Copyright ©1995, 1996, 1997 Gareth Moore
These pages are the 32-bit Acorn Gaming pages which used to be stored at
the University of Warwick, at http://www.csv.warwick.ac.uk/~csuod/ (until the summer of 1996). Since
I am no longer a student at the University they are no longer available at that
address. The old title page logo is shown here.
These pages first "went live" at the end of 1994, and have been through two major revisions, reaching their current state at the start of July 1996, when Andrew Clover at DoggySoft Ltd. kindly offered me free space on their world-wide web server. All the pages are 100% hand-written (that is, I don't use any utility programs to help with the HTML tags), apart from the Database pages which are created using a program I wrote in C++.
I am continually fighting to try and make the pages "work" on all the different browsers available. I try to avoid browser-specific extensions, although there are a few things that look better on the more advanced web browsers. The 'old logo' above, for example, has the text 'correctly' formatted alongside it if viewed using Netscape or Fresco, whereas the other Acorn browsers display only one line of text alongside it. I test the pages using Webite (Termite Internet's web browser), Fresco and ArcWeb (which is effectively the same browser as is used in Argonet's Voyager package).
I have also tried to keep the use of graphics on these pages down to a minimum, which is a tough task since I also want them to look attractive. The main graphic on the contents page is a good example - I wanted it to be significantly larger, but in the end I cut it down to its present size to save download times. After all, if I make the graphics too large then people will just turn off 'image loading' and then the pages will look even worse!
The VIDC1 256 colour modes of the "original" Archimedes are a continual nightmare - I have to choose colours which fit this palette. The background texture was the worst of all - it took me hours to produce a texture which was a pale colour and yet didn't turn to grey or lose its pattern when converted to the standard palette. !ChangeFSI is next to useless, too, since it turns white to grey, and won't produce "true" 256 colour images - and nor will anything else do the job.
Whilst these pages are written in my spare time (not that I have much), I am always trying to improve them, and welcome constructive suggestions. Feel free to email me with your comments.
Thanks too to the hundreds of people who've emailed their comments on the pages. Those who've contributed specific items (sadly very few) are credited where those items occur. I also owe a debt of thanks to Steve Mumford for his complimentary coverage of my pages in his monthly column in Acorn User. Also I use Ian Jeffray's superb WebGif2 for many of the images on this page - it's an excellent application. I've also used Peter Hartley's wonderful InterGif 5, which lets you create optimised GIF animations. And, as stated above, without Andrew Clover's kind provision of webspace free of charge on the DoggySoft website these web pages would no longer exist. He also drew the DoggySoft logo buttons at the bottom of each page.
Finally, thanks to all the people who have read these web pages - currently well over 100,000 of you!
This web space provided by DoggySoft Ltd.