Topic: General news

NickH, he of the YS Rock'n'Roll Years, and also the ZX downloadable, uhm... zx-umentary (!?), is about to be on the radio over here in almost England. Actually it's BBC Radio Wales. He'll be talking about the 25th anniversary and things in about 2 hours time. Innit lovely.
As an unrelated aside, sorry for the lack of news lately - I'm having some connection issues to raww.org from work, which is where I sometimes write "the news". There you go.

One of the WOS Forumites, Winston, has decided to celebrate the 25th (you'll be getting bored of all this celebration later) by completing his hardware project : a ZX Spectrum Diagnostic Board. The board, detailed on Winston's page is designed with the aim of diagnosing problems on troubled ZX's. The onboard Flash is loaded with a test ROM (or any other ROM for that matter - SE BASIC anyone?) which runs a series of tests on the ZX to help pinpoint where faults lie. It's quite a good idea, and it's all free (if you have the soldering know-how). Marvelous.

To be honest, I'd pretty much ignored the ZXMak emulator for since 2003, which is when the last version I knew of came out. But no, that was foolish, for there exists ZXMak.net, as we can see if we look at the Virtual-TRDOS Emulators page. This version of the emulator, for which I couldn't locate a homepage (but then I didn't look too far) requires the installation of that horrid .net framework, but don't let that put you off. It could well be worth the download... I'll leave you to decide, as I'm hungry and don't have much information about the emulator to be honest. It's in my download queue, at which point I'll find out more.

Different people celebrate birthdays in different ways. To mark the 25th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum, NickH has released the 1988 installment of his YS-RNRY TV Show. I've been at work all day so I've not seen it, but I've heard good things... and bad things about the download speed. It's a torrent people, so once you have it keep your downloads going to make things speedy for everyone else. Also if you have them, reseed the other episodes too. Go on... be your best friend.

A large wedge of cheese to Mister Beep for pointing out the ultimate in 80's nostalgia... Jellica has just finished several months of work on a Chiptune Megamix - oddly when Beep mentioned this to me I immediately thought of Jive Bunny, and sure enough they're mentioned on the page. Quality. Anyway, the megamix is a 22 minute mix of 60 chiptune tracks, including "One Bit Sound" by Mister Beep. The download is about 15Mb, so get downloading.

Yes, it would appear from looking at various sites that it's the 25th birthday of our beloved ZX Spectrum. Why haven't I written about this sooner? Issues with a squid, as it happens (this is actually true, the squid proxy where I work was playing up, and I can't get to any of my websites). I'm not going to point you to any articles about the machine... I'm sure mostly everyone who comes to this site already knows enough about it. Personally I think the birthday of the 128k ZX Spectrums is more interesting from a scene perspective, what with it bringing us 3-channel sound, two screen buffers, and all that lovely extra memory. But that 25th is a few years away. Go figure.

I'm not entirely sure I've got the story right, as googles translation is... iffy. However it seems that currently Chaos Constructions 2007 is in doubt. In order for the party to happen it needs to be announced around March - which was last month. This is to allow news to spread of the party, and for people to get something done for the competitions. However there is currently no source of funding (around $20k?) for the party this year... we wait to see if money will be found and the party will take place.

Now that Sergey is back online he's busy working on updating everything possible. Including his AY-Composers List, which aims to list every composer on the AY chip. Damn, even I'm in there. This latest release updates around 140 records. Check if you're listed, and let Sergey know of any corrections. Do it. That's an order.

Very quick note as I need to go home from work... I've added another block to the left listing the last 5 ZX additions on Pouet. Note that's the latest additions, not releases... so you could sometimes see some old work listed, which ain't a bad thing.

After a long time an 8bit compo is back to Spain in this year's Euskal Encounter. You don't need to be there to submit your entry, and if you win something I'll send the prize to you :) . It's a 8 bit democompo for any 8 bit machine, download the invitro done in C64 by Level 64 at CSDB. For any question or info visit the official forum line at Retro Accion or send a mail to myself at Almightygod... See also retroeuskal.org and euskal.org/es/.