Shawn Sijnstra (and Stefan Vogt) are working on 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).

For the 3th PunyJam contest PunyJam he wrote with the PunyInform library a text adventure game : Blorp! (February 2023). This is a short adventure set in an underwater brewery. You left your rather expensive experiments in the hands of your friend Dave, but you know something isn't right. You better have to download the Airlock Collection pack for its Amstrad CPC/PCW disk image, the Itch page has only a Z3 and Z5 infocom file.

James has modified Wolfenstein 3D to work on a PC XT in CGA and also wrote a web navigator : MicroWeb for Intel 8088 or compatible CPU, CGA, EGA, VGA or Hercules compatible graphics card, network interface (it is possible to use your machine's serial port with the EtherSLIP driver), mouse is desirable but not 100% required, 640k RAM is desirable. EMS/XMS are not required. And thanks to the author of the PicoMEM, MicroWeb is now supporting the CGA 16 colours of the Amstrad PC 1512 (was monochrome before, and GIF support too), but I dont see a new release in the github, so wait a bit.

Martine v0.40 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 is available as today. It is available for Windows, MacOS, ARM64 and linux.

Shawn Sijnstra (and Stefan Vogt) are working on 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).

For the 4th PunyJam contest PunyJam he wrote with the PunyInform library a text adventure game : Redux (December 2023). The game is an exploration into the mind of the protagonist, and has a highly unusual gameplay.

You can right now download the first version of CP/M for SymbOS by Prodatron and Prevtenet. You will be able to use Turbo Pascal, Microsoft Basic, Wordstar and so much more programs (see picture below, ZIP of 407 Mo ).

It's a virtual machine letting you running CP/M programs on SymbOS. First, screen drawing is faster because the emulation is using Z80 opcodes whereas CP/M is using 8080, and two you can of course have more than one CP/M VM due to SymbOS multitasking !

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)

Prodatron and Prevtenet are working on a virtual machine letting you running CP/M programs on SymbOS. First, screen drawing is faster because the emulation is using Z80 opcodes whereas CP/M is using 8080, and two you can of course have more than one CP/M VM due to SymbOS multitasking !

Cwiiis is the author of Maped, a python utility to edit Amstrad CPC(+) tilemaps (see on CPCWiki and Github).

On his Github you can find two other Amstrad CPC related utilities : dsk2dir (creation/extraction of .DSK) and cprtools (concatenate ROMs in one .CPR).

CP/Mish by David Given has been updated, last version is from the 7th January 2024.

All CP/MIsh sources are on Github for Linux.

The available memory is 60 Kb by using all the memory available (128 Kb) but please check the NC200 readme for more informations especially the warnings about files in RAM (lost after notepad is off), the disk cache (chance disk only at CP/M prompt, and switch off the notepad only at prompt or you may loose write disk accesses).

Playing to Wolfenstein 3D on a PC XT in CGA was your dream, James Howard did it. Several video modes are available :

• 4 colour RGB mode with red palette (default mode)
• 4 colour RGB mode with magenta palette (start WOLF3DC.EXE classic)
• Composite CGA mode (start WOLF3DC.EXE composite)
• Tandy 160x200 mode (start WOLF3DC.EXE tandy)
• LCD inverse monochrome mode (start WOLF3DC.EXE lcd)

James also wrote a web navigator : MicroWeb for Intel 8088 or compatible CPU, CGA, EGA, VGA or Hercules compatible graphics card, network interface (it is possible to use your machine's serial port with the EtherSLIP driver), mouse is desirable but not 100% required, 640k RAM is desirable. EMS/XMS are not required.

• Wolfenstein 3D CGA in vidéo by Al's Geek Lab
• MicroWeb in vidéo by Al's Geek Lab

The last version of multi platform assembler for Amstrad CPC RASM (v2.1.6) was released two weeks ago 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.

Prevtenet is the author of Zym an interpret of Infocom adventure games using the Z-machine for SymbOS. He has converted public domaine books (including the bible in different languages) to the .HLP format of SymbOS.

Disk Image Manager v2.8.0 by Damien Guard is an application for examining and manipulating disk images in the Standard and Extended DSK format used by many ZX Spectrum, Amstrad PCW and CPC emulators.

A video by Duke the author of the wifi M4 board for Amstrad CPC of an upgraded version of the ANSI Telnet client for M4 Board by Fergus Leen.

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:)