No, Monospace isn't the name of an upcoming party (I realise why you might think this, as all the news so far this morning has been party/compo-related). No, I just made a small tweak to the NooBloo2 stylesheet for this site, and the tweak relates to monospace fonts, such as those used in results posts. It should mean that the results are a little clearer (ie. larger) and that can only be a good thing. If it works. So check if you spot that things like results and stuff look a bit poo, add a comment to this post and I'll try to sort it out. Of course, as it's a CSS change you may need to CTRL-Refresh the page or even clear your cache to see it. Such is life.

It all seems to be about compos and parties today. Not a bad thing, certainly...
While we're waiting for some official results from the recent DiHalt party, I spot that Alone Coder has uploaded some work and mini-results from the party to his website. Annoyingly it's all compressed with RAR, which my company firewall blocks (so I'll have to wait 'til I get home to see check it out), but click on for some more results (passed through a translator, so probably wrong *cough*):

I just had a pm from Tygrys of AYLand pointing me to... well, AYLand and some information about the upcoming Riverwash party in Poland. They've sorted out a prize for the winning ZX Spectrum demo... a DivIDE Plus, the modded-and-expanded version of the vanilla DivIDE. I'm interested in getting a DivIDE Plus, partly out of curiosity, and I've started work on a demo (yes, an actual demo rather than an intro)... not sure I'll get it complete in time, but you never know.

I've had an email from Yerzmyey about a new competition for all you graphics-types out there. It's a compo with a twist... it's ZX81 graphics. Here's what he sent me:

H-PRG & SPC are proud to announce You the first *ever* GRAPHIC COMPO for ZX81 computer! (and clones)! :)
I got the idea while looking on brilliant pictures made by Andre Baune (probably the best ZX81 graphician).
The idea is simple (probably simpler than to put it into practice ;) ) -

Hmm, seems I've missed a couple of the recent updates to TommyGun, the Win32 development kit for 8-and-16-bit machines. Or is that the 8-and-16-bit development kit for Win32 machines? Well I'm sure you know what I mean. Three versions have been released since I last mentioned it, so I'll put the list of changes below. You may also like to know, if you didn't already, that there's a mock-up prototype of a re-written version available, coded in C#. This may mean that plugins are easier to develop (the current build uses a kinda proprietary plugin interface, I seem to recall). Anyway, here's the list of what's new since February...

The initial results and releases from this weekends DiHalt party are up on Pouet. A quick rundown of what's there so far, as I'm in the middle of cooking at the moment...

ZX Demo
1st - Ugly Kid, Magic Star - Triebkraft & 4d
2nd - Another Day - CPU
3rd - Dax Sax - CPU
--- - InSilver - Skrju
--- - 14 - Skrju

I'll provide info of more releases and results when I see them.

I just popped over to the DiHalt webpage to see if there was any news about the party (which is happening as we speak), and I noticed that there's a webcam up. A little late to be telling you this I know, but currently there's what looks like a darkened room and a bunch of people milling around. Check it out while we wait for results and things.

By way of cut-and-paste from the WorldOfSpectrum forums comes news of a new version of hand-held favourite GP2Xpectrum, a way for you to play ZX games on the go. I'm a bit busy at the moment, so here's the aforementioned cut-and-paste of what's changed:

- CPU speed increase to 125/170 wasn't enough, and many games performed
  slower than they should, so I had to put the default speed up to 150/185
- Speed can be changed from the menu using VOL, and can be saved for
  each individual game together with their keyboard profile
- Fixed memory contention for +2A/+3 models (Overscan now works)
- Changed the way to avoid the MMU hack problems, using Notaz's flush
  cache function instead of a screen buffer.
- Fixed a bug in L & R buttons assignation from .key file

I've just had an email from Yerzmyey pointing me to a couple videos that have been uploaded onto YouTube. The first is the video for Robert Miles' "Children" but with the soundtrack of Yermyey's AY-remix, as taken from the AY-Riders album "Do You Remember". The other is an altogether stranger affair... the movie is entitled "O.0' word" or "Smiley's wollen... poppooon!" - that translates as "Smileys want to shag". It's a short animated piece, the subject of which you can probably guess... and the soundtrack is "Beetle" by Factor6, which appeared on the AYR album "You Are Adult". See, they must be famous, they have music videos!

As I'm sure you've already seen over on WOS, newcomer to the ZX (that's to say he's never owned one) John Fotou has released a new freeware game titled "The Amazing Rocketeer". It's a platformer where you control a chappie with a rocket pack, and using a Kempston joystick must do that standard job of collecting stuff. For what purpose I'm not sure, but why should there be a point to collecting stuff in platformy games? There are three levels in the download pack, each stored as a .z80, with more levels promised.