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Here's an exclusive that might interest the passionate advocates of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It has been made known to me that Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith has drafted in some help for his project, known as Saucer, and that help is coming from famed 8-bit composer Martin Galway. Recently, Joffa has been talking to Martin, with whom he worked back in the day on many games, and Martin has agreed to score some music for Saucer. As yet, the final release date is unknown for the project, and it's unclear as to how it will be published, but I expect to hear more soon. I've also managed to speak to the man himself, and you'll get his two pence worth next week.

Keeping with Sir Clive's wonder machine, Jonathan Cauldwell has been creating another game, which has a working title of Untitled Blancmange. Jonathan describes this as something not too dissimilar to the game Solar Jetman, but in truth it's a cross between his games Higgledy Piggledy and Lunaris. Jonathan says that the current playable demo has taken him about a week of his time, and so far the feedback to it has been quite positive. Expect the usual difficulty level to be there though, as unless things change, it isn't going to be the easiest game you'll ever play. You can get hold of the playable demo by going over to www.retro-bytes.com/egghead/blancmange.sna

Finally this week for Speccy enthusiasts, Bob Smith has also been hard at work with the game Stranded 2.5, which takes his previous game Stranded to new (almost three dimensional) levels (hence the 2.5). The game mechanic is now fully functional and is unlikely to change greatly, and Lee Du Caine, he who produced such superb tunes on Farmer Jack In Harvest Havoc, is working with Bob on this title. Although I've not heard anything yet on the audio front, I'm informed that the music for AY-equipped Speccy owners will be as good as last time. There's a playable demo for people to try out too over at www.bobs-stuff.co.uk/S$25_1127.tzx. This contains four levels, and should keep you happy until the game is finally finished and released.

Remember that all the games mentioned here are being coded in what spare time the aforementioned bedroom programmers have, so feedback, positive or otherwise, is important for the creative process. As they all frequent the World of Spectrum forums it might be an idea for you to sign up there if you haven't already done so. www.worldofspectrum.org forums is the place to be for news and gossip from the Speccy scene.

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Two interesting developments have happened in the Commodore 64 world recently. Firstly, and rather disappointingly, the Freestyle Game Jam, which is offering up to $1,000 Australian dollars as a prize for the best homebrew freeware C64 games submitted to the competition, has received only its second entry, which means that there's a 50/50 chance that this one is going to win unless a rush of games are submitted before the deadline of the 20th January 2007. Anyway, this second entrant is called Green Runner by Aleksi Eeben, and is also available for the PC. To get hold of this, head over to bovine.artificial-stupidity.net:1202/gameoverview/jam.html, and also note that if you're able to write game code for the C64 and think you can come up with something halfway decent within the next few weeks, why not enter the competition? The odds of winning seem pretty good to me.

The second piece of news is regarding the second issue of Commodore Free. Rarely do fan-based publications run on time, but Nigel Parker has pulled out all of the stops to finish this to schedule. It's available as a PDF (and there's also a version in text format for those low-tech folk out there) from www.commodorefree.com, and the issue is packed full of news and in-depth information. It hasn't gone unnoticed that the Amiga has made an appearance too.

If you ever wanted to try your hand at writing, I'd like to point out that fanzines are a good place to start, and as long as you're willing to write about Commodore (be it the C64, VIC-20, Plus/4 or any other related machine or game), why not get in touch with Nigel. His e-mail address is on the Commodore Free website. You never know who is reading. The reason I started writing this column was because of an eight page fanzine I published electronically in 2002. On that note, I'll start writing next week's retro, which should be very interesting especially if you're interested in the Speccy. Until then...