Topic: General news

Simply because it's groovy: ZX Shaders. Finally we have a good reason for those expensive £300+ graphics cards that we stick inside our PC's.

Short news item - check this out if you want to enter something in the compos at raww.orgy this year. I can't ba arsed to type it twice, partly coz I'm p'sed. Noice.

For those who don't know... this weekend is raww.orgy weekend. A couple of the guests have already arrived (hello Gasman and Eq), I've gotta go pick up Bogie from the station, and Laesq, Jojo, Mikezt and Ellvis should be almost here by now. And I think Justinas is hoping to get here tomorrow morning.
And I've just finished the music player - so get your entries in quickly (mail me) if you wanna be included. It should be easy to recompile the player :]

That's it for now. Check out the rawwrum for more info as and when we can be bothered to post it.

Added XMI-files (XMIDI) and improved MIDI support, sequence/song number in command line for multitrack files (AY, AYM, MID or XMI) and many other changes (see readme.beta.txt for details).

File: http://bulba.at.kz/emulator_e.htm.

Got a link sent to me at work for the new "Toys" page on tv.cream, the site about old TV programs. I was just looking around it, checking out some info on things like "Big Trak" and it's ilk when I spotted something rather special at the bottom of the A-Z list. Yeah, no prizes for guessing it's the ZX Spectrum. Amusingly there's no sign of a C64. Hmm.
Worth a read perhaps. Or perhaps not. There's far from being anything new there to entertain you, but I thought it was worthy of mention.

Just spotted that Sergey has been working on AY-Emulator some more, releasing beta 13 of the v2.8 branch. You can click below for the full list of changes since the last version, but you're going to download it anyway so why bother.

Another new Italian Zx Spectrum clone (after "Chrome") has reached alpha-stage: it's ZX Bada Loc (meaning "ZX stunningly fast", as in Modena local slang).
Features: Z84C processor at 3.5, 7 and 21 MHz& 128k RAM& 32k ROM& 115k2 serial port.
There is no "contended memory" : this is the reason why it is so fast.
Check out http://www.zxbada.bbk.org - in particular: Gallery and the project (9 Mb of document). Unfortunately for now it is only in italian but very soon it will also be translated into english

When I was One, I had just begun.
When I was Two, I was nearly new.
When I was Three, I was hardly Me.
When I was Four, I was not much more.
When I was Five, I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.
                                    A.A.Milne

No before you ask, this isn't a contest for music that takes up 48k of memory (imagine a SQTracker module that big!?). It's actually a contest being run by Mister Beep. The aim is to find the best Beeper-music from Spectrum and Timex games. I already have a few favourites, tho' knowing my musical ear they're actually just badly-written AY tunes. Hehe.
Below you can read the full info on the competition, and you can download the votepack here.

Dr.Parker is obviously having a "bored" day today - he sent me a link to the 6 degrees of Wikipedia. If you don't know about the whole "6 degrees" thing I won't bother to bore you with the details. However, it's a fun diversion where you can try to get from ZX Spectrum to "something else" within 6 jumps of a Wikipedia page. One page that popped up when I tried to just from ZX Spectrum to Quake was this list of Cancelled Video Games. Well, it's a bit of fun.
Interestingly, we can link from the ZX Spectrum to Grandmaster Flash via 1980s. Isn't that cheating?