/*---------------------*\
*       NYoosletter    *
\*---------------------*/<*Yaroze Stuff*>
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| \ | | \ \  / / !  __  ! !  __  !  / ___!
|  \| |  \ \/ /  | |  | | | |  | | | (___    ____
| . ` |   \  /   | |  | | | |  | |  \___ \  |____|
| |\  |   / /    | |__| | | |__| |  ____) |
!_! \_!  /_/     !______! !______! !_____/
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| |     |  ____! |__   __| |__   __| |  ____! |  __ \
| |     | !__       | |       | |    | !__    | !__) |
| |     |  __!      | |       | |    |  __!   |  _  /
| |___  | !____     | |       | |    | !____  | | \ \
!_____| !______!    !_!       !_!    !______! !_!  \_\

SYNOPSIS

ben.johnson@canada.com
http://i.am/a.boring.twat/

Worst newsletter in the history of mankind. Featuring all the news
that's fit to print (and quite a bit that isn't).

/*
Welcome to the Halloween Special edition of NYoosletter. I know it's a day early, but I was looking for an excuse to run through my repetoire of Halloween gags. On second thoughts, I won't bother. I got a bit carried away this week. Thanks to an immense number of contributions, this weeks NYoosletter is going to read more like War and Peace than a low-volume digest. Still: it's better to have something and not need it than to need it and not have it, or some such. All the contributions were a darn site more interesting than the stuff I had lined up anyway. Hope I didn't miss anybody in the credits.

I had a few complaints that some of you are having trouble subscribing to the NYoosletter. I'll be testing it on my dial-up at home this weekend, but for the time being, just e-mail me at ben.johnson@canada.com (with whatever subject line appears in the small print) to subscribe. The procedure is the same to unsubscribe.

James Rutherford pointed out that the NYoosletter archive looked bug ugly in some browsers (before I explained that was how it was meant to look). Found out that he meant the lines were wrapping at 80 pixels. I fixed it so it should look as it was intended to: http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~throwbak/nyoos/index.html
*/

/*************************************************************************\
* Description: Simple newsletter thing  v00.00_01a                        *
* Credits: Nick Slaven for chucking in a few assorted links and snippets, *
* James Rutherford for very subtly taking the piss out of me and sending  *
* in loads of info, Derek Da Silva for a huuuge batch of retail news,     * 
* everyone who submitted their times to the Grav Championship, James      *
* Shaughnessy, Richard Cutting FGN Online, NTK, Mat Simpson               *
* (http://www.arrgh.co.uk/) and everyone else I'm stealing ideas off.     *
* I sprinkled everyones' contributions throughout the NYoosletter (it     *
* would have been a major pain in the arse to credit each snippet         *
* individually). Glad to say that a good 50% of this weeks NYoosletter    *
* has been made up of other peoples contributions. Ta very much everyone. *
\*************************************************************************/

Seems that the first batch of new members following the price cut have got themselves set up. I was anticipating a flood of charmingly naive people who've never programmed before and were expecting to write Gran Turismo on their first try. Looks like I was proven wrong though. Some nice pages and downloads available already.

http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~spiral/
New member who claims to be taking a more scientific approach to Yaroze development. I have to admit, he does seem to be at the cutting edge of things. Looking at this page on the 26th, I notice it's got a timestamp of the 29th.

http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~topcats/
'Nother new member. An interesting gallery of 3D pics done with Rhino 3D, and a couple of lines of code that spins and fades the sreen buffer in an FF7 style battle fade thing (at 50 FPS: don't remember seeing that one before). Also an allegedly dodgy game available that I haven't tried yet.

http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~bjdarlow/
New member with a rather pretty (and functional) home page. Obviously a Mac user (which he confesses to in his personal info). People are welcome to drop in and say 'Hi' (unless you want to be an unsociable bastard).

http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~smithers/
Richard Smithies (Dick Smitty to his friends) has uploaded gun.zip. Gun game with a difference - you get to blow the crap out of targets using two guns at once Terminator style.

http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~rcutting/
Richard Cutting has made another update to BTS. There are now 5 playable levels and it doesn't crash your Yaroze.

Robert Swan is back. His brother's got a Yaroze, so he should hopefully be picking up where he left off. For the time being, he's uploaded a working archive of the Adventure Game source code.
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~middex2/
New pages in the works.

Don't think I'm going to let a week pass without mentioning the Gravitation Championship. There's some rabid competition going on now - just take a look at the leaderboard:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~shaughnj/gravcomp.htm
James Shaughnessy has also put up a tutorial page for anyone who's thinking of giving it a try (also doubles as a handy introduction to game physics):

You might want to drop in at the main page to bump up the visit counter:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~shaughnj/
Congratulations to Andreas Weissl for being the first person to beat my map 6 course time. You are now the proud owner of a freebie cover disk (one off last months Essential Playstation).
Rob Swan has gone on a record breaking frenzy putting himself at the top of almost every table. Scott Cartier and Andreas Wiessl have also done their bit to put me out of the running.
The provisional deadline is Midnight Saturday (the witching hour on All Hallows Eve..), but quite a few people have called for it to be extended. I'll be sending in a fresh batch of times just minutes ahead of the deadline. Entry is free, and the more people sign up, the better the prizes will be.

Here's the (provisional) prize list:

1st Prize: A Sony Analogue Pad, a Euro Demo 34 disk, and your choice of either Judge Dredd for the PSX or Virtua Cop(with lightgun) for the Saturn.

2nd Prize: A Euro Demo 34 disk and either Viewpoint for PSX, or whichever of the first place prizes is remaining plus Guardian Heroes for the Saturn.

3rd Prize: A Euro Demo 34 disk plus any stuff that no-one else wants.

BONUS PRIZE! All entrants who submit times for all nine maps (no matter how crap) will be put in a raffle to win a copy of TOCA Touring Car Championship.

An appeal to any Yaroze members who went to ECTS this year: does anyone know what tune they were playing at the Acclaim stand (the one with all the gyrating birds)? Any help would be much appreciated. E-mail ben.johnson@canada.com

Thanks to James Rutherford for pointing out a possible mistake in the Yaroze manuals about screen resolutions. It says in the manuals that the Yaroze can manage screen widths of 384 pixels, but it seems that these don't work and the closest number is something like 368. Anyway, you might want to look out for that one.

Mr Frosty speaks: having been comitted elsewhere, he managed to break out of his straight-jacket just long enough to give the following comments about his mini-strop:
"..I think, in general, people are far too hesitant in showing appreciation (for no better reason than it doesn't occur to them, I'd guess). I think feedback is something you can't underestimate, and as long as criticism is constructive - most people will wholeheartedly embrace it. I'm not trying to be bitchy by taking my pages down, and nor do I expect many people to be particularly bothered (or impressed), but as long as people know my reasons and might consider being a bit more relaxed about emailing 'out the blue' then I'm satisfied."
He promises to have his new site together soon with an updated (and glitch free) version of the flibs:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~mrfrosty/

As mentioned in last weeks NYoosletter, James Rutherford is writing the music for James Shaughnessy's 3D Nine Ball Pool Game. The tune is going to be a rag-time styled pub theme (though James Rutherford reckons no one will notice it), but they seem to be having trouble getting piano sounds that work on the Yaroze. JR reckons that he'll have it fixed soon, but if anyone knows a way around it, I'm sure they wouldn't mind you giving them a few hints.
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~mrfrosty/
and: http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~shaughnj/

George Bain has uploaded 'The Ultimate 3D Coding Tutorial (C) Ica/Hubris'. The links were dodgy so I had a bit of trouble finding it. I hate linking directly to people's stuff, so go to:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~gbains/
then the file is in:
./download/3dica221.zip
(even though it would have been easier just to say
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~gbains/download/3dica221.zip)

Fifth week in a row that the Yaroze news page has been updated.

Slight update to the Yaroze tutorials (didn't say exactly what it was):
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/yaroze/docs/tutor.htm

Another Dundee piss-up being scheduled. In future, I'll let people know when they're /not/ having a piss-up in Dundee.

Major scoop for anyone in the London area. The Duke of Albermarle pub (just round the corner from where I work) is shutting down for a couple of weeks. They're trying to sell off all their beer, so they'll be having a lock-in tonight selling drinks at £1.50 a pint with prices dropping throughout the evening. I'll probably be showing up with a couple of mates (I'll be the one wearing round specs, a black cotton jacket, green shirt and dirty off-white jeans carrying a 'Head' rucksack), so anyone who fancies going can show up at any time (mention my name and I'll put half the money toward a packet of crisps =). The pub is just off Dover Street W1, just round the corner from Green Park station (Picadilly and Victoria lines), just off Picadilly. I'll probably be there from six pm onwards.

http://www.andyn.demon.co.uk
PC demo writer who's put together a nifty remake of Manic Miner.

http://dreamcast.ign.com/news/4652.html
An interesting rumour from a couple of weeks back. Some people may or may not have heard about 'Bleem' (an alleged PSX emulation project for the PC):
http://www.bleem.com/
Apparently, Sega have asked the team responsible to come work for them on emulating the PSX on the Dreamcast. This all sounds too far fetched to be true, but imagine the possibilities if it did happen. Wouldn't it then be possible for Yaroze demos to be loaded onto the Dreamcast and run with the emulator? Perhaps it would be possible to port other emulators over to the Dreamcast. It sounds like unverifiable marketing hype to me, but it was good for about a paragraph.

Here's some more game release dates as confirmed by their respective publishers. for retail. The initial batch of GB colour titles all seem to be 56 colour games (they will work on both mono and colour GBs), and don't take advantage of the game-boy-color-only fast processor mode and larger colour palette. Personally, as well as original titles, I hope to see some pixel-perfect NES conversions, as demonstrated by the Super Mario Brothers demo at ECTS. SMB3, Life Force, Snake Rattle 'n' Roll would be a good start... :-)

BODY HARVEST        N64   NOV 13
FIFA 99             N64   DEC 11
LEGEND OF ZELDA     N64   DEC 18
NBA JAM 99          N64   DEC 4
SILICON VALLEY      N64   NOV 6
TUROK 2             N64   NOV 27

COLONY WARS 2       PS    NOV 13
FIFA 99             PS    NOV 27
LEMMINGS            PS    NOV
TOMB RAIDER 3       PS    NOV 27
MICHAEL OWEN'S WLS  PS    NOV 6

COLOUR TETRIS       GB(C) NOV 27
HARVEST MOON        GB(C) NOV 27
NBA JAM 99          GB(C) NOV 27
QUEST FOR CAMELOT   GB(C) NOV 27
TUROK 2             GB(C) NOV 27

http://www.farts.com
Interesting site that stays faithful to its theme. Don't expect it to pander to your intellect though.

Official Dreamcast site is up and running:
http://www.dricas.com

An old favourite of mine:
The following site is best viewed at 800x600 or above and is not suitable for minors. Or cunts.
http://www.superkaylo.com/
The crank call real audio files are a riot.

Project X renamed 'Nuon'. Some PR company came up with the name (same company that thought of 'Thinkpad' and 'Powerbook'). Apparently, it sounds a bit like 'Neuron' and 'New On' and 'Neutron'. They came out with some really poncy explanation about how it sounds like some really small, fast and colourful, cutting-edge machine. Looks like they found out where Mr Minter hides his stash. I've just got a nasty feeling that this project is going the same way as the Jaguar and Multisystem (though it has made it past prototype).

Mattel announce 'Barbie Riding Club' and 'Detective Barbie: Mystery of the Carnival' for the PC. Currently out in the States, a European release date has yet to be announced. There was some stuff about MGS as well, but you don't want to hear about that..

Jobs in the US:
Sales and Marketing jobs at Hasbro:
http://www.hasbro-interactive.com/jobs.html

Tons of jobs going at Imagine:
http://www.imaginemedia.com/hr/index.html

Jobs at GameSpy (Net Games and stuff):
http://www.gamespy.com/jobs/

Psygnosis:
http://www.psygnosis.com/jobs/index.html

Sega:
http://www.sega.com/central/jobs/

I'll be dashing round next week to put together a 'GDUK Special' edition of the NYoosletter (hot on the tail of this weeks 'Halloween Special'). For the time being; a reminder of the finalists and a bit of info about the games and the geniuses (genii??) behind them.

Chris Chadwick          Blitter Boy: Operation Monster Mall
Nick Slaven             Come Baa
Robert Swan             Adventure Game

Nick Slaven:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~nslaven/
32 year old from Sheffield. Couldn't find much out, so I figured I'd fill the gaps in with stuff I made up. Nick Slaven was raised by wolves after being abandoned by his parents at the tender age of 23 (years). His first experience of computers was when local game keepers shot him with tranquilizers and electronically tagged him to monitor his migration patterns. He returned to civilisation just in time to write his GDUK entry. He currently has two projects available for download: 'Pong' (including a version compatible with the analogue joypad) and Come Baa. He also has a heap of utilities and libs available for download. Come Baa is a very original game (which makes it rather difficult to describe). You take control of 'Bob the Border Collie' and dash round a 3D landscape chasing sheep back into their pen. Nick mentions alot of animal behaviour and motion stuff in his references (though he naturally has first hand experience of this stuff being raised by wolves and all), and you can see alot of this in the game.

Robert Swan:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~middex2/
22 year old from London. Quite a bit of programming history for a youngster. Started coding in BASIC with an old Texas Instruments TI99/4A (probably the worlds first 16-bit home computer featuring 16K RAM, 16 colour high-res graphics and built in 14KB BASIC interpreter) back when he was seven. Didn't get much done in terms of games programming till he was thirteen when he got an Atari ST and got hooked on STOS BASIC. Tried his hand at DOS and Windows programming at University but didn't really achieve anything rewarding till he tried out the Yaroze. He regards his Edge anniversary competition entry 'Revolution' to be kind of an embarassment (despite the fact that it's rather good). He's put together quite a few 2D and 3D tutorials. Aside from that, there's just not enough space to list all his projects and achievements.
Adventure Game was written specially for GDUK. Rob put together a basic third person engine with Race Game, and seems to have borrowed some of his old code to put this together. It's a third person RPG with a few slashy bits (and very heavy irony). One of the most (intentionally) amusing games on the Yaroze, and it's incredible how he manages to make it look so easy.

/*
Well, I've had kind of a busy week. I'm the only one in the office at the moment. Some of the staff got wind of the cheap beer offer at the Duke and have headed over there to try it out. We sent some of the more meek members of staff to go and collect them (kind of like sending the lamb after the lion). There's nothing more pitiful than hearing one of the designers call in saying that they're far too drunk to meet a client (before breaking down in tears saying that nobody ever loved them). I'm the only sober one left for a change. Anyway: good news is they've left the storeroom unlocked, so I'm helping myself to some goodies. Sod it. I've got someone to cover for me now. I'm off.
*/

// More blurb
// ^^^^ ^^^^^
//
// This thing is probably best viewed with a package that uses true-type
// fonts and wraps at about 80 chars. Gonna' look shite however you view it
// though..

// The Small Print
// ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^
/*
'NYoosletter' is a newsletter that's sort of dedicated to Yaroze info. Send your contributions, suggestions, novelty toilet seat covers etc. to: ben.johnson@canada.com. View the archive at:
http://www.netyaroze-europe.com/~throwbak/nyoos/index.html

To subscribe, e-mail ben.johnson@canada.com with subject 'Mine's a half and a Pack o' Scratchin's Luv', or just use the form at
http://i.am/a.boring.twat/

To unsubscribe, e-mail ben.johnson@canada.com with the subject 'I was trying to think of an amusing subject and this was all I came up with..'.

Registered at the Post Office as 'Another Bloody NTK Clone' etc. etc.
*/