Category: Retro News

The Future Was 8 bit announces Mini PET, a modern take on the Commodore PET 2001

This Sunday, TFW8B has shaken the retro computer community with the announcement of a new retro computer, the Mini PET. The Mini PET is a fully functional 6502 based computer, compatible with a Commodore PET 2001N-32. It presents one quarter of the size and the tenth of the power consumption of the original 40-year-old computer. Main characteristics: 40×25 text mode…

1983 Microsoft GW-BASIC source code now available on Github!

As we know, now Microsoft loves open-source software. Regardless of the motives Microsoft has, the giant software company unquestionably played an important part in the personal computer history, since the initial release of the BASIC interpreter made for the Altari 8800. To be fair, Microsoft has been very helpful in the effort to preserve this history of personal computing for…

A new version of Atari800MacX is now available, bringing a small but important update

Update 5/21/2020: Shortly after the release of 5.0.2, version 5.0.3 is available including a fix for a bug that would display double characters. Mark Grebe has update Atari800MacX to version 5.0.3 bringing the MacOS Atari emulator up to date with Catalina. This update fixes some of the bugs reported by users in the emulator Github repository, including fixing the full-screen…

MSXDev’20 receives the 3rd contestant game – Subcommander

Subcommander is the third entry for the 2020 edition of MSXDev, the already traditional MSX game development contest that this year is, for a change from previous years, allowing only pure MSX1 games to participate. With this in mind, Zoran Majcenić has created a colourful and fast-paced submarine shoot’em up game. The gameplay is straightforward: you have to destroy as…

How to emulate a Color Computer in MAME – The ultimate tutorial

Steve Strowbridge has published today on his YouTube channel, the Original Gamer, a two-part video teaching how to emulate the TRS-80 Color Computer using MAME, the multi-purpose emulation framework. Although MAME is very powerful, it is not necessarily easy to set up for a specific machine if you are used to it, so Steve’s tutorials come to fill that gap…

Tiny Invaders and Raid over Moscow – Two new free games for the Commodore Amiga

The last week of April brought to great and completely different games for the Commodore Amiga. The first one will satisfy that urge of a quick arcade gaming session where you can jump in, play one or two matches, and move on with your life. Tiny Invaders is a nice version (homage?) of Space Invaders developed by Pink (Abyss) that…

New Commodore 64 Demos – April 2020

I started collecting and creating a video of the new C64 demo releases on CSDb last year, but due to many reasons, the release schedule was inconsistent. This month, I decided to try again and see if I can create one a month, making easier for the viewers to enjoy all of them in a convenient way, without the need…

Scene World Podcast Episode #88 – Digital Retro Park with Stefan Pitsch and Falk Heinzelmann

The Digital Retro Park is one of the premier museums of digital culture. Falk Heinzelmann and Stefan Pitsch are the guys who started it all, and they’ve taken some time to talk to AJ and Joerg about the museum, as well as take us on a virtual tour while we’re all stuck at home! (interview starts at 10:05) https://scene.world/drp

ZX Spectrum’s ‘Manic Miner’ gets a port for an unexpected machine – The Apple II!

Manic Miner, one of the best-sellers games released for the ZX Spectrum, has been ported for the Apple II, and the source code is available on Github. I’ve reached out to the author, “StewBC”, and he was kind enough to answer my questions and more! Stefan Wessels, a fellow Canadian living in British Columbia, first saw Manic Miner at a…

Laserbirds for the ZX Spectrum is out! We played it and we like it!

Laserbirds, the new fast-paced shoot’em up for the ZX Spectrum by Bitnamic Software is now available for purchase as a digital download. Last month we talked about Laserbirds where we mention that the physical tape would be available sometime in the first half of 2020 but due to the current state of affairs the world is facing, Bitnamic has decided…