this process was commonly known as a "pirate" copy. Completely against the law but somehow; as kids this didn't seem to matter and what harm was it really doing to the industry especially as they were making a mint from these games? Well many companies suffered as a result of loosing sales to these "pirate copies", and even closed their doors due to software pirates, how
could you educate children to what they were doing especially as parents were turning a blind eye (mainly due to the fact they didn't have to buy yet
another game) Some people suggested "the games are to expansive" however even Mastertronic £1.99 games were copied so this opinion wasn't valid as surely everyone could afford a good game priced so reasonably.

Some people went further copying the games from tapes to put on disk with menu systems allowing the player to select a game. As Games developed and multi loading tape system became the norm (mainly to dissuade copiers) this sort of defeated the art to some extent, especially when they were "dumps of memory" like from Action replay cartridges that could "freeze" the game a produced a menu for what you could do like copy the memory content to tape or disk. Some coders even managed to squeeze the multi load systems into a single file (commonly known as just that single file version) obviously the skill involved wasn't without question, just the ethics of such an act.

People copied games for fun as well! with Disk versions of many games being "cracked" where the copy protection would be removed so the game could be freely copied to another device, in fact I have some of these versions even though I purchased the full priced disk, the reason was the copy protection played havoc with the disk heads bouncing them all over the place. Some of these "cracked" versions also fixed bugs and even added enhancements to games.

So when you could buy a full priced version of a game; or just obtain a free copy, what would the potential purchaser do, sadly I think most opted for the free version! Publishers realised they needed to produce something that was touchable, they tried with adding things like posters and art and fancy cases to the games hoping buyers would purchase the game for the art, although it worked to a certain degree it never stamped out the piracy. Indeed various hardware devices were released for what the creators termed "making backup copies" of your games just in case the originals failed (of course most were used to copy games for friends),or another wordy way of saying "making pirate copies" you plugged the hardware in and could copy a new game to a blank tape

Tape Copying Device

I know a local club I populated always asked users to bring in a game and submit it to the club; then the "hackers" would work on the game for as long
as the club session ran, usually about 1 to 2 hours at the end they would have "broken" or removed the copy protection and have a version of the game to hand out to all members Free of charge!

This was ok in a way as you could try the game before you bought it, although
I suspect most just used this as a way to obtain free games. If anything was any good I personally would buy it; and of course if a game wasn't any good then I would format the disk and just return it for the next game. In a way this was a good thing for me; as it meant I bought more games because I could "try before I buy" to find the titles I really wanted. The idea was later used for cover tapes where a "demo" version with limited functionality like 1 level or a time limited version was released so people could try the game for themselves. At the time I did wonder how the reviewers in the magazines came
to the conclusions about the games; as some were scored very high but the
games were poor. It was later in life and after talking to one said reviewer who claimed "sometimes we are so pushed for the magazine deadline; we just
ring up the publisher and ask them "what's it's like" and for some screen shots, then write the review having never even loading the game" ! so it confirms some of my suspicions on dubious scoring. If the game was buy a large publisher who had a number of adverts of course pressure was on as that publisher could pull the lucrative adverts from the magazine.

DID COPYING KILL GAMING THEN?

Personally I don't think so, as a lot of people who bragged about the amount
of games they had never played them and I would think would have never bought them anyway! Personally I always bought the games I wanted or thought were
good as I wanted the instructions and everything that went with the game; incentives like stickers and posters of course were a must if the game was any good. I do respect that crackers liked to add e
--- CrashWrite 2.0
* Origin: --:)-- Dragon's Lair BBS --(:- (39:901/281)