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Greenstreet Publisher 3 2002 - 2005 Issues 1 to 10 ZXF10: 53 LOOKING FOR UNIQUE? ZXF merchandise: treat yourself to a piece worked a lot better had it been of 21st Century ZX Spectrum memorabilia... full cover) - a homage of sorts to the artwork of John Harris (who designed the cover to the original Spectrum manual, introduction booklet and Interface 1 & Micro- The ZX Spectrum on Your PC drive manual). Issue 6's cover "well-written and superbly presented" - took me ages and was inspired by Micro Mart Oliver Frey's CRASH issue 36 cover. Downloaded over 2,000 times and featured on Issue 7's cover was a detail from a the Retro Gamer cover disk, this guide to photo of my own Spectrum soft- Spectrum emulation on the PC is the perfect ware collection (passed through a introduction for ex-Spectrum users returning to whole cocktail of PSP fiters). Issue their first ever computer. Written by ZXF editor 8 - a popular cover, apparently - Colin Woodcock, The ZX Spectrum on Your is testament to what you can do PC teaches you how to use modern PC with a digital camera and a sand emulators to play all those old favourites, as pit on a bright Sunday morning well as some of the more advanced features (sorry to those of you who imagin- on offer too. You've read the electronic ed me digging away on a beach version, now enjoy the luxury of a profession- somewhere, but the ZXF expense ally printed paperback! account wouldn't stump up the bus fare). Issue nine was straight- 78 page paperback $11.99 (about £6.60) forward - a Christmassy 3D stero- gram featuring Horace (I'd always thought that Spectrum sprites might lend themselves particularly well to stereograms and wanted ZXF Mug to experiment). This issue's cover is Now you too can own a mug to be over- a play on the phrase 'The ZX CH Spectrum on your PC' and EAPER THAN possesive of at the office! Y involved a PC keyboard blue- OU THINK! $14.99 Now just $12.99 (about £7.15) tacked to the wall of the ZXF office and an LCD projector. Take advanta ge of super-low exchange rates 'The ZX Spectrum on your PC,' of course, is another project to have $1 = £0. come out of ZXF. As is ZXIF, the 55 approx Tile Coaster (ZXF07 cover design) interactive fiction software label The perfect home for your ZXF mug (which will see more releases in (other mugs also compatible). future, I promise). And the ZXF website. And a number of articles $5.99 (about £3.30) for Micro Mart magazine. And a sizeable contribution to last year's Your Sinclair revival issue. Gratifying things, for sure, ZXF Mousepad although the most gratifying thing ABOVE: The first issue of ZXF was produced using Pressworks 2 and of all, by a very considerable The popular issue 8 Manic Miner cover is now a converted to PDF format using the freeware program PDF 995. margin, is the sheer number of durable, clothtop mousepad. Graphically fairly unambitious, the DTP file for the issue weighed in at countries in which ZXF is read and a slice under 9MB. Also, PDF 995 had a few difficulties with fonts in enjoyed. $12.99 (about £7.15) those days, so the typface was kept at Arial throughout to avoid complications - even so there were a few difficulties (with Well, that's it for now. Just one last apostrophes) ocassionaly. JAWS PDF, however, experienced no such check to make sure the fridge problems, and at the same time that this was introduced (issue 4) the door's open. And I'm out of here. Currency confusion? $1 = £0.55/€0.80 approx (exchange rates can vary) so $5 = £2.75/€4.00 approx, $10 = £5.50/€8.00 approx and so on. Out of the door... down the Please note: ZXF merchandise is provided by www.cafepress.com, an American company, and items sent outside of the US will incur an inter- DTP software was also upgraded to Greenstreet Publisher 3. The way national shipping fee of $7.00 (approx £3.85/€5.60) for one item, with additional items charged at $4.00 (approx £2.20/€3.20) per item thereafter. was clear for some much more complex and creative work! The DTP street... feeling the sunshine... file for this issue, for example, weighs in at over 150MB. In ten issues smelling the air... Did I shut all the www.cafepress.com/zxf also the pagecount has gone up from 28 to 56 pages. windows? Oh crap... ZXF10: 51 support. for example, Willy crosses the screen almost twice as quickly as There was no border effect in he does in Spectactulator, al- Aquaplane, whether or not the though the 'Debug' option shows a “Fast rendering” option was on. The speed of around 103%. Overscan demo doesn't look too hot either. fZX32 also plays Cobra without flickering sprites. It also managers a The sound on Fairlight is pretty un- near-perfect rendering of the Over- pleasant to the ear. scan demo. Its rendition of the Fair- SpeccyAl K plays a mean game of light music is hideous – but in Cobra, however, with non-flicker- fairness, the release notes do say Above: ZXGP32 Options menu ing sprites, provided that “Fast ren- that the beeper will be improved in dering” is off (the default mode). the next release. The music on Fairlight is tolerable but not perfect. “Overscan” pro- duces a reasonable effect in the fZX32 (Xmas edition) Conclusion border, but it's not in synch with the This is probably the sleekest and Although the current generation of effect on the main part of the most capable emulator currently GP32 Speccy emulators can't com- screen. available on the GP32. It starts up pete with what's available on with a splash screen (based on a Windows, and they might not all be Head Over Heels room with a vari- SpeccyAl K 0.7 able to cope with the special ef- ety of game characters in it). It fects in demos, they will generally Curiously, SpeccyAl K loads with then impresses further by attempt- give you a decent play of your border emulation switched off. This ing to automatically identify the favourite Speccy games. tends to leave artefacts from the games you have saved onto the It would be nice if emulator authors startup or Options screen remain- card (in \GPMM\ZX). For example, could either agree on a directory ing in the border area, so I suggest Manic Miner displays as “Manic in which to look for snapshot and switching it back on straightaway Miner (1983) (Bug-Byte Software)”. tape files, or if they could all pro- (use both shoulder buttons to Although this approach can clearly vide a multi-directory browser. reach the Options screen). There only work for games known by the wasn't any obvious impact on emulator, it is a nice touch. (Note At the moment, fZX32 seems to performance. however that if you add any have the best general usability, The file selector (right shoulder games to this directory, you will with perhaps some problems get- button) allows directory browsing, have to rescan it.) ting the timing right. SpeccyAl K is probably the next most capable in which is a definite plus point. There fZX32 seems to be the most capa- terms of its functionality. is autoloading of TAP files, plus SNA ble of the emulators here for load- support, and, supposedly, Z80 ing different formats. It loads from support, although my 128K snap- inside ZIP files, it loads Z80 and SNA (c) 2005 Matthew Wilson shot of Fairlight 2 didn't seem to files (it is the only emulator here load. Also, attempting to load a file which I could get to load as 128K seems occasionally to cause the Fairlight 2 snapshot), it has TAP and HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GAME? GP32 to reboot. partial TZX support, and fast-load- The keyboard popup is another full- ing and auto-loading of tape files. Rare doesn't even begin to describe this title... if in fact it exists. The coding system screen image. Note though that, SELECT brings up the usual pop-up used by Sinclair suggests that it does, but other Sinclair silver inlay re-releases of the unlike elsewhere in this emulator, it's keyboard. This version is quite us- Ultimate titles - although hardly common - do crop up on ebay from time to time. the B key to select a key. able and can also be moved Not so Tranz Am. The image above is a mock-up; if you have seen the real thing around the screen. then ZXF would love to hear from you. www.cwoodcock.co.uk/zxf Joystick selection is between Cursor, Sinclair 1 or 2, and user de- There seem to be some timing Read more on page 42 fined keys – there is no Kempston problems on fZX32. In Manic Miner ZXF10: 8 ZXF10: 49 TZXF IS HERE >Cassette version of ZXF up for download It's a project I personally was seriously begining to doubt I'd ever Hopefully you'll have arrived at something not Epilogue: The Soundtracker compiler get even close to completing. But TZXF, the cassette version of dissimilar to the following: ZXF Magazine, is now a joint UK-Romanian venture and, thanks to Even though it's a completely different subject, it the help of Cristian Grecu - who got in touch with ZXF just after would be awfully impolite of me not to tell you issue nine had gone out - the first two issues are now ready to pull how to use your music outside of the tracker.
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