The development of Bmp2Scr EXP has been ceased. But don't worry, the much improved follow-up named Retro-X nears its completion. Currently there is a stability issue, but the release of a alpha version in May 2008 is not endangered.

Wolfgang Haller, the founder of Spectrum Profi Club Cologne has been struck by a brain hemorrhage and has been operated on in a Hospital in Cologne. He is currently being kept in a artificial coma and his current recovery state is unknown. We all hope, he recovers well.
There are currently no news on the SPC homepage.

I'm not sure I've really checked out the "One Man And His Mic" podcast before, but it looks quite interesting. Specifically the podcasts focus on old game music, and the latest episode is a Shadow Of The Beast special, featuring among it's tunes the ZX Spectrum versions of the theme music. Perhaps more interestingly for us is the previous episode (#5) which was a 48k Speccy special. Coo. It's one to keep an eye on, certainly. And the site is worthy of a visit for the pics of Emily Booth anyway.

A couple new versions of Assembler-generator CCZ80 have been released since I last mentioned it. v1.1.0 is now available and features a few bugfixes and enhancements to the parser. There's also an UltraEdit syntax file, should you use that editor. I did but moved on to the now-defunct Crimson Editor. Ho-hum.

Speccy Live have the scoop on a new album from Voxel/Triumph, in association with simbols. It kind of explains the scoop, as the news is posted by Riskej. Heh. Anyway, the album is called "Space Adventure" and is the first release from the as-yet un-updated Zi'Planet. Pop over to Speccy Live for the download and check it out.

Just a little pointer to Winston's blog-thing where in the last couple of days he's mentioned some advances with his Spectranet project. The project, surely you already know, is ZX Ethernet, and it's now conversing with well, a PC I guess. So far it's simply a sending/receiving packets affair and there's still a lot of work to be done, but it's good to see it progressing. Nice work. And lots of techie stuff in there for the geeks. Hoorah!

A new release of DSP, the multi-machine (including ZX) emulator is available, should you want it. Updates include enhanced memory contention, which is always good for business. There are other changes too, including a YM2203 emulator. Lovely.

Over on Shiru's homepage you can find a handy tool if you're playing about with his TFM Music Maker for you, eh, TurboSound-FM songs. "VOPMxTFI" v1.1 is a command-line tool that converts VOPM instruments into .tfi files for use in TFM songs. Did you understand that? It's music-related so it means little to me. However, it does come with documentation (in English) and source.

There seems to be a bit of a trend in the last couple of weeks with people letting their domain names expire (/me checks the status of raww.org...). The latest to join the collective forgetful is sinclairfaq.com, home of, uhm, the Sinclair FAQ. If you don't know it, it's a very handy resource about the ZX covering specifics of hardware and the like (well, those are the bits I look at). Don't worry - it still exists over at World Of Spectrum, so all is not lost. I'll keep an eye on the domain for freshness.

Over on El Portal Del Spectrum a couple days ago there was mention of Interface 2008. It's a game-coding competition, but with a difference. The limitation for entries is that it must be provided as an Interface2 Cartridge (that's to say, a 16Kb ROM file). Sounds like fun, especially considering most of the code I produce tends to be self-modifying (or self-writing, anyway). I guess the trick is to unpack to ZX memory then. Deadline for entries is 23rd December 2008, so you've plenty of time to hone that enemy AI you're working on.