If you prefer to make games as well as (or rather than) playing them, and you've always fancied creating a playable binary world on an 8-bit micro like a Sinclair ZX Spectrum but don't have the knowledge or skills required for something professional (and also want to avoid anything in Sinclair BASIC), then Jonathan Cauldwell's latest releases could be for you. Much more fun and logical, and easier to understand than Adobe Action Script, Jonathan's Arcade Game Designer (AGD) allows you to create stand-alone [arcade] games that, with a little imagination and patience, can be very complex and vast indeed, running independently from the utility itself, so you can even create your own loading and title screen should you want to put the extra time and effort in. Jonathan described the scripting language as "simpler to use than Sinclair BASIC", so even a programmer of relative inexperience should be able the work things out fairly quickly. And, as I've suggested, if you've ever had to fight with Flash Creative Suite, this is much less stressful.

Fairly comprehensive documentation is included, as well as two example games to alter to get to grips with the utility. The full download is available from rapidshare.com/files/371180517/AGD.zip and if you do create anything with AGD, why not e-mail it to me and I'll include it in this very column. My contact address is shaun@micromart.co.uk.

While on the subject of game creating utilities, the popular adventure maker The Quill is currently being converted to the Sinclair ZX81, which would be quite an achievement and may end up requiring more than a 16K RAM Pack to work.

This work is being carried out by ZX81 enthusiast and member of the RWAP [ZX81] forums (probably the best community of enthusiasts on the Internet, or at least the best one I've found) known as Gus. You would have thought that lacking anything close to a real keyboard and the infamous 'RAM Pack wobble', the black doorstop wouldn't exactly be the ideal platform for such a development kit; however a surprising number of text adventures were released for the 8-bit back in the day, and if you haven't got a keyboard overlay or an alternative upgrade, then at least there's emulation. Anyway, if you want to create a piece of monochrome interactive fiction with one of the most unsophisticated computers of the 1980s, point your web browser at tinyurl.com/ZX81Quill, which has the latest build as well as discussion about this development.

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There's a new 2D platform game for the Commodore 64, which was written in the late 1990s but only recently released. It hails from Poland and is similar to the German game Bobix, which you may have heard of if you were still actively using the bread bin in the mid-90s (and if not then 'Bobix' will mean nothing to you).

The game has been salvaged and finished off by C64 'sceners' Jazzcat, Piotr Tracz and Ian Coog, and contains some great presentation, graphics and SID chip tunes. The aim of the game is to explore the rooms in the locale and collect the various items while also avoiding the roaming monsters. If this all sounds familiar, then that's because it is, and such a game mechanic has existed for as long as I can remember.

The point is that familiarity doesn't always breed contempt, and Toxic is certainly no token effort.

To get hold of the relevant binary disk images for your emulator, go to the web page tinyurl.com/ToxicC64/ where you will find everything that you need.

It's heading for that time of year again when the warmer weather means that news starts to dry up on the retro front, so if you've any news you'd like to share with our readers then why not e-mail in? My e-mail address is shaun@micromart.co.uk, or you could do things the old fashioned way by putting pen to paper, clearly marking your correspondence with Retro Mart', posting it to Micro Mart's address found on the letters pages near to the news section. Thanks in advance for anything you can muster up.