Retro Erick presents in video the FreeSP utility by ChartreuseK (link to github or local download) which is useful to accelerate disk reading (with the DIR command) under FAT16 with msdos 4.0 and more. It's not useful with a FAT12 disk and/or msdos 3.x as DIR then doesnt calculate free space and msdos 3 keeps more informations in memory). But with FAT16 disks the DIR commandand (msdos or 4dos) is slowly calculating the free space, so the two following utilities will do the trick :

• freesp (not TSR : Terminate and Stay Resident) : put the command freesp c: (drive A to Z) in your autoexec.bat and forget it (one disk only)
• freespt (TSR) : it intercepts msdos interruptions msdos 21h/36h and can manage up to 18 disks, put the command freesp cdef in your autoexec.bat to manage drives C, D E and F (in my case the C: disk by the PicoMem and my ZIP drive as D:)

An information that I missed in April 2023, the release by Impact ofEGX Martine's slideshow for Amstrad CPC+ available on Pouet and here on Genesis8bit.

You can see EGX Martine's slideshow on Youtube in a by Xenomorph.

Martine v0.39 is an utility written by the Impact group :

• converting JPG and PNG images to Overscan screen or window for Amstrad CPC (and Plus series)
• new tile map mode, which allow to analyze an image of a level game, and produce .imp and .til readable by tile tool from Impact

This version was released the 28th August 2023. It is available for Windows, MacOS, ARM64 and linux.

HxC Floppy Drive Emulator v2.15.1.2 is available on Github.

It's an utility to manage .HFE disk images to be used by the SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator, a replacement for the 3 inch disks drives of the Amstrad CPC.

There is a support forum for HxC products and also a facebook group.

Christmas demo 2023 is an Amstrad CPC demo by Kukulcan (code) and Titan (graphics), also available on Pouet.

mTCP NetDrive is a new utility by Michael B. Brutman which lets you connect under ms-dos a network drive which is in fact an image disk hosted on a windows or linux server (disk drive or hard disk image) for only 6 Kb of RAM (adds the RAM for the packet driver though). A mariage in heaven with the PicoMem card by FreddyV.

Noel Llopis presents in his new video how he goes from 64 Kb to 1 Mb of RAM on an Amstrad CPC 464.

The expansion card to be used should have been by Revaldino but some components being hard to get, it's finally the card by Rebobinando which has been used.

Targhan has created CPC Scene Radio as Roland Radio has some problems since a few months.

Also, I just saw that there is now a version of Arkos Tracker v2.0.1 for Raspberry PI (also on linux, windows and mac).

Schneider made the Amstrad CPC under licence in Germany. They also did create PC XT like the EuroPC (several models). Retro Erik is presenting an ISA bus extension which he saw in another Youtube video. At the end of the video he is announcing that he is working on an universal ISA bus extension with a friend of the Norway retro community.

To make so beautiful Amstrad CPC loading screens like Eric Cubizolle (Titan), it's easy, you just need to use the same painting program : Multipaint by Tero Heikkinen AKA Dr. Terrorz, and maybe a bit of talent and mostly a lot of work.

Titan is describing Multipaint as a mmix of OCP Art Studio and Deluxe Paint for windows which offers the possibility of using the resolutions and palettes of a whole bunch of old computers including the Amstrad CPC (mode 0 and 1, overscan possible in mode 0).

Two videos presenting Multipaint (beware they are both from four years ago, so not about the latest version and features) :

• discovering Multipaint, a photoshop to draw 8bit screens (video in 2019 in french)
• presentation video by the author himself during a demo party : ZOOParty 2019 (see below)

mTCP v2023-03-31 by Michael B. Brutman is a set of TCP/IP applications for personal computers running PC-DOS, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, and other flavors of DOS. mTCP needs a 8088 processor (or +), 96 to 256 Kb of system memory depending on the application, ms-dos v2.1 (or +) and a network card (Ethernet adapter, or a device emulating Ethernet) that has a packet driver.

If you go on the mTCP web page, you must know that it's a 39 years old PC Jr which is running mTCP own http server.

The last version of multi platform assembler for Amstrad CPC RASM (v2.1) was released the 24th October 2023 on Github.

This multi platform assembler for Amstrad CPC (for linux, windows, and also for MorphOS on Amiga) let you program for Amstrad CPC. It's recommended to use it with the new emulator also by Roudoudou : ACE-DL released today, to get symbols and breakpoints importation and much more.

Shawn Sijnstra (and Stefan Vogt) continue to update VEZZA his Infocom/Inform/Z-machine interpreter for Amstrad CPC and PCW (and other computers) to play adventure games without needing a memory expansion (Inform format v1 to v8), under CP/M and not Amsdos.

The program you need to dowload is different if you are using an Amstrad CPC (vezza-nb.com) or a PCW (vezza-90.com).

Last time I announced a new version of FutureOS for Amstrad CPC was in 2018..., even if there were several new versions since. So this version is written by Gunhed (5-6 years ago by TFM).

The most important feature of this new version is the support for the excellent M4 board expansion by Duke.

Under the download links, you will find a link named M4-Folder which seems to be very useful if you have a M4 Board.

The video below (french) is one year old and is presenting FutureOS, done by Eric BOULAT.

The 4th version of the HxC Floppy Emulator Manager is available.

It features :

• User can now edit up to 20 slots (previous version: 15 slots was the max.)
• New UI, removed the old "demomaker style" presentation, now displaying more files on screen (with longer filenames)
• DEL key added to move back to parent folder while navigating
• The manager now skips DSK files when using a HxC SD/Slim device
• The Help page now reports the firmware version + build date of the Manager
• Switched compilation to SDCC 4.2.0 (resulting better Z80 implementation)
• Now compiled using RASM from roudoudou (previous version: Pasmo)
• Now compressed using ZX0 packer (previous version: the good old Bitbuster)
• Smaller binary (11KB) resulting a faster load from BASIC prompt (previous version: 16KB)

It remains compatible with the 64KB RAM-based machines, and the ROM version is sdirectly available into the AUTOBOOT.HFE file.