I realise that the SAM Coupe is not a ZX Spectrum but the two machines are about as closely related as you can get without them being packed inside the same case. That said I don't follow the SAM scene much, so it was only this recent post on Simon Owen's blog that made me notice the Trinity Ethernet interface for the machine. Considering the attempts to get Ethernet on the ZX I thought I'd point it out. Interesting to see the SD card on the interface too.

Just spotted a post on the WOS forums from young Jon Cauldwell announcing the release of the fifth of the popular Egghead series of games. The release is timed to coincide with the 18th birthday of Egghead (who I guess can now legally buy alcohol), and features music by Yerzmyey. The game can be downloaded from Jonathan's site.

Just a quicker pointer to the raww.orgy website where I've activated the forum again so you can go an ask questions about the party or register your intent to turn up. It was getting a deluge of spam which I've taken some steps to try and prevent (tho' no doubt some will get through, just not as much as before). You just need to do some simple maths in order to post a message. If there are any problems, let me know.

Just a message to say... Happy Birthday to World Of Spectrum, which is 12 years old today. As with previous birthdays, Martijn is keeping a separate updates page for today. Plans were for a new server but that failed (meaning some downtime earlier in the week). However one of the birthday treats (for us more than for the website I guess) is the new inlay browser, which goes hand-in-hand with the ability to display the inlays when doing an advanced search. Superb.

Over on Speccy Live riskej points us to issue two of Spanish-language PDF-zine Bytemaniacos, a general-platform retro affair which elements of ZX in it's pages. Oddly on the main site there's no obvious mention of the second issue, but it's certainly there. Personally I don't "get" Spanish so I merely flipped through the pages looking at the pictures, but #2 features articles on the Sam Coupe and I also spotted mention of classic game Valhalla in there. Worth a look if you understand the lingo.

JHCon, the traditional party before Christmas will take place at usual place, Vitezslav Novak gymnasium in the time-honoured town of Jindrichuv Hradec on the south of the Czech Republic. The party starts on Friday, the 14th December 2007 at about 5:00pm and ends in the afternoon on Sunday, the 16th. You can await 3 days of fun, Speccying, tasty meal, beer, etc. There are no compos at the party, but one can be sure there will be lot of other geeky things. The main and only organiser, Logout/MB Maniax, invites every Speccy fan. As a bonus, MB Maniax made a little invitation with nice gfx by Trixs and music by z00m. So make note in your diary.

Zyloj has posted some photos of the recent RetroMania event that took place in Zaragoza, Spain. There are two collections on Flickr: here and here. Looks like it was a good event.

Claus Jahn has been at work on his set of ZX Modules tools, releasing a selection of updates: ZX-Explorer v1.2.0.3, ZX-Editor v1.1.0.4, ZX-Preview v1.0.1.2, ZX-BlockEditor v1.0.1.2, and ZX-Paintbrush v1.2.0.4. Phew. I'll give some details after the clicky of what's changed in each module...

Just a quick reminder that there's only a few days left for you to vote in the 4k category of this years Minigame Compo. I'll confess that I've been a bit slack so far with this, but that doesn't mean you have to be. There are two ZX games in the mix, one by the ever popular Jon Cauldwell, so it should be worth your time to check them out.

MB Maniax are bombing us with their new releases. This time we have here TAP2MBHDD. It's a converter of TAP files to MB02 disk images. Not that classic .MBD ones but those which you can use with the MBHDD add-on. Practically, it's a normal BS-DOS disk image, but formatted to 127 tracks by 8 sectors, which is about 2MB. You can convert your favorite TAPs into the image file and this file can be easily dd'ed onto a CF or a hard drive. Note that the tool is made for Linux and no Wi*dows version is planned. Anyway, handy thing.