Diary of a Retro Computing Geek – December 2016 (part 2)

I love Christmas time. The young 11 year old me got a Sinclair ZX81 computer for Christmas in 1982. I loved it! I loved everything about it, from opening the box and removing it from the Poly inserts, to the “electronicy” smell of it. Christmas morning and getting it tuned into the TV and loading up the game Black Crystal in the shiny tape deck that came with it was just the best thing ever. My imagination ran wild as I looked at chunky blocks and letters on the screen that represented a castle or a piece of land and it was joyful.

That was the beginning for me. My trusty ZX81. From that Christmas in 1982 through the Christmas in 1984 when I got my Spectrum+ to the Christmas in 1989 when I got my Amiga 500 (Batman Pack), and inbetween times when I got a Commodore C64c as an impromptu gift during summer of 1987 I was addicted to getting better computers to do better and cooler stuff with and of course – play games.

Christmas time and computer games went hand in hand. We couldn’t really afford to buy new games from John Menzies etc, so we had to – like most of my peer group at the time, obtain pirated games.

The pirated games were obtained from the Glasgow Barras (if you’re not familiar with Glasgow – the Barras is a large weekend market at the east end of the city centre).

When I was old enough, my friends and I would endure the 70 minute bus journey from where we stayed in Faifley (Clydebank) to go and buy a couple of tapes each (and then copy from each other when we got home) and at Christmas time, the stalls would do special deals – especially on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was the best time to go to the Barras. Because the place is genuinely very old and some of the old buildings look like something out of a Dickens novel, and with Salvation Army folks walking through and singing carols it was quite a special place.

My friends and I went up there so often over the years from around 1985 onwards that we got to be friends with a couple of the stall holders and got good deals. As the years went on and the software for the machines moved to 5.25” Floppy Disk (C64) and then 3.5” Disk (Amiga) and the company I ventured to the Barras with had changed from being my pals to my girlfriend, it was not so much about the pirated games anymore but the absolute enjoyment of just socialising on Christmas Eve with people I’d been meeting for years. My favourite times were the Christmas Eve’s of 1989, 90 and 91 when we would hang out at Mick’s stall, drink some beer and play Sensible Soccer and Kick Off 2 tournaments on the Amiga’s he had set up. Not much software was being sold as a result but Mick didn’t mind. The banter and sheer fun of the day was all anyone wanted.

The Barras is now a dim shadow of the vibrant and bustling market it once was. Buildings are condemned for demolition; the many market buildings are almost empty and the stalls that do still exist, mainly sell knock off clothes, e-cigarettes, fake cigarettes and the odd pirate DVD / CD stall. Not a nice place to visit at all which is a real shame.

It is funny to think back at the Christmas’ of old and especially those of the 80’s when the pirated games would very rarely work; come on shabby cassettes or no-name disk; take hours to obtain in the first place and many more hours to get them to work, but here we are at the tail end of 2016 and I’m still playing these games, but this time they all work and there’s not a floppy disk or tape in sight.

Picking my Spectrum 128 (Toastrack) as an example; this is now connected to my CRT monitor with a lovely RGB SCART cable and I use an interface called a “DivMMC” from Zaxon to load games from and which also has the nifty feature of also having a Kempston joystick port on it.

The “DivMMC” plugs into the expansion port of the Spectrum (and also has a pass through on it should you wish to plug in any other peripheral – for instance maybe the add-on cart for Shadow of the Unicorn).

You put games and apps (in Z80, TAP and so on format) onto a MicroSD card which is then inserted into the little card reader on the board. Once the Spectrum is turned on; you can access the software on the card via a button on the board which then brings up a menu. From here, you simply chose what you want to play – and it’s loaded in no more than a second or two! No more 6 minute loads to wait for a game not to work, whilst at the same time enduring loading sounds coming from the spectrum that sounded like cats fighting!

It’s also strange that these days I’m going around and buying the original games I couldn’t afford back in the day but loved to play so much from eBay and forums on FaceBook – just to have them!

If you have a Spectrum (any Spectrum) – this is well worth investing in!

Merry Christmas – and I hope Santa brings you much retro gaming / computing goodness!