Chris Hutt has announced over at the Atari Age forums (www.atariage.com) that his Space Harrier project is still alive and kicking, despite the time that has lapsed since the last update. This is great news as the one-level demo that is currently available from Chris's website is nothing short of sublime.

There has been a recent, and quite major graphical engine rewrite which aims to minimise the slowdowns that are apparent if you're using a stereo Atari machine (in other words, having two POKEY chips somehow wired into your machine). So far, all levels up to four are complete, but Chris seems something of a perfectionist, as this project is now in its eighth year... and counting. All of this work should lead to a more apparent rate of progress, as far as Chris is concerned, which will also mean that there's not going to be many updates to the official website over at www.sheddyshack.co.uk.

The good news is that the final production should be even better than the current demo, which is already a worthy download. In fact, I'm confident that this will be the best 8-bit conversion of the game available, and is already a whole lot better than the original Commodore 64 effort released by Elite Systems back in the day. Anyway, set your emulator to 128K and go and get the playable preview from the aforementioned website, or if you need an Atari 8-bit emulator, you may download one from atari800.sourceforge.net.

Whilst on the subject of Atari games, the Lynx fans will be delighted to hear that Carl Forhan is currently preparing a collection of must-have titles on one single cartridge. Entitled simply Lynx MegaPak 1, the software included will be a mix of games and tools. With the likes of ChopperX and Paraply, Blackjack and Sketch, the cartridge aims to entertain as broad a spectrum of users as possible at a very reasonable price. Although you'll have to buy this from America, at least you'll get a lot for your buck, or pound sterling at the time of writing. Further information can be obtained at songbird-productions.com.

A Lemon 64 forum member known as Eslapion is currently working on a replacement (in the form of a clone) for the Commodore 64's FD2000 3.5" floppy disk drive originally produced by Creative Micro Designs. This drive is considered as one of the most useful for Commodore 8-bits as it's backwards-compatible not just with Commodore's own 1581 (which stored 800KB per diskette), but can also emulate the 1541 and 1571 by using its intelligent-geometry partition mode. The partitioning mode allows you to mix and match different sectors of the disk so that you could have one 1581 partition and up to four 1541 partitions on one diskette, for instance.

The FD drive will even read and write to 720K or 1.44MB formatted MS-DOS disks. Although this may be outmoded in Windows-land, Windows XP still has some support for this media, and with the size of the average C64 download (or indeed Commodore Vic-20 or C16/+4), you'll easily be able to use the FD as a go-between with your PC and Commodore with the relevant software.

Prices aren't expected to be cheap, but right now we in the UK will likely benefit from a cheap US dollar, depending on what the currency markets are doing when this device is finally available. To find out more, and to register your interest in pre-ordering a unit, head over to tinyurl.com/2yb5vl.

Not only have Atari coders been hard at work of late keeping their beloved XE/XL machines alive and kicking, there is also news of MSX and Vic-20 releases that are on the way.

Although emulators have their conveniences over using the real hardware, I know many of you out there like using your analogue television sets as visual display units to play old and new software. I'm therefore wondering if it would be helpful to you if I did some "how to" guides for transferring emulator files to real machines? Your comments on this will be valuable, so either e-mail me (shaun@micromart.co.uk) or get in touch via the Retro Computer Mart forums at: forum.micromart.co.uk