Newsworthy News

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From Issue 10
By Gregory D. George

May 3, 1997

Shareware Notice!

There were two contributors this month. Tom Kilbride of Waco, Texas, who I believe has been a subscriber for awhile. Yes Tom, I fixed your address. :-)

The other contributor was Jason Grainger who wrote me an excellent letter; By hand! Frankly Jason, I don't know how you are able to write that much without messing up. I'll probably use your Atari story in the future, but there's been a lot of Profile Atarian submissions the past month, so it may be a while.

Thanks to both of you for supporting the NL. Without cash donations such as yours, the NL would have gone electronic-only a long time ago. Thank goodness that has not happened yet!!

Iron Soldier II released!

You read that right people, the blockbuster Jaguar game, Iron Soldier, has finally spawned a sequel! I can't tell you how happy I am that there are new Jaguar games still being released. If nothing else, we can rub it in to all the negative people who had long buried the 64-bit cat.

On the somewhat negative side, Telegames was never able to get around the complicated Jaguar CD encryption. They even took the game to Germany to meet with Eclipse (the programmers) to try to get around the problem. Alas, the protection was never broken.

However, Telegames was able to copy the game to writable CD's known as CD-Rs. There's been a lot of talk about the longevity of this media, but my sources at work and on the internet say they should last for many years.

But how is the gameplay? Fellow Jaguarian Wes Powell has declared it his favorite Jag game, topping BattleMorph and Tempest 2000. Others say the controls are identical to the original, and is even more difficult. There are 20 levels, each of them are loaded with texture mapping. But, I don't want to give away too much. There will be a review next month. Probably should have had an Iron Soldier I review this month, but... Ah well.

To get your copy of Iron Soldier II (and the other new Telegames games) call Bits-O-Fun at: 1-800-FUNJAGS or go to Telegames' web site at http://www.telegames.com

TOS Lives??

TOS, the operating system used by all Atari ST computers may not be totally dead after all! John Skruch, one of the last few Atari employees has hinted at negotiations to license the operating system to an unknown source. Some have speculated the company interested is not C-Lab (makers of the C-Lab Falcon) but Wizztronics. This might mean we'll see TOS-based products in the future, but Wizztronics has a bad reputation for being even slower than Atari was for releasing hardware. But, it's still nice to dream of a time when Windows is replaced with something better!

Happy Birthday!

That's right folks, The Atari Times is one year old! Who would have thought only a year later, this NL would still be going strong? Wow, not even I expected it to last this long. I figured all the Atari stuff would dry up, and I'd have to cover stuff that had been covered dozens of times already. Thank goodness for Telegames!!

I originally started the NL because I wanted to put PageStream 2.2 (which I had just purchased) to use. Moments after I opened the box, I started toying with it and had made the banner, "The Atari Times". Right about that time, all the mags had stopped covering the Jaguar and everything just snowballed from there!

Because of the NL, I've learned the basics of DTP and web authoring, began an electronic version, and met dozens of loyal Atarians who have enriched my life. And except for having to fold 200+ NLs each month, there is nothing about The Atari Times that I don't like. (Well, I'd like color and more pages, but...)

My eternal gratitude goes out to all the NL's contributors. I couldn't do it alone. And thanks to them, The Atari Times will remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks you all so much. Let's have another round, shall we? :-)