The Peters website have posted a new poll for you to take part in. This time, it's the big question... "Would you like to buy a Sprinter?"
Personally I'm undecided. It certainly looks like a nice bit of kit, with some nice features, and more importantly, some Speccy compatibility.
It'll be interesting to see the results.

Shove the "general downloads" in here, I think. Nothing particularly demo-like, so it kinda makes sense. There's a few new games over at DJH Downloads, one of which ("Crime of Santa Claus: Deja Vu") contains some demos on the disk (.TRD). Not sure if that's game demos or the real kinda. But perhaps it's worth a quick download to check out.
There's also a few new downloads at POS, again not really demo-like, but there's four of them to grab at your leisure.
Also mentioned on POS is the actual deadline for Nuotrauka. See, I was right the first time.

Aah, self-explanatory headlines. I like that.
As you can see, the latest version of Bmp2Scr has been released, and you can download v1.72 now. I saw some preview screens from this version a few days ago, and it was looking good. Since then, I've heard back from LCD who has added even more modes to the image-conversion app. You can now select Floyd/Steinberg dithering, COD and Multitech mode, and AVI conversion.
Over on the homepage you can see loads of examples of what the program can do, including a huge number of pictures converted with this latest version. The page could take a little while to load, but it's worth it. Mmmmm, manga chicks!

Only just over a week ago, the Nuotrauka deadline was moved to the 1st of May, and now it seems it's moved again, according to Chaosite (have you noticed that site's becoming much more active recently!?).
I didn't spot much on the party homepage during my quick glance at it just now, but it seems that the deadline isn't actually set. All we have is "sometime next month". Heh.

Okay, I've had this thought for a little while, and it seems like I'm not the only one. There has been a TCP/IP stack for the Z88 for a while now in the form of Dom Morris's ZSock, and, as Chaosite reports, finally someone has looked into porting it over to the Spectrum. No sign of a download (or is my mouse pointer just missing the link?), but check the ZSock page for some ideas.

You read it, there's a couple new downloads added to POS. You can go there now and grab not only BestView 2.11, but an unreleased demo from the ASC-II demoparty. "Breath of Death" is a trackmo by X-Team. I've got it queued.

Heh, this is a nice little thing. Over on WOS they've posted a "Certification" program, to prove if you're, like, king Speccy. Check it out. I managed to pass (really), with a "just-scaped-in" 70. Well, that'll do me, I think. Happily my lowest score was with BASIC... well, it's only used to load machine-code, right? Mind you, I did particularly badly with that, too. I blame tiredness.
You can get to the certification here

Fairly quiet day today, which is just as well, as I have a few other things to get done tonight. So just a quick mention of the Speccy-less demo-party, Mekka&Symposium. The official results have been released, which I thought may interest the speccy-sceners who visited and showed what a wonderful machine we all have. You can grab the results here

Another post on the X-board revealed a (slightly late) Easter Egg in the recently-released Pondlife. I'll leave you to pop over there and find out how to get this little treat. I'll just leave you with the message that the seriously strange Gasman will soon be let out of the priory clinic <g>.

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What the hell -- three-in-a-row. Completely different subject, but I received a zipfile late last night from LCD of Bmp2Scr-fame. The archive contained a bunch of test-conversions of screens, created with the new, unreleased version (v1.72) of the tool. What can I say apart from... sweeeeet.

Okay, this was probably announced ages ago, and as usual I'm in the dark until the last minute. But hey, it's only just appeared on the Demoparty Calendar.
TRS3, as it so handily abbreviates, is a German-Polish party being held around May 25th 2001, just over a month away, in Eisenhuettenstadt. My crap knowledge of geography, and "can't-be-arsed" attitude to researching it, leads me to conclude that's somewhere in Germany, or perhaps not. Right?
No specific mention is made of the Spectrum, only that entries into the competitions can be in any format. I'm guessing that, as C64, Atari, etc are all mentioned by name, the Speccy comes under the "calculators or organizers" category. Grrrr.

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Another aside (well, it saves space in the long-run). A (very) mini-report on the Mekka&Symposium party was posted on the X-board by Factor6. Seems like the non-Speccy sceners appreciate good Z80 code when they see it. Photos to come, apparently.