Topic: General news

Purely as a matter of trivia than anything else (and hardly related to the demoscene), we get given diaries at work at the start of every year. Nothing unusual about that I guess. These diaries have an entry for every day that says "on this day in...", so it was interesting to see that on this day 22 years ago (that's January 10th 1985), Uncle Sir Clive Sinclair launched the Sinclair C5 onto an unsuspecting public. So unsuspecting that the car-o-bike was a failure. It's still nice to see one at shows, tho'. I almost considered buying a couple that popped up on ebay recently, in order to have races around the car park. Maybe next time.

Just a quick round-up of upcoming parties that you need to produce work for. There's actually just the two in the immediate future (that I know of - are there others in the next few months?). raww.orgy is 4 weeks away, with competitions for 256b intro, screen$, and AY-music. I'll start work on a simple player for the graphics and music in the next few days hopefully. Then there's the upcoming 8th installment of Forever, (one of) the largest ZX scene parties. This is taking place in the middle of March, with the usual Demo, 1k Intro, screen$ and AY-music competitions. There was also talk of Turbo-Sound (2x AY) entries being allowed, but I can't check the site from here so you'll have to check it yourself. My work on a demo for the party has slowed down due to excessive workload at... work. I may work on an Intro instead, so I'll at least be producing something. I expect you all to do the same.

The entry process for the 2006 CSS Crap Game Compo is complete. Entries were accepted up to the 8th of January, which is annoying for me as if I'd known earlier I could have finished my game. But I didn't, so rather than just doing a search for "icabod", you'll have to actually play the games to find out who to vote for. There are 37 games in all, so get playing.

If you are JSW ultrafan like me, you shouldn't miss this new game by Twibright Labs (which is rather a free non-speccy hardware developing group). It's definitely not yet another JSW remake with new rooms, but completely new game which is based only on the original Jet Set Willy. New graphics, rooms, etc. A music is a beeper mix of the original JSW tunes Moonlight Sonata and If I Was a Rich Man, performed by Factor6 *grin*. The game has a very smooth movement of the sprite (well, there is only one sprite, the Willy, no baddies yet). The goal is to collect all the flashing items and then go gaming on your ZX Spectrum (no more Maria). The end sequence is quite well animated so go and get it here! Except the game, there is a couple of videos from the game and a list of differences in comparsion with the original game. It's worth of checking for every Jet Set Willy fanatic!

If you registered my post about MDOS 2.1 disk system for D80/Kompakt, I have a news for you. MTs, the author of the project has updated it to version 102 (dunno why this number). As he wrote at Pandora Speccy message board, there are some minor updates and a new manual. Grab it here.

In theory, the deadline for entries to the 2006 CSS Crap Game Compo passed a few days ago, tho' there's nothing on the site to say that's actually the case. Either way, you can go there now to check out the games in preparation for the voting, which I guess will be announced fairly soon.
I know what you're all wondering... where's the entry from icabod? Well, it's not complete. December was very busy for me and I didn't have chance to get the final little bit of code working. I think my mistake was trying to make the game crap but in a "good" way. Maybe I'll get a chance sometime soon to finish it and release it to the masses for fun. Hell, maybe I'll be able to release it at the upcoming raww.orgy? Eh?

I'm not sure that it's "official" as such, but I've just spotted Gasman's comment to a recent article where he mentions that... the ZX demoscene is 20 years old! I'm not sure how accurate that is, but apparently Coolguys Ltd claim that they released the first ZX Spectrum demo during Christmas 1986... 20 years ago. I'm sure there will be people who will disagree, stating that there was probably a biiiig cracking scene before then, but it's the closest we get to a real birthdate of the scene as we know it.
So happy (belated) birthday to us. Have a beer.

A bunch of modified games for Kempston Mouse can be found at Velesoft's site. All the games can be controlled by mouse (with a K-Kmouse Turbo interface [guess who made its logo]), some of them for more than one player can be played even with two mice! I'd been a bit sceptic for the K-Mouse project at the beginning but when I tried to play Flying Shark for K-Mouse, I have to say it's great :)

Just a quick post, that a known Czech server www.speccy.cz changes its look, gets bilingual and comes with RSS news from important Czech Speccy sites. Now you can be more informed about news on Czech and Slovak Speccy scene.

Noby Noblnoch whom you can know also under nick Aragorn/Naughty Crew released a new old-skool demo called 10 Years Naughty Crew as an anniversary of ten years existence of this group. The code was done by Noby, music is by X-Agon, the picture made Factor6 (does anyone know him?) and the jokeful Czech text is written by Johny-X. The demo has been released just after Christmas, but the idea came from Factor6 (again... I think this mate has something to do with Speccy!) but Noby coded it just during Christmas and the final release is out! So switch your Speccy on and enjoy Czech it out! Hmm, crap... noooo!!!