Topic: General news

It's "icabod-be-slack" time again, as I squish a bunch of news into a small space:

• Sergey 'AY-Emulator' Bulba has produced a new player, entitled Micro Speccy. It plays the .AY files that AY-Emu doesn't handle, and this early alpha version sounds great to me so far. The 180K player can be downloaded from the AY-Emu page.
• After a long time resting, Virtual TR-DOS has been updated. Nothing much of interest yet, tho' you can download a photo of people getting drunk. Hurrah! (note: I also fixed the link to VTRD)
• I confess to not closely watching Samara, but I just happened upon some news relating to ProTracker, or rather to a new editor named "Minimal Tracker". My translation of Russian is both crap and computerised, but the basics are this... you can download new PT v3.5, and there's a heap of info about MT, but I couldn't spot a download. Get in there if it's your thing.
• Finally, I got an email from illegal about the results of the recent competition... PHART0. Here's a quick rundown (cut'n'paste job): 1) our swedish fruinde!; 2) depredator; 3) gf of the owner of 1st place; 4) relict; 5) me; 6) hazard who took part remotely. Heh. I kinda hope this is a joke ;]

That's it, I really have to get some sleep.

Just a short update for now, tho' I expect as soon as I post this all the Phat0 releases will come flying out (a side-note... Yerzmyey has sent out a couple releases already (by Gasman and Yerz, which you can grab here and here).
Anyway, back to this post. SS\Anubis has updated his reviews section with some releases from ZX-Party 2000 and CC 000. There's a couple controversial comments in there, so it's well-worth a quick read, especially if you've yet to grab these demos and intros. Pop over to Anubis' page here.

Started recentky is the SpeccY SourcE Library (SYSEL for short) by Dron of demogroup K3L. It's an idea that was going around back in July. Remember the post on High Technologies? Well, that site hasn't appeared (at least I can't find it), but this is much the same thing.
It's basically a point to grab source for various Speccy-relating things. There are routines for disk-access, FX, maths routines, etc. It's currently only in Czech, but it's fairly easy to grasp what's going on. Worth a check (Czech!?).

Here's a few things before I shoot off to the pub.

• Demotopia has posted the results of CC000, along with the releases and some shots.
• On the subject of CC000, I noticed on Chaosite's message board that there are alledgedly some photos from the party available. But I can't seem to access the messages themselves, so I'll leave you figure it out.
• I've finally joined the ZX Banner Network, with a couple (nice?) banners for raww.org. If you want to see them without continuously reloading a member-page, you can look at them here and here. I decided to go for two approaches, "classic" and "ambient". Hope they work!
• Chatting on #z80 the last couple days, and got a few details on Phat0 from people who are there. Something I thought was funny is that it's being held upstairs from Arsenals, an International Movie Festival. So if the sceners want some culture, not only can they go watch kinky Belgian films, but they can make amusing jokes about the building being a PHAT-ARSE (make the most of this, the jokes don't get any better from me <g>). Compos are being held tonight.
• X-Agon posted a message on his board asking for information regarding the DOS disk-format (you know, the FAT used on peecee's). He doesn't give a reason, but I'm hoping for some Speccy tool to come out of it. I'll check my Uni notes, but in the meantime if you have the info he wants, let him know.

There ya go. One more post, and I'm outta here for the evening.

I read today a sad post on both Scenergy and speccy.scenews. Ded Smirnoff (Andrey Smirnov), musician from Power Of Sound, has died. I won't pretend to be familiar with every piece of work he ever produced, but it's sad to lose anyone from the scene, especially when it's so permanent.
The POS team are organising a memorial program, and if you're interested in information, send a mail off to Himiks.
Our best wishes go to his family and friends.

Couple "little" things for this post, I think.

• Scenergy mentioned that a new version of the Burial Gfx Editor from Delirium Tremens^Freedom has been released. You can grab v2.22 from the Scenergy download page.
• Phat0 starts today/tomorrow/sometime this weekend. Hope everything goes well, people.
• Slowly reading through the latest issue of PCGamer, and I spotted another Spectrum-mention. This time, it's comparing the new game from Shiny (named Sacrifice) with the classic Chaos. The game's all about warring wizards. Kewl.

Right, on with the show...

Looks like Minisoft has been playing. ZX Banner Network has had a makeover, and is looking decidedly sweeter than the previous version. If you don't know, ZXBN is simply a banner-exchange program. You simply call a piece of javascript from the ZXBN-Server, and it'll do all the hard work.
And in case you're wondering why there's no banner on raww.org, and why we're not listed in the network, rest assured that we'll be there soon. I've designed a couple banners, and they're in the stage of "internal-voting". Basically, I can't decide which is the kewlest (they're all so good <g>). As soon as the decision is made, I'll get my side of the deal done, and send off the banners for inclusion.
Now, it's midnight, and I have an early start, so I'll leave you to surf.

For those who know Crashed fanzine, run by Dave Fountain, it'll be missed now that Dave has decided to stop production. However, there's some good news. The last, lost issue (number #31) is currently being sent out to everyone he knows via email. He's scanned in the pages, and is sending a couple a day.
I've checked with Dave, and he's happy for me to upload the images onto raww.org, for everyone to read-and-enjoy. I'll get something sorted out for you all this coming weekend, when I'll hopefully have a bit more time on my hands.

Okay, this is a bad thing to do, but there's a heap o'news out there, and it's 0:40am. I have to be outta the house in 6 hours time, so a quick "blah!" will cover the short notes, and I'll do another full update tomorrow night... that last post took longer than I expected!

• Over on S4E you can find new ROMs for the Sprinter board.
• Gas13 (you've surely seen his work) has a new website. Here you can vote for which image you think is best, and also download all the work from this master of the Speccy artform.
• There's been an update on the RealSpectrum page. It's not a new release, but here you can find news about the forthcoming Beta8. I'll leave the summary of new features 'til tomorrow, but it's looking sweet.

Phew. Done. Tired. Bed.

I've had a long day at work, and after a quick trip to the pub (to relax, of coz), I'm only in the mood for a cut-n-paste. This is a snippet from Andrew Owen about Spectrum SE, as noted to me by Gasman and Davide Barlotti. It was posted on CSS, so I guess it's okay to post it here...

" I just got back from up North (where I was stranded owing to the petrol shortage) to find I have been granted a 12 month working holiday visa by the Aussies. This means all my projects are now on hold until I get back from down under. The SE *will* resurface on my return. I'm handing all my Sonic stuff over to Anestis. My Speccy software developments are also on hold and some may not be restarted. In the mean time I am having fun with my ZX Spectrum +2C project. I have now managed to rewire a standard grey +2 so that the monitor port drives an Amstrad CM14 colour monitor with ACB stereo sound. It's lovely. Once I get the ROM I've done for it burned I'll be trying to get hold of a Beta Disk interface and converting the joystick ports to use Mega Drive pads. I'll try and answer any questions while I'm still in the country. My aowen@mail.ru address will still get checked while I'm in Oz if anyone has any pressing questions but I'll be off the ng after October. "

So, there you go. Seems that the ZXSE will be on hold for a while, but I'm interested in this +2C. Could be just what the scene needs, a Speccy with a few more features. Of coz, there's the chance it could cause another (3rd) faction of the scene, but it remains to be, uh, seen.
Spotted some info from Andrew in CSS myself, this time covering ZXSE Emulation. The emulator ZXSP (not listed in my collection, so I'll check it out) was apparently going to provide ZXSE emulation, but Andrew has requested that this be replaced with +2C. New ROMs have been flying about the place, and it'll hopefully be not long before they appear on one of the ROM-sites. The post covers a lot of details about the changes to ROM0, and if you don't have CSS, you can grab the full post here.