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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I had spend a lot of my youth playing those games. Elite was fun to play. It even had SimCity. Remember being so impressed I could get SimCity on my puny 3Mhz/48K machine since before I had only played it on an IBM desktop at scool.

But the good thing about the platform is that there quite a few programming environments, there was a C and Pascal compiler. You'd load the compiler from tape for 5 minutes, enter your program, compile it, run it, it would crash, rewind the tape, do the whole thing again. Remember writing my own assembler as well. Good times...

All in all ZX Spectrum platform is almost entirely responsible for me picking programming as my profession.

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> All in all ZX Spectrum platform is almost entirely responsible for me picking programming as my profession.

Me too. Started with the 48k, switched to assembly soon after getting bored with BASIC, and for a few years I got my name printed in Your Sinclair for posting POKEs for various games.

The Z80 assembly language set me in good stead for early programming with MS-DOS (3.3 or so) as the assembly syntax was familiar. (I think Zilog engineers were ex-Intel. But my memory is a little hazy these days.)

I still play "Choas:The Battle of Wizards" on an emulator every few months, alongside "The Hobbit" and the various Hungry Horace games.

Well, it was POKEs from Your Sinclair that got me into programming, so perhaps I have you to thank? Thanks!

I think there were a lot of people doing that stuff. Most people would send in one or two, but there were people like Jon North, & Gerard Sweeney, who I remember as submitting, contributing, and documenting hundreds/thousands of hacks.

Truely impressive to me, as a twelve-year old.

> I still play "Choas:The Battle of Wizards" on an emulator every few months

I remember my cousin introducing me to the game early on. I think I spent more hours playing Chaos on the speccy than any other game, possibly more than any other game combined.

For Chaos fans in this thread, note that there is just recently a nice remake of Chaos by the original creator called "Chaos Reborn."

On my case, was a ZX Spectrum +3 and a custom made (build by my father) PC with a AMD 80386 and an early SVGA card .

Really I had good memories of these little machine and of the few games that I had on it.

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