On November 1st 2003, Tarquin Mills is to host his first Sinclair ZX and SAM Coupe show in the city of Norwich. He is providing admission free to all, and would like to make the event a regular one in the retro calendar. The show will start at 10am through to 4pm and will be held at the Scout hut in Rowington Road. Tarquin is looking for volunteers and exhibitors, so check out his home page.

Colin Woodcock has published his own adventure game Blink for the ZX Spectrum, which is available to play via a Java emulator on his home page http://www.zxf.cjb.net, or if you prefer to use a real Spectrum, then it is also available for a mere 1.99p + 59p postage costs. In releasing this game, Colin has set up the software label ZXIF, which is to release other interactive fiction titles (that's text and graphical adventures to you and I). Whilst you're visiting the ZXF home page, don't forget to check out the latest issue of ZXF. It's a great read, but I'm still having problems with printing it correctly, as I can't seem to get the pages to fold properly.

Ever wanted to use a 3.5" on a Spectrum +3? Or perhaps add a composite video out? Well, with a little technical knowledge, the ZX-Zone will tell you how. The site also contains information about the CP/M Plus operating system, as well as downloads and plenty of other useful pages pertaining to the Spectrum (+3 mostly).

The IDEB4 is currently the fastest storage device available for the C64, and most people will be happy with the way it works already, however the Singular Crew have released into the public domain v0.9x (beta), which has improved support for JiffyDOS, speeded up the load/save routines to over 70Kbps in many cases, and tweaked many of the other features such as the built-in monitor. Check out the home pages at Volny, Singular Crew and the FTP site at ftp://c64.rulez.org/pub/c64/IDEB4/source/

The popular clone of the Action Replay cartridge, the Retro Replay, is now to return to production from mid-September. The problem has been that mass production does not work with most hardware for retro machines, but recently Jens Schonfeld has received enough support to ensure the device's survival. Jens is also launching a 10MBit-networking card for the Retro Replay, which will be initially supported by the operating system Contiki. More information is available from http://rr.c64.org/ and http://www.dunkels.com/adam/contiki/ for Contiki.

As I'm writing this piece, I'm looking forward to attending the Back in Time live event in Brighton. With news of the Spectrum and Sam show announced above, and news of other shows that have reached me, it feels that the retro community is gradually becoming more and more lively. And once again I'm anticipating one or two commercial outfits to muscle in and drain what little profits there are. This is how the CB4 community sees Ironstone Partners and Tulip Computers, with a knee-jerk reaction of who do they think that are? As for their big plans, we are still waiting, but if implemented in the right way then they could provide a model for others to follow on other platforms

The retro market is still delicately balanced. There are areas of profitability, which are usually filled by dedicated companies and backed by user groups, but other than rare items and collectibles usually traded over eBay, there is yet to be enough people who are interested enough to spend their hard earned cash. At the moment, it feels like there are bigger things to come, but many including myself like things as they are now, and will one day look back and see this time as a golden age for our beloved machines. Let's hope commercialisation doesn't ruin that.