Scene News

SCENE NEWS

The MB-02 is finished, as was already reported in the previous issue, but one still has to wait two weeks for the case. If you buy it without a casing, it is slightly cheaper, although you don't get the warranty either. A review will follow once I find an HD drive that works with the interface, as some drives apparently have issues with it. Unfortunately, the MB-02 does not support Microdrive syntax, and a +D emulation is not yet in sight, which is why SCENE+ will temporarily not be released in MB-02 format. An interesting feature of the interface is the use of the Z80 DMA, which can read or write a memory location per clock cycle, bringing massive speed advantages.

Russia is a country where the Spectrum is among the most widespread computers; there, only companies can afford a PC. Therefore, it hardly seems surprising that quite a few new games are coming from there, such as Scorpions: Die Machine, a war game, or Hexxagon (see the review in this issue). The PC conversions should also be very interesting: Prince of Persia and UFO: Enemy Unknown, which almost certainly were not licensed, just like Defender of the Crown, and therefore can likely only be distributed as Public Domain here in Europe. The only hurdle is the language barrier, but that's what capable crackers are for—they would gladly make English versions out of them.

I managed to get hold of some of these Russian games, which are reviewed in this issue; more reviews will follow soon, including Czech software as well.

Paul Howard is currently working on a new game, specifically a card game. The title of the game is 99. Apart from that, he is collaborating with Technium 220 on a new demo called Videosyncr...