Manic Miner, a great platform classic is seeing a WIP remake for Atari ST.

The fixed version by Nicholas Campbell of the Trap Door is availble on NVG. It allows to finish the game which couldnt be since 32 years, whereas you could finish it on ZX Spectrum and C64. A robot had to burn slimies in a cauldron, and it's now possible. Novabug just finished The trap Door on Youtube.

Targhan has released Arkos Tracker v2.0.0a4 for linux, windows and mac.

Arkos Tracker V2.0.0a4 released! (01/11/18)
Finally! After 5 months of work, here is it. It includes some cool features, such as:

Breaking changes:
- The Z80 assembler target now Rasm (by Roudoudou). Minimum effort are needed to convert them to SJasmPlus though.
This was required to implement the player configuration feature (see below) in a better way.
Please check the "players" page on the website to find tricks on how to use it on any assembler.

New features:
- Copy/cut/paste in the Pattern Viewer.
- Added a contextual menu in the Pattern Viewer.
- Changes in the keyboard shortcuts in the Pattern Viewer (transpose, octave, instrument, solo, mute, etc.).
- Added an Arpeggio Generator in the Pattern Viewer. Enter notes, select them, right-click and generate an arpeggio from them!
- UI changes:
- Changed the location of the Meters, now besides the Linker. More space!
- Changed the layout of some pop-ups to make them more small-screen friendly.
- Player configuration:
- "Player configuration" source files can be created when exporting songs or sound effects.
Using such files, the players only compile what the songs require (CPU and memory gain!).
- Done for AKG and its sound effect player.
- Done for Lightweight and its sound effect player.
- Done for AKY (Z80 version only, "normal" version (accurate/stable not done)).
- Song optimizer: on export, the Songs are more optimized (will introduce "clean song" options in the UI in later releases).
- Added a Vortex Tracker 2 import (.VT2/.txt).
- Added a Chip'n'Sfx import (.CHP).
- YM Analyser tool: load and play YMs, extract sounds from them.
- YM are now exported with digidrums.
- Atari ST:
- The AKY Player has been converted to 68000 for Atari ST, by GGN. A huge thanks to him!
- Added an option in the AKY export to encode all label references relative to the beginning of the song (useful for Atari ST players).
- Sample export:
- Added a fade out option to prevent clicks, for non-looping sounds. It can go to 0 of to the middle value.
- The padding value can also be 0, or the middle value.
- Added an option to export only the necessary length.
- Source profile:
- Added a mnemonic for strings.

Bug fixes:
- Corrected a big bug when inserting/deleting an item in Speed/Event Tracks (the wrong track could be changed).
- Corrected a source compilation problem when exporting samples in AKG format (thanks Hicks).
- Corrected a bug making the "export samples" dialog disabled, if in AKG/RAW export, export samples was off.
- Corrected a bug with the "source to Orgams" Python converter (thanks Hicks).
- Improved/corrected how the Retrig in instruments is exported (AKG, Lightweight, sound effects).
- Corrected a small UI bug about the selection when collapsing tracks.
- Corrected how the PSGs are addressed on SpecNext (stereo wrongly applied) (thanks Emook).
- Limited the export binary to 4 digits (#ffff) max. Handled correctly out-of-bounds assembling.

A new release candidate of the ANSI-C compiler SDCC v3.8.0 is available for download.

Too busy each start of September, I missed Still Scrolling 4k, an Amstrad CPC intro in 4 Kb by Siko and Barjack.

Barbarian plus v1.0 by Christophe Romagnoli (graphism), Colin Vella (programmer) and Simone Bernacchia (musician) is a remake for Commodore Amiga which is just available, with 2 more characters for example.

You can see it in this video of Barbarian plus.

Results of the Amstrad CPC competition CPCRetroDev 2018 are out.

You can see a video of all trailers commented (in french) by Oldschool is beautiful and also the Awards Giving Ceremony.

After the PC remake of Outrun by F.L. (Barbarian 1987), it's now the turn of a remake for the Vectrex console with a video of a WIP version on Youtube where you can listen to the port of the Amstrad CPC music as it seems the Vectrex sound processor is similar to our CPC.

There is also Desert Drift, a demake for Pico8 (virtual console).

4Mhz is the winner of the CPCretroDev 2018 competition with its game Operation Alexandra (local download). It's a beautiful platform game, you are a russian soldier patrolling outside (minus 23 celcius degrees) near the North Pole at the terra of Alexandra, and you must inspect a place where a signal was emitted. You enter what looks like an old base, without a doubt a nazi base... The rest is in your hands.

You can listen to the original music by McKlain on Soundcloud and also a synthwave mix of the music.

There are at least two trailers : the first and the third.

A gaming video by vidéo de jeu par Oldschool is Beautiful will let you discover the start of the game, lets say that it will you bring some light about the game.

A short but interesting interview of Stefan Walker who did the conversion of the game Pirates ! (Micropose) on Amstrad CPC in 1987. He even worked in the united states for 6 months with Sid Meier himself !

Not stated in the interview but in the CPCWiki's thread, the program was written in BASIC with RSX, which did ease the port to the X-Mass.

There is a longplay (very long at 6 hours) made by Amstrad Maniaque of Pirates !.

Arnaud Bouche is the author of both Bitume (CPCRetroDev 2017) inspired by Asphalt and Deeper Warrens (8th place at CPCRetroDev 2018) inspired by the classic Gauntlet with RPG elements (experience and buying equipment) on 25 levels !

A corrected version of Deeper Warrens is available after the initial release for the CPCRetroDev 2018.

Dont hesitate to download Bitume also, see a youtube video of Bitume if you are curious.

The Odroid GO supports now a QWERTY keyboard with is used by a C64 emulator (the second C64 emulator in fact).

Sadly, still no Amstrad CPC emulator in sight, but we can still pray for one, especially with this keyboard which would really help such emulator.