Xyphoe did organize a Alan Michael Sugar drawing contest with Paint, I let you see the results. Congratulations to all who did submit a drawing.

If it was possible, I would vote for JB Le Daron singing with piano. To be listened to religiously.

The firmware v1.1.6 of the Imperium Solo by Duke is available. This update is important if you are using a mouse.

It's an adaptator to use USB joysticks (PS4, Xbox One...) and mouses on a standard joystick port of an Amstrad CPC and other 8 and 16 bit computers.

A Notepad NC200 lets you put under the disk drive one type 1 PCMCIA card which is a RAM or SRAM card with a button battery to save the ram when outside of the Notepad. The problem is that the NC200 can only hold type 1 PCMCIA cards as type 2 are thicker, too big for the slot. Also these 1 or 2 Mb RAM cards are not much better than the capacity of 1,5 or 2,5 720 Kb disks.

But David Given who is the author of CP/Mish (CP/M for Notepad NC200) has been able to use a type PCMCIA adaptator in which you put a Compact Flash card (16 Mb). CP/Mish is of course able to use such mass storage. However it needs to open the NC200 case to change the PCMCIA slot guide with a new 3D printed part !

You can see his video on Youtube in which you can see the case being opened, so why not also changing the disk drive with an USB Gotek ?

After the physyical edition of Space Moves sold by Matra announced for 21,45 euros, there is now an upgraded version available.

For the pleasure of your ears, here are two musical remixes of the game International Karate :

• International Karate played with a homemade 8-bit synthesizer : the chipophone by Linus Åkesson
• International Karate (C64 cover) by SynthPeter

Released in April 2020, Las Aventuras de Rudolphine Rur is a spanish adventure game written by Dwalin where you are the shoemaker Rudolphine Rur who has everything to be happy but still is going to a dangerous place.

The game was first written in 2005 with the Superglus software (by Uto) which is a port of the virtual machine Glulx. In 2015 the game was ported to the ngPAWS still by Uto which lets create an online version. Finally in 2019, work started to port the game with the DAAD software created initially by Tim Gilberts and actually maintained by Stefan Vogt. Daad can create ports to many computers including the one which interests us :

• Amstrad CPC
  • tape version without graphics, with short places descriptions and answers
  • disk version with graphics, with short places descriptions and answers
  • version M4 Wifi with graphics, with short places descriptions (but long description by using the command D) and long answers
• Amstrad PCW without graphics, with long places descriptions and short answers

The firmware v1.1.5 of the Imperium Solo by Duke is available (more wireless gamepads supported).

It's an adaptator to use USB joysticks (PS4, Xbox One...) on a standard joystick port of an Amstrad CPC (and later ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga and Atari ST).

Richard Bannister was the maintainer of a MacOS port of the Arnold emulator, now maintained by Kevin Thacker. But he is also the author of the Audio Overload utility which lets you play VGM music files, including .AY and .YM Amstrad music files. This utility runs on MacOS, Windows and Linux.

Crosslib by Fabrizio Caruso is a retro-hardware abstraction layer library to program on retro computers without bothering about the particular hardware. You can program on many many platforms including the Amstrad CPC, and also it seems (by reading the release/tags) the Amstrad Notepad NC100 !

He wrote two gamse with this library as examples :

• Cross Chase (2017), stated as slow
• Cross Shoot (2020)

I tried Cross Shoot and after several attempts I was able to finish level 1. Well please read the rules of the game to avoid wasting time like me : the goal is to kill all common enemies or kill all 4 "skulls". Common enemies can be killed quickly if pushed against the walls by shooting at them. The "skulls" and the boss cannot be pushed and are harder to kill. You have to avoid all enemies, all walls, rockets and chasing missiles. All flashing items have positive effects and can grant you special powers. Your bullets have a limited power that can be improved by catching the multiple times special fire power item. You can also fetch the mine item that grants you 3 powerful mines to use against all your enemies. Discover the 11 items. Some items are secret. In total the game has 12 secrets. You can unlock the 12 secrets by shooting at the skulls and at the missile and rocket bases in different ways. The game has 16 different levels including 2 boss levels.