Welcome to Issue #8 of the #warez newsletter.  

This is essentially so:

a) I don't have to answer the same question 25 times in the space of 20 minutes
b) So people have a clue what is going on, at least some of the time.

PLEASE distribute this to EVERYONE you see on the channel, and put it on
ALL the sites you are on, it'll make all our lives easier if we all have a
constant base of information to go by.  And I'm not some kind of one-woman
DCCing machine, so any help I get is very appreciated.

Again, the newsletter is due out Monday's and Thursday's.  Both of these
dates are somewhat up in the air all the time, as I do have other things
to do with my life (believe it or not).  Sometimes I might even miss a
week.  Sometimes I will be away (ie., End of November I will not be in the
US, so I will not be writing one for about a week or so, give or take).

Don't hassle me for the newsletter, it'll come out when it comes out, this
is like a full time job sometimes, and it gets hard to keep up with all
the stuff, especially when lots of releases occur simultaneously, I get
very behind in writing stuff:) 

Also, any dates mentioned in here, follow the US format for dates, that is:
Month/Day/Year, so 10/20/93 is October 20th, 1993.  Sometimes, I will not edit
the sentences directly, I'll just throw an update for something after the
fact.

Any time information is given in terms of Eastern Standard Time.  That is, the
East Coast of the US (where I live).  -6 GMT, I believe.

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Games - 

Doom, heck, I'm sick of writing about it! Get a back issue!:)

Ok what the hell, about fifteen million things were just released, and
even more are due out within the next day or two, so this is gunna be tough:)

Dungeon Hack.  Loosely based around the old NetHack game from years ago
(people still play actually), this is a pretty nice game, I'm gunna keep
this around for a while due to its features.  Which features you ask?  It
will generate an entirely random maze every time you play the game, with
many configurable options for levels, and hardness, and monsters, etc.  It
looks REALLY nice.  More on this, and it's crack, later on, in the "People
" section:).

Unnatural Selection, this is one of the new ones from Maxis, the people
who make SimCity.  It looks kinda mediocre to me, especially considering
the size of the damned thing.  I think it kinda looks like a modification
of SimLife, with a higher fun factor (SimLife, unfortunately, was pretty
low on the fun factor).  You basically take animals, and mutate them,
introduce new ones in, mate them, make them fight, feed them, starve them,
etc.  It seemed amusing in the sense that you can watch individual
animals, and see what they are doing (The mating scenes are ESPECIALLY
amusing:)), which is a neat feature, but I doubt it will hold my attention.

Aces Over Europe is out.  No one is playing it, as predicted.  Like I
said, it's just another bad flying game from Dynamix.  They should stick
to the stuff they were good at in the past, games like Willy Beamish, and
the eternally old Operation : Firestart.  This flight simulator stuff got
tired after Red Baron, give it up guys.

Indy Car Racing.  It's the sequel to some old racing game that some people
liked.  I saw the demo, and it looked kinda like Virtua Racing in the
arcade (Ok, not THAT nice), but aside from that, it just seems like your
typical racing game, really nothing to write home about.  So far, the
consensus has been pretty poor on this game, most people label it as
"Rather mediocre."

Penthouse Hot Numbers.  So it wasn't massively awaited, I'm always a fan
of computer porn, but this sucks:) It seems that in Germany, there are
different graphics modes, so this thing just barfs (That's sarcasm for the
mentally impaired).  I'm kinda mad actually, it's something to fuck around
with when your bored out of your skull:)

Terminator Rampage.  Yet ANOTHER fucking Wolf3d ripoff, just this one is
oversized, as well as overhyped and boring.  It's just another shootemup,
no redeeming features, except for GUS support.  I didn't bother with this
one either, and again, the consensus so far has been pretty poor.

Warriors of Legend and Companions of Xanth are both out.  Especially after
the fanfare for Xanth, I haven't heard shit about either game, nor did I
bother downloading either, cause I'm waiting for real good stuff to come out.

Yay.  Epic Pinball full release.  Yet another crappy pinball game.  Hold
me back or I might go out of control.  Let's kill this pinball crap, shall we?

Stuff that's due out like today:  Sam & Max Hit The Road, and SimCity
2000.  These games are among the most waited for games of the year
(SimCity2000 possibly of the entire decade), and if their demos are a good
indication of what these games will be like, they WILL live up to their
name.  I personally will be BUYING SimCity2000 the second that I see it in
a store, cause I know it's gunna rock.  I won't go into details on either,
read a back issue, there's information on both games back there.

I wrote that on Friday, half is still true.  Sam and Max is due out today
(Monday November 15th), but SimCity2000 has been delayed another 2-3
weeks.  This really sucks my dinkle, and I'm very mad.  Unless of course
the delay is so that they can put the GUS drivers in with it.

Syndicate Data Disks :  Here's the low down on these much-awaited puppies.
They should be out late November, they will include 20 new *HARD*
missions, and 10 new MULTIPLAYER missions!  Multiplayer games will allow
for 2-8 players per mission.  Unfortunately, rumour has it that they will
at first only allow play over NetBIOS systems.  Two new weapons will also
be introduced, the "Clone Shield" which makes you appear as a civilian for
a limited period of time, and "Air Strike" which calls up the bombers,
which appear on your radar screen, and drop bombs all over the enemy.  All
of this, of course, is subject to change:)

Mega-EM v1.10 for GUS, is now due out on Monday, at last check.  I heard
from a beta-tester who got his copy several weeks ago that it is FLAWLESS
in emulating both SB DAC and MIDI at the same time.  This should be an
absolute godsend when it arrives:)  I REALLY want this to come out, cause
Dungeon Hack should sound fuckin sweet with it, as well as countless other
games:) (Dungeon Hack is my game du jour).      

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Applications and Utilities -

FrameMaker 4.0 is out, and around, and it works.  It's a good DTP program,
check into it, if you like that stuff.

Windows for Workgroups v3.11 is out.  This is a COMPLETE version of
Windows, and I recommend anyone that runs Windows to get it, just delete
any of the networking files that you don't want.  It will not delete any
of the old setup information you had, just augment it with the new data
(ie., you won't lose your old groups and stuff).  It looks nice, and
includes GREATLY sped up disk operations (about 150% faster) and a 32-bit
File Manager, among other things.

OS/2 stuff.  Two interesting things have crossed my "desk" recently.  One
is "OS/2 for Windows."  It allows you to take any pre-installed version of
Windows, and overlay OS/2 over it.  This allows IBM to not bother paying
MicroSoft for any patents they are using, a pretty shrewd move by IBM.  I
haven't seen this anywhere yet, and I haven't spoken to anyone who has
used it yet, more on this later.  The other OS/2 item that I have been
informed of is OS/2 Peer-To-Peer.  They MAY release this, with some more
features, as OS/2, but it is possible that this will be released in a week
or two.  Essentially what it is, is the equivalent of OS/2 v2.1 with the
Base TCP/IP install, that is, you can't run a network, like with the full
install, but you can be a client on a network, or be in a Peer-To-Peer
network (As the name would imply).  Again, I should have more information
on this shortly.  It sounds rather interesting though.

PhotoStyler v2.0 is out, and people like it.  It supposedly is as good as
PhotoShop, and better in some places, such as scanner support.  A
PhotoStyler v2.0 SE has been sighted by me, but I didn't download it.  It
supposedly has more features than the regular release.  I'll be looking
into this over the weekend.

There are also a bunch of new beta applications for OS/2, including
HyperAccess/5 for PM and AmiPro 4.0.  HA/5 is bad on ANY platform, so who
really cares about it.  It's the most non-intuitive program I've ever
encountered.  A six year old coding in Ada could write a better term
program, so just ignore this crap.  AmiPro 4.0 has been tried by some
people, and most think it sucks ass.  It's not multithreading, and is
missing a lot of features that people have come to expect from this
quality application.  Chalk another one up for Lotus sucking.

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News around the channel:

I *beg* all of you to PLEASE pass this around to everyone in the channel,
and even put it on boards and sites if you want, it'll really help educate
the stupid masses:)

The #warez-news is now officially a part of the new magazine, Lucid.  I
am also head writer for that magazine, bringing my magazine total to 6
(Adrenalin, Lucid, Xpress, Game Bytes, BiTCH, and this newsletter):)  The
newsletter (all issues that fit) will be in the forthcoming issue of
Lucid, it should be released end of this year, early next.

This issue is also late.  I have other things to do with my time (Like a
massive lab that was due Wednesday, and I didn't finish till Friday
morning), that keep me from releasing this on time sometimes.  So eat me. 
Please don't bug me constantly about when it will be released, or if it's
out.  

LoST is now accepting members, Xerobe and I are getting too big for this
group.:)

I cracked my first PC game!  And I released it, and I was like the first
person to release one!  I'm cool.  Dungeon hack was the game.  I took out
my old Soft-Ice, which I had no idea how to use, figured it out in like
half an hour or so, and traced all the stuff.  Got to the doc check,
searched memory for the word that was the answer, then set a break point
if that memory was accessed.  Then once I knew what commands were checking
it, I just changed the JZ to a JA (Jump on Z set, to Jump Always) so that
it always thought you answered correctly.  Had to do this twice, since
there were two seperate sections of code.  I editted the EXE with Norton
Diskedit (Hey, I coulda wrote a little C prog to do it for me, but why
bother), and sent it around.  I'm quite impressed with myself:)

Hey! Idiots! Yeah I mean you reading this : When you want something, why
the hell do you ask a person in private?  ASK THE GODDAMNED CHANNEL,
someone out of 40 people is much more likely to know the answer to your
question, than the one person you messaged.  I've already been asked five
times for the "Disney Screen Saver", when this person could have easily
asked publicly, and gotten a much better answer.  And also, in my case,
and in many other, I've got fuckin 3.5 meg quota, I *DON'T* keep anything
online, so stop bugging me.

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Disclaimer : I don't know where to find ANY of the stuff mentioned here, nor do
I know where you will be able to find it, nor do I have any of it "online", so
don't bother asking me.  Also, remember, stuff usually doesn't hit the net for 
a few days after it's release, so if something gets released, you usually
won't get it immediately.

I'm not going to put any requests into the newsletter.  It'll get much too
large for me to maintain, and people will just start ignoring it anyway.

I'm probably going to change the filename on this soon from #warez-?.news
to something that is more readily acceptable by systems that dont like the
format (the # being first, and the four letter extension).  I'll probably
change it on issue #10.

If you see anything in the newsletter that is wrong, just tell me, or tell 
someone to tell me.  If you don't know who I am, tough noogies:)

I don't mail this, I don't put it on sites.  If you want it from me, you
have to dcc it, otherwise you can screw off.  Find someone else to get it
to you, I'm not a knowbot or something.

Someone else is taking care of any mail requests.  If you want the
newsletter mailed to you, mail an43404@anon.penet.fi, and Xab| will put
you onto the mailing list.  Knock yourselves out, oh ye of crappy vaxes
and propietary systems.

I also appreciate any information I can add to the newsletter about just the 
scene in general, or any kind of releases.

"I don't make the news, I just report it."

November 15th, 1993  

-Your Favorite #warez Lesbian.
