Topic: General news

Don't worry, is't not a Mad Cow Disease or FreeBSD port for ZX Spectrum. Something better!
BS-DOS on DivIDE got it's name finally - The DivBSD and z00m^TCG has written a self-patcher and installer of BS-ROM and BS-DOS for DivIDE. Well, it's just for testing. It works on patched DivIDE only of course and someone has to patch the HDDPatch or EasyHDD to get DivBSD work with HDD/CF, as I've written in the previous post.
Download the installer here and its source code over here.

I think noone can disagree with the fact that Zilog, the author of divIDE, is kinda half-a-genius-person. At least I've such a feeling.
When he's heard about the new divIDE Plus project, he commented it immediately:
"In fact it's a classic divIDE with an MB02 port, which chooses ROM/RAM like on MB02 or chooses one of the 16 "sub-divIDEs". The software solution of the blocked /M1 is horrible, but it's switchable over a jumper. Well, it's such a hybrid between MB02 and divIDE, which keeps original features of both devices."
Today, Zilog finished his present to all the hardware gurus owning the classic divIDE.

8.2.2007 UPDATE - more in the article...

It's that time of year again when I wonder why today is circled on the calendar, then remember that seven years ago today I started raww.org. It all started because at the time there wasn't a decent place to get ZX demoscene news in English. I took to translating (hello babelfish) other sites to grab news, as well as monitoring a large number of ZX-related sites for tidbits, and the thing kinda took off.

2000 was the start of what has been an unexpectedly long project. 2001 was a bit of a surprise to me, in that I was still running the website. I really thought I'd get bored of it within a few months. 2002 saw the start of the "birthday stats", where I enthrall you all with information like "how many times has the word arse appeared?" (so far today it's 130 times). 2003 saw the big change to a new design and, more importantly, a new engine - I had just moved into my house and had some spare time over Christmas to work on it. 2004 was a fairly standard affair, while 2005 was belated due to me holding the first raww.orgy the weekend before. It was also a time of much slackness regarding news output (something that I hope you'll agree has changed now, especially with the input from Factor6). 2006, now only a year ago, saw me reciting poetry. Since then there have been 290 articles posted on this site, making about 11% of the total article output. Not bad for the seventh year.

And now we're here. The 3rd raww.orgy takes place in two days time, the site is 2470 articles deep, and the scene is still going strong with more to report. Here's to another N years.

Just a quick note, as my tea is nearly ready and I'm very very hungry.
I just spotted that AYLand, the AY-themed streaming radio station has move to a new server. The important change is that the server addresses for accessing the streams has changed. Go there to find out info.

Following the success of the ZX Spectrum Book (I have one and it's lovely) you may recall that work has started on a companion book - based around the C64. Well I've now learned (via ZX author Andrew Rollings) that pre-orders are being taken. Looks like it would sit neatly with the book you've surely already got.

The new testing version of the well known DEMFIR is out, now with an experimental overwrite function. Download it here. The readme file says:

This version brings alternate way to call reset, moving screensaver and finally overwrite files in image. Colour and monochromatic screens (6912 and 6144 bytes) are supported for now.
Usage is simple: use cursor in browser to select file with screen and with keys SS+w overwrite it with VRAM content when NMI button was used. The change should be visible immediately. It not work for second VRAM in 128K yet.
Thats all. The "format" is detected by file length.
It should work on CF and HDD, code for ZIPdrive is there but not tested yet.
Do NOT test this version on medium with something important. Anything can be destroyed anywhere!

7.2.2007 UPDATE - Tritol has found a fatal bug in the previous version, the most actual fixed one is here (and in CVS).

Sergey Bulba has been at work again on the AY Composers List, releasing v4.11 of the list in which he's updated around 150 records. This is a handy list of who's who on the AY scene, including aliases of musicians and when they have been active on the scene. Hey, I'm also included for my quality work on Mania, so the list must be detailed.

There's a lot of interest in a more powerful ZX clone, so the Sprinter was quite a nice machine when it came out. Just search on this site for some information and you'll see just how lovely it was. That's until the makers, Peters Plus, disappeared from the 'net. Well now it seems, according to the guys over at NedoPC, that it may make a come-back. Ivan Mak, the creator of the Sprinter has said according to a forum post that Peters Plus have given him the rights to the Sprinter, and that the project will re-open in the near future. Coo.

Following the news that OpenSourceZX has been updated, redesigned, and Anglicised (!?), it's now also moved to being hosted on Untergrund. Which means it's faster for most of us. How lovely. There's also a few more source files to peruse to go with the move. Yes.

As you probably noticed, whole domain zeroteam.sk is down for few days already. This is due late payment for domain. Now everything is sorted out and all the stuff (ZeroTeam and also FOReVER homepage) will be back online in few days!