I can't play half these games!

I used to stop outside the record shop on the way to school or out in town on the weekends and flick through the cassette tapes that were lined up in those tall carousels they use to sell postcards in the street.

The cassettes I was interested in didn't have music on them, but Spectrum computer games. I looked through every one to see one piece of information before I got too excited.

Was it 16k or 48k?

If it had 48k written on the cardboard insert sleeve back it went. It was unplayable on my original 16k computer.

Some of those 48k games looked so good, but they were out of reach.

Rubber Keys

The original Spectrum was the only computer I have ever seen that had soft rubber keys. Along with shift for capitals, there was also a symbol shift for those odd red characters beside each letter key.

Sometimes you had to press both shift and symbol shift and contort your hands into strange, claw like shapes to press the other key. All the BASIC language commands were accessible with a single click and there on the keyboard like documentation. What does POKE do? Let's try it out! This was the year I learned the names of all those symbols, although back then there was very little use for the '@'.

The keyboard was great for coding but not so good for gaming, which is why I was beyond excited when we got the Kempston joystick.

Peripherals

I was fascinated by the idea of peripherals. I pronounced it as "ferriles" at first, but I knew what it meant. It meant I could plug things into my computer to give it new capabilities.

One peripheral I got was a light pen. It came with a simple drawing application and let you draw lines on the TV. It worked badly, but it was pretty amazing. I liked writing code to draw things, but most of the time I liked to play games.

Most games in those days had simple landing screens that let you choose how to control it. Up until I got the joystick I could only choose keys, but the option of the Kempston joystick was now open to me.

I couldn't wait. I loaded up Snake, thinking how easy it would be to control it now, and plugged the joystick's clunky, wide connector into the long slot at the back of the Spectrum.

It didn't seem to work. I was dismayed. I tried playing with the menu. Nothing. So I tried restarting the computer, and then my heart sank.

Bricked

This is what my screen should have looked like, but now, since plugging my joystick in while the computer was on, that text at the bottom of the screen just looked garbled. Nothing worked. This was way before plug and play, USB, or any kind of decent, standardised interface. I had bricked my Spectrum.

Repair shop

I admitted my honest mistake. I thought then as I would now. Why the hell can't I plug things in and out while the computer is on? I guess my UX expectations were ahead of their time.

The Spectrum was boxed up and taken to hopefully be repaired at a local repair shop. Little shops that sold TVs and radios had started selling and repairing computer hardware and peripherals too.

The Spectrum was a simple machine, and looking back I assumed it came back fixed, but it could have been a different machine. They all looked alike.

Bonus

Along with the repaired computer came two cassette tapes. New games! I was delighted. Curse of Sherwood and Terminus Prison Planet. They looked great, much better than Snake and Jumping Jack. Then I saw the dreaded 48k requirement. Surely my parents knew better than to get me games I couldn't run? "They're 48k", I said, "I can't have them."

"Yes you can. We got the computer memory upgraded while it was being repaired."

Joy.

Upgrades

After that for many years I was gripped with the desire to add more peripherals and more memory to my computers. We upgraded to a Spectrum 128k that had a built in tape deck and a more traditional clacky keyboard, but it didn't offer much more than the original. It still had the same weirdly coloured graphics and beeping music.

All except one game that I hired from a local computer shop based on The Ghostbusters movie. Somehow the developers had been able to create crude speech in this title. When Slimer attacked you it said, "he slimed me". It was more like a random white noise, but you could definitely make out the words.

Machine Code

There was no way this kind of audio could be produced using the BASIC language I was used to. The only music you could make with this was using the BEEP command. I puzzled over this until a friend told me that games developers used something called machine code.

What this was, or how it unlocked these extra capabilities beyond the features of BASIC I did not know. There was no way of entering this machine code, so how did they do it? My friend said they connect them to other computers.

Two ideas were presented to me in that moment. Computers could be connected together, and there was more than one computer language, and more powerful ones than I had seen before.

16 bit

I didn't get around to finding out more about the Spectrum machine code. By this point people had started talking about the next generation of home computers. The days of the 8 bit Spectrum were numbered. Something new was on the horizon.