Simon Holdsworth is a man with a mission - to recreate the loading screen from Doomdark's Revenge with 49,152 miniature beads. He's making good progress on the mammoth project, and already has some striking pictures to show for it.

Yes I admit it's been sitting around on my drive for, ooh, about 66 months, but following some discussion on the WOS forums I've finally decided to upload the last ever un-published copy of Crashed, the fanzine from the pen of Dave Fountain (fountain pen?). For those not in the know, Crashed was a cult zxine from the late '90s which featured Spectrums news and swearing in equal measure. And the occasional naughty pic. Oh yes. We like. So, read on for links to scans of each page (they will also be available on WOS fairly soon - well, as soon as someone bothers to upload them)...

Having not heard anything about the famed (partly due to the non-standard tape format) Warajevo emulator in nearly 3 years, I was a little surprised to see an update on the website. But no, see it I did. A few days ago the author information was updated, and now we see that the source-code for the emulator is released to the public. I've not looked at it, I've seen far too much emulator code to actually have an opinion on it. But that doesn't stop you going and having a looksee.

As if AY-Emulator coming out of beta wasn't enough, I've just spotted that aylet, the *nix-based AY player has been updated to version 0.5. The fix is simple - it allows you to play tracks longer than 3 minutes. Sounds handy.

"Hang on. Did I read that right?" you're thinking. Yes it's true, Sergey has taken the v2.8 branch of AY-Emulator out of beta. The change-notes (now in Windows .hlp format) list a bunch of the changes made since v2.7 was out, so it includes some of the changes we've seen in the multitude of beta versions. Which is a long way of saying I'm not listing the changes here. Laziness rulez!

Like a man possessed, the suitably monickered Mister Beep has been working hard and produced a "non-party demo". As Gasman says, you don't see many of those these days. "The Beeper Demo" is, as the name suggests, a demo using the ZX Beeper to produce the music. This causes me a problem, as I've just had my ZX set up to use ACB Stereo and a SCART cable -- so I don't hear the lovely beeper tones. But I can always pipe the output into my stereo and blast the neighbours eardrums with sweet sweet music. I advise you to do the same.

I figure this is worth a mention just before I go out tonight - especially as it's from the keyboard of Kieron Gillen, one of the "new wave" of gaming journalists. Turns out he likes Chaos. Don't blame him. 'Tis good.

Simply because it's groovy: ZX Shaders. Finally we have a good reason for those expensive £300+ graphics cards that we stick inside our PC's.

LaesQ has uploaded his pics from raww.orgy 2 here. Go view em and don't laugh too hard when you see how freakish icabod is :)

A short note to mention that I've just uploaded the results of the competitions at this weekend's raww.orgy. You can see them here, or you can read on...
Note that the releases will be put online later.