Topic: General news

Those who don't know what on earth the MDOS is, I can silently whisper it is a DOS from slovak Didaktik 40/80 disk drives (and Didaktik Kompakt, of course), which are hugely widespread between Czech and Slovak Speccy owners. It could be a little bit confusing for those of you, who have heard about MDOS3 by Sweet, which is in fact a modified MDOS to use with divIDE. Well, MDOS 2.1 by MTs is intended to use with an original hardware from Didaktik Skalica. That means you must program you own EPROM with MDOS 2.1 and replace the old ROM chip in D80/Kompakt. Sadly, it can't be used with older versions of drivers which use MDOS 1.0, because these devices are based on a different floppy controller chip. MDOS 2.1 can be used only on later versions of D80 or Kompakts (those which used MDOS 2.0 originally). It is because of the FDC chip limitations. This all sounds complicated, but if you own D80 or Kompakt, it's worth of trying because the 2.1 version brings tons of bugfixes and advantages for the former user of Didaktik storage devices. It be even used with a divIDE if you have it connected together with D80, so your divIDE will behave like a superfast D80. MTs also made a great manual in PDF for that (in Czech, surprisingly ;-P). Everything can be downloaded over here.

Quick note while I take a short break from cooking my tea.
AYLand, the online AY radio station, has had another playlist update. Newness is very much demoscene related, which is rarely a bad thing. There's the addition of tunes from FunTop98, DiHalt'99, and also the recent ArtField. There's also some more music by Kriss and Agent-X - specifically tunes from the wonderful Dies-Irae. How lovely.

Following on from the very recent release of SjASMPlus comes the v1.07 RC4bf release. The "bf" in case you wondered doesn't stand for "big-n-floppy", but for "bugfix". What, you mean it was just me that thought that? Ho-hum.
I don't have chance at the moment to review the actual changes (I have to go and cook my tea), but I'm informed that it's "very important", so I suggest you download it now. Oh yes.

Traditional meeting of Spectrum enthusiasts is taking place from 15th to 17th of December at Vitezslav Novak gymnasium in the town of Jindrichuv Hradec in the south of the Czech Republic. More info (in Czech) is here or here. Forget pre-Christmas stress and come to meet ZX Spectrum friends, have a chat, compete in playing ZX games or simply to see news on the ZX Spectrum scene. Everyone is welcomed! The town is situated near Austrian and German border so visitors from these countries are also welcomed.

Well, I kinda missed the 0.5b2 release because frankly there wasn't anything of interest that changed. But the update list for DSP 0.5b3 is rather large, so worthy of mention. I won't list them all here as it would ruin your own fun (and I'm lazy), but there's a few bugfixes in the Z80 emulation, things to do with lenslock, ACB stereo and other sound options, and ooh some other things. Yes there is.

Congratulations to WOS for running for a stupidly long time (11 years)... probably the longest-running emulation site, which is certainly helped by it's efforts to remain legal. Damn, makes the nearly-seven years that raww.org has been running seem pitiful.
As a treat for WOS-visitors Martijn has arranged some, uhm... treats. They are three in number, and are as follows:
3) TR-DOS Restructuring - this includes some new files which were previously MIA. Nice.
2) Advanced Search - now you can search for more than just the name... you can look for player-counts, tie-ins, covertapes, protection scheme... gah, loads of stuff.
1) A screenshot browser - now you can find the game you want just by recognising the screen. Fantastic. Still some way to go to be complete, but that's surely where we "the public" come in.
Nice one Martijn. Here's to another 11 years.

Ok, so it's not quite Monty, and it's not demoscene-related, but it is retro, and retro we love. We also like cute. Cute and Geek go well together. So I thought I'd mention this YouTube video, posted to the WOS forums by Jörg Pleumann. It's worth watching. No-one I know is surprised that I find the music instantly recognisable.

If you're a user of the SjASMPLus cross-assembler, as I am, you'll want to know about the release of v1.07 RC4. Well maybe. The changes are minimal in this release, but if you use the SAVEx Pseudo-ops then there are some relevant bugfixes. Other than that the source has been updated to include a makefile, meaning we could soon see this assembler being used on *nix boxes, etc. A very worthy download if you don't already use it. A very worthy download if you do.

Just saw a link posted in the WOS forums about an AY Player for Symbian mobile phones. It's probably been around for ages but not having one of these phones I'll have ignored it. Yes, I'm quite the news hound. It actually plays C64 SIDs and Amiga MODs too, so if you have a compatible phone it's certainly worth a look. Maybe I should contact Orange about an upgrade? Hmm.

For the Mac users among you (which in my opinion is a scarily large number of people) you may be interested to know that there's a new version of Mac2Spec out. This little program converts various graphics formats into ZX-compatible formats (screen$, for example). I've not played with it as I don't have a Mac (not even a dirty-flasher one), but it's a handy tool to add to your collection. And who knows, it's open source so maybe one day it'll get ported to other platforms. That said, I'm guessing there's a bundle of mac-specific stuff. But who knows.