Site Mission

The nostalgic days spent imagining if should risk sneak in a corner in Laser Squad, the decision at Lord of Chaos of waste some mana in some pixies to eventually do a stealth search for a dragon herb or dare casting an illusion in Chaos are those unforgettable moments of pleasure that a lot of us spent playing in old Zx Spectrum days.

It's due to the wonderful creativity of Julian Gollop and his magical or futuristic universes that we must thank all this. This site is a tribute to someone that close to a quarter of century made a strong and clear mark in the way of design strategic games.

His games are his eternal legacy and my site only an ephemeral altar of worship to his work. But at least it lasts I have the hope that will stronger the legion of loyal fans with new devotees. Julian Gollop and his team surely deserve reverence for their gameplay vision and their iconic strategic games.

Why Chaos Squad?

Chaos Squad or ChaoSquad name choice is easily guessed if you know Julian Gollop work and his games titles. Is the obvious combination of Chaos (+ Lord of Chaos) and (Laser) Squad. Melting two different ages, merging the two universes styles always presented in his work, the futuristic side (Rebelstar Raiders, Rebelstar 1/2, Laser Squad, Ufo/X-Com series, LS Nemesis...) and the magical side (Chaos, Lord of Chaos, Magic & Mayhem...). Is like representing the Yin and the Yang of Gollop work.

The logo (check top-left corner of this webpage) is inspired in Target Games logo motif (Gollop owned company for Laser Squad distribution). I removed the inner "T" and replaced it with the symmetrical symbol of Chaos concept.

About the Site Author

My name is Nuno Barros and I'm from Portugal. My scholarship education was Advertising & Marketing but for living I'm a webdesigner. I in my youth as others of my age grew playing my speccy 48K. Laser Squad was my favorite Gollop game but I quite enjoyed a lot playing other Gollop's games like Lord of Chaos. I only played the antecessors (Chaos and Rebelstar series) several years later so I always preferred his last two Spectrum games due the strong bond created with both.

My love for Laser Squad driven me to do a Laser Squad Editor for ZX. It's mostly in Basic, it's bad coded, slow and clumsy but work well enough to change all "Moonbase Assault" scenario. There is a map and a graphics editor, a name, character data and weapon/armor table editor. It was ready to edit other scenarios but I never did the needed "drivers" for them. You can find it soon in Laser Squad Editor section if you are interested (it lacks do a proper documention first). A great irony is that after all the hard work I had my lazyness prevented me of do a new full scenario with it.

I also have an (old) dream to do a roguelike game (a kind of RPG) someday. In on a hiatus for now and I hope get spare time to really start it someday.

Unfortunately now my time for gaming aren't the same than years ago. My (2nd) Spectrum is in a box (don't know if still works!), I don't enjoy using my PC for gaming and the most advanced game console I have is a dusted Dreamcast (sometimes used for ZX emulation on a TV). I love playing Gollop games but I reckon that my enthusiasm for them never made me a greater player. I'm easily defeated when playing with other (human) players so the world don't lost much for me not playing much more ;)

If years ago I never had a chance to buy Gollop originals for ZX (in Portugal software piracy was permitted and shops only sold cheap copied ones instead of importing the originals) later in 16 bit era I redeemed myself trying buy almost all of them.

Boxed Gollop games I own:

Rebelstar 2 (Your Sinclair edition), X-Com Apocalypse (UK edition), Magic & Mayhem (UK Edition), X-Com Collection Edition (Ufo: Enemy Unknownn + X-Com: TFTD + X-Com Apocalypse)

"Related" boxed Gollop games I own:

The Art of Magic - Magic & Mayhem (never played this much), X-Com e-Mail (got it before X-Com Collection Edition)

Other (non-Gollop) favorite games for Spectrum:

Enigma Force, Solar Fire, Nato Assault, Heroes of the Lance, Rogue, Swords and Sorcery, HeroQuest, SpaceCrusade. Also I like Mike Singleton games (War in the Middle Earth is my favorite and not Lords of Midnight as everyone's favorite) and the board wargames of R.T. Smith. (I will review and reedit this list later)

In other platforms:

OmnibandTK (a 4-in-1 roguelike), a lot of RPG's like Arcanum and Diablo 2, some FPS as Op Flashpoint and for online only RTWC Enemy Territory. (I will review and reedit later also this list later)

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Site History

This Chaos Squad website that you are looking at is online since 1st March 2007 but this site has a really old history.

Chaos Squad first website went officially online on 20th December 1998. The “short” address was then http://gollop.homepage.nu. It was hosted in defunct Xoom free-hosting server at http://members.xoom.com/chaosquad/ and later in http://members.nbci.com/chaosquad/ when Snap.com and NBC.com merged to NBCi. The media group later discontinued hosting in 2001 and that was also the death of Chaos Squad v1 since for lazy reasons I never did the effort of redoing it. However, the heart of Chaos Squad was somehow kept alive because before in November 1999 at e-Groups (later Yahoo! Groups) I did opened a forum to help Chaos Squad activities. Sadly lack of interest (mine and the members itself) flourished and the group was even marked was inactive in 2001. Without true signs of life, I decided near 2003(?) that was time to close the group hoping that my dream of remaking Chaos Squad was someday true.

Indeed! In the homepage of Chaos Squad v1 I had the guts to dress an armor on Julian Gollop.	A inner screenshot. All very packed and free space for more text was a true need.

1st Chaos Squad website was that time daring in a graphic and technical way. The site itself opened in a unusual panoramic pop-up window (rare for that time), had a lot of images and made use of Javascript for navigation funcionalities. I had to keep two flavors of the site, one for Internet Explorer and other aiming Netscape for optimized navigation since difference in Javascript and HTML code for both were huge. It were the silly browser wars of that time. That bold features granted me some congratulations but also caused some complaints in places like news:comp.sys.sinclair where I keep some flaming but interesting discussion about if I should get or not ridden of Javascript and instead have full support for the beloved "tech-geek" text browser Lynx.

That feeling of being too "advanced" can still be felt online reading the speccy.faq from August 2000:

"Chaos Squad! is Nuno Barros' tribute to Julian Gollop's games. However, you will need Netscape or Internet Explorer v4 to access it due to its dependence on Javascript :-( "

Well, in those days of course I never had intention of left anyone out of the site, more than 90% used or Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4, Javascript was supported by them, I did versions of the site for both browsers and I had a warning before enter, so somehow I think I haven't many reasons to regret to doing it in that way. Reading that quote in our days is a bit funny.

Site Tech Info

Following web standards were an issue to achieve in this site. I made all efforts to comply with XHTML 1.0 Strict rules. It should be compatible with most used browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox/Mozilla and Safari) in major OS (Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX and Linux variants). During development was tested in Internet Explorer 6.x and Firefox 1.x. I corrected later some minor Internet Explorer 7.x glitches. I hope that further versions of that browsers should be free of serious problems. If you find significative bugs in other versions please warn me.

For client/user side (your browser) the site requires Adobe Flash technology but for non essential contents or navigation. JavaScript is applied to improve certain user commodities but not required. Image zoom enlargement (provided by Highslide JS) uses JavaScript/CSS techniques but degrades nicely (opening the image instead in a new window) when JavaScript not available.

You can check XHTML, CSS, RSS and also accessibility standards in the bottom of every Chaos Squad pages. Please warn me if for some reason I missed to comply somewhere. I'm aware that news sections have some external code links that aren't XHTML compatible. I hope correct that later.

The visual layout of this site isn't liquid (resizable for different screen resolutions) and I decided to aim to 1024 screen width users. Normally I still care a lot for 800x600 users but with 17¨ & 19¨ TTF massification and new videocards in our days shouldn't be a big concern. Several statistics show more and more that 800x600 users are rapidly losing quota. However, I have the right to be accused for not supporting well the 12% users still using smaller resolutions.

Chaos Squad is hosted in a datacenter in Portugal. My account is hosted in a Apache server which provides the PHP engine to deliver and manage the news (powered by News System at winged.info). No MySQL databases are required for now so access should be fast and hangtimes short. Soon the Forum/BBS will be implemented. I'm yet looking for a light, clean, transparent script that could fit well in my design and that can be easily CSS customized.

Navigation Interface Help

Hopefully you don't need to read this to find about how to navigate in Chaos Squad. Just follow follow common internet navigation website conventions. Please complain if you feel that the navigation interface is not well suited for you.

The five major sections are present in the big menu in top of every page and it have shortcut access keys. You can find also a more detailed menu in the bottom of each page. For navigation help all links are "block" displayed with different background like this one. External link are also dotted and underlined displayed and will open in a new window like this example. A hierarchical path showing where your are is always present after the page title and just before contents. You will also have a sitemap (not avaliable for now) to assist you. You find that link in the bottom of every page. Also when needed there is a Quick-Jump sublinks section on your right for faster reach of specific contents in the same page.

Game Timeline section could be tricky navigating for the first time and is the only section of the site with multiple subsections. A game table displaying all games done by Julian Gollop is always present in this section. They are showed in a chronological style. Older are more left, the most recent at your right. The modern (16bit/32 bit games) are show in a vertical list. Older are in top, recent bottom. Game info and contents were divided and spanned in several pages since showing all contents for certain games would produce very long webpages. So, after a game choice you could have a tabbed menu accessing more info about the chosen game (gameplay help, media/images, editors and clones, files/ downloads).

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Disclaimer, Copyrights and Credits

This website and their staff are not affiliated with Julian Gollop, Codo Games, neither was ever relationed directly with Mythos Games, Blade Software, Target Games, Hasbro, Microprose, Krisalis, Firebird, Silverbird, Red Shift, Games Workshop or any possible former company involving Julian Gollop and his team.

Chaos Squad is a non-profit website and not have commercial purposes. Hosting and domain is fully paid by site owner Nuno Barros that is used to host his personal work portfolio mediacorporation.net and other leisure personal projects like Chaos Squad itself and uses great part of mediacorporation.net account resources.

Since hosting has a certain maintain cost, Advertising Banner traffic provided by third-parties companies probably is implemented. The revenue will be used to reduce hosting cost or if remotely possible to improve Chaos Squad server features. Chaos Squad is always open to free banner exchange in order to promote organizations and websites with common interests. Check Promoting and helping for more info.

All site design, the conception and some texts are responsibility of Nuno Barros / mediacorporation.net and therefore copyright are reserved under Creative Commons License in Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.5 variant. Artwork copyright exceptions in this are made to original artwork conceived for Julian Gollop's software or other artwork from others eventually mentioned when possible. Provided texts will identify his author when the source is knew and only will be displayed in this site when permitted.

All software included is always freely available in this site and is copyright of the respective authors and it is only distributed under expressed licence of the same. If for any reason a work of yours are not permitted be distributed anymore, please ask me for the removal of it.

News management are powered by News System of winged.info. Thank you for the help provided. A simple, flexible, clean and recommended system.

The image zoom engine is provided by Highslide JS. A easy and powerful implementation system to avoid popup-up windows or change the page only to see zoomed images.

Acknowledgements & Thanks

These thanks are for people who helped me in the first version of Chaos Squad. Later other acknowledgements wil be added:

Lee Tonks (Blood) for the TAP files of Lords of Chaos and Laser Squad

Jim Grimwood (of SPOT) for the SU logos, magazines info and games reviews

Ivan N. Yarygin for the screenshots and info of UFO - Enemy Unknownn and UFO 2 - Devils of Abyss russian clones

Stairway To Hell - The premier repository for BBC and Electron software. My request of help there successfully lead to get Gollop BBC first games

World of Spectrum - We couldn't living' without that website. Essential for Spectrum lovers. A useful resource for Gollop aficionados. Most info and some files couldn't be here if WOS wasn't a reality. Spectrum universe is one most organized, documented computing systems thanks to Martijn van der Heide, his associates and hundreds of contributors.

Special thanks go to an old speccy pal Pedro Delgado for let me release his Lord of Chaos Wizard Editor in this site and several other gifts he presented me. Also, greets and thanks to Johan von Nameh and his friend TSCA of Laser Squadron site for their love and dedication for Laser Squad.

And evidently, a BIG thank you to Julian Gollop not only for the help but also for granting authorization for public distribution of his games. A big cheers for making so many great games.

Privacy Policy

Chaos Squad cares about your privacy. This also is obliged by European Community rules and by Portuguese law to protect and secure all information inserted by users and data gathered during navigation in this site. Your data and personal info will never be distributed to a third party without explicit authorization of the users.

The user can request the visualization, rectification or removal of his personal data previously conceded simply contacting us. See Contacts for e-mail.

Data about your IP, geographic origin, browser and operating system specifications are logged by the hosting server for statistics reasons helping to adjust this site to users navigation commodity. This data will never transferred to third party without our consent. Some data can be obtained by third parties like advertising banner providers during user navigation info only for site traffic ranking purposes and will never put in risk your privacy. Consult specific privacy of other services when necessary.

Promoting and Helping

Your help is welcomed! If you have any info about Julian Gollop life, an interview, a magazine review or any tips, a non mentioned editor or clone for his games please contact me. I will appreciate very much your assistance.

If you like to promote this site or if you also have a related thematic site I willing to do a fair exchange of promotion links. Chaos Squad banners are in the forge. Please drop a word just bellow in Contact.

Contacts

Since this site is for your delight, all feedback about it are welcomed. Your opinions, critics and suggestions will be a motif for future and further improvement of Chaos Squad.

I will also add soon as possible an direct contact form for your convenience. For now, feel free to directly e-mail me to this e-mail address. For spam caution, please remove "(evilspam)" replacing it with "@" sign.

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Quick-Jump

Site Mission

Why Chaos Squad?

About the Site Author

Site History

Site Tech Info

Navigation Interface Help

Disclaimer, Copyrights and Credits

Acknowledgements & Thanks

Privacy Policy

Promoting and Helping

Contacts