I started going through the tapes in a haphazard order trying to get the big ones that I thought were most important, and I was successful in that I think. Now, I've settled on smaller stuff, so they should be easier to look at it and process into something usable to maybe post about.

On tape 02, we find Clobber Castle, a very simple game. I found this was a type-in from Sinclair Programs, #14, December 1983. You can read it here, and it's in in an archive for that issue here.

I think this shows simple techniques to reduce "attribute clash". We have the sky/wall boundary very clean, and the wall climbers color doesn't clash with the brick lines other than it obscures them a little.

It has you defending a "castle" from the top of its wall against 10 opponents climbing up the wall to get to the top. You knock them down by dropping a ball on them. When you do, they start over at the bottom in a random place. At the very bottom, you can't hit them, and they are colored magenta to indicate this. Once one of them reaches the top, the game is over.

The version I had on tape was modified from the original as I think I was trying to improve the game play that was a little jerky. I seem to have changed the keys used from "Q", "P", and "F" to "5", "8", and the space bar, and displayed the keys on the screen along with changing the ball color.

When I recovered it, I then continued to work on improving it, and I think it helped. I removed where the climbers could move more than one row at once. I also made the inner key loop count a variable to be able to change the ratio of key checks to climber moves which changes the speed of the climbers as well as the heartbeat sound. Then I made the number of key checks per move go down for each 20 climbers hit until you get to the max speed of one key check per climber update.

Author: R. Flavell-While
Date: 1983
Modified by Ryan Gray, 1984 and 2023
Program: clobber, 3844 bytes, auto start line 5
clobber2.tap

I pulled out the old cassette tapes that were kept in a box for a very long time and have been recording them using Audacity on a Raspberry Pi 400, the sort of spiritual successor of the old home computers. Some have needed their audio masssaged a bit, but most went straight into the Fuse emulator which is excellent at reading audio files and making sense of the data. Unfortunately, it does not emulate the ZX81, so recovery of those tapes may be more challenging with other emuators and tools.

As a young geek, of course I numbered my tapes in hexadecimal, starting with 00. The tape recovery hasn't been exactly in numerical order, so there may be gaps until I get to all of them.

Most of the programs are mine since I couldn't really afford to buy much commercial software, and I was more interested in programming anyway. Most of my friends just had games on their systems, and that's a common theme in retro computing. At least for retro computing, it makes sense that the games are the things that have the greatest chance of holding up since no one is really interested in using a 40 year old checkbook program or database.

What I'm using so far is my old Griffin iMic USB audio adapter attached to my Raspberry Pi 400, and two different tape players so far: a modern-ish Sony Walkman and a vintage Tandy CCR-82 computer cassette recorder. I record and edit with Audacity to WAV files. These are then loaded in the Fuse emulator as the virtual tape.

Many of the recordings have loaded easily, and I've recovered several of the key programs that I had wanted to have. Some just needed a little aplification or normalization tweak here and there, but a few have just a terrible dropout in the middle that may be impossibe to fix. I try not to spend too much time on the very difficult ones, so will have to come back to them later.

So here will be posts of the some of the programs as I recover them. I'm not going to post every last thing as most of these are silly, uniteresting, or incomplete. After all, I wasn't a professional software house producing titles for sale, and I don't have that much time anyway.

There are many things that were mainly tests of some way of doing a particular thing that may be useful ideas for people, but I need time to process those.

I may also make a tiny mod to make it usable. Many of these had nearly no user help as they were just for me - me of the past when I could remember what I did. I want to go through these and pull out useful routines, or even finish or enhance some of these.

There are several that I want to continue to work on. Indeed, I've already been doing that with my font editor, and with one of my games.

g r a y t r e k