Topic: General news

Well it seems that scene-site Bla'dskie Demoscene has closed it's doors. It occasionally came up trumps with some handy news, but now the site is down, with the following message:

" www.blia.f2s.com is closed. Forever.
But you can sign our guestbook until february 28, 2002. After this date blia will be completely annihilated. Hurry! This is a limited offer! Just $9.95 per message! "

Hey, what a bargain <g>.
But still, no details of why it's closed. Perhaps if I'd been bothered to translate the whole site before, I'd know. Ah well.

Vaguely ZX-related this. If you have a twisted mind. Information on the Sam Coupe have been added to old-computers.com. Did anyone actually buy one of these? One of my mates did. We even used it once. Hmm. It's actually quite an interesting read.

Is it my imagination or have all .sk sites disappeared? Well not disappeared, but the ones I usually check seem to be screwing up. The "visitors" section of the FOReVER3 site (hosted here) has lost all ability to use PHP. More information on problems is at C64.sk, where it seems the host has had "some big catastrophe." My unprofessional opinion? Some trainee techy was playing with config files. That's how I manage to kill raww.net.
Hope it all gets well soon.

It's highly unprofessional to put several bits of news in a single post, but who ever said I was professional?

• Retro Review : Mentioned this just over a month ago, and the latest on issue 1 of this Retro 'zine is that it'll be shipped on January 15th. Get there for details of grabbing an issue.
• QC : Real Software have posted the latest version of Quick Commander on their site. It's version 2.62. They also mention UnrealSpeccy v0.19b2. Hmm, a little behind (it's on b5), but the thought was there.
• Sounds : Over on POS you can go grab a tune convertor. It'll do Advanced Sound Master v1.xx to Pro-Tracker v3.xx. I haven't downloaded it, but then I've heard my music.
• Spectrum Zone : Got sent a couple links to Computer Emuzone, a site about emulators, and to it's sub-site, Spectrum Zone. Mainly in Spanish, I think, tho' I've not had a chance to fully check it out. Added the ZX site to the links.

Well, I have an early start tomorrow, so that'll do I think.

Serzh sent me an email that he's updated LDIR, his Zx-Spectrum Magazine. Nope, issue 1 isn't ready just yet, but there's a load of information (mainly images) available for you to view.
There's reviews of a bunch of demos, tho' they act more as storyboards, images of a few famous sceners, and a kinda LDIR #1 preview. I must say it's looking really rather neat so far. Looking forward to the final release.

Well there aren't demos at the TZX Vault just yet, but I got an email from Steve who runs it, saying he'd be happy to post any demos you may have on the site.

" It would be preferable if they were in .tzx format, but failing that I'll accept .tap as I can master tapes from .tap files and create .tzx files from tape masters. "

I think that generally, standard-loader demos wouldn't be needed (these can be picked up from Demotopia). But I mentioned the other day about a non-standard tape-loader by the Israeli Team. This would fit well as a pure tape image at the Vault. I'll have a dig through my old tapes and see if I can sort it out. Any others people know of?
So if you have some non-standard tape-loader demos, create .TZX's and send them to Steve. Instructions on conversion can be found on the Vault, and also some unrelated information on attaching a 3" drive to a PC. Wish I'd known about that one earlier.

Not much more to say about this that the headline hasn't already covered. Version 2.6b of Sergey's AY-Emulator has added time-positioning for .AY and .AYM files, and has improved compatibility with Windows NT. The improved compatibility allowing it to actually work. Noice.

Well yet again Babelfish is failing me, this time by reporting that Scenergy isn't valid HTML. Hmm, works fine in my browser. So, no translation, but here's what I can glean from my complete lack of knowledge of the Russian language.
Basically, I can see there's news of a couple emulators (other than those we already know about). The first up is FooN, an ZX emulator for the Gameboy Advance. I don't have one of these, so I'll end there. If you do have one, you could check it out.
There's also a link to the intriguing Emulator 3000. It's an emulator of "Soviet calculators, electronic games and home computers." Hmm. Calculators. But hey, it also emulates the "Commodore 64, ZX-Spectrum (48K, 128K, +2, +2A, +3, +3E, +4)." May be worth a shot.
While I'm here, I'll mention quickly a couple new downloads you can grab from Scenergy -- "20 #5", and "NY Gift". I've got 'em queued up, and I'm guessing at least one is a new demo, by O.C.A.

Saw a neat article posted over on WOS, written by a guy calling himself Philip Mulrane. It's certainly one for the hardware hackers amongst you, and I know there are a load of you. The title is "I can't believe it's not the +D!" and it's some details on building your own +D interface. At one point this was the system all ZX-users needed, especially for swaps in the demoscene (until the MB02 came along). But as mentioned in the article, they're generally only available now on Ebay at huge prices. Well now you can get out your soldering iron and have a crack at creating one.
I've not checked out the full article... far to techie for me. Could be good for some of you, tho'.

Looks like there's a few problems over at the huge ROM repository, Speccy4Ever. It's been down a couple days, but now there's simply this (badly translated) message: "SiliconPark excuse with the Customers for the momentary suspension of the service web." SiliconPark of coz being the hosts for the site. Hmm, hope it's all fixed soon.