Talking of unkept promises…
There are a few interesting thing to tell you: at the beginning, when we started, it was more or less the days of Wolf3D, so we thought “why don’t make our readers walk in a virtual 3d environment and find the texts there?”; and then, after Thomas Serafini gave a voice to my little executable file, we started to think about vocal commands. That is, we imagined a huge number of computer freaks who talked to
KULTXXXX.EXE giving orders like “up”, “down”, “back” and so on.
Oh yes, sometimes (a lot of times) we didn’t think so much: we simply did. But the thing we wanted most (at least in the last two years) shifted away month after month. As you can imagine from the title,
I’m talking about a Windows version of the Maniac Viewer.
The main reason we delayed this act of programming was that if we wanted to keep the DOS version alive too we had to limit the Windows version to graphics and sounds; and even if I think that at the time it was good to see a DOS program running 320x200x256 colours smoothly,
I don’t think it was so good to see the same graphic in a window moving slower and feeling like a Dalì painting in a church. And so we waited till now, when, with our hearts aching, we’re going to make a serious cut: no more handshaking with DOS. We put KULT Underground out of reach of 286 and 386 (but now even the Pentium is out of production), but we make unbelievable gains in visual impact and compatibility with sound cards and odd computer configurations.
But I don’t want to tell you too much. We’re still working on the new engine (and on the new editing tools) and so it’s possible that something I think is sure now will be slightly different for
KULT0398.EXE… What’ that? CD-ROM? Internet only? No. none of these things. Reaching W95 means above all two things: you NEED W95 to read KULT Underground, and you CAN’T run it from a floppy. But this doesn’t mean it won’t fit a floppy disk anymore and, well, it’s quite probable you actually CAN launch it from the old-fashioned A:, but you’ll need to have about two megabytes to spare for a while on your computer master disk.
We can’t be sure if the readers will like this move or not.
We thought a lot about it (two years, I repeat) and then we actually went ahead and DID it. Peace. If you want to scream out in pain or sorrow, do it, and we’ll see what we can do to make you feel better again, but it’s something we’ve simply got to try. Don’t you agree?
Ok, that’s more or less all I want to say this month, as long as we don’t mention the fact that the CINEMA section is shining bright like
Venus in the sky (thanks to our local heroes Michele Benatti, Beatrice
Di Venosa and Gabriela Guidetti), that SCOPRIAMO is (wow!) re-born and it seems it’s here to stay, that ARTE is full of stuff (the art critic
Giuliana Galli seems to want to fill all our magazine by her own…) and that, as you can see, we still have texts in two different languages (Italian and English)… and we can’t help mentioning our great Irish friend, Sarah McCann, who did a good half of all the translations…
Last, but not least, “Nella rete del giovane Holden 2”, the art competition we’re going to support for the second year has now got its homepages on-line. We invite you to read more about it at the http addresses:
Have a nice read.
