Topic: General news

Just had some news posted by bverstee linking to his site and also to a couple videos he's posted on Youtube of his home-built MB02 Clone. I've often praised the MB02 interface as being simply lovely (for it's tape emulation and DMA and ooh, other things) so now you can see it in action here and here (the second link isn't up as I type this, but should be soon). And as the MB02 in question is un-cased, it's like pornography for you hardware types. Mmm, just check out the height of the chip in the middle of the board... oh yeah baby. That's what I'm talkin' about. *cough*

As you'll all be aware, this April marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the ZX Spectrum. If you didn't know that you probably deserve a right royal slapping. There has been talk on various forums of how to celebrate the event, but so far it seems to be just that... talk. If I'd thought ahead I could have delayed the raww.orgy by a couple months, but there you go.
Anyway in the interests of celebration, NickH (he of YS-RNRY fame) has started a thread over on WOS about what people are doing - think of it as an announcement thread, tho' mostly people will probably say "I'll have a couple beers" or something. Hey, it's WOS. Worth keeping an eye on perhaps, in case you get news of someone organising a shindig in your area. Or worth posting on if you're the orgyniser.

A quick note because my tea is nearly ready, and I'm rather hungry.
It seems that YS3, the second sequel to quality 'zine Your Sinclair, is online in blog form. There are only a few articles so far but they're quite well-written, including one about the PC200 (you remember that?).
As a side-note I spotted this news on the YS-Rock-n-Roll-Years website, and it seems that in the next couple weeks they'll have another video download ready for us, detailing 1988. Good job there.

Also mentioned in an email at the weekend was news of Retro North, a "retro gaming event" taking place in sunny, uhm... Glossop. That's the north of England, if you didn't already know. The aim of the day (which is 25th August 2007) is to play on retro games machines. Will the ZX feature? I don't know. Really I don't. But the proceeds go to the Diabetes UK charity, so it can't be all bad.

An email I had at the start of the weekend mentions that "the other" news-stand (albeit only in one shop) Retro magazine, Retro Fusion is to join up with gaming site eurogamer.net. The Fusion team are to run the sites upcoming Retro section, which will sit neatly among the PC and "console" sections. Until then the Fusion team have created a "Retro Fusion" group in the gamer's community. I didn't spot the fusion group immediately, as the community section of Eurogamer seems to consist mostly of talk about breasts. No bad thing.
I just wonder how this development will affect the news-stand (ok, gamestation-stand) print-a-zine.

Just had an email from Sergey Bulba to say that he's got a new home for his AY site: bulba.untergrund.net should replace your current "at.kz" bookmarks. As well as this site-move, Sergey has released v4.2 of the TR-Songs archive. There are now around 18400 modules for your aural pleasure. I'm a tad busy at the moment so I won't even attempt to list the changes, I suggest you go download the 13Mb file and get-a-playing.

Just a quick note to mention that I've added another block to the left of this site titled "Recent Parties". The idea is that when a party has happened I'll add a link so that you can go get the releases as they come out. The parties listed will be the latest 3 that have ZX releases or information. Currently the links just point to Pouet, but I'll probably change it later link to Pouet and the official party-pages, and also to look a little neater. And maybe show when the party happened.
Note that this ain't no automated malarkey and relies on me updating it "by hand", so if I've missed a party, drop me a note.

Over on the WOS Forums zxbruno has posted a link to a Youtube video of someone running a ZX at 14MHz. The interesting thing with this video is that they're using a PC to switch the speed up to 14MHz, load a game (using a wave-player with the speed set to x4), and then setting the speed low to play Arkanoid. The machine that's being used is actually an early ZX Badaloc (I recognised the early keyboard and sure enough the video is mentioned on the website).

Quick mention for a link I picked up on zxby.org. It seems that PC World magazine listed the 50 best ever tech products... and a bunch of readers thought that the list should have included the ZX Spectrum. Too damn right.

In an effort to bolster your burgeoning emulator collection I inform you of the release of DSP v0.6b1. DSP, if you don't know, is kind of a cross between a ZX emulator and MAME. That's to say it emulates a variety of machines, including our beloved Speccy. There's a few bugfixes regarding .TAP loading, +3 emulation, and there's also "BUG: With Z80 OUT bug fix many demos now works" which is always a good thing. I think that demos are often a good way to test an emulator, so getting mention in a fix-list is groovy.