Back in the 1980s, home computers were it in terms of the future. Almost overnight, it became possible to recreate the thrills of the local arcade in your living room. Not that Croydon had any arcades, but you would come across the occasional Galaxian or Scramble machine in record shops or the annual fair. Like many kids, I was bitten by the bug, with stories of teenage programmers becoming overnight millionaires after whipping up the next bestseller in their bedroom.

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It was a too good to last, and it didn't. Somewhere around 1983, the whole thing came crashing down and we all moved onto – well, I was going to say more realistic ambitions, but deciding to chance my hand at becoming a rock star hardly counts as that.

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I persevered for a bit though, trying my hand at increasingly ambitious feats of programming under the auspices of Diode Software. That name came up on the spot when I tried (and succeeded) to blag my way into a computer fair; I'd totally forgotten about it until I discovered my old source code and demo tapes while trying to find cassette versions of songs I'd written not long after.

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So, several decades later, I found myself picking up the threads of those old programs. The development tools available today are something we could never have dreamed at back then, and it's strange how and which memories persist (I could still remember that LDIR took 16 t-states per byte because I'd written a faster routine to get around screen flickers, but couldn't and can't remember the POKES to blank out the attributes in the input area. How embarrassing.) – but having rekindled an interest in coding, the time has finally come to finish what I started...

 

...and maybe add to it.