Tuesday 21st February 1984
Woke up at 8.45 and got up at 9.45. At 10.00 Doug rang to see if I could come down, and I could so I grabbed some paint and brushes and met Doug half way to his house. When we got there we made the control box for K9, and put it on. Then K9 was finished and only needed painting.
At 11.45 Mam came for me and I went home and had dinner. After dinner I got changed and at 1.10 Ozzie came for me and we went to his house. First we played Jetpac on the Spectrum, then we had a go on the sharp computer while the Spectrum Cricket game loaded. When we had finished we played Spectrum cricket and Ozzie won.
At 4.00 I came home and went to Doug’s but there was nobody in so I came back and had tea. 5.5 Watched Grange Hill, then at 6.40 I watched Tucker’s luck. After that I played on the videopac and at 9.00 I watched Alas Smith and Jones. 9.45 Went to bed.
HISTORIC DAY!!!
The first time I ever played on a ZX Spectrum. Oh yes, the beginning of a headlong, passionate, life-changing five-year love affair began on this otherwise unremarkable chilly day in February.
Ozzie was, of course, Ian Oswald, my curly-haired Fighting Fantasy collaborator, and this was the first time I’d ever been invited to his fabulous rambling home in the nearby village of Maltby. Ozzie was smart and funny and a good mate, and – amazingly – he had TWO COMPUTERS in his house… partly the result, I think, of his Dad being a maths lecturer at the nearby Teesside Polytechnic. Or, as it became a few short years later, the somewhat grander-sounding ‘University of Teesside’.
Pfffft.
In 1984, dual computer ownership made the Oswalds a futuristic rocket family on a par with The Jetsons. In fact here are the whole clan travelling to the nearby Yorkshire Dragoon for their weekly Sunday dinner…
I’m almost (but only almost) proud of the fact that I can remember exactly which model of Sharp computer the Oswald family owned. It was a Sharp MZ80K, and it looked like this…
Look at the built-in tape recorder! THIS IS THE FUTURE!!!
As far as we were concerned, this was a rather grown-up, serious computer intended for household accounts and co-ordinating mutually assured nuclear missile strikes (a popular family pastime in Maltby). However, it did have a nifty, in-built version of ‘Hangman’ which would do to pass the time while the ZX Spectrum took fifteen minutes to load ‘Jetpac’, crashing twice along the way with the dreaded ‘R: Tape Loading Error’.
Jetpac was a legendary game though, and well worth the wait. It was produced by the godlike geniuses of the mysterious Ultimate Play The Game software house, virtually anonymous coders based in the mysterious (and surely fictional) hide-out of Ashby De La Zouch. And it was one of a string of hits that made them The Beatles of the North Leicestershire software world…
I can’t remember with 100% accuracy, but after a spell of gruelling, intensive research (thanks, Google) I think that the ‘Cricket’ game that we played was actually a typey-in game published in the Sinclair Programs magazine sometime in 1983.
So yes… for the benefit of our younger readers, these weren’t games bought ready-made on tape or disc or even (gasp) CD-R, but games whose code was published over several pages of an inky high street magazine. We pale-skinned young boys would then devote days of our lives to typing them in manually on the Spectrum’s rubber keyboard, usually getting through at least fifteen R: Tape Loading Errors, and anything up to six cartons of cold milk shoved up against overheating 16K rampacks.
And this is the result… yep, this IS Sinclair Programs’ version of ‘Cricket’…
If any of you have kids who constantly complain that their X-Box 360 or PS3 or Nintendo Wii games are ‘crap’, then I suggest you show them this. I think the fourth stickman on the left is Graham Dilley.
Good to see our model K9 moving on apace as well. We’d completed the ‘control box’ (ie the little oblong of switches and buttons on top of his body), although you’ll notice that despite braving my Dad’s ever-growing dead spider collection to ‘grab some paint and brushes’, we didn’t do any actual painting. Consider that a tantalising teaser for tomorrow’s diary entry…
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my friend MJ Hibbett’s glorious paen to the ZX Spectrum. Firstly because it contains references to both Jetpac and R:Tape Loading Errors, but also because he speaks the truth…
‘The games you get today, well they might be very flash
But they’ll never beat the thrill of getting through Jetpac’
He’s right of course… games back then were built to last, and the X-Box 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii are all crap. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
If anyone’s interested, MJ and I are playing a live gig together next Tuesday (24th) at the Lamb pub at 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London. It’s my first-ever London gig and it’d be lovely to see any of you there! Just getting my excuses in early in case next Wednesday’s diary entry is late.
Wiffle Lever To Full! 
Crikey, that Jetpac soundtrack nearly blew my eardrums! After about a minute I could feel my ears going funny and had to turn the volume down.
My first console was an Atari 2600
Which, by the time I got one, had already been superseded by two models of Nintendo. I used to get games from South Shields Open Market as real shops didn’t sell them!