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QUOD INIT EXIT (QIE) has recently been released for the Commodore 64/128. It's a 2D platform game starring a very hungry pig who needs a great deal of food to sustain his life. Each level has six platforms in which will pass food or poison, and whereas it's easy to travel up due to the fact that our swine has the ability to jump, there are only set routes to move down each screen. Once you've consumed enough food, what appears to be a toilet will appear on one of the platforms, which will show the safest exit to the next level. Miss it and it's game over, so you need your wits about you to progress.

QIE is a fairly solid release, with a well-animated main sprite, but it feels a little repetitive at times, at least to me. However, members of the Commodore Scene Database (CSDb) seem to like this production, and you can grab the disk image there to run on your emulator.

If you prefer making C64 games rather than playing them, then there's a new sprite animator for Windows XP SP3 or better, allowing easy importing into your projects as well as graphical rotations with 19 accuracy, overlaying up to 20 palettes, multicolour and high-resolution sprite images and much more. This handy little utility may be had from www.coder.myby.co.uk/spritepad.htm

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Z80 programming wizard Bob Smith is working on a new 16KB Sinclair ZX81 game based on the classic Atari XE/XL and C64 release Boulder Dash, launched in 1984. For those who don't know, the task in hand is to collect the valuable diamonds from each screen while avoiding the falling rocks and boulders. This project is at a very early state of development (in fact, at the time of writing, only a few concept screens have been drawn so far), but with Bob's previous work on the ZX Spectrum and ZX81, this project will be eagerly awaited by fans of the monochrome beast.

To follow this development, keep an eye on Bob's site, which also has his previous worked archived for your favourite emulators.

There's a new electronic magazine (claimed to be the only one on the Internet) called Atari User. It covers all of the classic machines from the original 2600 through to the 16-bit ST and even the (apparent) 64-bit Jaguar. The first issue takes an in-depth look at the 5200 'Super System', as well as using various emulators on your PC, and rounding up the latest entertainment software written for the aged hardware range. This is carefully written by fans and enthusiasts. With the amount of devices that can read e-zines and so on, it's surely worth taking a few moments to 'flick through', especially as it's the future of publishing.

The virtual publication is priced in US dollars, at $4.25 per issue. This currently works out at around £2.65, so is a bargain for Atari fans - the current issue is available from www.atariuser.com.

Well, that's me for another week. If you have anything that you'd like to say about retro computing or gaming, then don't hesitate to contact me by e-mailing shaun@micromart.co.uk, or pop by the relevant sub-forum over at the Micro Mart website.