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Hello, SCENE+ readers.
First, the bad news: AWAKEN, which was around 60% finished, has been discontinued due to lack of funds. The coders from Rage have not yet given any statement on whether they will ever finish this game, despite its strong commercial prospects. This goes to show how much resonance Thomas's appeal to support Russian coders with money actually received. Ars of FTL wrote something about it in the question-mark section, but in Russian, so I haven't been able to translate it yet.
However, there is also good news for emulation fans who own a PC-box: from Hispania (Spain) comes El Spectrum 256, a fairly new ZX Spectrum emulator that (currently) emulates the Speccy 48K; one of the upcoming versions is supposed to support 128K. But what is so special about this emulator? Internet junkies can find out for themselves at:
http://G.emulatronia.com/emusdaqui/spec256
(According to WoS, a virus might be lurking there, but my virus scanners found nothing.)
There is a version available for download. For everyone who has sworn off the internet, here is the answer: with Spec256, many standard Spectrum games can be played in 256 colors without attribute clash (no joke!). This is achieved via a 64-bit Z80 emulation: with every piece of information copied into the video RAM, 7 additional bytes—normally invisible to the processor—are copied into the video memory. It has a built-in disassembler/monitor, although you wouldn't necessarily need it for that.
Of course, several redrawn games are also available for download so you can admire them in full color glory, e.g., Jetpac, Underwurlde, Game Over, Sabre Wulf, Abu Simbel Profanation, Cybernoid, and others. You can toggle between standard display and enhanced mode with a single keypress, though in normal mode the graphics can look rather odd. Unfortunately, the program also has a few flaws: due to the lack of attributes, you cannot hide graphics (Ink=Paper) or use flashing (which made it hard to tell which menu option was selected). Furthermore, it runs too slow even on a Pentium 233, and it cannot load TAP files (naturally), supporting only Z80, SNA, and GFX snapshot files. Nevertheless, one can look forward to future versions; I see a great future for this program. Plans include 128K emulation and True Colour (16.7 million colors).
Good news #2: Pussy will be released on 31.12.99 and offered for download in the TRD archive.
Good news #3: At DX99, I got an MB02 version of UFO: Enemy Unknown. That is set to become my second translation project (after Scorpions: The Machine), as soon as I find some spare time. Right now I am simultaneously busy with cracking games, writing Legacy, writing articles for Spectrum magazines, Scene+, and doing raytracing on the winDOSe (as well as other graphics).
Another piece of good news comes straight from Zilog and was brought to light by Frank Meurer: the eZ80 is coming! It's a Z80-compatible processor designed with the Internet in mind. Technical specifications: 100% Z80 compatibility mode, 64 KB / 1 MB / 16 MB address space, up to 80 MHz clock speed, opcodes executed 4 times faster than on a regular Z80 (effectively matching a Speccy at 14 MHz; at 80 MHz it equals roughly 320 MHz), on-chip TCP/IP stack (Internet), autonomous multiply-accumulator for DSP applications, and much more. Whether it can be utilized for the Speccy remains to be seen.
Big thanks for the new software go to Matsoft from ZX Magazin, without whose help this issue would look entirely different—as you know, fresh stuff always has top priority for me.
Some of you wanted to know what the deal is with "Jetboy", who appears as hate figure #1 in several demos. Let me shed some light on it: around 1992, this self-proclaimed Amiga scene expert wrote in a Polish magazine that there were hardly any Spectrum demos left and that nobody cared about the machine anymore anyway. Well, that guy is still around, isn't he!?!
That's all for this month,
Tiger's C[law] / L. C. D.
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