Announced a good while ago here was the One Chip MSX, which is basically a new version of the MSX, but in FPGA form with a whole host of extra capabilities for the famed 8-bit. The final design will have an SD/MMC card slot, which is apparently 'hot-swappable' (sounds good to me) and FAT16 compatible, meaning that the well-known (to MSX enthusiasts) disk image emulation tool 'EP' can be used on the One Chip MSX. The default configuration of the One Chip will be equivalent to an MSX2 machine with an astounding 256KB of RAM, will support the MSX-DOS2 standard, connect to PS/2 devices, have two MSX joystick and cartridge ports and two standard USB ports.

The device itself comes bundled with 32MB of SDRAM, but, of course, this will be for developer's purposes, since it can be entirely reprogrammed to be something other than an MSX, due to its FPGA standard: It will work with any VGA monitor, or a standard TV. Its European importer, Bazix (based in Holland), has all the latest news and pictures of the current prototype over at www.bazix.nl, with further announcements and discussions over at the MSX community portal at www.msx.org.

The popular bilingual fanzine for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum known as Suc-Session, hailing from Germany, has recently seen an overall drop in English subscriptions to the point were the team behind it are thinking of discontinuing the English language version. Which would be a great shame as the zine is on its 206th issue and astounding 24th year.

In an open letter to the Speccy community posted on www.raww.org, Thomas Eberle is asking for people to spread the word about Suc-Session and hopefully boost its English-speaking readership to keep the international flavour, especially as the Speccy's spiritual home is here in the UK. For a free sample issue and more information, head over to www.sintech-shop.de/home/spectrum-user-club.htm.

One thing about being a retro enthusiast is that quite often there is little opportunity throughout the year to actually meet up with people in the real world; indeed, small communities of like-minded people have only survived for as long as they have largely thanks to Internet forums, usenet groups and specific websites.

One such group would be Amstrad CPC enthusiasts, so it has been suggested on comp.sys.amstrad.8bit that there should be a CPC get-together this winter, with the proposed time and venue being 18th November at the Pillars of Hercules, Greek St, London. Nothing has been set in stone, with things being open to discussion.

So, if you're interested in attending and meeting real CPC enthusiasts (yes, they do exist), go to www.google.co.uk, click the 'Groups' tab and enter 'comp.sys.amstrad.8bit'. No doubt this will be talked about elsewhere, such as www.cpczone.net too.

A new playable preview of the Commodore 64 game MOOD has been released into the public domain. Cunningly disguised as a Doom clone (though if you want to be pedantic, it's probably more akin to Wolfenstein 3D in terms of the playable environment), it's been one of the more eagerly anticipated C64 games over the past few years, especially as many have pondered how far a playable 3D environment could go on the aged 2D technology without the assistance of accelerator devices such as the SuperCPU.

To get hold of the download and try it for yourself, head over to noname.c64.