Orion Prime, the Amstrad CPC adventure game, has been translated in english, spanish and french, but now also in german.

Glory Holes, an Amstrad CPC demo got the 1st place at the ReSeT#8 meeting (Coutances).

Main code by Krusty/Benediction, player byGrim/Semilanceata, music by Tom&Jerry/GPA. Graphics by Grim/Semilanceata, Beb/Vanity, Ced/Condense and Voxfreax/Benediction.

Asm sources are included inside the archive.

Sardina Forever by Gen Soft (showed at the RetroMadrid 2012) is available on Amstrad ESP.

It's a remake of the Sabrina game by Iber Soft in 1989. It's the original programmer Javier Garcia who wrote the remake.

The remake include a new loading screen by David (6128) and music by McKlain.

Controls are Q, A, O, P to move Sardina and 1, 2, 3 to beat people.

Boulder Dash - the collection is available on Android Market, 5 games in on (buy them grouped or each individually) with new graphics or old school.

Playing SID music on Amstrad CPC is possible, but you can also play YM music on C64 using YM-64 by Norbert Kehrer.

And the winners are :

• graphic : Rexbeng
• demo : Krusty, graphics by Grim, Beb, Ced and Voxfreak, music by Tom et Jerry, for Glory holes
• music : Pulkomandy

All entries will be available later.

The Amstrad CPC use the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip, providing 3 channels, each configurable to generate square waves, white noise or both. A small array of hardware volume envelopes are available. The C64 use the SID sound chip with also 3 channels, each configurable to generate 4 different waves forms : sawtooth, triangle, pulse, noise. It offers other features, much more than the AY-3-8912.

So is it possible to listen to SID music on an limited Amstrad CPC ? The answer is yes, and if you are lucky enough to read french, you will be able to read the article "les SID-Voices" on Quasar. So to resume, yes you can do it on a plain Amstrad CPC, but if you play 3 SID-Voices, you wont have enough CPU time to do something else. Otherwise on an Amstrad CPC+ using the DMA, you will be able to do something else than playing music. The Quasar article comes with the AY+ source to play SID-Voices on a CPC+. On a plain Amstrad CPC, you can use a program by Geco, a hungarian programmer. He usually works on the Elan enterprise, he wrote a SID player for this computer, and ported it to the Amstrad CPC. Download this Amstrad CPC SID player (128 Kb only).

Some informations about this utility directly from the author (taken from chipmusic.org) : I created the player used 6510 emulation code of Simon Owen, and CPC header checking. The player spends a lot of time with 6510 code, this is the reason of speed changing on CPC, on Enterprise I met less speed changing, may be the cause of this on EP the processor is running at 4Mhz if the code is not in the video Memory. Yes, only some feature is emulated, frequency registers, envelopes in 50Hz, control registers (without wave formats), and volume register, if I remember well. And the noise emulation is also interesting on CPC, because when noise should apply then I give fix 0f value to noise channel, and drive the frequency with tone channel frequency (set reg 6 tone and noise enable on a channel), with this solution 3 different noises can appear on the AY. The player can play songs in 2 speeds, 50Hz, and 100Hz, does not matter of SID speed, ex if the speed of SID is 60Hz the player plays it on 50Hz.

Finally, you can play it hard too, with an extension. Read about it on CPCWiki (a bit of drama included).

WYZTracker is a tool developed by Augusto Ruiz (interface in english and spanish), from Retroworks, that can be used to compose music for WYZPlayer.

WYZPlayer is a Z80 player for the AY-3-8910 sound chip (a 3-voice PSG : Programmable Sound Generator designed by General Instrument) used by (and for) the Amstrad CPC, MSX and Spectrum. It can be used for games and demos due to its minimal use of CPU and RAM, the player takes little code and all musics are compressed.

Finally, you can use cpcwyzlib by Raul Simarro, an Amstrad CPC library to play wyztracker tunes with SDCC. He also wrote the cpcrslib used with z88dk.

A new release candidate of the ANSI-C compiler SDCC v3.2.0 RC1 is available for download.

You will find on CPCMANIA 3 new SDCC tutorials :

• using sprites in Z80 asm and C (spanish tutorial)
• SDCC vs z88dk : Comparing size and speed of the binaries generated for Amstrad CPC (z88dk link) (spanish tutorial)
• converting and displaying an image on the screen (spanish tutorial)

You will find on Phenix Informatique an interview of Alain Massoumipour (alias Poum) who wrote for the french Amstrad CPC magazine Amstrad 100%.

If you throwed all your issues of Amstrad 100%, you will find them on le site des anciennes revues informatiques.