A quick pointer to a new release of my current Assembler du jour, SjASMPlus. This is the first new version for almost a year (well, about 10 months), and has a few changes which I'll cut-n-paste here:

• Applied bugfix patches for SAVEHOB/SAVETRD pseudo-ops by Breeze.
• Fixed memory leak in line parsing routine
• Fixed 48k SNA snapshots saving routine
• Added missing INF command
• Fixed code parser's invalid addressing of temporary labels in macros

Good stuff.

Yerzmyey is an odd sort, in a really nice way, as he is quite obsessed with Beeper music. This is no bad thing when the beeper music in question is of a high quality. He's informed me that he's set up a new site dedicated to ZX-made beeper tunes, downloadable in mp3 format. z80 Music Site features music from the likes of The Follin, Martin Galway, and sceners such as TDM, Factor6, and Qjeta. It's worth going along and having an aural peruse.

If you have a few spare bytes of bandwidth among all of the pornography you seem intent on downloading, you may like to pop along to Sami Vehmaa's page, where he's uploaded a 21Mb video of the ZX Matrix (CF + USB) in action. It actually shows the use of ResiDOS as well, which is an added bonus. I guess it won't be long before this video is put on YouTube?

Following the recent beta release of Fuse for Mac OS X, the "final" release based on Fuse v0.9.0 has been made available. Changes since the previous beta include .mdr, .mgt and .img type information, and adding +D and Betadisk write-protection, among some interface tweaks. Go see.

Another day, another MB Maniax' tool. This time a new formatting utility named ff20 designed to work with MBHDD devices. No more Basic line disk and sectors number editing in the original Busysoft's ff17. Just format as many virtual (or real) floppies as you want. You can format a single disk or perform a sequentional format. For MB02+ only, of course. Handy if you're the owner.

Demfir is a DivIDE firmware. DTP's Emulator Files Runner, that is. That means it's able to run TAPs, Z80s, SNAs, even not complex TZXs. Besides this, it can handle POK files and has far better file browser with search feature than FatWare. It works with ISO images instead of direct MSDOS FAT access. And this won't change. Demfir was never supposed to work in this way, btw. But this new beta release is a bit revolutionary. Why? It can save to TAPs. Well, again: It CAN SAVE to TAPs! The saving is done by overwriting of existing TAP file (it can't be done in different way). An 128Kb empty.tap file is included for your tests. I've tried to save Basic stuff and even music from SQ-Tracker. It works. It's in a very beta state now, there's a lot to do, but finally there is a firmware which supports saving and works on unexpanded DivIDE. Hooray.

MB Maniax seem to be quite active in the last time. This post is about a new NMI menu replacement written by Hood. NMI Menu v1.31x (that red border with stripes when pressing NMI button) brings you new cool features including SNA/Z80 load and save, changing disks and directories without jumping to Basic, running files directly, load/save of a memory chunk, date displaying, launching Devastace+ monitor and MRS assembler (when in memory), etc. Full list of new features (copy-pasted from the original info file) is below. Download is here.

I wouldn't normally mention competition entries for the PC 64k compos, but the new release by Ate Bit is worth checking out. "Pimp My Spectrum" is Ate Bit's way of saying that the PC 64k scene sucks. Or at least that it could be better. They've coded an intro which features an "overclocked" Z80 emulator as it's core, including a TurboSound 6-channel mod. It looks rather lovely. Not sure where it came in the compo yet tho'... I'll update this post when I find out, tho' as today is my birthday I'll probably be too busy to check :)

It's been a whole week, so it's about time some more people posted photos from the recent Forever9 party. I didn't take a camera with me due to memory-card issues (you can't take many photos when you only have a 16Mb card spare), but CreamD over on C64.sk points us to some galleries: one from Krupkaj, a couple galleries from Jailbird [1 and 2], and a downloadable pack from Mikezt weighing in at about 57Mb.
Also check out the Outro on the party-page.

Just because I like the idea of USB storage on a ZX Spectrum I thought I'd post a link to the Swedish ZX Spectrum DIY Site, and specifically to a page with a boxed ZX Matrix board. It looks quite lovely, eh? Not sure of the boxed price yet, but it's a good one to watch. I'll run ResiDOS on something yet.