I've just seen from a post on the WOS forums that Akton Films is still alive - I was a little worried as the website has been giving me errors recently (well, my web-checker has reported some to me). But the site is back and redesigned, and with some news that "Sinclairs Gate" will soon be released for the wonderful price of "free" (tho' donations are of course welcome). I understand that I may well have a credit for some translation/correction of the text, tho' I don't think I actually managed to get my translations in on time before someone else had done so - that's what comes of being a slacker, eh? Still, it's something to look forward to. Hoorah!

A very quick pointer to a mention on the ZXMMC+ page about a new version of PCB arriving, which includes some patch circuitry. What this means to us is that we're a step closer to all running the lovely ResiDOS. Marvelous.

Tho' I didn't spot any change on the official Artfield webpage, Speccy Live are reporting that a date has finally been set. When I mentioned this back in June there was no date or venue, but Vinnny states that it will be held on December 8th in Voronezh. It's being held separately from Kidsoft, and will feature ZX compos... other than that you know as much as (or more than) I.

Update: the Artfield webpage has been updated with the new information.
Update: thanks to elfh for pointing out that compo entries should be sent to kidsoft-zx.

I'll be honest and say that I don't actually know what the "Inward DVD" is that's been mentioned on the homepage of Cyberpunks Unity, as it's a whopping 2Gb download. That said, it's from CPU/Inward so it's probably worth the time it will take to grab anyway. Hmm.

Update - just checked with Elfh, and the DVD contains video of a selection of Inward demos, for playing on a real DVD player... so you can entertain your relatives with it! Hoorah!

Elfh pointed me to an article located on the time-bending ZX-AAA demo site (time-bending because they keep posting demos in the future). The article was written about ten years ago by Stever of, among others, Centronics Hackers Group, but has recently been translated into English. It covers some history of the ZX Hacking Scene (that's hacking games as opposed to hacking into the FBI computers) back in the mid-90's. Could be some interesting lunchtime reading.

I'm going to make a confession and state here and now that... I think I messed up my monitoring of the Harlequin project page. There have been a few updates recently that I've missed, and it's all good stuff (from an overly geeky technical viewpoint, at least). Recent articles on the page give some information regarding the floating bus and, of interest to me, some detail on memory contention. This is something I was looking at recently, and was chatting with evilpaul about. Something that's currently missing, IMO, from the emulation scene is a debugger that allows you to step into an instruction. On the Harlequin blog Chris Smith has realised, as I had, that memory contention occurs only on the parts of an instruction that access contended RAM (that makes sense). It makes me want a debugger that allows me to step to M1, M2, ... of an instruction - for timing critical work it would be a great boon to development.
But hey. This is getting far too geeky. If you want more check out the Harlequin page, it's full of technical information related to building a realistic, accurate clone.

While I'm in article-writing mode, a very quick pointer to Antique Toy. Not many entries so far, tho' as all party/compo organisers know most entries come in just before the deadline. But this is your 14-day warning.

I realise you don't tend to find many ZX machines with a SID interface (do you find any?), but I also know that some of the ZX scenes musicians also like to dabble on other chips, so I thought, on a whim, that I'd point you to c64.sk. There CreamD, one of the organisers of the hopefully-soon-to-be-announced Forever demoparty has announced the 7th C64.sk SID Compo, taking place until November 5th. There are a number of rules which, if you're interested in participating, you can bloody well go and read for yourself. What am I, your mother?

Very quick note here to mention that there's a new version of DSP emulator released. This is v0.7b2 and has rather a lot of changes, and not just bugfixes neither. There are new and enhanced features too. Read on and I'll "fill you in" on the relevant bits...

Riskej over at Speccy Live points us to Alone Coders page where he's put up his latest version of the UnrealSpeccy emulator. v0.36.6 looks like it's mostly a bugfix release, but that's even more reason that you should download it. Details of the changes are below...