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I've had a few questions in recent weeks regarding the Retro Mart awards that I started in the magazine last year, with the idea being to decide the best games overall and by format of the previous year. Although there was some controversy arising from last year's results, it seems to have been a success, certainly in showcasing the best of what is currently available in the community. As to which of the previous year's independently published 8-bit titles will be among the winners, all of the results will be announced at this year's upcoming Byte Back gaming convention (as I had planned, for those who were keeping an eye on the event's forums).

Byte Back is taking place on 7th and 8th March, in Stoke-on-Trent, with all the profits from the event donated to two charities: the RSPCA and the Donna Louise Trust. During the weekend, attendees will get to meet and greet some of the industry's finest from the 80s and 90s, with a special mention going to the 'Ocean reunited' gathering, which includes Bill Harbison - an artist on games including Chase HQ and Dragon Ninja on the Spectrum and Batman: The Movie on the Amiga; Jim Bagley of Special FX Software - responsible for such Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC games as Cabal, Gutz and Red Heat; Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith, who is widely regarded as one of the finest Speccy programmers at Ocean; Mark R. Jones, who pixelated Speccy games such as Wizball, Arkanoid II and Gryzor; and finally Simon Butler, one of the more prolific contributors to Ocean Software, responsible for in-game graphics across more than 30 titles.

The event isn't all retro though, as it aims to unite gamers of all ages in a celebration of the entire history of videogames, from classic arcade machines and 8-bit home computers all the way up to the latest generation of systems such as the Xbox 360 and Wii. So it should be a good one, then. Tickets are £12 for adults and £5 for children, and further information is available on the Byte Back website. I'll see you there!

For some people, 48K is enough, but if you want more from your rubber-keyed Speccy, you could do worse than to explore the possibilities thrown up by Velesoft's latest piece of kit. It's an external do-it-yourself upgrade giving your computer a massive 128KB or more of RAM. This will also allow compatibility with some popular Russian Speccy clones, such as the Pentagon 256. There's a little bit of expertise and a good steady soldering hand required, as 48K owners will need to disable upper 32K DRAM chips inside the computer, whereas if you're actually lucky enough to own a working 16K model, there's no need for any internal tinkering, just to build the upgrade in the first place. Anyway, everything that you need to know is over at velesoft.speccy.cz/zx/external_128kb_upgrade. Good luck!

Set to plug the gap left from the unfortunate demise of the fanzine Commodore Scene, Commodore Free is now in its third year. The 'zine comes in many guises: HTML, PDF, plain text, 40-column text and sequential text files (with the latter being format-specific to Commodore 8-bits), and now as a disk mag (for C64 users) similar to the great Load Star. The latest issue includes news and reviews for all Commodore machines (including Amiga), interviews, programming tutorials and a complete listing of the Pac-Man clone Quickman for the Commodore VIC-20, which is handy if you want to learn a bit about programming the machine in assembly language. To grab the latest copy, head over to www.commodorefree.com