Micro Mart


EggHead Is Back

 
Published in Micro Mart #1134

There's a new Egghead game on the way for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as Shaun discovers.

Retro Mart: EggHead Is Back

As exclusively revealed recently on The Cat Community radio station for Crewe and Nantwich in Cheshire, Jonathan Cauldwell will be releasing the latest twist in the Egghead saga for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This one, unlike EggHead Round The Med (Egghead's last adventure) will work on the classic 48K machines, and sees our hero facing evil Commodore extremists whom are hell-bent on eliminating all traces of Sinclair technology - particularly the Speccy - from the world. With Izzy currently missing (star of Gloop and Izzy Wizzy, also by Jonathan), Egghead was mysteriously contacted by a secret agent who has infiltrated the Commodore terrorist group and left clues for Egghead to save the world from this terrible plot.

This game is a puzzle-cum-platformer with everything that you'd expect from a piece of entertainment written by Jonathan, and some things that you probably won't. More details will be announced soon through what is described as 'official channels' soon, so keep an eye on tinyurl.com/J-Cauldwell.

Whilst talking about new Speccy games, the late, great Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith's last Speccy game Saurcer will be finally be released. The work will be sympathetically done by Chris Smith, using Joffa's last build and source code. When I first saw the demo of Saurcer back in 2007, I could see that Joff had lost none of his skill or passion for 8-bit coding and was really looking forward to seeing this game. This was announced through the World Of Spectrum forums, over at , so have a look at the 'Development' sub-forums for more on this.

Breaking Out

Recently released for the expanded Commodore VIC-20 (requiring a 16K RAM-Pack or more) is Jonathan Andrews' take on Atari's classic bat and ball game Breakout called Balls To The Wall. Consisting of 34 levels in total, with varying brick formations in each, as well as collectibles that will either help or hinder your progress through the game.

This is Jonathan's first attempt at a machine code game, which he used as a stepping stone to learn 6502 assembly language, and is an extremely playable and enjoyable implementation for you to try. The PRG file (which designates that it's a program file), is available from tinyurl.com/BallsOnTheWall, and more information on the production may be obtained from tinyurl.com/BallsOnTheWall-info

A Decade Of HDD

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of 64HDD, which allows you to connect your Commodore 64 or 128 (or, for that matter, any Commodore 8-bit with an IEC Serial port) to a PC, in turn giving allowing the PC to be used as a slave storage device, there is a new, improved version ready to pre-order. With even more features promised, the 64HDD -X- edition allows the slave PC to boot from CD-ROM, bypassing the usual operating system, and auto-configuring for optimum performance. Allowing 'power loading' and easy access to your archived programs via an intuitive, user friendly GUI, it will make life a whole lot easier, potentially reducing the space needed for your whole diskette or cassette tape collection into one old lap top or dated desk top x86-based PC.

Pre-orders need to be placed before 25th December this year, so to save writing your letter to Santa, head over to www.64hdd.com/64hdd/64hdd-x.html, where you will find all of the relevant information.

Shaun Bebbington