A new version of Mod Master XT beta 21 by FreddyV is available on Vogons. It lets you hear a lot of music modules formats on any PC under msdos even a PC XT (CGA), for example an Amstrad PC 1512/1640 or a PPC 512/640...

Corona Crisis demo 2020 is a german Amstrad CPC demo by Alex and AXEL by the Treble A group. It needs 128 Kb of RAM. There are 4 parts on 2 disks, including a bonus part on disk B. Type run"readme for some informations and run"corona to launch the demo. My german is too rusty to read the first part, other parts are in english.

The football game CPC Soccer by Voxeltower is available for download.

You can still pre-order the game on Bitmap Soft for 10 pounds.

You are the happy owner of an Amstrad PC 1512, 1640 or a portable PPC 512/640 (or another Amstrad XT model) but are lacking a hard disk, so you are limited to slow floppy drives, either a 360 Kb 5,25 or 720 Kb 3,5 inch floppy drives. Of course for older PC it's easy to use an 100 Mb Iomega ZIP drive (parallel, SCSI or IDE) but the official driver is using an instruction only available on an Intel 80186 (seldom seen) or a Nec V20/V30 processor (stated on wikipedia). The PPC 512/640 has a V30 but the official driver uses a lot of memory and needs msdos v4.0+ instead of msdos 3.3 on the PPC or v3.2 on PC 1512 (also 1640 ?).

Well, there is another solution for using a parallel ZIP drive (not the Plus version which also features SCSI), it's using PalmZIP by Klaus PEICHL which works with msdos 2.0+, even with a 8086, uses much less memory. The only limitation is using three 32 Mb partition (C:, D: and E:) if you are using msdos 2 or 3, with msdos 4 you can use the full 100 Mb with only one partition (but disks accesses will be a little bit slower). It's a shareware, you can test it for 7 minutes for free to check that it is working for you. If it is the case you will have to pay only 8 euros. I did it two days ago, five hours later I received a zip file by email with the registered version ! Yesterday I bought a ZIP drive and I was able to test it during the night. Happily I still had some ZIP disks I was using years ago and that I kept through several house moves.

Using the driver is simple, just add in your config.sys the following line :

device=palmzip.sys /c

/c is for loading the driver only if it is connected, though the driver is only 3 Kb. They are other options so I recommend to read the included documentation (english and german). You can use the /f option to treat the zip as a fixed disk for faster operation but then the zip disk must not be removed unless using the zipman utility.

Zipman must be used if you are using msdos 2 or 3 to format three partitions of 32 Mb each (FAT12 or FAT16), or an usual 96 Mb partition if you are using msdos 4 or above. Zipcopy is another utility for copying complete partitions within a disk. The partition assigned to the destination drive will be overwritten. The last utility is lpr_test which is designed to check if your parallel port(s) supports the bidirectional data transfer mode. The PalmZIP device driver runs a similar test to determine the correct mode of operation.

You can see a youtube video by Retro Erik using the PalmZIP driver on an Amstrad PPC 512. You should check his youtube channel as he has several videos about Amstrad PC computers.

Totems by ESP Soft was released in 2012. It's a twisted remake of Columns by Sega (nice game by the way) with a Tetris mechanic. It seems I missed it, but in may 2020 ESP Soft has released Totems Enhanced Edition that you are able to order as a physical edition on Bitmap Soft. This new version allows you to play versus your Amstrad CPC, who will be smarter you or a thirty years old computer ?

The demo of the adventure game Tristam Island by Hugo Labrande is available for a gameplay estimated to 1 hour-1 hour 30 (first part of the game). The definitive game will be available in a few weeks for 3,99 euros. This adventure game uses the PunyInform engine by Fredrik Ramsberg.

Brick Rick by Reidrac (Juan Martinez) is available on his web site.

Reidrac has been interviewed by Kyuran.

40Crisis has written a Game Boy emulator for Amstrad CPC which allows only to play the original Tetris game (the ROM is of course NOT included with the emulator).

To put the v1.1 ROM of Tetris (v1.0 won't work) inside the Temu .DSK disk image, you can use ManageDSK (don't forget to add the Amsdos header). The name of the file must be rom.bin.

Attention you must use this emulator with an Amstrad CPC 6128 (run"temu) or 6128+ (run"temuplus").

This emulator could for the future emulate other games but the mapper for example isnt emulated so few other games would work.

For the keyboard commands, please read the included documentation.