Well voting has finished, Gasman has been counting on all available digits, and now the results of the Minigame compo have been released. You'll remember that the aim of this compo was to write a game in as few bytes as possible. Here's a quick rundown of the top few from each category:

<font size="-1"> 2k games
1 - Minima (c64) - Macbeth, Wyndex, MagerValp
2 - Magertris (c64) - MagerValp
3 - Nibbles (zx) - Gasman
512b games
1 - Star Wars (zx) - Serzhsoft
2 - Pacman (c64) - Tape
3 - dwCave (c64) - dW
</font>

Well, MagerValp helped to wipe the floor with the other entries in the 2k games compo. And is anyone really surprised to see Serzh up there in the No.1 slot for his 512b game? I don't think so.
The turnout for the competition was good, especially from the C64-camp. Here's looking forwards to next years event.

Well, to be honest the fact that Demobit was on at all slipped by me. But then it hadn't appeared on any of the "major" news sites that I monitor.
Anyway, this post on the X-board from CreamD mentions that it's been cancelled, tho' it was originally scheduled for this coming weekend. You can still get to the party-page, where you can read up on what's caused this to happen. Assuming you can read Slovakian, at least.

Yes, a new version of AY-Emulator has been released, this being beta 2 of v2.5. What's new? Well there's some "time positioning" for .VTX and .AY filetypes, and a bug in CPC emulation has been fixed. Apart from that, pretty much the same. A good same.

A couple little notes about site "thingies". Thanks go to z00m for pointing out that the URL I had for 8bit Company had gone outta-date. For some unknown reason they've removed the link to the Sinclair section from their mainpage. Odd. It's been corrected here now.
Also, I've added another button to the sidebar there, this time for Raww Arse Archive aka Papaya Dezign. You've not checked it recently? Then I suggest you do so now.

Woo, I almost forgot about this update to Andrew Owen's ZX Spectrum SE project.
The change this time has again been rather massive, but the important news is that there's now a release date for this nimble piece o' kit. And it just happens to be April 4th, 2002, the 20th anniversary of the original Spectrum launch. I'm sure it's just coincidence, mind you.
However there is a catch, in that the ZXSE won't be a thing you hold, it'll be a thing you experience... as software. Oh go to the site and you'll see what I mean. There will be a number of options for running the ZXSE kit, from current hardware projects through to one for the x86 written by emu-coders extraordinaire, Ramsoft.

First spotted this over at VORC. Millennium'1902 demoparty has been announced over at BDP.
It's set for the 4th/5th of May 2002, in Minsk, Belarus. You can get over there yourself to read up on the info (it's all in English too <g>), but suffice to say that ZX compos will be the standard set of intros, demos, gfx, and music. Only annoyance is that entries must be in .TRD format, but it's not a big problem, as entries will be run on Pentagon, so .TRD is easiest.

Well if you've not handed in your votesheet, it's too late now. Voting for the Minigame compo is over, and the votes are being counted. They should be released by the end of the week.

I don't usually cover games new (the Minigame compo is different, as it's a coding-thing). But I think some worthy news is that TZX-Vault has been granted exclusive rights to publish games from Zenobi software. There's a fair few titles there, with a bunch more still to be converted, I think.

A couple days ago, Speccy4Ever posted a couple more ROMs to the vast collection. These are variants of the Betadisk ROMs, or something. Go to the site and check them out. For info, here's what WSW thinks has been added:

• TRDOS 5.04F Base version 5.03, High speed, Turbo format. Copyright C.C. 1991
• TRDOS 5.05D Base version 5.04T, Error fixed, Magic modified. Cyrax Inc. 1997
• TRDOS 6.05R PROFI Version TR-DOS specially under ports PROFI. Enables instead of the "D" disk to create RAM-DISC.

According to V-TRD, a new player has been released for the General Sound board. Written by Psb\Halloween, the program titled "Realtime Audio Player" allows the playing of .WAV files in realtime. That's a case of loading from disk and playing as it's loading. A nice idea, and surely it'll have some uses for people who have this board -- wonder if it works with emu's?