Yes, I know it’s late… but I’ve been away from home since last Wednesday and haven’t had a chance to sit down and write anything! Anyway, Retro Gamer 86 is in the wild and the homebrew reviews are Ghost Castle 2 and Genesis: Dawn of a New Day both for the Spectrum (a great Sabre Wulf-esque adventure and scrolling shoot ‘em up respectively), which are accompanied by NES time-based blaster Blade Buster and an Oric implementation of the classic Impossible Mission.
There’s a quirky little shooty puzzler called Kagnyan for the flash game, a futuristic rendition of APB called Space Police on Superhighway 9 for XBLIG , more gun-based action with Nova 2010 for the PC and Rocky Memphis and the Temple of Ophuxoff gets remake of the month. The Homebrew Hero interview is with Genesis author Utopian.
Staying with the subject of magazines, whilst rooting through some of my stuff (taking up a significant amount of space in my dad’s garage) I found a few odds and ends including my two TIB Ultimate drives, a Commodore SFX Sound Expander and the magazine pictured here…
…called Public Domain – this is the ninth issue, dated August 1992 and it covers PD and shareware for the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS-based PC – there’s a piece on how highly expensive CD technology is being used for public domain collections (with a note that Amiga users will need an A570 for their Amiga 500) and a boxout on page 75 titled “what’s CONFIG.SYS and how do I edit it?” raised a slightly pained but nostalgic smile.
This find was a surprise because, along with absolutely no memory of buying the thing in the first place, I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that a magazine dedicated to the modern day equivalent of PD and shareware, the indie and homebrew communities, could work as the focus for a magazine and that I’d be first in the queue to both buy and preferably write for such a publication! In fact, now I can back that argument up a bit the only problem I can see is advertising; Public Domain is almost exclusively comprised of PD and shareware libraries like Scorpion Shareware and that kind of firm all but went away with the proliferation of the internet.
Still, I’m sure there are other relevant companies out there who’d consider advertising at the slightly more technically savvy audience something like this would attract and, if anyone decides to go for it, don’t forget where the idea came from and that I’m cheap!
Oh, another find was a promotional toy for Banana disks, probably from the mid 1980s when we’d get bulk loads of 5.25″ floppies from Commodore and Personal Computer World shows in London. Beep beep!
