Topic: General news

Congratulations to Ate Bit who have beaten off intense multi-platform competition to win this year's scene.org award for Most Original Concept, with Old Skool Invitro Maker. It's the first ever award winner on the Spectrum - here's to many more!

Hardly an original name, SpecOS is the project hinted at in the WOS Forums a few months back. It's a project from Team Spin, the people behind, uhm... Spin, the Windows-based ZX emulator. It's basically an OS based around Spectrum BASIC, designed to run on "modern" machines (I say modern as the sample image of SpecOS actually shows it running on a 486). There's still a lot to be done on the project, but it looks like it's well on it's way. Check out Dunny's Blog for information.

I think like most people I wasn't sure what to expect from the upcoming project from Akton Films, a Spanish independent production, uhm... thing. The teaser for that came out in the middle of last year for the film "Sinclair's Gate" was cryptic, to say the least. Well now there's a trailer out, downloadable from the Akton Films site via RapidShare, weighing in at only 3.8Mb so you really have no reason not to watch it. It's a combination of animation and live-action based in a world of computer graphics. Think a cross between Darwinia and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I must say I'm intrigued.

I just browsed over to Virtual TR-DOS and saw mention of a couple bits of software that you may be interested in if you're one of those people with a TurboSound system. TurboSound is (surely you know this already?) a dual-AY system, giving you 6 channels of lovely square-wave music. Mmmm. The actual TurboSound system is detailed at NedoPC, or over on Velesoft's website.
Anyway, on VTRD you can find a new player of TS modules, and more interestingly (I think) a Windows-based tracker, TFM Music Maker, allowing you to track all 6 channels from the comfort of your desktop. How handy. And yes I know there's been a version of ProTracker for TS for several months, but it kinda passed me by. Hmm.
Correction: Thanks to Alone Coder and Striker for pointing out my mistake. I was thinking of the TurboSound, but this is the TurboSoundFM. It's a board with two YM2203 chips in addition to the two AY chips. TFM Music Maker allows you to alter the FM channels only. I'll post Alone Coders' explanation in the "read more" section... sorry for the confusion.

I've just seen that there's a new single out from AY-Riders (it's good that the site's back up, eh?). The two tracks are covers of old scene music, and are a collaboration by X-agon, Factor6 and TDM, all featuring multi-ZX music. "Breath Of Air" was made on two machines, and "Satellite One" was made using three... so much for TurboSound, eh?

I've never owned or used a QL. I almost bought one on ebay, but I got outbid because I didn't fancy paying more than about a tenner for it. Ok... so almost is a slight exaggeration. To be honest, there's not much information around about the QL, which I guess is where Rich Mellor's QL Wiki comes in. It's there to provide information about the machine and it's software, and being a Wiki it requires people to add to it. So if you know stuff about the machine, go add. I realise this isn't exactly "demoscene" stuff, but wouldn't it be great to see a demo for the QL? No? Oh, ok then.

Garry Lancaster, he of plus3e fame, has updated his ZX OS ResiDOS to v2.00. The OS, which is now compatible with RWAP's DivIDE Plus board, adds a few new features in this latest version, including much-requested FAT support. The full details are below (cut-and-pasted from the site, you know). Hopefully there will soon be a memory addon board available, so that those of us with a standard DivIDE can use this really rather lovely system.

Just to note that M dot Strange, the film-maker behind "We Are The Strange", has dropped a note to Yerz regarding the music-use in the trailer... apologies and things were mentioned, and he said he'd give Yerz and AY-Riders "some props" for their work. It seems Yerz is happy, and sure enough the YouTube video is there, including promotion of Yerz' Myspace page, which contains some of his new music including "Alex Tears", a "tribute" song. Finally (for the moment), it looks like the AY-Riders page is back up, where you should be able to download all the previous albums... and I hear there's a new one being planned. Wooo.

It seems that some promotion footage for independent animated movie "We are the Strange" uses the remix by Carl/Micromusic of Yerzmyey's AY version of Tatu's "30 Minut" (did you follow that?). Yerzmyey of AY-Riders wrote his version for the Riders' album "Do You Remember?", and the track was then remixed with the original Tatu song. It's this version that's featured on the trailers and promo movies [1,2,3]. As far as we are aware, permission to use the music in what is basically a commercial venture was not sought.

I was debating whether to mention this, as it seems somewhat incestuous, but if anyone else had written about it I'd mention it here too. So, a quick pointer to my blog where I've posted an article about the issue of saving files from the ZX onto large-capacity (or any other) devices. The problem from my viewpoint is that the majority of current formats (.tap, etc) have much more baggage than is necessary, so my comments on the blog come from that side of the discussion... making things simple.
It's just thoughts really from recent discussions on forums for how best to make use of the new storage mediums we have at our disposal.