Well CPC 4 Ever was an april fool. I fell for it nicely.

You still got the Amstrad CPC music announced on the site above played nicely on piano (done in two nights).

The game this time is an adventure graphic game in french, written in basic (hard to play without reading the listing) : Adventure 2 ou l'accusation. There is no relation to Adventure 1 ou la grotte also by Ludovic MABILLOT (Ludo's Software Distribution). JB le Daron prefered the first game to the second.

El Tesoro Perdido de Cuauhtemoc by 4Mhz is available since today as a download as disk, tape and mass storage. Run Forest run !

New version of the Amstrad CPC core for MiST by Renaud Helias is available.

• TV mode using VSYNC/HSYNC xor and Gerald VSYNC/HSYNC width formula
• This version was realised with atari forum team, testing several experimental forks
• It does output 15kHz original signal on SCART. Do use mist.ini scandoubler_disable=1 (see http://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki/DocIni)
• sorry FDC work will be for a next time : my r005.8.15 candidate version does fail 80% of arnoldemu FDC testbench...

For old timers, very very old in case of Sapiens, I want to remind you that the original authors of the game Didier and Olivier Guillion have written a windows VGA remake of Sapiens. The game is a shareware for only 10 €.

The original music was written by Gilles Soulet, here are 2 remix of the music on Youtube :

• Sapiens - Atari ST, midi music for monotimbral synths (Yamaha MU1000 with DX)
• Sapiens Main Theme Remix

The Amstrad CPC original music of Sapiens is of course also available on youtube.

SPOILER ALERT : it's an april fool !

I knew JB le Daron as a youtubber, I discover today that he isnt just that, but also a musician.

CPC 4 Ever is his project : the best musical themes of your favourites Amstrad CPC games are remixed, with piano for example. There are already 5 tunes available on the site. Personnaly I like them very much and is awaiting for more ! See you on Twitch the 4th April at 22:00.

Often in games, the music is either written by Tom et Jerry or McKlain.

For the music of El Tesoro Perdido de Cuauhtemoc by 4Mhz, it's the turn of McKlain (listen to the music on Soundcloud).

Some parts of the music makes me think of elite's music.

The original Amstrad notepad NC100 emulator was written by Russell Marks. Nilquader has modified it, and Gnarz has modified this modification.

Gnarz's modification features :

• removed the vgalib and terminal versions
• made the gtk version compile with GTK+ 2.0
• made the sdl version compile with SDL2
• made the menu key available on modern keyboards emulate the NCs menu key
• changed the serial port emulation to allow it to use devices other than stdin/stdout. For example, the command socat -d -d PTY,raw,echo=0 PTY,raw,echo=0 creates a nice serial device emulator, whose ends are output by the command. You can specify the open end with -s, and use the other end with cat or sx or what have you... stdin/stdout is still available by passing - as an arg to -s
• some cleanups in the Makefile
• added ncconvert

Back to commercial games Xyphoe is showing Thunder Blade, an arcade game by Sega in 1987, converted on Amstrad CPC in 1988. It's a game with 2 phases, either a vertical shoot them up game or with thir person view, piloting a helicopter. Xyhpoe first tests the arcade original game, then the Amstrad CPC version at 5 minutes 30 seconds.

Colin Pitrat is the author of a port of the Amstrad CPC emulator Caprice32 initially programmed by par Ulrich Doewich.

Caprice32 features :

• Complete emulation of CPC464, CPC664 and CPC6128
• Mostly working support of Plus Range: CPC464+/CPC6128+/GX4000 (missing vectored & DMA interrupts, analog joysticks and 8 bit printer)
• Joystick support - it can be fully used with joystick only, thanks to an integrated virtual keyboard.
• Joystick emulation - joystick-only games can be played using the keyboard
• English, French or Spanish keyboards
• DSK and IPF files for disks - VOC and CDT files for tapes - CPR files for cartridge
• Snapshots (SNA files)
• Direct load of ZIP files (all formats except IPF)
• Custom disk formats
• Printer support
• Memory tool to inspect and modify memory (peek and poke)
• Experimental support of Multiface 2 (you should prefer using memory tool)
• Text mode graphics (using aalib or libcaca)

The CSW2CDT tool suite is a set of three programs whose main purpose is the encoding of computer tapes used in the Sinclair ZX and the Amstrad CPC families during the Golden Age of European videogames (1982-1994), when tapes were the most popular distribution method of commercial software :

• CSW0 is a command-line program that reads WAV audio sample files and writes CSW V1 packed samples
• CSW2CDT is a command-line program that reads CSW1 V1 packed samples and writes CDT/TZX tape images
• CSW2CDT-UI is a dialog-driven program whose graphical user interface simplifies the usage of the first two tools.

The general procedure is divided in several steps :

• The tape must be sampled as an uncompressed WAV audio file whose quality should be at least 22050 Hz. Mono and 8 bits are preferred over stereo and 16 bits
• The resulting WAV file must be fed to CSW0, that will measure all the square waves and produce a CSW V1 file. Optional flags can be used to perform band-pass filtering on the signal
• This CSW V1 file will be handed to CSW2CDT, whose task is to scan the data blocks within and build a CDT/TZX image. Again, optional flags allow for increasingly complex processing of the contents
• The CDT/TZX image ultimately needs to be tested then in an emulator that can play tape files back, such as CPCE and WinAPE for Amstrad CPC titles or FUSE and UnrealSpeccy for ZX Spectrum softwares

CSW2CDT-UI eases the procedure because its graphical user interface is more comfortable (although less flexible) than the command line : choosing the sample, generating the CSW V1 file, and encoding the CDT/TZX file can be performed by pushing buttons and choosing options. It also allows for the reverse procedure of playing back CDT/TZX images into CSW V1 files and WAV audio files with some few mouse clicks.

Dlfrsilver, loyal alphatester and main inspiration, wrote the French and English handbooks.