The news is a bit old now, but I had intended to pass it along here for a few weeks now. Not being a Russian speaker, it's taken me that long to get my registration correct
Anyway, I just wanted to announce that SP1 for Z88DK was released a few weeks ago. SP1 is a flicker-free sprite engine for writing games on the Spectrum in C or assembler. Sprites can be any size and any of five main types: mask, or, xor, load and attribute only. They can occupy any of 256 planes. SP1 contains a large number of functions for collision detection, drawing backgrounds and manipulating sprites that makes it a lot easier to write games.
Along with SP1, z88dk contains, among other things, an IM2 library to register C functions on interrupts, a dynamic block memory allocator for fast and efficient memory allocation, abstract data types like linked-lists and hash tables, and functions for reading the keyboard, many joysticks and mice.
I have started an english language tutorial on http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forum...ad.php?t=11729 that will cover all the features in SP1. I would say it's about half-way through and will take another week to two weeks to be finished.