It's almost October which means two things. It's nearly time for a massive beerfest in Germany (and one of my workmates is going - grrr), and it's time for another round of Zlincon. The first proper announcement I saw was from Factor 6, giving some basic details. The party is in just under 3 weeks time (17^th to 19^th October), in Zlin-Priluky, Czech Republic.
For more information (or at least a contact email) Czech out the link above (hehe, did you see what I did there?).

Well if you've been working hard on your Minigame entry, and are sweating away at the keyboard, with only another day of work to do... you may as well stop now and go to the pub. The deadline is here (okay, so maybe it's in a couple hours time or something). A few more additions to the game list have been made, and in a few days time the voting pack should be released, with all you need to check out the bounty. Skimming through the list, there are 14 ZX (and ZX81) games out of the many on the site. Not a bad total. Head over there and check them out. Or wait for the official pack. Hmm.

In the last couple days we've seen a few updates over at Demotopia, so working through them, here's a quick list of what's new. The final batch of Millennium releases are ready for download, along with some fixed CAFe files. There's a couple more demos, and a music collection courtesy of Seth of Ellipse (41 new tracks to stimulate you aurally). Finally Demotopia goes all "Memento" and works backwards, providing the missing releases from Demobit'95. Lovely.

Yeah it's true, there's now another opportunity to make a bit of cash "on the side" as they say, by writing software for the dear Spectrum. I actually received the details of this a couple days ago, but with me being slack-tastic, it's just stayed in my inbox 'til now. Basically, Sintech want a few apps written and are willing to pay top dollar for them (albeit in euros). The full mail is here...

Surely it must be taking it's name from another recent OS (<cough>beos</cough>) but there's no reason why the recently announced BeeOS (see what I mean?) can't be a success on the Speccy. Details are scarce at the moment, aside from a brief mention on both OB and Scenergy, tho' there's a forum online, with the first post stating that two versions will be created: Russian and English (or Western). We'll have to see how it goes.

I don't generally cover the Sinclair QL partly because I know precious little about it. But as mentioned by news-monger Yerzmyey, there's a new machine aiming to fill the gap left by it. The Q40 (and Q60) are motorola-based machines running three different OS's: QDOS, SMSQ/E, and Q60 Linux. They allow running of classic QL software along with new software that takes advantage of the machines features.
Checking the site, it reads a little like the QL's answer to the Sprinter. I guess this is a good thing if you're a QL-fan.

Aah, now that Babel is finally agreeing to translate Scenergy for me I can get on and provide some news from there. First up is a request for information on your demogroup for the upcoming issue #5 of Genz 'zine...

As is becoming the norm here on raww.org, "new tool downloads" are being bunched together, partly so it clears out my list of "here's some news" in one easy step. Handy.
First up over at DJH Downloads you can grab yourself (oo-er! ahem) v1.0 of ZX Amp (the music player), 3.05 of Burial (gfx editor), and 0.76 of AC-Edit (an... editor!). On another note you can also find a report (in Russian) of the recent CAFe party.
This stuff is also available at ZX-Soft Collection along with v0.3 of JPEG Viewer and Turbo Disk Utility v2.1.
Not forgetting Virtual TRD, which also has those files and if you're an amiga owner there's a couple tools for working with .TRD and .SCL files. Lovely.
Finally (for now), if you're a user of ZX Rainbow (personally I'm a very recent convert) then you'll be wanting to download the latest bugfix, all to do with opening files. Yes.

Have you noticed that demo parties have half-lives? Like radioactive material? It's true. When a party is over, the news carries on for a few days, and slowly dies out. It's true also with the recent Millennium party, where we're still seeing ripples. But then it did only end a few days ago. The latest news is not only a photo report courtesy of AMiGA Today, but also a bunch of releases!
I think the first place they appeared was over on V-TRD, so credit where it's due for a speedy upload. You can also grab the files from Demotopia (tho' perhaps not the gfx yet), and the Millennium FTP server should have everything you want, including non-ZX stuff.
Oh, and I've just noticed a small report of the party over on the Realsoft homepage. Seems that V-TRD is up to 422Mb. Nice.

A little while ago I mentioned about a project coming up for Open Source ZX Code. Well, the site is now open, and there's a nice selection of source for you to go grab including music editors, the source for a version of AC-Edit, and... well, go and have a look. I'm only just queueing up a bunch of files. Do the same.
The site itself is fairly basic, but it does the job adequately... it's not unlike Sysel, the SpeccY SourcE Library, started by k3l, also a good place to look for code, tho' I don't think it's been updated for ages.