Of course the problem with waiting a week or so before posting news is that you sometimes need to update it straight away. Like now, when I spot a new release of ZXSP, the MacOS X-based ZX emulator. Just a couple bits of tweakage in this release, with stereo audio output and new context menus.

Four of the Wild Compo entries at this years' Forever9 party were ZX Spectrum 1-bit tunes... that's to say multi-channel music played through the Spectrums beeper. And being a good news-hound I've completely neglected to mention the results of an unofficial competition held at the party of the four tunes. The results are below, along with links to mp3 downloads kindly provided by Mister Beep.

I quite like the look of the K-Mouse interface detailed over on Velesofts page, as does Ben Versteeg of Ben's Hobbies. He likes them so much he's been hard at work making a batch, and is now ready to pass them on to like-minded ZXophiles. The price is 45 Euros (plus postage). He's also just posted a quick-reference manual for the device, which is handy as much of the current docs are in Czech.

With the increasing use in large-capacity storage systems for the ZX Spectrum it's nice to see that people are still using the "old-fashioned" method of transferring data. I've previously mentioned k7zx, the system for loading high-speed tapes (incidentally I think I neglected to mention that v4.3 was released). This forms part of "Project Otla", which has just had a v2.1.0 release. Most of the documentation is in Spanish (?) but the project as a whole seems to be to create a multi-platform k7zx equivalent. Indeed on the non-Google project page you can see examples of Project Otla working with ZX, CPC, and MSX. It's an interesting project, and shows what can be done with "simple" tweaking of the standard load routines.

If like me you don't speak or read Czech, all is not lost when it comes to Shucon, the non-party scene-party holiday. For piecing together information from the Shucon homepage and from ZX Magazin you can work out that Shucon this year will be taking place from the 12th to the 17th of July 2008. Yes, Shucon lasts a whole week, and is pretty much a holiday for sceners. Lovely.

Thought I'd point you over to Winston's Spectranet page, where you can read up on the latest developments with his ZX Ethernet project. But this post isn't in the "Hardware" section, oh no, for his latest updates are relating to the Library Code that we'll be able to use to do stuff. Ok so there's not much there at the moment, but there's API detail for the all-important "socket" call, so you can write your IRC clients with some stub functions at least.

I see that a couple days ago kio (I think) released a new version of ZXSP, the Speccy emulator for MacOS X. This is v0.7.2 preview 6, and adds a couple features since the last version - Audio input and output from a file. It also comes with new ZX80 and ZX81 ROMs, courtesy of Paul Farrow, and also now part-emulates the Jupiter Ace.

Upcoming in 2008 is the next Retro Fusion event. Being held in Warwickshire, England on the 19th and 20th of July 2008, it's an ideal chance to go along and play about with a bunch of retro machines. Details are on the webpage. Yes.

As I've informed you in this article, there's a new FlashII tool for MB02+ with MBHDD and 29C512 or 29C010 Flash ROM chip. When installed, it allows you to boot directly from the hard drive or Compact Flash card (disk @3) instead of using obsolete floppy disk. How to do a mod, which stands on a simple change of the old EPROM for a new Flash one, is described on by blog. In Czech only (yes, again), but it's not so hard to do it even if you don't understand a word. There are lots of pictures of the process. The short English manual is here.

What is DISO? Well, nothing special. Just a compilation of the best Speccy games, demos and utilities as well as these empty files for saving (placed in /work directory) in a bootable ISO image for Demfir, made by z00m/TCG. If you're not familiar with making your own ISOs this is quite good chance to test Demfir. Just save the image onto your CF card and put it to your Demfired DivIDE. Go, grab it here.