Commodore 64 and 128 users have long been able to enjoy the luxury of hard drives connected to their main system, thanks to Creative Micro Design's (CMD) intelligently designed and highly compatible HD series. Even before CMD was on the scene creating hardware solutions, other options were available. The problem has always been that the price of such devices, regardless of how useful they could be, was out of reach for most users, costing upwards of £250 in many cases.

This changed when the IDE64 cartridge came along, which allowed users to store their most commonly used data on virtually any compatible IDE storage device. Although not nearly as compatible as CMDs solutions (and a little uglier), this sub-£100 upgrade was popular enough for many games, demos and utilities to be patched to work with it, including the famous operating system GEOS - giving it a significant speed boost due to it replying on drive access. Although not working in the C128's native modes, it was, however, compatible with the SuperCPU and other devices, increasing its appeal for the so-called 'power users' out there.

The evolution of this upgrade has been stalled for a while, but now the IDE64 team has announced that Version 4 is pending. The most obvious improvement from previous revisions is the USB port, which isn't intended to be used for USB devices, but to connect to your PC for fast file transfers between the two machines. This means that files bigger than the capacity of a floppy disk (which can be up to 2.88MB with the 'enhanced density' CMD FD4000 disk drive) can be transferred to your Commodore. For more information, head over to the IDE64 portal at www.ideb4.org

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The popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC game The Wild Bunch, written by Kevin Smith and released by Firebird Software in 1984, is finally making its way to the C64 thanks to programming guru Jon Wells and Jason MacKenzie. This game is a menu-driven texty affair which sees a man being shot, and you are a witness to the killing. Although you see the real culprit for the crime, the local Sheriff has set his deputies on your trail. Therefore, you take it upon yourself to find the real villain before you're found and tried for a crime that you didn't commit.

True to the wild west legend, you must keep your strength up by drinking in the local bar. This game is going to be a real-media release only, to celebrate the game's 25th anniversary, and is expected to be released by the end of the year. For pre-ordering information, and to get up to speed on what's happening with the project, point your web browser to www.gamesplaygames.co.uk/thewildbunch

Shoot-'em-up games have always been popular on the C64, due to the fact that scrolling is fairly easy to do on the machine. Manfred Trenz, he of Turrican fame, was considered something of a master in creating all types of shooting games, and fans of his will be pleased to hear that the long awaited sequel to the classic Enforcer: Fullmetal Megablaster, released in 1992 by the German software label CP Verlag, is nearing completion. Imaginatively called Enforcer II, this game gives you yet more reasons to dispatch the invading alien scum with your small but heavily armed spacecraft. From the YouTube video preview (available at tinyurl.com/%5ijwnul, things are looking very good indeed. The final release is expected to be cartridge-only, which will hopefully mean that the game should work on the C64GS. However, this could change as the project progresses to the more popular 5.25" floppy diskette. I'm keeping a keen eye on developments here, so expect more details to follow shortly.

If you like your shooters to scroll vertically and not horizontally, the Games That Weren't team has uncovered a rather interesting Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit (SEUCK) game called Laser Hawk, by Shaun Coleman, which dates back to 1990. This isn't your typical SEUCK affair, in that it features a smattering of parallax scrolling and there's certainly been a lot of work put into this title. It just goes to show how powerful the package was in the right hands. Find out more from www.gtw64.co.uk