Just a little update on the current "icabod's pc" situation. Re-installing the O/S was trickier than I had planned (due to not being able to find my registration details), but I think I've worked around it (importantly, I want a "legal" pc, so using dodgy reg-numbers isn't something I really want to do).
I've borrowed my girlfriends pc to check my emails on, so thanks to the people who've sent in competition entries. More are always welcomed.
I'll get my webchecker set up shortly after the pc is working, so that I can find out what's been going on in the world of zx, and report on it here. Until that point, I'm kinda in-the-dark with regards "the news", and I don't have time to randomly surf the interweb. Sorry for that.
Ho-hum. Who'd own a computer, eh?

So, at the end of last week my home PC went whoopsie. Damned annoying. At first a couple things went wrong, and it gradually got worse and worse - now it takes about 15 minutes to start up, half of the devices aren't seen, and a bunch of system files appear to be "missing". So I bought a new hard-drive which I'll spend the next few evenings filling with an O/S and trying to recover all my applications and stuff.
Why am I telling you this? Basically, it means that for a couple days I've had no internet access, and no way to view my emails. It'll stay this way 'til probably midweek if I can find the time to fix things. I'm writing this post from work, but I can't access my emails from here. Hmph.
So there you go. Thought I'd tell y'all.

Thanks to Wixet of TCG for sending me some details about Bytefest, a multiplatform (in more ways than one) computer meeting, and successor to Nostalgia'03. It's taking place (eek!) the same weekend as the raww.orgy, on two floors of the VSMIE (it's a college) in the lovely city of Prague.
More details can be found on the website.

I happened to look at Virtual TR-DOS just after an update today, and I see that there's a new version of UnrealSpeccy ready for downloading. This is a great emulator, and definately worth a try if you've not already grabbed it. One of the things that makes it really rather special is that it comes with Source. Mmm. Below you can find out the list of changes while you grab the emulator and the required Roms.

Found a rather interesting bit of news over on the Rob Hubbard website. Rob is, in case you didn't know, a popular Computer musician, producing music for shed-loads of games in his career. Well I thought it was interesting that his latest project is an orchestral version of the music from Iternational Karate, which will be played in a concert in Leipzig later this year.
Hmm.

Yesterday, Sergey Bulba released the latest beta of Ay-Emulator 2.8, his tracker-player. Beta 8 contains a number of bugfixes, detailed below. He followed this up today with a new version (release 6) of his ZX-based "universal PT3-player". It's cross-compilable to include in your projects, and should play tracks created with all versions of Pro Tracker 3.

Just before I left home to head to work this morning I checked my email and saw a message from Jeffie, who has kindly provided a translation of the raww.orgy info-file into Russian. Now that I'm at work, I can't for the life of me recall who did the actual translation (tho' I seem to recall it may have been Miguel of CPU - I'll confirm that later if I'm wrong).
The translation is of v0.4 (the latest as I write this), and can be downloaded from here. I'll upload it to the party-site when I get a chance.
As a side-note, space at the party is now looking to be kinda cramped, but please feel free to send entries for the competitions - you may even win a prize. Woo!

A little note before I head off to work, I see that a new version of ASpectrum has been released. v0.1.7 has a few changes in it, now supporting several additional models of Spectrum: 16k, Inves, Spanish 128k, and +2. It also features working with snapshots (I'm not sure if it did this before). Ok, so the feature-set isn't the greatest so far, but importantly the project is Open Source, and written in C. You'll need to translate the site from Spanish, tho'.

Thanks to Wixet of TCG for pointing out that speccy.cz now has a download for the book "Computer Games 1". This book was written by Frantisek Fuka, aka Fuxoft, and covers a lot of information about ZX Games within it's 100 pages, including it seems details of the various types of "pseudo-3d" that some games have used. Frankly you can't fault a book that features some of my favourite games, such as "Movie", and "Academy". However, you can fault the fact that it's only in Czech at the moment. Now, who has the spare time to translate it for us, eh?

Being kinda "out of the scene" recently, there's a few bits-and-pieces I've missed from around the scene. I know, you can berate me when you come to the orgy. One of the things I missed is a recent addition to the hosted-list over at speccy.cz. It's called ZX-Videos, and it does what it says on the tin - it's a collection of videos relating to the Speccy. There's the famous "Spectrum Diamond" video (weighing in at 914Mb), videos from various parties and shows, and even a 136Mb download of our own Gasman and his NotCon talk.
Mmm, bandwidth-munchingly good.