My first job after leaving college was as a games developer at Software Creations, a small UK games company based in Manchester. Up until the early &#

Recreating my ’80s dev system (Part 1)

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2024-11-01 14:30:17

My first job after leaving college was as a games developer at Software Creations, a small UK games company based in Manchester.

Up until the early ’90s they were using Tatung Einsteins as the source machine for developing games on the Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64.

The workflow was quite simple, yet a massive improvement on my home rig, which was a single 48K ZX Spectrum with an Interface 1, two microdrives, and the Zeus Z80 assembler.

On the 8-bit micros memory was at a premium, so not having the assembler and source code resident on the target machine was an advantage. On my home system these would be overwritten every time I assembled and ran the game and I’d have to load them in again. With this workflow, all the developer had to load back in was the boot loader.

I was employed as the Amstrad CPC developer. The first couple of days was spent copying the Spectrum parallel transfer board and making it work on the Amstrad. Mike Webb gave me a bag of components and some Veroboard and basically said: “How’s your soldering?”.