When I met a man at Forever9 who asked me if I helped him to organise a demoshow for public in one of the biggest and most known cinemas in Prague, I said yes immediately. I think it's a great idea to persent 8bit demo scene to public in this way, as about 1 hour long film with demos. The show is called 8bit Demoscene - 1024 Byte Films, but it's just a name. There will be mostly demos presented in the show, but few intros are planned, too. The whole evening is presented as a show of modern electronic art done in a minimalistic way using limited instruments (8bit computers). The show will be divided to three major platforms - the Spectrum, 8bit Atari and the C64. The selected demos will be mostly those weird ones by skrju, c.p.u., triebkraft+4d but we want to include some Ate Bit production as well as some more. The same style is planned for the Atari (e.g. New Generation) and Commodore (Fairlight demos) scenes. All the stuff will be recorded on a professional film equipment. The show is taking place on 7.5.2008, in Svetozor cinema, Prague, Czech Republic. Here is some info.

According to this post, LCD, the author of the spectacular BMP2SCR tool has announced a new Windows based multiformat converting tool called Retro-X. It converts pictures into various formats including Speccy, SAM Coupe, Amstrad CPC, C64, MSX, Atari XL/XE and many more. Go here to get it.

Yes, it's been a while since I added any news - I'll try to do a catch-up over the weekend. In the meantime I suggest you keep an eye on Speccy Live, especially as they're now posting some news in English.

Just a quick pointer to the new release of Hood's NMI Menu in version 1.33H, before I go to bed. What's new? As the original article says, there's EasyHDD write protect mode added and a new manual in PDF. Download here.

I've just seen some news from local hero Garry Lancaster to mention that he's released a new version of both ResiDOS (v2.06)and the +3e ROMs (v1.36). For me this is quite exciting news as one of the main changes on each of these is MB02+ support (I've been using my MB02+ a lot recently). With ResiDOS we have a full MB02+ port (yay!), along with some ZXUSB/ZXMatrix fixes. With the +3e there's been a boot speed-up (for some devices), and again some ZXMatrix fixes. It's also been proven possible to use these ROMs with an MB02+/MBIDE combination. I'm currently missing an MBIDE, but still - Yay!

I like Pouet as a demoscene resource. You tend to find most new ZX productions there, and people can comment on them (by saying my work sucks, for example). One of the problems is that on the recent comments page it's quite tricky to spot comments made for ZX productions in amongst all of the other platforms. So I wrote a couple Javascript hacks to fix it, which you can find over on one of my other pages. Basically it will go through the page and highlight (actually "lowlight") any productions for the ZX so you can spot new comments a little easier. It's something I wrote for myself but thought someone else may find it useful. Of course it's simple to alter the scripts to work for other platforms, but that's for someone else to do.

Quick pointer to some images pointed to (point-to-point, see) by Garry Lancaster - Ingo has got ResiDOS working on an MB02+IDE system. Currently missing DMA, which will be worked on when Garry gets himself an interface, but... coo, eh?

Just spotted a new ZX prod in the Pouet feed over on the left there, and following the link shows that it's a new album by Skrju titled "onomatopoeia". That word, in case you didn't know, describes words that are the sound they represent. Like "Bang" or "Splat". It's kinda appropriate for a Skrju production. But I digress. I just tried the album very quickly but had crash issues in the emulators I tried except for UnrealSpeccy, so you may want to grab the .scl download. Of course it could just be me being rubbish.

Over on Speccy Live Voxel points us to a couple new tracks over on ZX Music outfit ZiPlanet. They're by Voxel himself and bring to us the wonder that is TurboSound. Available as both mp3 and the ProTracker3 originals, the tracks are "Step by Step" (or is it "Step to Step"?) and a Drum-mix of Riskej's "Memory Games". Go grab and feast your ears. Or something.

Just a quick pointer to a post on the WOS forums by one Winston, developer of the SpectraNet Ethernet interface. It seems that he's just posted off on order for a small batch of prototype PCB's, which he's going to "play around with" in an attempt to streamline the assemblage process. For us this means that he could have some spare prototype boards available, built-and-working-ish in a relatively short time. Keep an eye out. I would guess that these boards would be of most interest to developers rather than the casual user - as without developers writing software, most people won't find the boards much use at all.