Topic: General news

Apologies for the slightly late posting of this news. It's been a busy (and very hot) weekend. But I see that Yerzmyey is still on form, sending out a whole heap o' releases from the recent Syndeecate Apocalypse party, held in the lovely Czech Republic. The full pack of downloads can be grabbed from Demotopia, including the slightly delayed release of Wirne by Mike\ZeroTeam.

Not strictly scene-related, but it might interest you anyway if you still have some old demo tapes to transfer to PC :-) We have updated our MakeTZX and CSW tools to versions 2.33 and 2.00 respectively, with more features and bugfixes. Check out the main headline for all the pointers, or read more...

This new version fixes some bugs, adds lots of keyboard shortcuts, and is a bit more configurable.
As usual, take it from: http://www.speccy.org/metalbrain

I spotted a link from ellipse.raww.net to a site called ZX-OS. It's all about a possible upcoming replacement operating system for the ZX Spectrum which claims will be multi-tasking. The site is in Russian, so I can't be certain of the translation. But it's an interesting idea, and the site appears to be inviting discussion.
One concern tho' is how generic this will be? Something that will run on the majority of ZX machines would be nice, as opposed to working on just a couple clones. Hmm.

Doesn't the headline just say it all? Check out Blackeye.org for an interview with multi award-winning pixel-artist Gas13, a regular in most ZX compo's. And hey, the interview is in English, which is a bonus.

A recent announcement on the CAFe'03 party-page states that, basically, they've lost the entries which have been sent so far. So if you'd already sent some work to them, please resend it. Details are on the site (in Russian).

The first release from the Syndeecate demoparty is available on the 'net for your downloading pleasure, coming from the ever-prompt Hooy-Program. It's called "Sailor Demo", was produced by Yerz, Hellboj, Vavrzon, and Factor6, and can be grabbed by clicking here.

Perhaps "frenzy" is too strong a word, but there's been a couple updates to AY players in the last few days.
First up, Speccy-Player 0.1b has been released - it allows you to play .AY tracks on a real ZX, as nature intended. Changes include additional playback controls, track-name display, and something to do with "overlaps". Hmm.
There's also been another release of Sergey's AY-Emulator, fixing a couple problems in v2.7 relating to .VTX files it seems.
Credit goes to Vorc for being a hady place to rip AY news.

I'm sure in our time we've all tried cracking into games, even if just to rip out graphics (the animation in Rex for example) or music. Well this post on the WOS forums is asking that some people go back and do it all again. Basically bcass of Project AY is asking people to help out with filling up the archive with all the ZX music we can find. It's not a small task, but if enough people put in a few files, the archive will soon begin to bulge. So check it out, do some good.

A couple new issues of 'zines have been released recently, so a quick mention to them... over on ZX Files (note - due to some 'zines being only in Russian, the link is to the Russian version of the page) you can find #4 of Inferno. You can also grab the bilingual (it's got English articles too) Adventurer #14. Thanks go to Miguel for pointing me to a couple other downloads of this one, in either .TRD or a fixed .TAP format.