Rise From Your Grave - Resurrecting my old Speccy +3

As were the words famously spoken by Zeus at the start of Altered Beast, and they were the words I thought of once again just a couple of nights ago. As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, I recently undertook an arduous-but-productive expedition into the mysterious depths of my old bedroom and the attic of my parents house. This resulted in the retrieval of my old gaming magazines, as detailed here in the previous post, but something else I unearthed - and one of the things I was actually looking for - was my old Spectrum +3, and happily I found it.

It was more or less exactly where I left it actually - in the attic, safely sealed in a big box along with all the cables and bits and pieces as well as a load of tape games. After cautiously opening the box in case of spiders or other scary creatures and finding none, I began sorting through everything in preparation for actually seeing if it still worked. This presented me with a problem though - how the devil do you get a computer like this working on a modern TV? As it turned out, this was easier than I thought (after consulting the instructions for my TV, naturally), and splendidly I soon saw the distinctive opening menu offered by Alan Sugar's fancy revamped Speccy models. Further progress, however, was cut short by the pesky keyboard which was apparently no longer working. Unwilling to admit defeat, this meant I had to do something I very rarely do - actually try to fix it.

For someone as technically-minded as me, that involved taking it apart, blowing all the dust away, and putting it back together again, but to my not-inconsiderable surprise, it worked! The first thing I did was try to load a disc game. First candidate was California Games, but alas, some clunking noises and an error message. Perhaps the disc was wonky? I instead tried Into the Eagles Nest but met with the same result. Sadly then, while the Speccy itself now works, the disc drive does not.

My run of bad luck didn't end there either. Upon deciding to try loading a tape game (which I was going to show my wife since she finds it amusing that games used to come on cassettes), I discovered the tape player wasn't working either. No Chronos for me then. About all I could use it for, then, was to fool around with BASIC, and this isn't something I'd done for at least 25 years. Luckily, I still remembered a few simple commands and ended up fiddling around for most of the evening (behold my masterpiece, above!). Ordinarily of course, despite how much I enjoy messing around with old computers and consoles, this isn't something I would usually have spent a lot of time on, mainly because I simply wouldn't have had that much free time. To my immeasurable sorrow, however, the stupid bloody hard drive in my laptop gave up the ghost last weekend.

This has severely hampered my ability to keep posting here at Red Parsley, and will also no doubt cause me a tremendous amount of hassle down the line (my 750GB of data was backed up but not particularly organised), but it has also given me a bit more spare time for fooling around with stuff I wouldn't normally have time for, such as dismantling and playing around with a certain Sinclair home micro, and you know what? I've bloody enjoyed it too!

To cut a long, typically rambling story short then, my blogging has taken another hit, but, as always, there has been a silver lining. How many of you, I wonder, still have the time for using hardware 'properly'? I don't mean plug 'n' play consoles, of course, but the more complicated or time consuming stuff that comes with using many home micros. Not many, probably, but it's worth making the time for now and then...