I can remember when computers and electronic games were not the norm, when toys were still made of metal and wood. Don't get me wrong i am not harking back to some golden age, just to say that i have a vague memory of things when they were analog. Shop tills had pull levers to calculate the cost and the television sets still had valves in them.
There are of course many folks out there who also know this, but i do think that my generation is a wee bit special in that we have some memory before computers and electronics were everywhere. Those who came after my generation were born into a world of silicon chips and binary code.
My father was a sailor my brother was a teenage thief, or at least that was how he got his first computer which was a ZX81. He ordered it by mail using my dads credit card when he was still at sea.
This would have been early 1982; i would have been ten or eleven, a few months before the ZX Spectrum came out, this pissed my brother off a bit i can tell you; still he was a proud owner of a computer he shouldn't have had, so i guess he couldn't really complain.
He was really quite good with it too, most people played games or sorted their finances out with computers back then, but he actually set about trying to program it. I remember there would be cassette tapes lying around that had 'compliers' and other 'utilities' on them which i never understood. Iwould get as far as writing "Dale is great" all over the screen.
10 Print "Dale is great"
20 Goto 10
Run
That would always impress my friends that would. Anyways, my brother
eventually got a VIC20 and he gave the ZX81 to me.
The ZX81 as you will know had a smooth membrane keyboard, this was cheap to produce but also made it difficult to diferentiate between keys if you were not looking at the keyboard. This was not a problem if you were writing stuff as each key had so many bloody functions on it you 'had'to look at the keyboard. However when playing games the last thing you wanted to do was look at the keyboard, imagine playing monster maze 3D and having to find the 'back' key or having to look at the keyboard to find 'left' just as T-Rex is about to pounce! A good way around this problem, my brother dicovered was to put ring reinforcers on the keys you were using for the game. Those little adhesive rings you put on the holes in paper when you put them in folders. Now i think of it, does anybody use them anymore or have we all moved to polly pockets now? Hmm, anyway. These wee sticky rings did just the job and there were littlegroups of them on the keyboard depending on which game you were playing.
Of course this made reading the different functions on each key, and remember some keys had four functions, difficult. I struggled to pick them off one day, I had little fingers and i used to chew my nails and couldn't get a grip, I needed something to help. I choose a dart, I pierced the keyboard membrane and broke my first computer.
My brother was a bit pissed about it, but hey! he had colour and hi-res graphics on his VIC20.
Dragon 32
My brother had his Vic20 which i played with but never realy liked it, not really sure why. I think if pushed it was because the screen was white when it switched on. It un-nearved me that. Oh, and the games were crap, there was one called 'omega' which was ok, a bit like asteroids, but crapper. It did take cartridges tho, which was a bit like a games consol, except crapper.
I dont really think my brother liked it much either. I certainly remember when my dad said he was going to buy it for my brothers xmas and watching him try and hold his face to say yes! Vic20's are super, knowing that they were not, but that it had already been bought. I am not sure how long he had it, but being a good little teen programmer he played and no doubt had fun.
I on the other hand had a Dragon 32. Its screen was green when you switched it on, that was better! It has to be said that that was one of the few good things about the Dragon32. The Spectrum and C64 had loads of games, the Dragon didn't. The spectrum had dodgy graphics and so did the Dragon, except the Dragon while having a range of colours could only display a range of 4 at any one time in two different modes, or so i remember. One was green with blacks and so on, the other was white with orange and so on. The white and orange mode reminded me of the Vic20. This mode was so crap visually that very few games ever used it. It did have a high res mode, but this was black and white and again was never used much although was impressive when it was. So mostly it was a green background with three othercolours.
But it did have 'Chucky Egg' which was a great game, one of my all time favs! I even had a port that i ran on my pocket pc. There was a range of titles with a character called Cuthbert too. A bit like the 'Horace' series of games for the Spectrum, and similarly they were crap. Games software for the Dragon32 compared to the world of Spectrum and C64 was quite poor. While it was actually a 'good' computer as far as the market was concerned in the mid 80's, i believe they were about to be bought for schools across the UK, it really was more of an 'also ran'.
It did have one claim to fame though, which was the game Joust. Remember Joust? You flew your wee bird onto the heads of other wee birds and collected the eggs when they fell? Yup Joust; a good game, and rendered well on the Dragon too. Better than the Speccy version and a match for the C64. The thing that was interesting about it was not the game itself but the anti piracy gadget that came with it.
Remember now, we are in the mid 80's, all home computer software came on cassette tape and was easily copied. There had been some effort in having colour cryptographic codes on the cassette inlay cards but these could be photocopied in black and white and you could still make a fair guess of the code. In short there was not much going on in the world of anti piracy then, except wishful thinking. Then along came Joust for the Dragon and its dongle!
Firstly it must be remembered that at 13 years old, dongle is a really funny word. It seemed somehow sexual at the time. Anyway tho' what it did was plug in to the Dragon32 and then you installed the game Joust. The game wouldn't install without the dongle, so in one go it stopped kids like me doing tape to tape to make copies. It didnt stop people copying this game for the dragon tho'. Strange as it sounds, Dragon User magazine challeged folk to break this anti piracy device, and the good readers did!, quite quickly it seems. By next issue of the magazine there were a range of ways to bypass the hardware device. But it was all pointless of course. The dongle was too expensive to produce and was never going to become mainstream.
The main thing that stopped Dragon games being copied though, was the fact that nobody bought the computer and the company went bust. I dont remember ever seeing a dongle again.
I do remember seeing an advert on a box of Weetabix for the Dragon64 shortly before the company went bust which i remember thinking was cool, but that was really as big as it got. The Spectrum and the C64 WERE home computing in the mid 80's in the UK. I did subscribe to dragon user magazine for a while, and i wish i still had a few copies. i have seen them on ebay, Dragons as well for that matter, all at fair prices. You never know i may find a space for one one day.
I dont know what i did with the Dragon in the end. I did try and sell it to a guy at school called Colin, but after lugging it to his house and spilling a coffee all over his dinning room table he said no. You know i really wonder what i did with that computer.
After that i didnt really play with computers until i got my first PC running Win95 in 1997, around 13 years later.
But when i did, golly did i get bitten hard. My brother continued however, and went all Atari, starting with the 800XL, he got quite good with the ST i think.
But anyway, hello and welcome to a sort of old Mac, sort of personal home page, sort of retro computer generally sort of site.
Hiya! - Play Nice