Topic: Tools and Utilities

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.

At Outline 2010, Gasman has released an unique player routine (which have won the 1st place in the Wild compo btw.) which is able to play streamed video with digital sound on the Speccy 128K with DivIDE interface. Go to the project website look and test it! Both emu and real hardware use are described, as well as a YT video.

If you need to convert a Speccy .scr picture to some PC gfx format and you don't have any binary tool, you can try online scr2png converter written in PHP by Dusky aka UB880D.

Just uploaded the new Retro-X Alpha 7 to my website (http://lcd-one.da.ru come and get it or wait until it was updated on WOS). There are many many many improvements, bugfixes and additions in this release, so it took more time than previous releases. There is still a lot to do, so the next version will still be Alpha, but I think, the last alpha version. The Beta versions start probably 2009.
And now read the list of improvements:

I've got quite long email from Velesoft to the Czech Speccy mailing list at pandora.cz, where he describes his (and Hood's) new TR-DOS emulator for MB-02+ with MB-IDE. The whole project is tested in RealSpec emulator only at the moment, and is far from completation, but if you're curious enough, you can watch a short video to see how it works. The MB-02+ boots, then runs Prometheus with emulator source code, loads a screen$ from TR-DOS image, returns back to Prometheus and runs the code from the point where russian 128 menu is placed. Real disk drives aren't supported, the user will work with TRD images in four virtual disk drives. I hope the thing will be finished soon. So let's wait.

Okay, it was uploaded two weeks ago in fact, but again a lot of bugfixes... So grab it at WOS or from http://lcd-one.da.ru. And I'm currently working on Alpha 7. What is the killer feature of the next version? If you are a +D/SAM user, this will be probably a great help for you...

Don't have much time at the moment to do a detailed post, but I do have time to cut-n-paste the changelist for the latest Alpha release of Retro-X, the follow-up tool to the wonderful Bmp2Scr... but it does so much more besides. Grab Alpha-5 and play. Changelist below the break...

A new website of Hood/MB Maniax has been launched. There are some interesting MB02+ tools for download, like for example the latest version of NMI Menu (current version 1.35) or a patched version of ResiDOS for MB02+ with improved installer, "dot" patch (replacing . character instead of % before keywords) and some more useful things. You can read the full info file inside the article.

FF20 is a formatting utility for MB02+ with MBHDD add-on, replacing the old Busysoft's FF17. You know it already. Now, Shrek/MB Maniax presented the final version 1.0, with a new Fast Format feature, so the formatting of your CF will no longer take minutes, but just seconds. You can get it from here. So get it.

If you browse over the CI5 site, you can find out there is a bunch of three new MDOS3 tools written by Sweet Factory at Kaplicon 2008. Maker, Mover and Enlarger. Maker formats a fresh MDOS3 partition made using zxfdisk or Linux fdisk with ID 49 on your media (zxfdisk can be found inside the MDOS3 distribudion package). Mover is a batch copier from real D80 disks to MDOS3 images. You need a real D80 to be connected with DivIDE at once (with a little data cable hardware mod). It can skip non-empty images and is able to make the images for 94x9 tracks while a classic MDOS disk has normally 80 tracks. Thath means the final image on the CF has 846K instead of 720K. Finally, Enlarger does the last step as Mover does but with any existing image - enlarges the size of it to 94 tracks without data loss. Handy.