Looking for bedroom coders / developers who in the 80s worked on ZX Spectrum or Sam Coupé games

[hotdog soup]

Hi,

For a small documentary video, I am looking for bedroom developers / coders who in the eighties worked on Speccy or Sam Coupé games and can tell something about the development process. Specifically:

- what machine was used to code on?
- if it wasn't on the target machine itself, how was the code moved / copied to the target machine for testing?
- if you used a specific device to "squirt" data to the target machine (like Matthew Smith famously did) do you still have photos or videos of it?
- did others playtest the game or was it a one-person job?
- which tools or applications were used for coding, testing and delivering the final product?
- which tools or applications were used to create graphics, sound, music?
- were there any negotiations with publishers or was it just "we pay you amount x and that's it"?

I'd love to hear any information about this, in the comments below or via private messaging. It's not necessary to provide your name or game titles if you don't want to, it's just that I am interested in the specifics of how things were done.

Thanks!

[Stefan]

Hoi Martin,

I converted the Speccy version of Sophistry to the SAM Coupé in 1994

- developed on my SAM Coupé
- others did not playtest
- Comet Assembler
- SAMpaint (by Robert van der Veeke) and E-Tracker (by Craig Turberfield)
- No negotiations

[Dr beep]

I coded many games but nit really released.
I gave copies to friends but that is it.

I made 48K Kraak which was for sale on a local market for a while but no official
softwarehouse for the release.

With internet I coded more games and now today some games are still for sale at cronosoft.

[grelf]

To answer a bit more (re my response to you on Reddit):
My day job in the 80s was as a software developer but in a very different area and my employers were not interested in what I was doing as a hobby for the Spectrum.
I programmed on the actual machine because I had no alternative. I taught myself Z80 assembler from an Osborne book. When microdrives came out I used them although they were very unreliable - I had to make several copies of everything (which I still have). Rummaging in my Spectrum box today I can see I used an editor/assembler called Editas. I have a master cassette and working copy of that. There is also a cassette from Softek containing a Basic compiler but I don't remember using that.
I also don't remember how I got in touch with Phipps Associates but I do still have in a file the correspondence with John Phipps and his associate Trevor Toms. As a hobbyist I think I was happy to accept what they were offering because I wasn't depending on it for my living. It was great to see The Forest on sale in the local high street as a result of my own creative efforts. It only sold a few thousand, so I really only got some pocket money.
Trevor moved to RamJam Corporation and introduced me to them to develop Explorer. That was much less satisfactory because it took a long time to work out a plot for the game and in the end it was not very exciting. They sold the result through Electric Dreams and as far as I remember I got nothing for it. It was also disappointing to discover only recently that ED had marketed it in Spain.
My design work and full source code for both The Forest and Explorer are fully documented in PDF files I made last year which are now in the Spectrum Computing site's database. I still have a lot of paper files too.