Fractoid by the Osmium Path group is an Amstrad CPC demo about Julia fractals. It's written by Optimus (code) and Ham (graphics and music). This little intro was written for the Decrunch demoparty.

After having released a new version of his Amstrad Notepad NC100, NC150 and NC200 emulator, Russell Marks has just released a new version of his version of CP/M for these same machines : ZCN 1.4, the new features are :

• NC150 support, with a custom zcn150.bin kernel. As with the NC200, this is not as complete as the NC100 support. Also, it has only been tested under emulation
• Internal ramdisk support on NC200 and NC150, so you can use ZCN on them without a memory card (to some limited degree). This is really only intended to be used if you lack a memory card - you switch between memory card mode and ramdisk mode using the "ramd" command
• Improved keyboard layout support via keyb, supporting Danish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and US keyboard layouts, in addition to the old UK and Dvorak. All supported keyboard layouts can be used on any NC model
• Preinstalled memory card images for NC100/NC150/NC200. These are intended for use with emulators like nc100em/MAME/RC2014, but they should also work on the real thing if you have the means to write them correctly. (Serial link installs are still supported, of course.)
• Support for booting from floppy disk on the NC200 - this uses David Given's floppy-boot code from FUZIX, almost unchanged. ZCN itself does not support the floppy disk, so this just loads ZCN and a small ramdisk image then boots it
• Support for displaying some non-ASCII characters, specifically some from the old DOS code pages 437 and 850 like in the ROM software, as well as the euro sign character from 858. Only a few dozen characters are supported (!) and you need to run keyb beforehand (i.e. since boot) for this to work
• NC200 time-reading and time-setting support, meaning that e.g. time and timeset work
• The man command now uses ZX0 compression - the data file is smaller, man.com is smaller, and man pages load faster
• Certain .com files in the support directory, like QTERM, are now also provided in versions using ZX0 compression. So for example, the ZX0-using version of QTERM is 5k smaller. ZCN comes with a "zx0com.bin" file you can prepend to a .zx0 file to run it in this way (limited to .zx0 files of 16k or less)

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, german 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.