My Gaming History #1.

I do enjoy a good old game, anything up to the PS1 era is my thing as you probably well know, but what you don't know is where it all began for me. Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum 48k.

'Uncle' Clive Sinclair brought us many an innovation. Who could forget the Sinclair C5? My interest wasn't in his personal transportation device though, it was in the Spectrum range of product Sinclair put out in the 80s, the ZX Spectrum.

The first one I ever owned, and was actually my first gaming device, was the Spectrum 48k. With a Z80 @ 3.5MHz and 48k RAM, it loaded games, slowly and noisily, from tapes. It had rubber keys and it was actually fun to learn BASIC on the thing. Believe me it was a vast improvement on its predecessor, the ZX81.

The machine changed my life from the moment I booted it up; Horace Goes Skiing, Tir Na Nog, Robozone, Spy Hunter, Byte Bitten, all firm favourites of mine as a kid. I would spend hours alone in my room just messing with games, pokes and BASIC code. A trend that continues to this day, only now I'm searching for AR codes and writing C/C++. Things I wouldn't necessarily be doing now were it not for Uncle Clive. So cheers for geeking me out, Uncle Clive. I honestly appreciate it. :)

After the 48k, I grew up a little bit and and the Speccy was getting as bit long in the tooth. My mum got me a Spectrum 128k +2. It was pretty much identical, although owned by Amstrad at that point, I believe, just with more memory and a built-in tape deck so it didn't stay long before I bought myself an NES for proper gaming. I still used my Spectrum +2 to write BASIC in the time I wasn't playing Super Mario though. Such a shame I no longer have these, as I'd love to go down memory lane again. I've tried emulating the Speccy with mixed results. If anyone can suggest an emulator of the Spectrum, let me know please.