César Nicolas Gonzales released for his birthay (on 17th May, happy birthday, just a month too late) a new version of his CPCE emulator.

The entire "Ecole Buissoniere" (plus the secret part) works perfectly (it stopped working on v1.90), LPTCPC doesn't forget to calculate the sector size in 1-sector tracks, file extensions are lower case by default, the new AUTOTYPE option provides a more flexible boot method, better SVGA support for DOS and DPMI, Z80 dummy DD/FD bugfix ("Skateball.cdt" by Dlfrsilver), RAR archive support, the TZX direct recording block is now operational, Simon Owen's DSK extension for unstable sectors was added, a new debugger function (bytelogger), LPTCPC is now menu-driven, LPTPC has a Windows NT/XP port, LPTPCIO, the tape motor relay pause is emulated (Opera Soft tapes need it), there's a little Easter Egg for the WIN32.IMAGE_DOUBLE=1 mode... A new corrected v1.92 version was released the 2th June.

Next version will offer CPC+ and Gunstick emulation.

RFTM ! While reading the documentation, I just discovered that CPCE let you play on internet, one person acting as a server, the second one connect to the server as a client. I will try this and let you know about it later.

SAMdisk v3 by Simon Owen is out, it's a command-line disk image utility for Windows 2000 or later. The utility supports transfers between floppy disks and disk images (DSK/MGT/IMG/HDF), and is designed to work with almost any soft-sectored disk format compatible with the PC floppy controller, including some copy-protected formats. Low-level floppy device access requires the fdrawcmd.sys driver to be installed.

You can use a java GUI written by DevilMarkus : SAMdisk GUI.

This utility requires a floppy drive connected to a standard motherboard connector. USB floppy drives cannot be supported as there is no way to access their embedded floppy controller chip.

Need some Amstrad CPC parts ? Well time to go on Eliot's shop !

Rules of this useful shop :

- parts are aimed to be used in the CPC community or any other 8bits friendly community,
- some parts are rare so please order only what you really need,
- please do not resell parts you got from the site.

Welcome to Coutances, home of Amstrad Expo meeting, organized by the tiredless Eliot. Arrived Friday in the morning, 2 people already, myself and a distinguished member of Greece : Voxfreak.

Symbos running on Eliot's computer with a symbiface and a Compact Flash card working as a hard disc.

Voxfreak (left) and Eliot (right).

Bad news, GamebaseCPC will stop to share its work.

Good news, dumps of programs will still be available on CPC-POWER.

Current order on Ebay of the SDCard HxC floppy emulator. The price is 60 sterling pounds (add shipping cost).

You will also need a cable :

• cable for standard CPC (not Schneider or CPC+),
• cable for CPC+,
• cable for a Schneider CPC (not CPC+).

You can download Arkos Tracker v1.0 beta 3 for PC by Targhan.

Here's the changelist :

• AKStoYM, a command line tool to convert any AKS song into an interleaved or non-interleaved YM6 format,
• MSX2 compatible player test thanks to WYZ.

If you don't have .Net, you can still use the command line tools (AKStoYM, STKtoAKS, AKStoYM) if you have Mono installed.

Another order on Ebay of the SDCard HxC floppy emulator. The price is 60 sterling pounds (add shipping cost).

You will also need a cable :

• cable for standard CPC (not Schneider or CPC+),
• cable for CPC+,
• cable for a Schneider CPC (not CPC+).

Dont forget that you need a 5 volts alimentation for the HxC.

See below for a nice integration of the HxC inside an Amstrad CPC by MUSICMAN3512 of the CPC Rulez forum :

GameBase CPC v15 is out.