Amazingly programmers wrote games for the 2600 using only 1, 2 or 4K of cartridge memory. Today with our 65,536K (64 Mb) computers, it's easy to forget how expensive memory was! The 2600 was ahead of it's time, not only did you get colour, but you also got sound which was output through the TV (a big deal in those days) and two joysticks ports.   

Pac-Man was one of the best games on the system. GigaHex and his bro. managed to clock the score counter back to zero (nice programming guys, it didn't crash). It took a marathon 9 hours or so, and two pairs of blistered hands to accomplish. 
 

After seeing a rubber keyed Spectrum 48K running Jet Set Willy at a friends house, teen aged GigaHex pestered his parents to buy him a one for Christmas. Santa brought him a Spectrum 48K +. The plus bit being that it had a decent keyboard at last. It cost £175 back then but you can pick them up now for around a fiver.  

It was rumoured, at the time, that if you turned the Speccy + upside down, all the keys fell out! They didn't. There was a hell of a lot more memory to play around with than the 2600 and also 8 colours, but the sound came from a poxy speaker in the base of the computer. It had no volume control and produced  virtually inaudible 'beep' sounds. It didn't even come with joystick ports  as standard and loading software took forever with cassette tapes, but all was forgiven because it could be programmed.   

Like most teenagers with a Speccy, days were spent entering in source code from magazines, only to find it never worked, and then spending several weeks de-bugging the bloody thing. The only original thing GigaHex created on the Spectrum was a Dungeons & Dragons style adventure game using GAC (Graphics Adventure Creature) for an O' Level computing project. As everyone else was creating Teletext pages on the BBC it got decent marks. Unfortunately there isn't any screen shots of it, but you can click here to see GigaHex's above average O' Level grades.  
 

The sound was equivalent to a PC Ad-lib card but a few reading this probably won't remember what that was like! There was a palette of 512 colours to choose from and a descent resolution of 320 x 200 pixels and upwards. Unfortunately though, only 16 of the colours could be on the screen at once and considering black and white are essential this only left 14 to play around with. Keep this in mind when viewing the graphics in games you're about to see below! The 360k, single sided, floppy disk drive turned out to be a god-send for programming. The whole thing cost £299 back then, which was a bargain,  but you can pick one up now for around £50.  
 
Programming-wise, GigaHex played around with ST-BASIC (Slooooow) and STAC (ST Adventure Creator) but found his calling with an amazing language called STOS (not sure what it stands for!). This was an advanced BASIC language that was enhanced for games programming. There was even a compiler upgrade to convert all the source to super fast machine code. Visual Basic users have only recently acquired this option with v5, so as you can see, it was advanced for it's day!   

Many programs were written with STOS. Some where sold for magazine cover disks while others where released into the PD (Public Domain) as Shareware or Freeware. Click on an item in the list below to discover more information and even download the software:   
  

All of the above software can be run on the PC using the PaCifiST Emulator, except for Arcadia ST. The emulator may need resetting after each game, as the joystick routines seem a little unstable with STOS stuff at the moment. 

Nobody e-mail asking for source code. At this stage GigaHex was a self taught programmer, which is the worst kind, so things like comments, procedures, functions, or documentation were never used. Even FOR and WHILE loops were a mystery. Everything was done with good old GOTO's... but it worked!!! It does mean however that the source cod is unreadable. More time was spent coding and dating than doing A' Levels so they were far from spectacular!  
 

It was far better than anything Atari or anyone else had produced, but it was all too little, too late. The 32 bit 68020 16 MHz chip gave it descent speed. 16.8 million colours and dedicated graphics processors did the business visually. Sound was of the 4 channel stereo type that all Amiga's before it had. This wasn't so much a bad thing, as anyone who'd heard it will agree. It was akin to the modern day wave table synths on the PC, but with fewer channels. It was also supplied with a decent 820K disk drive, IDE hard drive interface and 2 Mb of RAM as standard. Now, 2 Mb might not sound like much to a PC owner today, but the Amiga's and Atari's of this world didn't eat memory up like PC's do!   

Rumours abound about financial difficulties at Commodore and like rats from a sinking ship software developers started to axe Amiga projects. One of the first rats off was Insomnia. After all, who wants to spend 6 months developing software if at the end of it there is no one to sell it too! As a result only wrote 2 pieces of software were written for the Amiga using an Amiga version of STOS called AMOS Pro. More info about these when screen shots and zip files become available. Software coming soon! 
 

It was crap! The DX-33 processor was faster than the A1200 processor, sure, but the graphics left much to be desired. As for the sound, back to the beepie Spectrum days with an internal speaker! The games were crap too, apart from Wolfstein 3D (an early DOOM type game for those who don't know). It cost £700 with a 250 Mb hard drive, 256 colours, 2 Mb of RAM and it was always braking down! GigaHex has never bought a PC since, always opting to build his own and save a fortune in the process. Sybex's 'The Complete PC Upgrade & maintenance Guide' is recommended for anyone thinking of doing the same. Things have got a whole lot better now for PC game players, to a point where console manufactures have started to release there titles on the PC. Obviously they recognize the market potential of X million PC's world-wide!   

After working hard, some amazing HND results were achieved with 82% of the modules passed at distinction level. The college gave their award for academic achievement, the Katherine Cusick prize. It was £150 so wasn't refused! Below are some of the more graphical programs written on the HND Computing course. All of these are in the BGI's (Borland Graphical Interface) weird buffered resolution of 640 x 350 pixels with 16 colours.   
  

Owing to the pressures of both HND and BSc college work there hasn't been any time for writing games. However the following are some of the finished programs put together in the small amount of spare time available.  
  

The latest gadget obtained is a Compaq PC Companion C140 hand held PC. These devices are really useful for managing your life and getting on with work while on the move. Everyone should have one.  

If you can afford it though, go for a colour Windows CE v2 model as v1 isn't quite up to the capabilities of full PC. However, the biggest plus point about this model is that it is one of the smallest available, fitting in most pockets, where as some CE v2 models are now getting up to A5 in size. Oh yeah, the C-140 is also cheap! 

There are many problems with Windows CE v1 so a support page has been created to help other non technical users solve them. You can get there by clicking on the HPC image. 

Below are the specs of the Compaq C140 for anybody interested in a cheap Windows CE device. Visit Computer Bargains to purchase one now!