Let there be games...

Not a rant this time, more of a fond look back at the start of the home computer age in my time.

Everyone these days has a computer and most likely a console blasting its state of the art graphics and sound, you can spend the night killing the Russian army, winning the World Cup, jump up and down like a crazed tele tubbie or save the universe all in stunning high def...

The kids take all this for granted but us older ones know it was very different back then at the dawn of home computing. I started out with a ZX80, a diy computer from Sinclair Research, I later upgraded to a ZX81, a prebuilt box of magic with a heady 1K of memory, at the time I thought all these bar charts and pie charts were built in and didn't realise you had to actually type them in, oh the let down...

But those sparked my interest in the workings of a computer, my next beast was a Commodore Vic20, I'd seen a little shop called the Vic centre behind the BBC props place in North Acton, in there was a couple of nice helpful blokes and what seemed a mad hippie customer, I'd spend ages in there chatting games and such, looking at the mad hippies game demo's, by then I had stop calling him a mad hippie and learnt that his name was Jeff, nice guy if not slightly odd. It was then I met my brother whom I'd not seen for around 10yrs when he left home, we somehow sat next to each other in the Leicester Square Odeon watching Blade Runner, that's when I saw one of my 3 favourite home computers ever, the Atari 8bit, it was amazing, I was seeing games far better and more pretty than any I had seen before. The Atari then became my life, I was approached by Maplin Electronic to become their technical salesman in Hammersmith West London, they had no one who really knew much about the machine so I went from teaching handicapped children to selling and teaching about the Atari.

Before I knew it I was writing for Atari User, another trade mag and very firmly in 'the scene' which bordered both sides of the Atari world, the nice legal stuff and the naughty pirate side, the scene was not as mad as today, most people knew of the others and had mates who knew them and so forth. I met a load of the programmers of some cracking games via Maplin, I also got friendly with an old mate who became the first person in Britain to be taken to court for selling copies of code from Atari 8bit cartridges, he advertised them in Exchange & Mart.

Bit silly that...

Eventually I decided to get a Commodore 64, I bumped into my old mate Jeff from before but by then he was more famous for programming as his last name was Minter, Jeff Minter. Had a great deal of fun on that, met a load of sceners and then moved onto the Commodore Amiga, a peach of a computer, this was when I got serious into what a computer could do, before I had programmed, hacked, cheated games and generally just played but with the Amiga I could do art, sample music at a good Hz level and got into 3D modeling.

Sadly Commodore screwed the Amiga and I had to turn to a PC, the good old bloated PC, a dinosaur of architecture these days but it does what I need.

Thankfully my love of all things retro has carried on by the stunning work of emulator writers, my old Atari 8bit is now revived in an emulator called Altirra, its perfect, my old Amiga is there as WinUae, another fantastic emu that works just like the original, all the old games perfectly emulated, good time!

For the old arcade titles I use MAME, a rather bloated but good bit of software that runs a fantastic range of 70's - 90's games almost perfectly in most cases. The importance of these emulators is that they allow you to see some of the most playable games there have ever been, games written in 8K or less that recreated arcade titles of the day. Today we have the Xbox360, PS3 and PC running very pretty games but these youth will never ever feel what I did when I was there as the home computer and arcades were born, there simply was nothing before them, we watched the birth of games in electronic format and it was a fantastic experience that these kids take for granted.

And they played like little gem, sometime people say rose tinted specs but I defy someone to sit down with an emulated Super Nintendo and play Super Mario and not get a kick out of it, to sit down and play Star Raiders on an Atari 8 bit and not get hooked, to not love Jumpman on all formats, a game whose looks are laughable to today's polished eye candybut its got 'just one more go' dripping off it.

I love my Xbox360 and games like Modern Warfare 2, they are mind blowing but I'll never forget my gaming roots as there are some total gems still sitting there begging to be played just one more time....