Jan 162017
 

4Sceners and Bitfellas published their favourite demoscene productions for the year 2016 and it is great to see three Amstrad CPC productions in their list, too. Ranked on 3rd place in the category “Best Music Disc” you will find the CPC vs. Virgill music disc by Tristar and Red Sector (TRSI). The other two productions can be found in the “Best Scene Game”. The awesome Pinball Dreams preview by the Batman Group ranked on the 2nd place (hey, this is just preview – what can we expect from the final product :-)) and ranked on the 7th place you will find the game Outlaws by RetroBytes which won the CPCRetroDev 2016 competition. You can have a look the complete results on the 4Sceners website (german).
It is always great to see Amstrad CPC productions mentioned in demoscene :-).

Jan 032017
 

A new version of Sugarbox, a Amstrad CPC emulator for Windows, was released. The main features of the new version are emulation optimizations, command line switches, sound emulation improvements and various other improvements.
Be sure to test the new version of the emulator and download the latest version from http://sugarbox.free.fr.

Changelog:

  • [Emulation]: Add some optimizations. MAX speed should be faster (about 100% gain from v0.26).
  • [Emulation]: Remove memory leaks in IPF writing process.
  • [Config files]: Fix the ‘-’ and ‘_’ for french keyboard: « From scratch » now autorun properly.
  • [Display]: Screenshots are fixed: No more unwanted black line at the top.
  • [Dump support]: Fix the code used to compute multi revolution dump, to be more reliable (when a revolution is wrecked, dont use it).
  • [FDC]: Lots of fix in the FDC: The ‘acid tests’ of arnoldEmu are almost all corrects now.
  • [FDC]: Fix some bugs when reconstructing the tracks (fix some dump of « Le Necreomancien », and various CTRaw files also).
  • [FDC]: The ‘Flip’ fonction (used to flip double sided dumps) is now working correctly. Double faces IPF are now working.
  • [FDC]: ’10′ bits used for bit synchronisation can be in a smaller number: 40 bits are enough to consider the PLL as correctly fixed between clock/data bits.
  • [General]: Fix a deadlock that occurs when a command is used during a dump disk is read.
  • [General]: Fix the autotype feature : the feature is more relevant. Also, the « | » character is correctly rtanslated to ‘ù’ on french keyboard.
  • [General]: Add a function to recording every frame into a screenshot.
  • [General]: Autorun feature is a bit more reliable (more rules added).
  • [General]: Added some command line switches: -sn xx (load xx as a Snapshot file), -drivea xx to set xx into drive A, -driveb (same for drive B), fullscreen to start in full screen mode, -config xx to load xx as config file, -command xx to run xx as basic command at start.
  • [GUI]: Fix the incorrect update of « Save as.. » menu when inserting a disk.
  • [Multiface II]: Add preliminary support for Multiface II (no config yet).
  • [PPI]: Rewrite most of the 8255 implementation. Now run the ‘acid test’ properly (when it have meanings).
  • [PSG]: Correct lots of bugs (sound is now a LOT better, and digitized sound works correctly). Fix Dick tracy, Antiriad, Crazy cars 2, and probably a lot more!
  • [PSG]: Also run the ‘acid test’ of PSG correctly.
  • [Z80]: Support for NMI added.
Jan 012017
 

My best wishes to you for the year 2017 and hopefully we see another thrilling year like 2016. If we look back at 2016, we saw an awesome amount of new productions, hardware and a lot of new people joining the Amstrad CPC community. So a big thank you to all the authors who dedicate their spare free time to the development of new retro games, utilities, etc. and a big thank you to all the other people who are discussing, produce videos and dedicating their free time to their hobby as well.
As you might have noticed, in 2016 I have changed the way, how I write the news on this page and try to continously provide you with news instead of writing 3 news a day (ok, let’s not look backward at yesterday – that was my own firework on this page ;-)). This was a success so I will keep this system. Another thing, what I want to change is to use SSL for my website. Currently I am investigating how much effort is necessary to change the whole website to SSL.
Finally, if you are an author and your awesome work is not mentioned here, then don’t hesitate to use the contact form and submit it here. I am always happy about any submission I can get for the news :-).

Finally – again – a happy new year 2017 and my best wishes for you and your families! Maybe we see us on an event like the Revision, the Evoke or the XzentriX :-)!

Dec 312016
 

As promised, Keith56 released his new bullet hell shooter for the Amstrad CPC 6128 & Plus on the 31st December. In the good old tradition of bullet hell shooters, you are playing a side-scrolling game with enemies, shooting an extreme load of bullets to you, which you have – of course – to avoid. Here is the introduction from the author:

“Chibiko didn’t get any presents from Santa this year… in fact, in the last year she’s been killed by
God, banished from hell, and reincarnated as the enemy of all mankind -so it’s pretty likely she will
never get in his good books again!
Still, she can always do without that ‘gotta-buy-it’ plush doll, and the coal is always useful for
burning ‘leftovers’.
What’s a whole lot less welcome is the strange monsters that have been lurking around the
mountains lately – and now they are infesting HER castle!
Join Chibiko in her unholy battle against the invasion of badly drawn, cliche and generally uninspired
enemies, pummel your way through 4 levels of brainless firepower crazy action – and unleash hell on
the 4 end level boss enemies!”

You can download the game (and its source code) from the website of the game or at the end of this news. Of course, you can also discuss it on the CPCWiki forums.

ChibiAkumas Multidisk
ChibiAkumas Multidisk
ChibiAkumas_Multidisk.7z
Version: v1.06
114.4 KiB
865 Downloads
Details
ChibiAkumas Source With Spritecompiler
ChibiAkumas Source With Spritecompiler
ChibiAkumas_Source_With_Spritecompiler.7z
Version: v1.06
269.9 KiB
789 Downloads
Details
Dec 312016
 

Roudoudou worked on a compressor / decompressor which uses the LZ48 / LZ49 compression algorithm on the Amstrad CPC and released his work in the CPCWiki forums. The compressor is inspired by the LZ4 compression algorithm of Yann Collet and the modifications fits well to the Z80 CPU of the Amstrad CPC. The advantage of this compression method is, that the decompression code is very small (83 bytes) and very fast. The disadvatage is that there are other compressors which feature a better compression ratio, but require more memory and more time for decompression as well.
You can get more information about the modified algorithm and download the assembly source from the CPCWiki forums. You can also find a version for SDCC / CPCtelera and binary files for Windows there.

LZ48/49 (de)compressor
LZ48/49 (de)compressor
LZ48-49-de-compressor.zip
16.5 KiB
386 Downloads
Details

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