Sinclair Spectrum Vega Plus Console

Spellbound


Jetpac


Cybernoid


Cybernoid 2


Bubble bobble

Phantom F4 - II

The loading screen became one of my greatest life changing moments. Not because of the artwork or the sound, even though we meditated to it willing it not to blip and lose that little bit of volume which indicated the tape loading error. But for me it was a whole other reason.

Not sure how many noticed this, found it or leveraged it, but if you pressed stop on the tape player, often the loaded code would be dumped to the screen. How many trawled through that code and learned from it. I took it to the point of learning the sound of the closing signals and practicing to press stop to achieve the goal of all or all but the last line or two of code to be dumped, then adding those last lines and saving back to another tape. Once perfected you could then edit the code to create iterations of games. This is how I learnt to write games. By hacking exisiting ones.

Take Skool Daze edit the code to write messages on the blackboard, switch the game with your firend tape, they load it and wait for the moment they spot it.

I did progress and start writing my own and taking computer studies at school, now as I write this (35+yrs on from the ZX81 and Input magazine) on one of my other screens is a text editor with pages of code, the latest lines in this legacy that started with watching tape counters and loading screens.

Thank you Sir Clive.