Before the Internet we would rely on printed material such as books and magazines for information on using the Atari ST. We also had another source of material in the form of the diskzine. This was simply a magazine on a floppy disk that could be easily copied and shared amongst the community for free. […]

Sitting in the back of my brother’s car clutching my brand-new Atari STE I happily declared I was going to be writing my first game soon. The Atari STE came with a selection of games I was keen to play but the image of STOS the Game Creator, a programming package that came with the […]

You will be forgiven for thinking that I am teaching you how to make illegal pirate copies of your software after reading the title above. Well, rest assured I won’t be walking the plank as this article is for information purposes only. As a programmer, I understand how software piracy can hurt companies so I […]

The main thing that stands out with text adventure games is that they usually have no graphics. The game world is made up of many locations which are described using words, although a few text adventure games will display images of the location along with the description. Playing the game involves typing instructions to inform […]

I remember my first fumble with basic on my ZX Spectrum computer back in the 1980s, ploughing through pages of basic commands and example code without any real idea of how I could write programs myself. It was like reading a dictionary where I could learn certain words and their meanings with limited information on […]

I still remember the excitement I felt when I wrote my first basic program on the BBC Micro at school. It was a simple four-line program that drew a triangle on the screen. In the early 1980s, we enjoyed playing games such as Chuckie Egg and the famous Granny’s Garden on the BBC Micro which […]

I’ve had many discussions with people who ask me why I am still playing retro games when there are newer games that are visually better on the market. Why am I still interested in playing old arcade classics such as Donkey Kong or Mr. Do. Why have I spent a lot of time tracking down […]