A little later than planned, here's some mention of the recent music releases over on ZiPlanet, in no particular order (actually, in the order they appear in my Firefox tabs). First up are two singles "n-mb flight" and "yer standing still on my shoulder", both by Scalesmann. Then there's the two-part album (containing 22 tracks) by Riskej entitled "Decorative Sex" - all of the tracks are available as .pt3 or .mp3.
Meanwhile over on Speccy-Live pulsar points us to "maytro", a zx-able demo featuring music from Riskej, Karbofos, and Scalesmann. Go grab.

A very quick pointer to the newest album release from Ubiktune - I would have rushed to mention it before, but it's Onomatopoeia by nq of Skrju, so you've surely already heard it :)

I apologise, I've been slacking. But you already know that. So by way of penance, I will point out that TommyGun, the rather nice development environment, has been updated to v0.9.28. About two weeks ago. Regarding the Mongo project, a collaborative work by the author of several ZX tools, I'm not sure what's happening with it - it looks like work may have stopped according to this WOS post, but I'll have a look around and see what I can find. I've been kinda out-of-the-loop lately.

If you're a user of CCZ80, the C-like Z80 Assembler (does that make sense?), then you may want to know that a bugfix version was released, ooh, a week or so ago. v2.0.2 features three noted fixes:

• Avoid specify as source file the value "".
• Avoid warning 'Constant not used' when it's used.
• Corrections in expressions evaluation.

Only a quick mention for these, as the only place I see 2008 information mentioned about either Bytefest or RockOn is over on ZX Magazin, so we'll just have to go by what information they have... Bytefest 2008 will be taking place in Prague from 5th to 7th of September, while RockOn is on the 31st of May. Somewhere.

From the hallowed portal that is El Portal Del Spectrum I see news of a couple competitions from Bytemaniacos. They both appear to be game-writing competitions, with specific aims - BASIC 2008 involves writing a game using only Sinclair BASIC. There are different categories, including writing a 7-line game. Choose Your Own Adventure involves writing a game along the lines of the books... you know, where you "choose your own adventure". Again I think there are limits to your approach, so you can't just load up GAC and get hacking.

I'm not entirely sure where I found this one (perhaps on the WOS forums), but for a few weeks I've had a bookmark pointing me to an Analog Gamepad Controller for the ZX. Don't expect this to get produced just yet tho' - as the comment at the bottom of the page says, the designer is "still figuring out if the [...] schematic makes sense."
I mention this now because for some reason Website Watcher is showing me that the homepage of Csaba Gondos has been updated - and on there you can find a design for an Analog Joystick Interface. It's probably been there for years, but there you go.

It's been a couple weeks since the previous release of... oh... wait... I see what's happened. The latest version of the MacOSX port of Fuse has was released a week ago. v0.9.0.2 is mostly bugfix territory, with one new feature - that being a "Quick Look generator for emulator file formats". Yes. Yes indeed. Certainly a must if you're a MacOSX user, so you can calm the weirdness with some ZX frivolity.

It's been about 7 pre-release versions since I last mentioned ZXSP, the MacOS ZX Emulator. I made a conscious decision to stop posting updates until a full release was available (unlike the unconscious decision to not post any news about anything at all), but figure that v0.7.2.pre15 is worth reminding people about. Various snippets of newness, and if you're into your beta programs... well worth a checking-out thereof.

I posted recently about a new WinAmp plugin from Shiru to allow you to play TFM TurboSound tracks through it. Well I see that the player has been updated to v1.1. Fixes are below the break. There's also a new version of his TFM Music Maker (v1.22), released a few days ago, details of which are also below the break...