15. Dream Machines.

As much as I enjoy certain aspects of it, and indeed have to exist in it, the real world is not my hot milky beverage of choice. For as long as I can remember I’ve much preferred the worlds found in the printed page or on the screen. Or better yet the ones in my head. In those worlds I could do what I wanted, with whomever I chose and never have to fret about the consequences. So while those interminable minutes passed as the latest game crawled off the tape and onto the Speccy, my mind would go a-wandering. And a fantasy grew in my head, in stages. Something that would look a bit like what was sat on the desk in front of me, but could manage a whole lot more – a computer like they had in Blakes 7, only without the hammy acting. An Ultracomputer if you will.

Yes, but where do you plug in the joystick?

Early versions of this fantasy were simple - I would imagine simply not having to wait so long to play the games. I knew about cartridge loading thanks to Mr Atari, but for the humble Sinclair owner that was nothing but an impossible pipe dream. Although of course Uncle Clive had obviously been to Nolan’s house too as he eventually showed up at a Microfair or something with Interface 2 and a handful of old Ultimate and Psion classics on ROM. But the games were three times what they used cost on cassette, were too old and boring to be cool anymore and it never caught on. Interface 2 merely ended up as yet another competing joystick format until recently resurfacing as every Ebay seller’s wet dream.

Then, as now, I had friends with competing systems. So from time to time I’d experience the thrill of Pitfall on the Dragon, or strange games with camels on the C64, or Elite. Oh God, but I wanted to play Elite. So the mind began to wander again. This time my dream machine would not only have its own, dedicated monitor and load games in a fraction of a second, but it would load anything I wanted to play. I could play Speccy games one minute, C64 games the next and might even allow me to play Elite without stealing time from the school computer lab or having to squint through a cruddy piece of plastic in order to play the Spectrum version.

An impossible dream…

Time passed and my machine evolved as it took on more extravagant features. I’d seen stuff on the telly about a box of tricks the BBC had got hold of by the name of Quantel. That let them do all sorts of primitive image manipulation and flashy effects. This was too good to waste on the News At Ten so I wanted some of that for my Ultracomputer. Then of course the Atari and Commodore turned up with, respectively the ST and the Amiga and turned our heads with Deluxe Paint and Neochrome. But they were expensive and needed new mastery of a mouse and a handheld scanner and actually they couldn’t handle the colours and resolutions you really needed to play with pictures properly and I went back to racing cars, shooting things and dreaming of greater things.

”One day, we’ll be able to do this on a computer” “Zzzzzz”

Despite it not being the all powerful picture factory I wanted, the ST took me another step closer to that goal. I played some of the games, I doodled and cut and pasted bits of other doodles on top. I did the same with pictures scanned from magazines. Music was created. Letters were written. Numbers were crunched. But it still didn’t do what I wanted in my head. It still didn’t let me play the old games as well as the new – I had to get the Speccy out of the loft for that. Then of course a small Public Domain library turned up at an Atari Event or something with a PD disc containing a ZX81 emulator. But there wasn’t any way of getting hold of ZX81 software to go with it just then and a few hours scouring the darker corners of the loft for old magazines with listings we could key in proved a fruitless experience. So I went back to dreaming of something that would do everything, convinced by now that my Ultracomputer would never see the harsh cold light of reality.

But, although I didn’t realise it then, what I had been fantasizing about was just around the corner. Quite literally in fact as the Brother’s friend had bought one of them new fangled 386 PC’s to replace his ST with and despite our initial mockery I, eventually, followed suit. And bugger me if (a few years down the line admittedly) it doesn’t do everything my dream machine was trying to achieve.

See. Dreams do come true. But not the one with the carrots and super model…

True colour picture handling and messing about. Sounds as good as they come. Loading in a fraction of the time (well, on a good day when the hard drive is behaving). And of course it plays all those old games. I’ve got emulators for every system I used to dream of, and stacks of games to run on them. Fancy a game of Technician Ted before moving straight on to Radar Rat Race? Not a problem.
You see, back in 1983 I invented the PC. My fevered imagination foretold emulation (although I missed the interweb– but hey, nobody’s perfect) and a million and one other things too. Where do I go to claim my royalties?

simonb, April 2004.

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