This is just Part 1. Each of the games will follow next then I’ll talk about switching from self-employed programmer to being an employee and what I wrote during that time.
I bought my first computer in 1979, a Video Genie which was a cheap clone of a TRS-80. On the plus side, it had a built-in tape deck. On the negative, it didn’t have lowercase in its character set. For those of you who’ve only ever owned computers with graphic displays, that means both a and A would display as A. Not really a hardship in those days, but it made the Video Genie unsuitable as a word processor.
I taught myself how to write in assembly language using that Video Genie and then a few years later a friend showed me his brand new ZX-Spectrum. At the time, I didn’t realise I’d be writing games for it as I was just a hobbyist.
In those days, there was no internet so learning how to program was a challenge. It came down to books, magazines, and the unofficial shop clubs. I believe a similar culture exists, or has existed, in music shops. Keen hobbyists would hang around in computer shops playing with the computers and showing off their projects to each other. We’d ask each other questions and learn. Then we’d go home and try out what we’d picked up and the next week we’d show off what we’d come up with.
It was through one of those shops that I heard somebody was looking for a programmer to write games. That was Albert Owen and he had a video shop where he also sold games and wanted to get involved in producing them. His son, Ray Owen was a commercial artist and we all got on quite well so we set about working out how to write games for the ZX-Spectrum.
ZX-Spectrum because it was a viable platform and I already knew Z80 assembler.
By the time I met Albert and Ray I’d upgraded to my model III TRS-80 and Albert bought me a useful interface from John Campbell of Campbell Systems who had developed it for his own use. He also had a TRS-80 and had a pacman clone in the charts. Fortunately for me, he lived nearby and Albert knew him. I never asked Albert how much it cost, but it was an essential part of my development kit. With a small TRS-80 program, it allowed me to push the assembled code down the printer port and into the edge connector of the Spectrum. I could send an entire game to the Spectrum in seconds. If the game crashed then I’d fix it and send it again. I didn’t have to wait minutes to reload an assembler and source code on the Spectrum. If I’d had to do that I don’t think I’d have written the games I did.
The circuit board for the interface is shown here.
Next, my first Spectrum game Bonkers.
Love that you kept the interface! So did you hand-write the assembler on the TRS-80 then pushed it to the Spectrum?
Yes. The ROM on the TRS-80 used the bottom 16K of memory, the same as the Spectrum. So I could just assemble it on the TRS-80 using an assembler that I could load from my floppy disks. They were 180k storage per side and I had two of them. Microscopic, by today’s standards, but way quicker than loading from tape.
I’d send the assembled binary code only.
Actually, the interface went to the https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/ along with my model III.
Looks like I can’t put a photo in the reply here, but I’ll share a photo of that later in the blog series 🙂
My family (kids are home schooled) and I visited just before lockdown! An amazing place – and thank you for donating it to allow others to experience a piece of 1980’s history. Reminded that one of the curators showed us some of the paperwork that you’d also donated. Have to say that I had a bit of “Squeee” moment 🙂
I wrote a program on my ZX Spectrum for O Level exam, that I pretty much re-wrote when I worked for IBM, and it made them tens of billions of dollars in revenue. Amazing how this little computer touched and shaped so many lives!
Good that they’re showing some of the stuff I left with them :).