Sinclair ZX81 with RAM pack

I got my first ever home computer in 1982 - a Sinclair ZX81. It featured a whole 1024 bytes of on-board memory, monochrome block graphics, no sound facilities and an extremely laggy touch sensitive keyboard. Despite all these shortcoming, there was a certain buzz about actually owning a home computer in those days and many hours were spent crouched over it learning the rudiments of BASIC programming.

The famously wobbly Sinclair RAM pack arrived in my xmas stocking soon after and with 16KB, the sky was the limit! Well, it did at least mean you didn't have to resort to strange coding methods to save precious bytes when entering programs (ah, the fabulous VAL instruction:) Also, it meant commercial games were almost worth buying. If you could get them to load and the RAM pack didn't croak, such programs would often be versions (I hesitate to use the word "clones") of arcade games with instructions like "You (the inverse asterisk) must climb the ladders ("H") and avoid the monsters "X"). Primative stuff, to be sure. There were some better games by companies like J.K Greye Software ("3D Monster Maze") and later on a company called Software Farm figured out how to do quasi hi-res graphics.. but by then I'd moved on the ZX Spectrum.

(Intermission: Here, chortle at Cascade Cassette 50 :)

Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Ahhh.. the 8-colours, moving-keyboard and sound features of the Spectrum seemed like a dream after the ZX81.. If only Sinclair had improved on the practical side of things too. Once again peripherals were a nightmare: My own Spectrum and a schoolfriend's were both toasted by dodgy joystick interfaces. I remember waiting about 6 weeks for it to be repaired - seemed like years..

Initially the main source of software was "type-in" listings from magazines like Sinclair Programs. I distinctly remember the print quality being dire - it was usually photocopied from the output of thermal ZX Printer (another triumph of cheapness). More often than not programs didn't work and there'd pages corrections in the next issue of the magazine, what fun! As the Spectrum became more popular, the type-in magazines gave way to games review mags like "Crash" and "Sinclair User" and the first computer games boom began. (Quite often C90s of dodgy tape-to-taped games would do the rounds at school, but there was a pride in owning originals and I bought a fair few titles back then too - Ultimate's Jetpac was probably the first.)

My real interest though, was programming my own stuff and after cobbling together some BASIC utils like a graphics editor and so on, I set myself the challenge of learning Machine Code. The Spectrum's user manual made it seem quite mysterious but with the aid of other books like Rodnay Zak's "Programming the Z80" I started to make progress..

Sinclair QL, sir? We've got loads. (For some reason..)

After a while I made a few simple machine code games - here's one I made 20 (!) years ago which I recently discovered on a tape in the loft: Its called Bouncing Bomb - dont laugh it wasn't a commericial release or anything :) I also picked up some bad habits like entering code as hex bytes instead of using an assembler, but it now seems almost everyone did that back then - huzzah!

The Spectrum really was a pretty limited beast hardware-wise and getting anything really impressive out of it meant programming minor miracles (so hats off to people who did stuff like Knightlore with its 3D masking and Zynaps with its smooth attribute scroll). Fortunately for me, my brother had recently summoned up the cash to buy a Commodore 64 which meant Hardware sprites! Smooth scrolling! Proper sound! So that's where my attention turned next. Sinclair meanwhile went on to tinker with the basic design and came up the Spectrum Plus (new keyboard - woo) and later the Spectrum 128 series with more memory and AY sound. The least said about the Sinclair QL the better, I think.

Commodore 64..

The Original C=64

The Commodore 64 was in a different class to other 8 bit machines like the Spectrum. It had cool sound, hardware sprites, multicolour modes, joystick ports and a "proper" typewriter style keyboard. It also had a slightly dubious wedge-shaped power pack that doubled as a room heater! Still, the old C64 was a sturdy, reliable beast - another huge plus over the flimsy Spectrum.

Programming! The built in BASIC was of course dire; if you wanted anything useful to happen you'd have to consult the manual for a series of Poke instructions. But hey, nobody was really interested in BASIC on the C64 anyway right? (Well OK.. *I* had a tinker and even bought the "Simons Basic" cartridge - but still.. BASIC.. urgh!) No, it was the games that were the big attraction. It has to be said though, most of these were pretty lousy early on! The expanded sprite mode proved very popular and was used in all its blocky glory far too often (which gave Spectrum fans cause for mirth). The C2N datacassette loading routines weren't exactly brilliant either - 15 minute loading times were not uncommon (and we curse when Megabyte size files take a second or two to load these days!).

Of course there was always the CBM1541 disk drive. An expensive, weighty shoe-box with a gargantuan transformer, it was actually slower than some tape turbo loaders! Well done Commodore. Its most annoying "feature" however, was the hammering disk heads; format a disk, and the "whirr-ratatatatat" was enough to knock the heads out of alignment - you'd then spend ages trying to get the damn thing working again. Thankfully, third party software soon appeared allowing fast loading and quiet formatting. (We invested in a "Phantom" parallel expansion board which really made the thing fly.. and get extremely hot!)

On the games review front, here in the UK you had two main choices, Commodore User and Zzap!64. CU had a pretty stuffy attitude in the early days and the reviewers seemed to be all old fogies. Zzap!64 was much better, with its highly amusing Liddon/Penn/Rignall reviews, Oli Frey artwork etc. It was in Zzap!64 that we first learnt about Compunet, the closest you could get to the Internet in the UK at that time. "For the price of ten aliens", ran CBMs advert, "you can contact much friendlier beings." Yeah, £100 for a 1200/75 baud modem which offered ALMOST 8 bytes per second upload speed - amazing! But such was the state of modem technology in those days and for its brief existence, Compunet was great fun and was where the UK "scene" as it became known was born. The graphics and sound demos uploaded on Compunet together with the people we met inspired me to create my own demos on the C64 and I kept doing 'em long after Compunet bit the dust - scrollers, stretchy sprites, colour bars, bouncy logos, you name it. All done with the aid of an Trilogic Expert freezer cartridge and a well thumbed Hardware Reference Manual:)

Through all this I'd become pretty familiar with the C64 hardware and eventually I started coding games too, my first effort was "Warspite", a pretty poor Delta clone which didn't get a commercial release. My next game was a bit better, I sent it to a few software companies and Players (The £1.99 wonders) said they'd publish it if I changed it enough to pass as a virtual C64 conversion of a Spectrum game called Taskforce that they were about to release. I did the necessary butchering and got my first game published. Afterwards Players asked me to do more C64 versions of their games so I became a self-employed freelance (back bedroom) coder and came up with a number of budget titles including "Operation Hanoi", "Havoc" and "Outlaw". My apologies if you actually bought any of 'em - they weren't that brilliant to be honest- but how many budget games were eh? :)

As time went on - programmers and games just got better and better. Andrew Braybrook's Uridium showed how things should be done, demo writers began to produce clever new effects (EG: sprites in the border / digital sound) and Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway and Benn Daglish amazed us with their SID music. In the hey-day of the C64 scene there was an unbelievable flow of software. European groups like "The Judges" with their the stunning "Think Twice" demos became the front runners in the demo scene and later a new wave of musicians like The Maniacs Of Noise pushed the SID chip to its limits. Meanwhile, games reached the excellence of Sensible Software's "Wizball" and Thalamus' "Armalyte".

There were a few oddities along the way too - Commodore's development dept. certainly came up with some turkeys in its time (The C128, C16, C+4 to name but three) but also produced some interesting peripherals. For example the CBM sound sampler and the FM Music Expansion System (not to be confused with that cheapo plastic keyboard "music maker" effort!) were fun, if poorly supported.

The 8-bit bubble eventually burst with the arrival of first the Atari ST and then the Amiga. The ST was something of a false dawn but was enough to signal that time would soon run out for everyone's favourite home micro. Still, the C64 kept on as a "viable" platform right up to the early '90s and now lives on in nostalgia and game music remix sites.

Commodore Amiga..

The Commodore Amiga A500

When the 16-bit era dawned there were two choices, the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga. The ST had the initial advantage as it was the cheaper of the two and so many people ditched their 8 bit computers to embrace the ST. Personally, I wasn't impressed by the ST - it had weak sound & little custom hardware so I waited a little longer for developments on the Amiga front. Just as well, within six months the Amiga A500 was released - my brother and I bought ours in 1987 and it seemed like a massive technological leap what with its 512KB memory, hi-res colour bitmapped display, window-based OS ("Workbench") and Unix-like command line interface etc.

Decent software was very hard to come by at first. Games mostly consisted of jerky arcade clones by the likes of companies like "Anco" (being impressed with sampled loading music soon wore off..) Still, we tinkered about with Deluxe Paint, played Marble Madness and.. got brutally fleeced for blank disks! Suddenly, out of the blue came SCA's "Miami-Vice Digi", the first "proper" Amiga demo I'd seen - it was just a big long sound sample with some wavy scrollers on screen but what a relief to see something the ST / C64 couldn't do! (SCA went on to produce the "Something wonderful has happened" SCA virus - another Amiga first - though this was obviously less welcome than their previous creations..)

Gradually, more software began to appear, much of it from Europe. For some reason everyone seemed to go mad writing tedious breakout clones in those early days. One title, however deserves note and that was "Crystal Hammer" - the first game I encountered with a real "Soundtracker" tune rather than crude samples - respect is due to Karsten Obarski for breaking the mould. Other early games like "Sidewinder" offered a hint of what was possible but it was pretty gutting that most UK software houses could only manage to churn out lame, jerky ST-ported games (US Gold / Tiertex, take a bow!) No, it was the demo scene that led the way as far as coding skills went - early mega-demos (a whole disk packed with graphic effects and music that just got better and better) like those from"Dexion", "Sodan" and "Red Sector" were really putting the games software companies to shame.

Programming on the Amiga seemed a foreboding task to me at first. However, I bought a 68000 assembly language pocket book and began tinkering soon after. (I was actually hindered by buying "The kickstart guide to the Amiga" which insisted things like "poking to screen RAM" on the Amiga were impossible. Thankfully the Hardware Reference Manual came to my rescue!) I got to grips with the Amiga's processor and hardware by coding a whole heap of demos / intros and later put the knowledge to use when I wrote my first commercial Amiga game "Violator", which was published by Codemasters. Afterwards, they asked me to code some racing game or other but they just sent me a few crappy graphics and no design, so I didn't bother and started on some of my own designs instead. I wrote "Operation Firestorm" which "Hi-tech Software" were about to publish but unfortunately they went out of business.I also started to write "Aquanaut" but I was becoming disillusioned with the software business for one reason or another and it was left at the 70% completion stage.

I gradually got back into the "fun side" of the Amiga on the demo scene and wrote "Wibble World Giddy" (Freeware) as a parody of the endless Dizzy games - which went down well. I also coded a few catalogue listing programs for some Public Domain companies and also "Kwikcopy" - a disk copying util, among other things. Later I did "Giddy 2" and joined various demo groups in which I released a few things like diskmag engines and so on. I was back into coding so I completed "Op. Firestorm" and "Aquanaut" and sent them to F1 Licenceware which at last made me a bit of cash out of them.

And so the worldwide Amiga phenomena progressed. Public domain companies sprang up ten-a-penny, 3rd party developers began making peripherals, demo groups like "Anarchy" and "LSD" dominated the UK scene and "Phenomena" and "Kefrens" were big in Europe. Disk-based magazines like "Grapevine" were very popular and the release-rate of software was incredible. In this, the A500's hey-day, many classic games were released: "Denaris", "Turrican 2" (top marks Factor 5!), "Battle Squadron", "Silkworm", "Sensible Soccer", "Pinball Dreams", "Alien Breed" to name but a few. In the early 90's, a few minor developments from Commodore brought us the A1500, Amiga A500+ and the Amiga A600. The A1500 was just a "big-box" A500+ (The plus being basically an A500 with more memory on board) and the A600 was a cheaper, slimmed-down A500+ with PCMCIA slot and internal harddrive connector. A lot of users new to the Amiga came to it via the A600, which was unfortunate as a few months later the A1200 was released at roughly the same price!

The A1200 (and its A4000 big box counterpart) had faster, real 32bit processors and a revision of the graphics chipset called AGA - which meant more colours and better resolutions. Unfortunately, the actual graphics engine: the blitter remained relatively unchanged - which was something of a massive shortcoming. Still, the A1200 was warmly received and sold very well. Software was slow to take advantage of the new AGA graphics abilities (Commodore didnt help, what with being so secretive about the new hardware specifications) and AGA games were non-existent at first. Also A500 demos of the time like Spaceballs' "State of the Art", Sanity's "Interference" and Kefrens' "Desert Dreams" were out-classing early AGA-efforts like those from "Team Hoi" and it began to look like AGA might never take off (though it was fun having loads of colours to muck about with on Deluxe Paint 5:)

Eventually the hardware specs did leak out and at last impressive AGA demos started to appear. On the games front it was still a bit bleak.. Conversions of A500 games to AGA just resulted in them coming in on loads of disks and running slower because of the increased strain on the hardware. Quite a few AGA specific games were created but its hard to recall any real classics - most of the decent AGA stuff came from the Amiga "scene".

It was around 1993 when things first started to go pear-shaped for the Amiga. Commodore failed to produce a CD add-on for the A1200 but came up with the CD32, a disastrously under-powered entry into the games console market. With losses going off the chart, CBM started to close many of their offices around the world and eventually the whole company folded in 1994.

In the end it was Commodore's chronic lack of investment that held the Amiga back and enabled the PC to leap ahead both as a games and general purpose home computer. At one time, in the days of EGA 286/386 PC's, the Amiga's hassle-free system with its GUI, impressive sound and graphics won it many fans. How we A500 owners sniggered at the PC's 4 colour games and its beepy sound, how we chuckled at the pitiful DOS and shaky windows.. For years, nothing changed, the PC was still rubbish and the Amiga was still the Amiga (IE: The A500 or variations on it). Eventually though, certain key factors came together to change it all. Among them:

1. Doom.
2. Ever more powerful consoles.
3. Windows.
4. The Internet / WWW.
5. Commodore sitting on its laurels.

Doom: The end of 2D games had arrived and even hardened Amiga fans couldn't fail to be impressed with Doom on the PC. It was doubly galling that the Amiga (A1200 included) just couldn't do 3D anything like as well, its hardware so geared around 2D scrolling and sprites just couldn't compete.

Consoles. The Amiga could never match the Mega Drive or Snes and with piracy rife in the Amiga world, it was hardly surprising games developers were keen to move to more powerful and secure platforms.

Windows: With version 3.1 onwards, the PC was getting ever more user-friendly.

The Internet: protocols,standards and software were quickly being forged on the PC side and the hardware required to make the Web a comfortable experience was already surpassing the Amiga's capabilities.

Commodore: the Amiga's hardware hadn't advanced one jot for years on end and by the time the A1200 appeared it was "too little too late". Granted, it had a CPU running twice as fast as before and more colours but there was no 3D-friendly VGA-style display and the same old blitter and sound chips were present. Software demands had already outstripped the benefits offered - even the (overpriced) accelerator boards could offer little respite. The PC's development was gaining momentum but meanwhile Commodore continued to score own goals - The CD32 was the final nail in their coffin. CBM went bust, the Amiga rights were bought by Escom, who went bust. The rights passed to various other companies all of whom did nothing with them. Its a shame it had a long drawn out death really - RIP Amiga, an excellent machine in its day!