They are back. Who? AY Riders band with their newest EP album called Atariders. It contains mainly covers of famous 8-bit Atari songs as well as some original compositions. Go here and listen AY influenced by POKEY.

Before DiHalt remained a matter of hours.
And I want to inform you that we have again implemented the online voting.
At the moment we have 3 demos, a lot of graphics and music.

Online voting begins in the morning 10 and ends on the morning of July 11.

To see the marvelous new stuff for ZX Spectrum can be found here.

It's Shucon party and as usual there are several presentations of new Speccy hw and sw projects. One of them is diZZy's MIDI synth using SIF serial interface connection. It allows user to play 3 AY tones at once with keyboard dynamics possibility. It's very beta, but if you're interested, just look at my blog. There is a YT video. Watch it.

MacBuster of XTM has opened a new competition to recreate the popular Horizons tape that was shipped with every new 48k Speccy, but in your own way/style. There's even a great prize for the best entry. But hurry, you have less than 2 months to make your New Horizons! More info can be found here!

Oh yeah! Public pressure, organizers di: halt which will take place July 10-11, agreed to hold the beeper music compo. The rules are very simple. No more than two tracks from one author, the length of the track no more than 3 minutes, the track can be written in any musical editor under Beeper. The music is desirable to send in a set with the invoked Basic file (tap / trd / scl image), well, or at least compile music file with the address playback. And do not forget to specify the name of the track and music editor. Address for sending works: dihalt10 (at) mail.ru
Official site

The Spectrum summer party Shucon is held from Thursday, 1.7. to Sunday, 11.7. in Nezdenice, Czech Republic. If you're a Speccy fan, then just come and have a nice summer holiday with mostly Czech&Slovak Spectrum scene mates!

Prodded into action by an email from Vinnny, it's only fair to point you to the website of DiHalt, arguably one of the two main ZX events of the year. It's on July 10th and 11th in Nizhny Novgorod. Good stuff.

I recall that on 19 June will be an 8-bit demoparty Artfield 2010.
And I have good news. All those who miss the event, will be able to watch broadcast, chat and even vote for the contest works.
Broadcasting on June, 19th from 11:00-18:00, demonstration of competitive works at 15:30 (Moscow time).

Shiru (author of Music Box T.E., Music Synth 48K T.E., and Phaser1) and Alone Coder (author of Sewerage and Beep Tracker) have created a blog about 1-bit music.

Many people asked where is the Ramsoft's site with thier fantastic RealSpectrum emulator. I grabbed some archives and brought it online again, at least all the gfx and downloads, here. No updates, no news, just the (almost whole) site as it was when abandoned.