Home-brew programmer extraordinaire Ian Munro has announced over on the Cronosoft forums (www.cronosoft.co.uk) that he's just finished the Sinclair ZX Spectrum version of his Amstrad CPC game Iron Sphere, and as quick as you like, Cronosoft is already selling it.

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The story centres round events during a particularly stormy night. A bolt of lightning has hit Professor Roland Iron-Sphere's secret laboratory, which opened up a vortex in the space/time continuum and threw the mad prof into his own experiment. Parts of the apparatus vaporised and mutated, while other sections crystallised into diamonds.

The task in hand is to collect all the diamonds that have been strewn around this strange and perilous new world to enable him to escape from it. Unstable structures, as well as the need to keep topping up the power of the rolling vessel, keep this game fresh and interesting, and once you start the ball rolling, it does not stop.

This is a rather nifty and addictive little 2D puzzler, and with prices starting at just £1.75 for the emulator file (for each version of the game), it's hard to see why anyone would want to be without this. More details are available from Cronosoft's aforementioned website, with a viewable preview (in AVI format) also from www10.brinkster.com/ismunro/main.aspx, where you will find a handy map to help you on your way to completion.

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Also announced from the Cronosoft camp is the game Glove, which is a Gauntlet-type affair for a machine that no-one ever owned; the Dragon 32 [I did! Still got it, too - Ed]. This game is by James McKay, and should be available shortly, or at least I hope so, as I've been waiting to see this one for quite a while now. Again, the already-mentioned Cronosoft website is the place to be for those who seek more information.

For years, Commodore users have been able to connect their IEC Serial Bus disk drives to their PC thanks to the X-1541 cable. There have been many revisions to this cable, but essentially they have worked through the old-styled parallel printer ports, and in turn this has meant that digital archiving of old disks (among other things) is possible to do from the comfort of a PC. This is all fine, of course, if your PC has the required port, if not, then you'd need to attain a second-user system to do the things that you want.

Well, this is about to change with the implementation of the xu1541 by Till Harbaum. Designed to be compatible with the existing software range, this new cable connects a Commodore IEC Serial Bus device, such as the 1541 or 1571, to a PC (running Linux) via a USB port. Although there are some limitations, this is still very much a work in progress, and has been successfully implemented already. For those of you who are brave enough to wield a soldering iron, a list of components is available from www.harbaum.org/till/xu1541/index.shtml, where you can also see the first finished version of the hardware.

Personally, I'll just wait until it's available to buy, as my expeditions into electronics haven't always been successful.