Well, this article could be taken as a little self-promo, and even commercial, but it is worth to mention it here. A new Spectrum 128 game called Thieves Shool has been released by World XXI Soft Inc. It's a multiplayer arcade platform game with many cool features (and AY music by Factor6). It has very professional look, story, etc. The game is not free but worth of trying. The demo version of the game is being prepared at the moment as well as distribution on a classic cassette tape with printed inlay.

You've probably noticed aeon by triebkraft&4th dimension in the pouet zx news list, which has won the 1st place at TUM'08 lowend demo compo (congratz, guys!) last weekend. Now, for all the non TR-DOS users we bring you a little New Year gift. The TAP version of the demo which should work on all 128K Spectrums (thanks to Velesoft). Do download and try it. As a bonus for those with prehistoric browsers, you can watch it online in a GIF animation.

[update] Finally, here is fixed tap version of the demo which doesn't slow down on firm Spectrums 128 and +2. Thanks to diver^4d and Velesoft.

The end of the year is near, just in a few hours, and I've finished my Christmas and HNY fast little demo called Jezisek, inspired a bit by an old Atari 1981 Merry Christmas demo, as well as Karate has finished his (much better) XmasPF demo. Download, watch, listen, read, drink, celebrate!

Good old Chris Smith (of the Harlequin project - nicknamed 'bomb in a box' at the Oxford meet) has posted pictures of the insides of the 6C001E-7 ULA. He's also decided to make a book on his findings/work on the ULA. So get on over there now and register your interest!

There are many WWW sites dedicated to ZX Spectrum128K series.
However it is sad that Spectrum 48K seems to be forgotten. :( People sometimes even don't know that certain programs are made for ZX48K (like Sound-Tracker, Sample-Tracker, The Lyra II, Agony MegaDemo, Shock, and others).
It forced me to make a portal dedicated to ZX Spectrum 48K: zxspectrum48.i-demo.pl

At the moment my news-houndishness is a little slack - due to other "stuff" I'm not actively seeking out news as normal, but posting stuff I "happen across". And I just happened across a news item on Pouet (via Bitfellas no doubt) about a new site-launch called "8Bit Today", dedicated to the 8bit world (including the demoscene). Not much there at the moment, but when raww.org started it was fairly sparse.

Thanks to bverstee for pointing me to this case-mod, the result of someone having far too much time on their hands. They've taken a ZX81, gutted it, and it's now a PC running Windows/Linux. Personally I like the opposite approach of fitting a ZX81 inside a server-tower case, but that's just me.

I noticed mid-last-week that Artfield'2008 had taken place just a few days before, but at the time there was no news about the party... then I noticed that Speccy Live had come up trumps again, pointing us to the results and releases. Nice.

Thanks to Mr.Beep and Yerz for pointing me to some just-released music... first up is Mister Beep's "Romantic Central Processing Unit", a beeper-tune made using "Orfeus Music Assembler" and "The Music Box". Then there's "Ye olde square", a new album by Yerzmyey containing some of his old tunes from early in his AY career on his Timex 2048 + AY box. Go grab. Enjoy these Christmas treats.

JHCon 2008 is on and I have some stuff. Some photos, YouTube videos of Dex riding Sinclair's A-Bike and a little stupid crapmo made for fun. So that's the news.

Update: Another YouTube video from Sunday.
Update #2: Added more photos to Picassa album and photos from Pardal.
Update #3: Photos by Noby and TDM's pictures.