30th April 2002 - No new downloads from The Hovel.

As some of you may well know, I look after The Hovel using a 56k modem. This wasn't too painful in the early days when the whole site weighed in at a mere twenty or thirty megabytes, but it now runs to something more like three hundred and fifty. Moreover, as meaty DXes and chunky JPeMu files become the norm, looking after this massive blob of data is becoming increasingly intolerable.

To be honest, I could live with that (and have been doing for some time), but in recent weeks I've been getting an increasing volume of e-mails from people asking for more reviews, more articles, more musings and more rants. Simply downloading and uploading files, as well as maintaining the ever-growing download tables is taking up more and more of my Hovel time. Something has to give, I enjoy doing the writing, as in so far as I can tell, you enjoy reading what I write - so it makes sense to concentrate on that.

There are now several other solid, fast, reliable MPU downloads sites out there, and there seems precious little point in me duplicating what they're all already doing perfectly well. If you're not currently using or aware of them, from the LINKS page take a look at MPU World and DX'CELLENT, as well as MPU Emu and Fruit Machine World. Between them these sites host every single ROM and layout ever released, and are always on the ball with new releases.

Effective immediately, the download tables will not be updated again, and no new files will be uploaded to the server. I will not be deleting the download tables or any files from the servers, so newcomers to the scene will always be able to start off their collections using this site if they want to, and you'll be able to return to re-download any old files whenever the need arises.

I sincerely hope that this doesn't cause too many problems for too many of you, I know that there are a good number of people who still use The Hovel as their major point of contact with the scene, and who rely on it for their downloads, but as I've already said, there are now several other sites you can grab files from. To be quite frank, I either lose the downloads from this site or shut it down completely, because as it stands it is using up far too much of my free time and starting to feel scarily like a second job, the last thing I want to do is end up resenting the site and the scene - because it really would be impossible to continue with the writing then.

In return, I hope to be able to get back to adding new reviews and articles on a regular basis (as I did in The Hovel's early days); I've had several articles on the back burner for a while now, and these have never been finished, simply because by the time I've completed the daily file management and table updating duties I've precious little enthusiasm left.

I'm hoping that there are enough of you out there who enjoy and visit this site on the strength of its content to make the new "words and pictures only" Hovel a viable proposition, because obviously, if you don't visit, there's precious little point in it being here. If any of you have any strong feelings on all of this one way or the other, please don't hesitate to drop me a mail.

Finally, I will continue to announce new releases here exactly as I always have done, the only difference will be that the "ROM" and "DAT" links will be missing from the end of the ** NEW RELEASE ** line.

I think that's all for now - have a nice day!