A new version of the Caprice32 emulator maintained by Colin Pitrat is available.

Version 4.6.0 was released the 2th October 2022.

PulkoMandy is the author of the Albireo expansion card for Amstrad CPC which lets you use mass storage (USB and/or SD card) and a serial port.

With the agreement of PulkoMandy, Zik is going to make a new batch of cards (beware without the serial port). It's even possible to use two cards (but needds a cutter and some soldering).

You will need a ROM board and one of the ROM which can manage an Albireo, Unidos for example. The estimated price for the card, shipping cost and maybe a SD card is 30 euros.

If you are interested, go write on the CPCWiki's thread.

CPCRetroDev 2022 competition has been announced. You can check the details on CPCRetroDev.

You can submit your game between the 14th october and the 2th November 2022.

As last year, the game will be submitted on Itch.io.

Amstrad Eterno 2022 es un evento de Amstrad CPC en Barcelona (España), el 8 de octubre de 2022.

Amstrad Eterno 2022 is an Amstrad CPC event in Barcelone (Spain) on the 8th October 2022 (10am to 8pm).

Francisco Gallego of the studio Byterealms, creator of the CPCRetroDev contest and of the framework CPCTelera will launch Amstrad Eterno 2022 as usual with his conference programming rasters effects in C with CPCtelera.

See also the Amstrad Eterno Facebook page.

These last years several expansions allows you to use mass storage (USB or sd...) on Amstrad CPC, each needing a ROM to use it correctly.

And if you use two of these expansions, you will need to load two ROMs, so less RAM for your Amstrad CPC.

So Offset did write UniDOS and drivers to be able to use another expansion, needing only one ROM with features being the same whatever the expansion. Unidos can manage actually :

• Albireo by PulkoTronics
• M4 Board by Duke
• X-Mass by Tot0
• Symbiface II by Dr.Zed
• Nova by PulkoTronics

Offset also wrote UniDOS Cartridge Creator (v1.4) which is an utility to create Amstrad Plus cartridges equipped with a patched firmware which allows to add UniDOS and its DOS nodes. You can furthermore configure up to 30 additional tool ROMs (such as Utopia, Maxam, Protext..) in the cartridges (compatible with ParaDOS and Burnin' Rubber) without requiring a real ROM board. The tool also let you automatically download the latest UniDOS ROMs from the official web site.

Unidos v1.40 brings the following modifications :

• new |CAT RSX which is sorting directories with color
• new generic driver UniTools with : allowing automatic boot on whatever drive (check the driver documentation for more details), upgraded ZERO drive (now supports hexadecimal values)
• upgraded DOS Albireo driver to use two at the same time
• upgraded M4 and FatFs DOS drivers (minor modifications)
• small uupgrade of the DOSNode_Init API
• minor modifications

Michael Wessel is the author of several hardware expansions for Amstrad CPC which I let you discover on his github and Youtube channel.

His last making is quite original as it's an Amstrad CPC 464 portable as it includes an integrated LCD screen taking the place of the tape drive (it was not working anyway) and it can work with a battery (and still on sector of course). It is 2,84 Kg when finished with more than 40 hours of work.

Other sites are writing about it :

• Hackaday
• Adafruit
• Hackster.IO

There are several presentation videos including one in french by Passion Jeux Vidéo TV sur Youtube, the most complete is the third one by Michael :

• first video by Michael Wessel with MIDI sound in 43 seconds
• second video by Michael Wessel showing working with battery and SID music (4 mn)
• third video by Michael Wessel in 10 minutes, the most complete video
• video by Passion Jeux Vidéo TV in french (8 minutes)

The features of this portable Amstrad CPC 464 are :

• one MX4 card usable
• ROM board
• external stereo speaker (with velcro) and of course the internal mono speaker
• DDI4 disk controler by Zaxxon (which is also a 512 Kb RAM expansion) and slim HXC drive emulator by Lotharek, the SD card is at the back of the CPC with a rotative button to change disks
• HDMI LCD screen with a video conversion card
• a small power supply board also takes power for the unit via USB-C, such that it can operate from a power bank

Seen on BDCIron's youtube channel : Real Plasma Preview 2, and the first preview here.

Le téléchargement du .DSK est disponible sur CPC-Power.

ACE v1.25 by Offset is available. It is available in french, english, germand and spanish (thanks to the translators). New features since v1.24 are :

• Added a splash screen to deal with plugins which are slow to initialize or activate/deactivate
• Added MagicBeacon notification support when making a screen grab
• Improved plugins API (v7) regarding mice and joysticks events (better plugins portability and efficiency)
• Clean up in plugins SDK (better documentation)
• Added analog joysticks support to plugins API (Amstrad Plus only)
• Upgraded mice and joysticks plugins to use the new plugin API
• Added info bulle to inform the user about mouse events being captured/released by a plugin
• Improved joysticks internal management to natively support Playstation, Xbox and generic gamepads layouts
• Improved joysticks plugins to handle combined (use one gamepad to control both CPC joysticks) and analog modes
• Minor fix in CRTC 0 and 2 emulation
• Minor fix in Gate Array emulation
• Updated Multiface Two plugin's icon (thanks to Christophe 'Highlander' Delorme)
• All plugins but joysticks are now automatically deactivated when selecting a quick prefs preset

A SDK exists if you want to program your own plugin for the ACE emulator.

Ikonsgr is already the author of two expansion cards for Amstrad CPC:

• first card the USIfAC (Universal Serial Interface for Amstrad CPC)
• and its evolution USIfAC II

He just released a new expansion card : multi purpose board : 512K RAM Expansion/32x Rom board/256K Ram+2X Rom board (a complement to his II) with the following features :

• 512K RAM Expansion (default mode, should work with other boards too,like M4, DDI interfaces etc.)
• 32X Rom board mode (supports both lower and upper roms)
• 256K Ram expansion + 2X Rom board mode (supports both lower and upper roms)

You can see two videos of demonstration (the first one being already showned below) :

• first demonstration video
• second demonstration video

The original Amstrad notepad NC100 emulator was written by Russell Marks. He just released a new version : v1.3 whose main features are :

• new SDL2-based version
• NC150 support
• NC200 floppy disk support (using John Elliott's lib765)
• everyone being 21 years older than the last time he did a release

You can of course use the native ROM of a notepad or use ZCN also by Russell Marks at v1.3 (with a fix if you use the format command). It should also be possible to use CP/Mish by David Given thanks to the NC200 floppy drive emulation.

The v1.2 has been modified by Nilquader and Gnarz.

These last years several expansions allows you to use mass storage (USB or sd...) on Amstrad CPC, each needing a ROM to use it correctly.

And if you use two of these expansions, you will need to load two ROMs, so less RAM for your Amstrad CPC.

So Offset did write UniDOS and drivers to be able to use another expansion, needing only one ROM with features being the same whatever the expansion. Unidos can manage actually :

• Albireo by PulkoTronics
• M4 Board by Duke
• X-Mass by Tot0
• Symbiface II by Dr.Zed
• Nova by PulkoTronics

Offset also wrote UniDOS Cartridge Creator (v1.4) which is an utility to create Amstrad Plus cartridges equipped with a patched firmware which allows to add UniDOS and its DOS nodes. You can furthermore configure up to 30 additional tool ROMs (such as Utopia, Maxam, Protext..) in the cartridges (compatible with ParaDOS and Burnin' Rubber) without requiring a real ROM board. The tool also let you automatically download the latest UniDOS ROMs from the official web site.

mTCP v2022-07-01 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 +),96KB to 256KB 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".

The meeting Benediction Coding Party #2 organazied by Eliot will take place from Friday the 28th to Monday the 31th October at the Foyer Résidence du Bois Taney, rue du Bois at Gavray sur Sienne (50450). For more informations go to the du Benediction Coding Party #2's web page.

I will be present at this meeting.

Amtix issue 4 by Fusion Retro Books was released at the end of June 2022.

Find Fusion Retro Books on Twitter and Fusion Retro Books on Facebook.

I am just 3 years late to announce this graphical adventure game by Blerkotron : Unhallowed which has a good note in the issue 56 of CAAD (spanish zine about adventure games).

It’s Halloween and you’re on your way home from work, tired and hungry and wanting nothing more than to put your feet up in front of the TV. But something dark and evil lurks within your home, waiting for you to return...

Unhallowed is a classic text-adventure game with a few twists to make it more palatable for modern players.