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There's a brand new game starring Smith the Great's legendary pixilated hero just released. This title is called Ultimate Manic Miner for the Spectrum 128, and is more akin to a role-playing game than the traditional screen-by-screen platform game. Ultimate Manic Miner is set exactly one year before the events depicted in Manic Miner, with a hapless Willy entering mines near Stonehenge run by a secret world government known only as Eugene, with a promise of eternal paradise.

Willy must follow the clues within each screen to complete the game, uncover the conspiracy and acquire riches beyond his wildest dreams... something like that anyway, all in a rather sinister and warped underground world in which people are forced to work to the death in some cases.

This game contains some adult content, and so its creator Igor Makovsky has given it a 17+ rating - you have been warned. You may download it from www.geocities.com/justabunchofpixels/UltimateManicMiner.zip and if you require an emulator to play it, about the quickest and easiest to set up is ZX32, which can be found at www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/9932/.

In other Spectrum news, Jonathan Cauldwell is working on a project provisionally called Gamex: The Games Exchange. The idea is to implement as many mini-games in one program as possible, eventually fitting into 48KB of RAM. Jonathan was on his seventeenth mini-game by his last update, and all on a humble 8-bit micro too, which is just incredible. To find out more on this development, have a look at the programmers' log over at members.fortunecity.com/jonathan6/egghead. Jonathan's site also contains information about programming the Spectrum, for those people who want to get their hands dirty and give it a try themselves, and some free downloads too for your emulator.

In all, then, quite a good site to keep an eye on, don't you think?

atari.sk has a new public domain game released ready for the Atari XE. It's called Scorpions, and will work with any good emulator that can provide 64KB of virtual RAM. There is very little information about this game from the website, and the download adds nothing to this unfortunately, however these games usually don't take a lot to figure out and beggars can't be choosers as they say. Be warned though as starting the game is a bit of a problem. Anyway, you can acquire Scorpions from www.atari.sk/download/XE_games/scorpions.zip. Keep an eye on www.atari.sk for all Atari 8-bit and ST scene news too, as there's usually something there to download or read about.

www.msx.org is the ultimate resource on the Internet for all fans of the popular Japanese MSX box of tricks, which is run and maintained by the MSX Resource Center Foundation.

Containing the latest up-to-date news, well-written features, reviews and including an active forum means that you can't go far wrong here, whether you're new to the technology or not.

The site also contains over 500 legal downloads to suit all tastes and lists the upcoming MSX meets and fairs for those who might like to travel. It's worth a visit even if you're not an MSX fan thanks to the joys of emulation - especially if you like to keep up with all things retro, as we do here. So, what are you waiting for? There's a whole world of MSX to be discovered.