Topic: General news

The funny thing about emulator developers lately is that they tend to release an awful lot of beta versions. The latest one is from MikeW of EightyOne fame. He's just uploaded a new beta of his emulator (EightyOne), called... EightyOne 0.43b. Recent changes include support for Piters' 16-bit IDE interface (support for his 8-bit IDE was already implemented), addition of +D/Disciple (read-only), and even some preliminary QL emulation (I almost bought one on Ebay the other day, but it went for more than my 5 quid budget).
Nice stuff.

Not just an MTV video, but it is worth of checking this. It's a music video called Nikdy nic nebylo by Czech band 100 Zvirat. In English it could be translated like Never there was anything by 100 Animals. While watching the video you will be teleported back to the early 90's, transferred into robot Karel from the so called programming language for absolute beginners, which was extremely popular in the 80's in Czech and Slovak elementary schools and computer clubs.

Just a note to mention that the life's work of Andrew Rollings (well ok, it's been something he's worked on for the last year or so) is "at the printers". The ZX Spectrum Book covers a big bundle of games from around ten years of the ZX. The preview chapters are well-written, and it's designed to be a coffee-table book... so leave it out for guests to peruse. What? You mean you've not pre-ordered? There are apparently around 500 left "un-sold", so I suggest you go order one this minute. I would order an extra copy as a prize for the upcoming raww.orgy, but my guess is that anyone who wins will probably have pre-ordered the book anyway. Hehe.
Delivery of the printed books to Andrew is expected mid-December, so they'll hopefully arrive with us consumers a little after the Christmas. Just in time for your New Year hangover to subside.

If you're one of those people who love to look at other people's code and work out how it's all done (you know who you are you wierdo's), you'll be pleased to know that Open Source ZX has had a recent update, adding a few more programs to the growing collection. There's a couple games and utilities, and also a bundle of source from our own Gasman, who has a fondness for the GPL.
Whilst technically the site is all in Russian, the bulk of the content is source code... how hard can it be?

If you're keen to add your comment to a bundle of ZX demos, saying stuff like "Oh, the music roxx", "The design is great", or "how do I run this in an emulator? Can someone provide a divx?", then you'll be pleased to know that Factor6 has been upping his glops over on Pouet by adding a large backlog of ZX Spectrum productions. Yay for that! Go comment on some old demos. Especially if it's one of mine and you only have good things to say.

In the first update to their site for nearly six months, Brom has announced that Ell!pse have decided to close down. The site itself has oft been used by me as a source of news, so it's a shame to see it go. And as always, it's a shame to see groups disappear from the scene, tho' as Brom mentions they have not been overly active in the last few years (releasing mostly music, I think). Ho-hum.

In case you didn't spot it from the previous article, there's a new version of DTP's Emulator Files Runner, or DEMFIR for short. This was the first firmware I saw running on the DivIDE board, and works really well (tho' I now use FATWare, but it's simple to swap between the two). In this new release, which comes after a year of silence, are some nice additional features. For a start there's a file-search, booting from El Torito CD ROMs, and most interestingly there is some preliminary support for .TZX files. Very handy.

This weekend has been held a little meeting of Speccy fans in the heart of Czech Republic, Prague. For those who didn't attend, there were presentations of DivIDE, new version of DEMFIR, MDOS3 and FatWare. Everything in a big cultural hall of Praha-Smichov Railway Station, about 30 meters from a local pub (yes, beeeeer!), filled also by a small Barbarian competition. Here is a bunch of photos.

Ok, yes, technically the updates I'm about to mention to the AYLand playlist happened a month ago... but hey, at least I'm mentioning them now, eh? The updates are very "demoscene" relevant as they consist of the top 3 tunes from Doxycon'98, and a big bundle of tunes from Enlight'97. Party tunes are usually worth a listen so point your winamp-a-like streaming audio player (that's QCD for me) over to AYLand and crank the volume up to 11.

I got an email via Yerzmyey over the weekend, from elfh of CPU. The email reads something like this:

We are making a speccy diskzine now - Adventurer #16. One of ideas, that came in mind is to ask people, who did something for spectrum in the past, what are they doing now? The better way, I think, is to make an expanded answer for the question 'How does enthusiasm for spectrum affected your life?'.
Best regards, elfh

Personally, my enthusiasm for the ZX tends to annoy my girlfriend - tho' it does give her something to talk about at parties. Hey, and she's still agreed to marry me, so it can't really annoy her that much, can it!? We came to an agreement... I get to keep my collection of Spectrums if she gets to keep her collection of shoes. And there are more shoes than Spectrums, believe me.