It's been a good week if you're a Commodore fan. Leading on from those C16 and Plus/4 developments mentioned last week, I've heard that Jason 'TMR' Kelk has found a way to push the Plus/4 (or C16 with extra RAM) further than before with a new graphic engine that will allow the use of the upper and lower borders on the machine, but not just for demo effects. Jason plans to implement this in a game, using 28 character lines for the play area, meaning a vertical play area of 224 pixels. Current reckoning is that this will be a record once finished, although at the moment there's nothing to actually see unless you speak 6502 assembly language.

On the hardware front, the commodore16.com forums have updated C16 and Plus/4 fans about JiffyDOS that's making its way to the hardware, whilst Dutch enthusiasts have come up with a successor to the popular-yet-slow 1541 disk drives which work with all Commodore machines that have a serial bus (which is all of the main 8-bits from the VIC-20 through to the Commodore 128). This device is called the 1541-II, created by Dan Derogee, and allows the use of SD cards for convenient storage, which means that 5.25-inch disks should soon be a thing of the past... finally. More details will be announced in good time with this one.

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On the C64 front, Protovision have finally released Tanks 3000 which is available in a deluxe boxed edition like Metal Dust is. Tanks allows two to four players to fight it out in a subtle tribute to the Atari 2600 classic game, Combat, which is great if you have the four-player hardware, three mates and several beers to try the game out.

Finally, the Lemon64 forums have been talking about Pinball Dreams again. The game has seen yet more development, with the current beta looking better than ever, but what caught my eye was that they were talking about implementing the game on cartridge with possible link-up play between two C64s. So far, everyone is liking the idea of the link-up as it's another excuse to invite friends around with liquid refreshment and what will be a popular C64 game when finished. It's nearly there, so be patient.

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The growing retro software label, Cronosoft, have over a dozen releases lined up for 2006 for six 8-bit platforms. The list includes the puzzle game Reaxion (for the Atari 8-bit, Commodore Plus/4 and ZX Spectrum), Times Of Lore (for the Oric), VICOLUMN and Lunar Blitz (for the VIC-20), Yarkon Blues II, Help Inc., Stranded and Iron Sphere (for the Amstrad CPC) and finally More Tea, Vicar?, Supaplex, Stronghold and the charity-ware Cassette 50 Reloaded (for the Spectrum).

It looks like it's going to be a busy year ahead for them, especially as there's some tape and disk mastering to be done there. But things are on the up as word is slowly spreading that you can buy new 8-bit games at pocket money prices, just like the old days. I'm currently playing through Cronosoft's Spectrum collection as we speak, and I can vouch for the quality on offer. To find out more, or submit your own game for evaluation and release, visit www.cronosoft.co.uk

In a sly nod to the pending 25th anniversary of Sinclair's mighty ZX81, our website of the week is www.zx81.de. This site is home of the German-based ZX-TEAM - a passionate group of enthusiasts who just can't get enough of the little black box. All manner of information is archived there from the earlier ZX80 through to the popular, and not so popular, clones, including one developed ten years ago to celebrate fifteen years of ZX81 computing.

There's also new and recent software at www.zx-team.de/andre for your downloading pleasure, so get clued up on this British classic and head over to one of the best ZX81 sites on the net.