Topic: General news

If you don't know ImageJ like me till today, it's a kind of picture viewer written in Java, which means it should be runnable on various platforms. Omega^Patisoners, the known maker of impossible demo effects and also well expected Exception demo has written two small ImageJ macros for importing ZX raww picture format (scr, 6912 bytes) and Sinclair QL's 256x256x8 and 512x256x4 pictures. The whole article is here at vakoveverky.net portal. The macros are called ZX_View and QL_View. Not quite useful for the Speccy, where you can grab and save a picture using any emulator, but handy for converting QL raww pictures into some normal format like GIF, PNG, JPG etc.

One of the great things about the MB02+ disc system is/was the DMA. Using the device's built-in Zilog DMA chip you could throw data around at very high rates, meaning some nice FX (such as Multitech and other lovely graphics effects) were possible. Over on the WOS forum Velesoft, the Czech hardware guru has mentioned the Data-Gear, an internal mod that provides the same DMA functionality as the MB02+, without needing an actual MB02+. Nice, huh? In fact, here's an example of what you can achieve - the green area is the time spent doing DMA. Yep, entire screen scrolling in about half a frame.
Of course the problem with mods like this is that they require people to have them in order for people to fully utilise the functionality (I know that's obvious, but why would you develop code that used DMA if only 7 people could run it?). Personally I'm a big fan of having a "vanilla" ZX for running software on, rarely using the bonus features of any addon device... but maybe that's just me.

Heads-up to those of you who get the BBC News 24 channel - according to Hern on the WOS forums, the program "Click" is celebrating 25 years of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum by doing a program about it. It's on... now, in fact. I've just set my Sky box to record it, and as it's GF's birthday tomorrow I'll force her to watch it with me (haha!). It's repeated several times over the weekend, and I expect it'll be on Youtube before the week is out. Lovely stuff - thanks Hern.

Thanks to evilpaul for pointing out something I missed from the recent Boomkat mailshots. ZX Spectrum Orchestra have released an album, "Basic Programming" and CD-Single with accompanying DVD of the track "Dollar Power". The single may well be worth getting as the DVD features footage of "vintage spectrums in action, with loving shots of the hardware rubbing up against reams of code as the music thuds away wantonly in the background." Uhm, yeah. Right. Ok.

Not sure if this is a permanent thing, or someone just forgot to put a pound in the meter, but it looks like bulba.at.kz, the home of the AY-Emulator, has ceased to be. A quick DNS check shows that the domain doesn't exist in any nameserver. As I say, hopefully it's a temporary setback and the site will be back up soon, at the very least at a new location.

Not a fresh news, but worth to mention that a newly disassembled source code of MB02 BootROM (that's the thing with the Amiga-like-insert-disk animation) appeared at Poke's Vakoveverky site. Because the original sources by LMN^8BC were lost many years ago, Poke did this hard disassembling work to develop a HDD boot feature in the future. You can grab the sources directly from here.

This years scene.org award nominations have been posted, and it's nice to see that perhaps the most inventive demo of last year, Ate Bit's "Old Skool Invitro Maker - Sundown 06 Invite" has been nominated in the OldSchool section. It sits there as a lone ZX production among 4 (count 'em) C64 demos. So good luck the Ate Bit.
(news via UKScene).

While the release of some source code isn't something I'd usually mention in itself, I thought the release of the v105 source for EasyHDD by LMN of 8bc to be a timely happening. Why? Well there's lots of talk at the moment about modding the DivIDE board to be a tad more MB02 compatible. This means that replacement ROMs like Busy's BS-DOS can be used with the device... but it requires someone to mod the MB02 HDD software. See? It's a little more interesting now, eh?

If like me you were sitting at home thinking "You know, what the world needs is another attempt to produce a ZX-Spectrum-a-like" then you'll be pleased to know that Chris Smith has begun work on the Harlequin (I think that's the name). One aim of this project is to document the process of building a clone - other projects generally say "here's my clone, ain't it great" without showing how it came to be in the current state. Think of it like a hardware version of the Xe03 blog.
If you're very much the hardware monkey then this will be a worthwhile site to keep an eye on. Indeed, it should interest most ZX fanatics. So on it, an eye we shall keep.

Drink Lovers of Triumph did great release for the Turbo Sound device, an additional soundchip for the ZX Spectrum, which allows using of 6 channels instead of 3. As the result, here we have about 40 minutes and 18 tracks. We proudly announce that this is the first release ever made with such a device. Feel free to download it from Ubiktune by next link - http://ubik.untergrund.net.