PUBLIC HOUSE

Oh blimey. I really can't think of an intro. Quick, Andy, the phone! (Furious dialling.) Hello, Intro Man? We need your help. Yes. That's right. Basically, we need an intro for a public domain column. Mmm. I see. Good idea. Thanks very much. We'll be expecting your invoice. (Hangs up.) Well, Andy, Intro Man recommends a nice, straightforward 'Here's Jonathan with the last three demo reviews,' as it's clear, concise and to the point. I'll act on his advice at once. (Clears throat.) Oh, damn and blast, out of room.

To finish off Public House, I've three not-bad-at-all demos - one from a new group, one from an established programmer, and one from a musician who likes to really annoy people by also being a good coder but telling everybody he's really crap. Sorry, that wasn't terribly funny, was it? I'll stay late and rewrite it.

Scoriasonic Preview
By Jackson Hollis
Reviewer: Jonathan Nash

If you haven't twigged by now, on last month's covertape, just after Pokerama, was the Game Over Remix, a demo of the three-channel sampled music program Sample Tracer (not Tracker as Jonathan - ahem - corrected it). Scoriasonic Preview contains a similar demo which squeezes more out of the 128K sound chip than would have been thought possible a year ago. It's even got a bit of a sense of humour (in a crap sort of way) as one of the instruments is a sampled burp.

There are actually three parts to the preview - a title screen that uses interlaced graphics to produce a 256x384 pixel image, an 'unlimited vu-meters' screen which, well, has lots of bars bouncing around in time to the music, and the sample bit itself - but to be honest we couldn't really see the difference between the interlaced pic and a normal one, and the vu-meters bit were just vu-meters (No! Andy) (But yes! A Reader) The best bit is that you have to press different keys at different points to find the different parts, so there's lots of proddy fun to be had in order to get a look at everything.

Agent-X's Hypersonic 2 proved that previews don't necessarily have to bear any relation whatsoever to the final release, but judging by the slickness of this peek-at-a-prog, Scoriasonic (the full version) should be spanky.