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Hello there! My name is Tom and I love the ZX Spectrum.
I created this site purely as a hobbyist and a way to share Speccy related stuff.
It isn't something that I rely on for income or anything like that, I'm just having fun as I get older and wanted to do some things Spectrum related.
Any cassettes that I sell don't really make me much profit, but I've always wanted to have the means to get games that I have created out into the wild to fulfill a dream I had of being a self published Spectrum developer, just on a small scale like this.
At the end of the day, it's all fun and games!
The 1980's to early 1990's
It all started back in the late 1980's, I was a small kid back then.
My older brother gave me a ZX Spectrum 48K+ as a hand me down and I quickly became obsessed with it.
One of the games I played the most was The Trap Door by the great Don Priestley.
As much as I loved playing the games, I equally enjoyed mucking around with BASIC and getting the computer to make the things I wanted to happen on screen.
The User Guide that came with it was one of the first things I ever read (I was learning to read using it) and it was all because I wanted to understand BASIC and learn more about it.
I still have that book to this day, although it certainly is a little worse for wear.
As time went on, my brother got a ZX Spectrum +2 grey model and I spent a lot of time on it marveling in the joys of 128K games and the awesome AY music that a lot of them had.
Eventually, in the early 1990's, I ended up getting my very own ZX Spectrum +2A and that was the one I spent the most time with.
At this point, I was often daydreaming of how cool it would be if anything game wise I had made could be put on an official looking tape and released.
Even as the decade went on and I was playing on the Sega Master System and Mega Drive, I still kept finding myself wanting to fire up my Speccy.
The 2000's
More time rolled on and as I got into the 2000's, the +2A had broken and although I still thought about it a lot, I wasn't really actively mucking about with Spectrum stuff.
Then it got to around 2003/2004 when I discovered emulation and the brilliant World of Spectrum website.
Finding all the old games I used to play (and many I hadn't had the chance to) was a dream come true and I was back to fiddling around with emulators such as RealSpectrum32 and ZX Spin.
Back in my element, I joined the forum under the name xfa84 and started making lots of really crap quality BASIC games as XFAWorld Software.
It was all good fun, watching what was happening in the community.
I was amazed and in awe at how many people were keeping the Speccy alive and doing so much work.
In 2005, I saw that someone was hosting a Spectrum Games Compo with both BASIC and Machine Code categories.
I knew full well that I wasn't exactly adept enough to create a game that was groundbreaking or anything, but it inspired me to come up with something that I thought would be funny in its own right.
This is when I created the original version of "On the Burgle!" and entered it.
Much to my surprise, it actually won the BASIC category. (I guess other people found it funny too.)
After that I was motivated to carry on and make more "Burgle!" games and uploading them to WoS.
I was having a lot of fun and even that time period is now nostalgic to me.
Again though, as time wore on and life got busy, the Speccy slowly slipped away from me again and I wasn't mucking about with it as much and eventually, barely at all.
2023 to Present Day
Fast forward to 2023...
I had spoken to my missus many times about the Speccy and my love for it and on Christmas Day she surprised me with something that would set me on the path to where I am now.
She had gotten me a copy of The Trap Door, the Alternative Software re-release cassette and I could feel a spark within myself.
I felt compelled to find a way to load this tape up and play it.
I had never beaten the Super Berk mode on it in the years back and I felt like this was my calling to do so.
I got myself a USB Walkman and bought the Spectaculator emulator for my PC.
With these two things, in January 2024 I loaded it up and finally managed to beat it and I was thrilled.
This lead me to join a ZX Spectrum Facebook group and post about it.
I was overjoyed to find so many like minded people online again.
From that point onwards, I was getting more and more Spectrum games, a ZX Spectrum +2A and inadvertently ended up becoming a collector. (I no longer had any of the games or hardware from my youth.)
In August 2024, I managed to nail down a pretty fast run through of Gremlins - The Adventure.
I then thought it'd be cool to upload it somewhere and thus I created the YouTube Channel.
From then on, I was uploading playthroughs of various games that I had in my collection and whatever else I felt like doing, all the while slowly learning how to make videos in a very simple kinda way.
During October/November 2024, I decided I wanted to go back to the "Burgle!" games and fix them up.
Two were slow due to being BASIC only, one was bugged and the other was unfinished.
Luckily, I still had all my files and code portions backed up on a hard drive so I went to work in my spare time.
Eventually they were finished and I put them up online for free.
During the year, I had backed a Kickstarter for The Horace Collection by Pixel Jockey and I really loved the look of it all, especially the artwork being printed onto the tape.
As I was remastering the "Burgle!" games, I felt inspired by it to do my own cassettes and then I came across Band CDs.
Using them, I got my first batch of tapes made and put them up on eBay in December 2024.
And now here we are...
I've created this site and honestly, I don't know where I'm going from here or what the future holds.
The idea is just to bumble on and do whatever silly idea my brain comes up with as I'm really enjoying mucking about with all this.
Thanks for visiting and having a look at my adventure!
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