|  2002 - The Year in Review | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-31 |
2002 is over. For the last news posting this year I thought it would be nice to reflect on what kind of year this has been. So here are some of the things that happened in the last 365 days in the World of the Plus/4.
On the emulator front the coders were quite busy. YAPE went from 0.33 to 0.42. Minus4 went from 2.1 to 2.5. Even the very first emulator (Mr. Lidovski's) got updated to 1.1 (plus the source was released as well). The year brought only one Artifex update back in March. Other than that, we didn't hear much from Zsolt Prievara, leaving the fans of his two excellent emulators a bit disappointed. (We hope that you were just busy, and that you will return!) Christian Nowak has surprised us with PlusIVe for the GP32, plus a port of YAPE.
New stuff on the web. Mike Dailly became the lucky owner of plus4.com. Several new Plus/4 related sites have appeared. James C's site has found it's final home at cbm264.com. The German c16doc.de opened and now carries all German diskmags, including the still running Club Info. Maugli/EDC created a new site for their crew, listing all of their releases. Ati has created a homepage for his stuff as well. And of course Lando's Classix and the Plus/4 Database has merged, more on this later.
New software. 28 brand new releases came out this year. While this may not sound much, it's definitely an increase from the past couple of years. Is the scene really growing? I sure hope so, but only time will tell. Still, respects to all those guys who released something this year. This included: bubis, Erich/Unlimited, Hifi and the TLT gang, James C, Paul Panks (Dunric), Skoro, SVS, and me (Csabo).
The people. So many guys did so many things. Let's see: Lando has done his share of work as usual, scanning tons of covers for the site. Noro has found his way back to the scene, and has given us five cool maps. bubis has been around too. Even though he is coding on the C=64 as a Resource member, he's done some really cool stuff for the plussy. MC/EDC dropped by a few times, and even wrote a D64 utility. That crazy guy from Italy (no other than SVS) hasn't stopped pouring out the cool stuff. His ROM Map and utilities are real gems. Luca has been busy uploading stuff to c64.rulez.org, and even entered a tune for the SID Compo II. James C has gathered lots of interesting stuff, including lots of magazine article scans. The list goes on.
For me, there's a few things too. There was the endless work on this site, when I look at it now, it's hard to believe how far it has come. Written four games for the MiniGame compo, one of them won 4th place. Released the Plus4IDE tool. Hacked a bunch of games to make them work with emulators. The database project keeps growing and changing, the number of programs listed has almost doubled since we've opened Plus/4 World. I'm glad the project is finally public, we're all building this.
It has been a good year. Thanks for everyone who made it happen. Let's hope that we can make 2003 an even better year! |
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| | W-Man Picture and Emu News | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-29 |
 The Faces of the Scene gallery has just received a new addition, a picture of W-Man of Gentlemen Software. Many thanks to Ati (Attila Cseri) for sending us the picture!
The following news items are a from early December, but still worth mentioning: PlusIVe, a Commodore Plus/4 emulator for the GP32 has been released. MESS has been updated to version 0.62. |
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| | UVL Plus/4 World Links! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-29 |
| UVL (Universal Videogame List) is a very ambitious project run by Andrea Doino: it aims to build a database list of all video games on all platforms! This, of course, includes the C=16/Plus4 as well. Users of UVL who search for our games will now receive a platform specific link, which lets them search for a game on Plus/4 World! Cheers Andrea! |
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| | YAPE 0.42 is out! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-17 |
Attila writes, this version is basically a bugfix release. It solves a couple of serious problems (and still leaves a lot more untouched) like the now infamous fullscreen crash...
You can catch the full story and of course your copy of the latest release from the official homepage as always. Many thanks to Attila once again for his contined work with Yape. Cheers buddy! |
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| | 3000 Programs! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-13 |
| It still needs some sorting, but it's official: we have 3000 pieces of Plus/4 software listed! It's hard to believe we came this far. When I joined my site with Lando's I only had around 1600 entries, and now it's almost double that. Special thanks go to everyone who has contributed to this project! |
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| | TomHX Disk Archive Uploaded | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-12 |
| The complete TomHX Disk Archive is now online. 281 files, ~29MB stuff. If you find any problems, broken links, etc. let us know on the forum. That's a lot of stuff to dig into. Happy digging! |
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| | Crackers' Demo 3!!! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-10 |
 In 1992, when the Plus/4 demoscene was alive and well, the third installment of Crackers' Demo was made. A huge collaboration of the scene, the demo takes up three floppy disk sides. Well, you can finally watch this demo again (or for the first time). I, Csabo, have a copy of the demo, but the first two disks are damaged. I still managed extract not less than 19 parts from this cool production. It is now uploaded to EMUCamp in a zip file. I made the parts separately loadable, and they all run surprisingly well on most emulators.
The participants included groups like CNS, DS, EDC, LOD, MTV, SCN and even TEK from Germany. Ah, the good ol' days. |
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| | Two New Tools Added | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-09 |
| From TomHX come there two new utilities for the PC. D64Dir is a small but useful utility that lists the contents of D64 files to a readable TXT file. The second, Detoken (written in 1997) converts Commodore Basic V3.5 .PRG files to readable .TXT files. Both tools come with full C++ source code! Go to the Tools Page to check them out! |
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| | TomHX Disk Archive! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-05 |
 Well, someone did come along and gave us a pretty big gift: a complete disk archive! It comes from a true Plus/4 veteran: Tamás Nagy (AKA TomHX). This old-school programming guru from Hungary has written lots of programs and magazine articles all the way back in the eighties. He has also created numerous hardware extensions. His record has been updated with a picture, email and website addresses (just in case someone wants to drop him a line and thank him ;-).
It will take a while to upload all the stuff, but I'd rather release it as soon as possible, so for now please don't report broken links yet. If something is not there, it's because we didn't have the time. Go check it out now!
I've also added a small link above the logo - please click it and then click the banners to support Plus/4 World (popups!). |
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| | Mega Update!! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-04 |
We have completed another mega update! The software library has more than 2700 programs listed and linked. We have more than 6200 working download links - (almost) all files on all download sites have been added! The VICVentures site was also added, and one site which no longer exists was removed. Today we have also added about 25 screenshots for games, still lots to go. Go to the new uploads page to see the nearly 200 new programs added in the last 7 days.
This means soon we will be down to the nitty-gritty: it's difficult to add more new programs, and any new find will be a rare one... Unless someone comes along with a disk archive or a list to help us out  |
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| | Become A Goonie! | | Posted by Csabo on 2002-12-03 |
 The original Goonies game was made in 1985 by Datasoft for the C=64, based on the hit movie with the same title. Mucsi from the Muffbusters converted it to Plus/4. Unfortunately, the game uses a special loader routine that currently does not work on any emulator. Csabo has created a work-around which you can download in a zip file from here at EMUCamp.
It's an interesting platform style game with puzzle elements in it (many of the puzzles recall scenes from the movie). What makes it unique is that you always control two characters. Now you can play this game on YAPE! |
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