Through the Interface

Happy 40th birthday, Speccy!

On Saturday the ZX Spectrum turned 40. Does that make anyone else feel old? When first released on April 23rd, 1982, Sinclair Research’s ZX Spectrum had 16K of RAM, a horrible rubber keyboard and some very quirky colour graphics. In fairness, though, it was a quantum leap (another Sinclair reference for the astute observer) beyond the ZX81, which had – unexpanded – just 1K of RAM, a truly grotesque membrane keyboard and low-res black and white graphics. Both of these devices changed the world: the Spectrum went on to become the UK’s best-selling microcomputer, launching an industry and many,... Read more →

Autodesk's 40th anniversary celebration

As I mentioned last week, Autodesk turned 40 yesterday. In anticipation of this milestone, Shaan Hurley and the Autodesk Community team organised a fun online get-together on Friday for people to join and get nostalgic about the good old days. Shaan asked me to prepare something Floppy Friday-related, so I went and created a Floppy Friday Zoom background that I used during the event. Here’s a GIF version, in case you’re interested. At its peak there were around 70 people in the call. It was so nice to reconnect with people after such a long time. It would have... Read more →

Autodesk is turning 40

As many of you will have heard on social media, Autodesk turns 40 this year. More specifically this coming Monday, January 30th, is the 40th anniversary of the original organizational meeting held at John Walker’s former home in Mill Valley, California. (You can find details in this recent post from John.) The anniversary of Autodesk’s official incorporation and initial stock distribution is on April 26th, but Autodesk as an informal entity already existed from the end of January. Although the company wasn’t called Autodesk at that point, as that wasn’t fixed until some time in April… among the other... Read more →

Floppy Friday #64

Well, this is it. Floppy Fridays – at least for now – have come to an end. For some time I’ve been saying I’d stop at episode 64 – as the main focus of the series is the awesome Commodore 64 – and this episode has come around, finally. And, despite me following basically my usual random approach for selecting games for this episode, it was a really good way to end the series, with a wide range of very interesting games. We kicked off with the classic Turrican II - The Final Fight – a game we’d played... Read more →

Floppy Friday #63

In this week’s episode – the first of 2022 – we take a look at five Commodore 64 games, although we only get to play four of them. We start with Bomb Jack, then (once again!) fail to load Test Drive, before playing Ace, Pitstop II and wrap things up with another Hewson Consultants classic, Eliminator. Here’s the cover art from this week’s selection: Now for a couple of reviews from Zzap! 64 magazine. Here’s one for Bomb Jack from issue 14: And here's a much more positive one for Pitstop II from issue 2: See you next week... Read more →

Floppy Friday #62

So here it is, the last episode of 2021. The first game we attempted to play – Super Huey – in many ways set the scene for the rest of the episode. Here’s a quote about the game from one of its reviews, as per its Wikipedia entry: "For those desiring an 8-bit helicopter flight simulator, Super Huey and its sequels fill the bill. For those desiring excitement as well, it would pay dividends to look elsewhere." Ouch. After not even being able to take off, we moved on to Crystal Fever (which I failed to find a level... Read more →

Floppy Friday #61

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, the breadbins were whirring, without even a mouse. - Unknown It’s the Christmas eve Floppy Friday! In this episode we discover a few interesting – and largely unheard or, I believe – games, as well as a couple we’ve played in prior episodes. I was really surprised/impressed with the Italian motorbike game we started off playing, if nothing else that for the progress bar while loading. Could this be the first example of a game having such a feature? (I’d be very happy to hear it’s not the case,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #60

Well, we made it to episode 60! Just four more to go after today’s episode. Today we ended up playing Eagle Empire – a clone of the class arcade game, Phoenix – and then we played an old favourite again: last time it was called Pogo, while this time it went by its more usual name of Nebulus. Then we played a somewhat disappointing Petch before failing to load Dam Busters and finishing up by actually playing the rather good Knight Games. Here’s the cover art for this week’s episode: Here’s the review for Knight Games from Zzap! 64... Read more →

Floppy Friday #59

In this week’s episode we play five more fun (or less fun) Commodore 64 games, loaded from floppy diskettes. We start with a pro wrestling game called Rock ‘n’ Wrestle, followed by a couple of platform games: Miner 2049er and Mr. Do’s Castle. We then played Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge and wrapped up with an educational game called Quick Thinking! Robot Tables. Here’s some cover art from this episode: Here’s a review of Rock ‘n’ Wrestle from issue 12 of Zzap! 64 magazine: And one last thing… here’s the music video for a song called Computer Games by the... Read more →

Floppy Friday #58

I almost thought today’s episode wasn’t going to happen. I started checking the directory listings for a few floppies, and suddenly things started to fail. I couldn’t read any at all, and ended up trying a series of combinations of different computers, floppy drives and cables, all with similar (bad) results. I went back to cleaning the drive heads (once again – this was the first thing I tried) and eventually things started to work in time for me to record the episode. Totally surreal! I can only blame those nasty gremlins who clearly enjoy haunting 1980s equipment. Anyway,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #57

In this week’s episode we mostly played Summer Games II. It’s not exactly how I expected things to turn out, but there you go. It’s also a game I’d already played back in Floppy Friday #32 – I knew it looked familiar! (sigh) – but I chose a different set of disciplines to be awful at. Apart from the javelin, as I seem to love failing at that one. I’m pretty sure I fluffed selecting nationalities in exactly the same way, too, but hey. We did get a little time to play a couple of other games – Commando... Read more →

Floppy Friday #56

In this week’s episode we play 4 games on a Commodore 64, loaded from 5 1/4” floppy disk. We started with a game I had high hopes for – coming from Gremlin Graphics, and being based on a series of “fighting fantasy” gamebooks (although not the Steve Jackson & Ian Livingston ones, it seems) – called Blood Valley. We then played Pac-Land, an interesting game called ATF (Advanced Tactical Fighter) and then Thrust II. Here’s the cover art for this week’s selection: The folks at Zzap! 64 magazine loathed Blood Valley ... … and tolerated Thrust II: As mentioned... Read more →

Floppy Friday #55

In this week’s episode we look at 5 more Commodore 64 games loaded from floppy disk. Things kick off with Shadow Dancer, which seems like a very playable side-scrolling fighting game. We then try a logic/puzzle game called Sliding Skill before loading a German-language steam engine simulator (how cool is that?) called Dampfmaschine. We then play a game called Billiards or Pool (not sure which, to be honest) and then wrap up with a fun little game called Lazy Jones. Here’s the cover art I could find for this week’s episode – I couldn’t find anything but screengrabs for... Read more →

Floppy Friday #54

In this week’s episode we play five more games loaded from a single floppy onto a Commodore 64. This week’s selection was actually really interesting, I found: we started with an action adventure called Olli & Lissa: The Ghost of Shilmore Castle, part of a series that apparently did quite well when released as budget titles. From there we loaded a game called Toddler, which I believe was also released as The Equalizer (I guess it sounds more compelling… it’s certainly a much more 80s name!). We loaded a Breakout clone called Krakout, which had fun floating faces. Next... Read more →

Floppy Friday #53

In this week’s episode we start with a few obscure German games (no offence to my German friends – this is a snap judgment based on a few web searches), called Katz und Maus and then Rudi the Rat, before finding a floppy with some more interesting fare: River Raid, Sub Hunt and Raid over Moscow. As usual my ability to play these various games was highly variable, but hopefully you’ll get a sense of – and perhaps even some nostalgia from seeing – how they play. Along the way we opted not to load Batman (seen in episode... Read more →

Floppy Friday #52

In this week’s episode we once again play some more games on a Commodore 64 that we find on random floppies. We start with a game I remembered we hadn’t had time to try last week, which turned out to be International Karate. As the directory listing stated “Seite A” (“Side A” in German), I decided to flip the floppy and see what was on Side B. Well, it had some real crackers (mostly cracked crackers, in fact) such as Enduro Racer, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Yie Ar Kung-Fu II and Tetris. A fun episode! Here’s the cover art for... Read more →

Floppy Friday #51

I’m just back from a fantastic 10-day vacation with my family on the beautiful Italian island of Sardinia. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now the first priority has been to get an episode of Floppy Friday out on schedule. Once again this episode had zero preparation, but I was very happy with the selection of games we stumbled across. The first three games came from a “team sports” floppy (an unofficial collection, it just happened to contain these games): MicroProse Soccer, International Basketball and International Hockey (which I was sure I’d played before in this... Read more →

Floppy Friday #50

We made it to 50 episodes! I’ll only record another 14 – to take it up to a round 64 – so we’re getting close now. I wanted to make it a special one, but as I was a little busy getting ready to leave on holiday I didn’t quite get the time to research each game ahead of time. I do think this episode has a nice selection, nonetheless. We started by playing Nemesis, which was released in some places as Gradius, apparently, and then played Flimbo’s Quest and Destroyer. All gdecent games. I also tried (and failed)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #49

In today’s episode we go more retro than ever, dusting off an old 1970s Pong console from Inno-Hit. We played all 10 of the games on the console, which certainly made the editing simpler than usual: no speeding up needed, at all! My 12-year-old daughter kindly joined me off-screen (out of respect for her privacy) for the 2-player games. It was fun to have someone join me. As mentioned in the video, my kids have already played this console for hours: the games really are timeless! Read more →

Floppy Friday #48

This episode of Floppy Friday is dedicated to the memory and legacy of the late Sir Clive Sinclair, 1980s computing pioneer. Sir Clive invented the slimline pocket calculator and worked tirelessly to democratize technology, whether home computers or electric cars. His impact on today’s computing landscape is undeniable, as he helped launch the careers of countless IT and software professionals (me included). Thank you for everything, Sir Clive. It felt like episode 48 was the right one to crack open the ZX Spectrum (48K, of course), especially given last week’s news about Sir Clive’s passing. On a side note,... Read more →