> And then for the rest of the year spend all my after-school time trying to build rather poor impressions of those arcade games on my home computer, not unlike a cargo-cult worshipper on a post-WWII pacific island trying to build a US military radio station from wooden sticks.

Hahaha, this matches my own experience exactly :) Playing the likes of Dragon Ninja / Bad Dudes and then trying to reproduce them on the Spectrum. The few arcade games that did have Spectrum versions were disappointing - thinking of Green Beret for example.

Best memory might be finding a POKE for infinite lives in Commando, playing it for 3 days straight until level 70-something (the levels just looped every 5 or 10 stages, I think?), and ending up with a burned CRT. I'll never know whether the infinite lives POKE also made the game loop, or the developers never thought of including an ending in the Spectrum port.