For a while now Demotopia has been a little lacking in updates. Regardless of how much we punch and kick, Gasman has been stating that he won't be doing updates as he's working on a kind of "replacement". And now, DemoZoo has gone live. It's less ZX-specific with the aim being to cover the whole demoscene, but includes links to sites like Demotopia, Pouet, et al. It also aims to be more detailed than anything else. Of course the site has only just gone live so that's where we, as "the scene" come in. Check your information. Check it's correct. If not, submit a fix. And go have a browse anyway, just for fun.

Oddly for a demoscene site, I don't tend to mention Assembly here much, despite it being probably the worlds largest, and longest-running demoparty. There doesn't tend to be much ZX work there, and if there is it doesn't do too well in the votes... so it's nice to see that this year a ZX production gets a prize! Hooray! The news from our "man-on-the-scene" (Gasman went there coz someone said "Sinclair" five times) is that moroz1999 came third in the old-school graphics competition with his work "Mind Invaders". Marvelous.

I've been slacking a bit when it comes to news on raww.org lately, but in some spare time I've had a chance to write a little utility which some of you may find useful. Not so long ago I started using Garry Lancasters +3e mod, which allows the use of hard drives from a ZX Spectrum +3. My main aim was to get a load of my old software from my 3" discs onto my PC. But the +3e uses a custom HDD format... which is where 3eExplorer comes in. It allows you to extract files from an image of a +3e hard drive (use something like SamDisk to create the images).
It's only in beta at the moment, at v0.1.0.1, and only features exporting of files to .TAP (for files less than 64Kb) and raw binary. Importing of files to an image is planned for the future. But there you go. Try it out... hopefully it won't break anything.

I guess not many of you own D40 or D80, a disk drive from Didaktik Skalica, the former Slovak Speccy clone manufacturer. Anyway, a Czech guy nicknamed Seraphim fixed some games to work with this device. You can find them at zxm.speccy.cz, all of them for 48K Speccy. I recommend Space Crusade, originally 128K only, which has never been ported to 48K Speccy, afaik. Oh, and you can try the games in RealSpec if you don't own the real hardware or using MDOS3 on DivIDE.

A few months back I mentioned the Harlequin project, where a ZX clone is being built. Well you may be interested to know that Chris Smith, the buy behind the project, has managed to get near 100% accurate memory contention timings. The claim is actually 100% accurate, tho' the timings appear to be slightly out compared to a real ZX (I'm assuming a 48k model). Still, it's nice to see that things are going well. Worth keeping an eye on the page, certainly.

A quick mention that rc55 has pulled his finger out and produced a proper webpage for the upcoming Sundown2007 demo party, taking place in the South of England. There's even a mugs gallery so you know who you're talking to at the party. How handy is that? I'm not currently listed as I'm still only a "maybe" for attendance... are you!?

Hmm. I actually wrote this yesterday when I saw the news, but for some reason refrained from actually pressing the "post" button. Either way, the news is still that Papaya Labs have begun shipping their DivIDE orders. Of course there's still the LED Colour choice to make, but in the future you may have even more options for customisation of your DivIDE. The Labs have done some research and found a source of more boards, but with a choice of colours, so we could be veering away from the standard PCB-green. Personally I like the idea of a Red board, tho' if the option of purple ever comes up that would be even better. There's a poll of Colour Choice at the Labs' site - pick wisely, as I guess they'd have to bulk-order one colour to make it cost-effective.

I've just had an email from C-Jeff with news of the latest developments @ Ubiktune. The team have a new artist among their ranks, Lee du-Caine, aka dC Audio, who hails from just up the road in sunny Bristol. His first release under the Ubiktune label is "Stranded 2.5", based on the music from the game of the same name (being published by Cronosoft). Lee did the music for the game, you see. Ah, it all makes sense now. Ten tracks in all, so go download.

The emulation community is an odd thing, especially on the ZX Spectrum. Here people seem obsessed with archiving all of the old software as precisely as possible, which is no bad thing really as those old tapes are gradually degrading. One of the popular formats is TZX, but it has recently caused issues due to its complexity - if you read the WOS forums you'll no doubt have spotted threads about newly-added TZX blocks. The general response if people have complaints is that they're welcome to "come up with something better"... and that's exactly what Patrik Rak has done.
The PZX format was proposed way back in April and received some good feedback (ok, and not-so-good feedback). One of the comments was that some kind of toolset was needed in order for the new format to be considered... so a toolset was created. Three weeks ago. I missed it. Sorry. Anyway, you can grab the PZX Tools and have a play, and you should be able to read the latest format proposal too. Will it be adopted? Who knows - we can but wait. Or provide input. It is a community, after all.

Perhaps not really "news" and actually more of a boast, but I thought I'd mention that I've seen a pre-release version of the upcoming "Sinclairs Gate" by Akton Films. There is still some work to be done on the movie, mostly on the subtitles (the film is in Spanish with English subs), but it's actually looking quite impressive. I'm sure you've already seen the trailer, and there are certainly sections where it plays out like a live-action Darwinia, Introversion's retro-style RTS, which is no bad thing. Other than that I'm saying very little about it... you'll just have to wait.
The final film should be released towards the end of August, all being well with the world. And no, I won't let you have a copy even if you ask really, really nicely.