We're leading the news roundup with something a little different this month. Following a suggestion from seanstar to plug little-known audio player Cog, I thought it'd be a good idea to (briefly) highlight a few audio apps for those of you with collections of game rip audio and other video-game sound formats. Please let us know in the comments if there are any others you recommend.

So first up there's Cog, a free open-source audio player that supports tracker formats (it, s3m, xm, mod), several video game formats, and a host of other common audio formats. With playlists, Growl support, and a small memory footprint, it's a great choice. But development has fallen away over the past few years. Use the latest nightly build rather than the 0.07 release, unless you run into stability issues.

The lightweight Vox music player is in rather more active (albeit slow) development, and comes close to matching Cog feature-for-feature -- with the bonus of a slick interface and some cool effects plugins.

Old school Mac fans will be pleased to note that SoundJam MP is available for OS X, although it doesn't work in Lion (nor does it support any video-game music formats).

Getting a little more focused, the Commodore 64 music player SIDPLAY was recently updated to work in Lion. It mimics the look and feel of iTunes, and was designed with the huge High Voltage SID Collection in mind.

Richard Bannister's M1 and Audio Overload lack the bells and whistles of the other players mentioned, but between the two of them they cover 34 different video-game music formats (M1 is for arcade music only; Audio Overload is for everything else).

If you're looking towards Apple's iDevices, try Modizer for multi-format playback. Sid Player and Module Player offer music in the Commodore 64 and Amiga sound formats, respectively.

Keep reading for the emulator updates, including new versions of Parallels Desktop, Pom1, Atari800MacX, and more.

The iPhone and iPod Touch App Store is brimming with content for just about every niché (except those that will never meet Apple’s stringent requirements). But so many apps are terrible that it can sometimes be a dice roll whether you’ll find what you want. This is doubly so for fans of retro games and technology, with countless attempts made to trick you out of your money in an orgasmic blast of nostalgia. Some apps actually are what they say, however, so I’ve put together this list of nine iPhone apps worth a look for fans of retro gaming and technology.

2600 Magic / DragstrMagic

From the creator of Pitfall, David Crane’s Technical Wizardry Series has so far spawned just two apps. But both provide phenomenal insight into the work that went into making games for the Atari 2600. Each app describes the internal workings of the hardware, and reveals the tricks used to make various graphics appear on the screen. The language used is very accessible, seldom requiring any technical knowledge whatsoever, and there are numerous interactive diagrams used to illustrate the descriptions. You'll likely finish wondering how anything was made at all, given how difficult every little task must have been.

Cost: 2600 Magic -- $1.99 (a free ‘Lite’ version is available); DragstrMagic -- $3.99.