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A rather interesting-looking game has recently appeared for the Atari 8-bit machines. This is an early 90s-styled platformer called Crownland, featuring cute graphics, serene music and superb gameplay.

The game is a horizontally moving push-scroller affair (in a similar vein to the early Mario games from Nintendo), starting off at what feels like a pedestrian pace. Soon enough, though, you'll find the game a little fraught as the well-designed levels tax the skills of the most ardent retro player.

Crownland is certainly a binary treat and it manages to show the best of what Atari's aged technology has to offer to the gaming world, so if you'd like to give it a try, head on over to www.atari.sk for a playable demo.

While you are there, don't forget to check out the other legal downloads available from the site - click 'more news' at the bottom of the page to see everything from August 2006. If you're looking for an appropriate emulator, Atari800Win Plus seems about the best one for users of the Microsoft Windows operating systems. This can be found at atariarea.histeria.pl/PLus/index_us.htm. For users of alternative operating systems (including Mac OS X, Unix, Amiga, MS-DOS, Atari TT/Falcon, SDL and WinCE), there's also Atari800 available from atari800.sourceforge.net/index.html.

Commodore 64 users (and presumably all Commodore 8-bit users whose computers have an IEC serial bus which can use the standard Commodore 1541 disk drive) will be delighted to hear about a new storage solution to replace the age-old 5.25" floppy disk drive. It's basically an FPGA implementation of the 1541 that doesn't require the old magnetic media any longer.

If you don't know what any of that means, then don't worry as neither do I. But from what I gather, it's a piece of hardware that mimics the old Commodore breeze-block sized drives which has storage space for your disk images that you've either archived or downloaded to use with emulators such as WinVICE or CCS64. This is currently still in the development and testing stages, but Ron van Schaik has reported that compatibility tests have been very successful and further news is due to be announced in February 2007. To find out more, head over to commodore-gg.hobby.nl/innovatie_1541kaart_eng.htm.

In other Commodore news, the 34th edition of the famous disk-mag GameOver(view) is now available from gameoverview.artificial-stupidity.net, but it comes with a healthy warning of adult language contained within. This issue has four reviews and a list of upcoming games that are still somewhere in development, including some projects that I've completely forgotten about and I should, therefore, track down. To conclude your Commodore reading, issue three of Commodore Free is now available and yet again on time - well done to Nigel Parker for that. It's available as a PDF electro-zine or in plain text (for low-tech computer users) from www.commodorefree.com. Issue three has cast

its net wider that the C64 to include other machines from the famous company, including the VIC-20 and an overview of the mythical C65. A thoroughly enjoyable read it is too, so while you're waiting for next week's Retro Mart, you could do worse than peruse the aforementioned fan-based publications.