Orion Prime is the best adventure game ever made on the Amstrad CPC.

The game is available in 3″ and 3.5″ discs and Free Download.

The Story:

Engine failure… A hyperspace voyage that ends in an asteroid field… Forced to eject, you wander aimlessly in space, until you detect a signal from the Orion Prime.

However, you quickly realise that this gigantic vessel is no longer the jewel of the scientific research fleet that it once was, as you discover that the crew has been decimated by a strange illness…

You must escape as quickly as possible, but to do this, you will have to explore the Orion Prime, understand what has happened on board the vessel, and perhaps even confront it…

source: orion.cpcscene.com

This is the last notice for the Ultimate 1541 version 2.

from 1541 Ultimate homepage:

• 184 Ultimate-II units shipped.
• The last few (5) will be shipped out tomorrow….
• If you paid after June 1, you will need to wait until the new production batch is finished.  (Refund possible..)
• New production startup in progress!
• Unprocessed payments will be processed before the end of the week (week 27). Please hold your payments until further notice!
• Question of redistributing the Free Xilinx tools within a virtual machine is under review by the legal department of Xilinx. If they approve, I can provide the planned virtual machine; if not, I will need to write instructions on how you can instal the tools separately.
• Last firmware version: 2.0RC4. Downloadable update available by end of week 28.

source: 1541ultimate.net

Luigi Di Fraia is working on version 3 of his DC2N. The DC2N is a digital replacement for the C2N datassette. With the DC2N you can read cassettes and transfer the data to a memory-card.

It is also possible to save data from a memory-card to a datassette. The DC2N is a stand alone system, what means you can do the transfers without a computer.

The newest version has USB support and uses a graphical screen to show the signal that is recorded. You can watch various videos of the DC2N on youtube.

source: commodore-gg.hobby.nl

The developer, IlTimido released a new C64 frontend for Windows called C64 Memories. This frontend focusses on manageability of the big TOSEC  collections.

C64 Memories features:

• Full support for Tosec naming convention: displayed data about games are taken directly from the filename.
• Supports nearly all C64 images: .D64 .T64 .TAP .PRG .P00 .D71 .D80 .D81 .D82 .G64 .G41 .X64
• Comes with a C64 emulator: C64 Memories uses a slighlty modified version of Vice2.2 emulator.
• Directories display: the list of the content of a .D64 or .T64 file is displayed in automatic by C64 Memories.
• Favorites folder: you can add your favorite games in the favorites folder (and every disk/tape of a sequence is added in automatic).
• Search filters: you can filter results for the first letters, substrings and you can show only the first disk/tape of a sequence.
• Snapshots galleries: your can take screenshots from inside the games and the pictures will be displayed in automatic in C64 Memories.
• Notes: you can add custom notes for every single game.
• Ratings: you can rate every single game.
• Search providers: you can easily find additional informations (review, screenshots, remake, music) over the Internet for every single game just by pressing a button!

source: c64scene.com c64memories

CBM-Command is a disk manager for the Commodore 64 / Commodore 128 / Commodore VIC20 / Commodore C16 computers. It is written like Norton Commander or Midnight Commander, but is much simpler due to the target platforms. Both the C128/C64/VIC20/C16 have their own native version of the application.

Release Notes – 2010-07-09 – Version 1.0.1/1.0.2

New Features:

• Added support for Commodore Plus 4 computer.
• 32K Expanded VIC-20 now supported.

Changes:

• (VIC20) Refactored many of the screens to better fit the 22×23 layout.
• (VIC20) Filename shortening removed and the file type moved to the left of the directory display.
• (PLUS4) Created color scheme to match the environment.
• (VIC20) Panels are not displayed side by side, only one panel is displayed at a time.
• (VIC20) D64 support is removed, the RAM was needed elsewhere.
• (ALL) The screen has been made more scalable.

Known Issues:

• (VIC20) Many of the keyboard shortcuts on the left side of the keyboard do not work under VICE. After speaking with members of the VICE team they are pretty sure this is a problem in the GETIN kernel routine which is used by cc65. I would greatly appreciate it if someone with a real VIC can verify that the keys do not work on real hardware before I bring the problem up in the cc65 forums.
• (VIC20) I still haven’t figured out why saving the configuration doesn’t work. :(
• (VIC20) CTRL-D and CTRL-E don’t work.
• (VIC20) The launcher doesn’t yet know about the VIC, so it loads the wrong version of CBM-Command.
• (VIC20) The configuration tool cannot save.

source: cbmcommand.codeplex.com

New 8 Bit Software – Scavenger, Penultimate Fantasy and DungeonExplorer for Commodore 64.

source: noname.c64.org

Commodore Free Magazine Issue #41

In this issue you can find:

• Editorial.
• Readers Comments.
• News.
• Interview With Jim Brain.
• Review Of Knight ‘N’ Grail.
• How The C64 Changed My Life.
• Equinoxe – Evolution (8-Bit Girl)
• Interview With 8-Bit Girl.
• Adventures In Time Review.

source: commodorefree.com

SD2IEC is a hardware mass storage device using an SD/MMC card and interfacing with the IEC bus. It is based on the ATmega644 microcontroller from the Atmel AVR microcontroller family.

The most prominent use of SD2IEC is emulation/replacement of a Commodore-1541 disk drive for a C64. Hardware and the microcontroller’s firmware is available as open source (GPL).

Changelog:

2010-06-21 – release 0.9.2

• Bugfix: Rename was broken on FAT.
• Turbodisk is now disabled when running on internal RC clock.
• Button debounce timeout increased.

source: sd2iec.de gitweb forum thread c64-wiki

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italian.

Some new Games & Utility for Commodore VIC-20.

• FCBPaint-0.5. This is a preview of an editor for a new graphics mode I’ve been working on for a while.
• FIFA WORLD CUP 2010. FIFA’s unofficial VIC 20 football/soccer game.
• Odi Est Amo. You will hate this game.
• Q*LOAD V0.1/U. Q*LOAD is a tape loader / mastering tool for the Vic-20.

source: Denial (The Commodore VIC-20 forum)

The new meeting will be held on July 3rd, 2010 at Orvieto.

We will be guests of the beautiful event CRACK AT THE TREASURE CAT 2010 (www.wardriving.it) with our retrocomputers.

source: retrocommodore.com

After this update, the collection should contain 37,714 SID files!

Thanks to all the people who have helped to make HVSC the collection that it is today, without your help it would be a much tougher task.

This update features (all approximates):

• 1045 new SIDs.
• 897 fixed/better rips.
• 20 PlaySID/Sidplay1 specific SIDs eliminated.
• 133 repeats/bad rips eliminated.
• 1076 SID credit fixes.
• 81 SID model/clock infos.
• 23 tunes from /DEMOS/UNKNOWN/ identified.
• 10 tunes from /GAMES/ identified.
• 81 tunes moved out of /DEMOS/ to their composers’ directories.
• 11 tunes moved out of /GAMES/ to their composers’ directories.

source: hvsc.de

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italian.

CartographPC is a Windows application created to assist in designing tile-based datamaps. This devtool serves as a companion piece to our C64 native Cartograph devtool.

The original purpose of CartographPC was to enable us to take nice screenshots of our datamaps without having to take four or six screenshots of smaller windows and piece them together.

CartographPC has since grown into a full editor with the benefit of being able to load datamaps created on the C64 directly into memory and edit, save, and move them back to C64 without much hassle.

It works by creating datamaps using tilesets created on C64 with the old, but popular, ultrafont editor. Datamaps can have dimensions of 1 to 255 tiles horizontally and 1 to 127 tiles vertically. CartographPC allows the user to create a datamap as small as 40×25 tiles (one screen) and up to 255×127 tiles.

Read more…

Autopsy:

Thanks to recompute33 for the donation.

The Protek Joystick Interface allow to use a Digital joystick in place of analog joystick for BBC Computers.