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Games For
Your Sinclair ZX81
"What Am I Supposed To Do With This?"
It was back in the xmas of 1982, that my brother and I received a joint xmas present from my grandparents. It was a brand new Sinclair ZX81 16k personal computer. I recall as I opened it and looked over the box, that I asked the question rather ungratefully, “what am I supposed to do with this?”.
I wasn’t ungrateful, but a little confused at what else to say. I didn’t know much about the world of personal computing, although I had just started a course at school on Information Technology which was raising my curiosity. Anyway, I unboxed said ZX81 and started to read through the manual. It didn’t take long for me to get consumed in the world of Sinclair and all things ZX81. I spent hours, locked away in my room learning everything I could about the machine.
I bought magazine after magazine and spent many an evening after school, tapping in basic code from magazine listings to see how certain routines acted on the low res black and white screen.
I really was the epithamy of a computer geek. I couldn’t afford to buy too many cassette tapes that were on the market at the time so spent even more time reading books and magazines.
It was may be a year later, that it became apparent that the limitations of the ZX81’s basic operating system where preventing me from doing much else with it. I had pretty much learnt everything there was about basic and it was it that time that I discovered machine code and assembly language. I came across the book, “Mastering Machine Code” which was an absolute game changer.
Whilst this way of programming was much more complicated than basic, (theres a clue in the name), it was clear that this way of programming which spoke directly to the machines processors, was the way forward. I was starting to see the magazines carrying articles and listings of machine code programmes and I spent more time dissecting how each program worked. Wind on a year or so and I had written a number of programs in both basic and machine code that I was really proud of. I was still at school and decided that I would try and flog a few of my programs so I set up a small business. I found a tape duplicator that could provide copies of my programs on computer cassette tape. I created hours creating tape covers using something called Letraset I think.
You had to scratch the lettering onto your piece of paper to create the wording for the cover. It was really difficult to keep it straight and aligned but it worked. I then photocopied a load of those and my finished tape was complete. After that, I set about advertising my product in the classified section of computing magazines such as ZX Computing and Personal Computer Weekly. Unfortunately my business venture was short lived.
After selling a handful of tapes, I discovered girls and socialising and my beloved ZX81 soon ended up in my desk draw. I discovered a number of my original tapes in my mums loft a few years ago and sold those on ebay. There are still a few of the originals around.
Its now 40 years since I wrote those first programs and I decided it may be worth reinvigorating the original and re-release the tapes to what appears to be a resurgence of new energy in the ZX81. There are some great new games around which really do push the boundaries of what the ZX81 was designed to do, I particularly like Bobs Stuff and Cronosoft right now. I have included links to their sites below.
It really does look like the ZX81 is going to be around for many years to come
