My first (decent) programme
The Lynx's biggest problem was its lack of software. The market soon became highly dominated by the BBC Micro, Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore C64.
The Lynx had hardly any commercial games, but the demo tape had a simple game called Air Raid but it was hardly of commercial quality.
I set about, making it a little more interesting, with multiple lives, levels, high scores etc and in September 1983 it was at a stage where I thought it was pretty good. The place in Norwich where those of us with the same geek gene used to hang out was Anglia Computer Centre in St Benedicts Street (now long gone). As I had no idea how to market a game I took the ingeniously named Super Air Raid into the shop one Saturday and asked what to do.
Well, they liked it, and were impressed with what I had been able to do and said that they would send it off to Camputers and they said it would stand a good chance of being used due to the lack of software for the machine.
Some copies were made, sent off, but that was both the start and end of my games writing career. I never heard a thing! I put it down to Camputers effectively having a pretty short lifespan as it wasn't far into 1984 that things went south for them.
So, life carried on, I finished my HND, got a job, then 8 days later a better one, and 15 months after starting out I moved down to London as a fully fledged PL/1 and ASM programmer working at Datastream which at the time was an offshoot of Hoare Govett stockbrokers and now are part of Thomson Reuters.
My Lynx, and the tapes I had, along with copies of Super Air Raid were dispatched to my parents loft. I had moved on - no-one wanted that anymore - I was now into PC's - first a 286, then a Elonex 386SX, then a continuous progression after that.
The Lynx got moved from one loft to another, and then another, until a couple of weeks ago a pang of nostalgia entered my head - I wonder if I could get the Lynx working again and show my children where it all started by me. Could I get Super Air Raid to load, would anyone else apart from me really care....
The Lynx had hardly any commercial games, but the demo tape had a simple game called Air Raid but it was hardly of commercial quality.
I set about, making it a little more interesting, with multiple lives, levels, high scores etc and in September 1983 it was at a stage where I thought it was pretty good. The place in Norwich where those of us with the same geek gene used to hang out was Anglia Computer Centre in St Benedicts Street (now long gone). As I had no idea how to market a game I took the ingeniously named Super Air Raid into the shop one Saturday and asked what to do.
Well, they liked it, and were impressed with what I had been able to do and said that they would send it off to Camputers and they said it would stand a good chance of being used due to the lack of software for the machine.
Some copies were made, sent off, but that was both the start and end of my games writing career. I never heard a thing! I put it down to Camputers effectively having a pretty short lifespan as it wasn't far into 1984 that things went south for them.
So, life carried on, I finished my HND, got a job, then 8 days later a better one, and 15 months after starting out I moved down to London as a fully fledged PL/1 and ASM programmer working at Datastream which at the time was an offshoot of Hoare Govett stockbrokers and now are part of Thomson Reuters.
My Lynx, and the tapes I had, along with copies of Super Air Raid were dispatched to my parents loft. I had moved on - no-one wanted that anymore - I was now into PC's - first a 286, then a Elonex 386SX, then a continuous progression after that.
The Lynx got moved from one loft to another, and then another, until a couple of weeks ago a pang of nostalgia entered my head - I wonder if I could get the Lynx working again and show my children where it all started by me. Could I get Super Air Raid to load, would anyone else apart from me really care....
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