Tall tales about the spectrum

[PeteProdge]

People used to say you could kill a Spectrum with a certain command, entered in Sinclair Basic. I don't remember if it was a POKE or a USR thing.

Probably misattributed from its genuine case for the Commodore PET.

[HEXdidnt]

Although I don't know what, if any, process there is for a printing plant to come into contact with the actual cassette/disk media. I suppose it's not out of the ordinary for them to be somewhat involved a bit further in the fulfilment part of this supply chain? 'Twas late 80s.

Based on my own experience with CD and floppy disk production, it would have been common enough for the Printer to crease, fold and fit inlays to cassette boxes. These may or may not have had the cassettes already in: if the duplication was already done, the tapes may have been supplied to the Printer, who would likely have employed day-workers to do the donkey work of folding and fitting. Otherwise, the cases with inserts fitted would have been passed on to the Duplicators.

[1024MAK]

Probably misattributed from its genuine case for the Commodore PET.

Some versions of the PET, not all.
Although NMOS 6502 (and the other microprocessors based on the same core) could be made to 'freeze' if it executed certain invalid instructions (12 exist).

Mark

[Lee P]

I had a mate who said he'd found an extra screen in Jet Set Willy, he said "It's near Dr Jones Will Never Believe This, it's called, erm, Dr Jones Will Never Believe This 2". I'm no doctor and I'm not called Jones, but I didn't believe him either.

[toot_toot]

But back to the Speccy, and a mate insisted that he got a lot of Ocean games because his dad worked at the place where they printed the inlays. Even that remark made me think "oh how VERY convenient, yeah riiight". And the games he got were on blank cassettes with none of Ocean's custom loading, but a message saying "M1 LOADING" and screen corruption at the end - yeah years later when I got a Multiface I then realised those were Multifaced snapshots.

However, in his defence, the dad-working-at-the-printers thing could well be true because I realised, decades later, there were a cluster of specialist colour printing plants, and various companies, over in Corby, about 17 miles away.

I guess his story could be correct, I’m know that Ocean used US Gold’s CentreSoft arm for distribution (like Gremlin and a few other publishers), but from doing a bit of digging around, it was Ablex that did the tape duplication : http://www.masis.co.uk/us_gold_information.htm (this has to be the hardest web page in the world to read!)

Crash have an article in issue 47 on how duplication worked, mentioning Ablex: https://www.crashonline.org.uk/47/copying.htm

However, it only mentions “ London-based COS group ” as being able to also do the full end-to-end bit of printing tape inlays and labels. So I’m going to take a guess that Ablex didn’t do that, it would have to be another printer that did this.

And Ablex, owned today by Racal Electronics plc, has made tapes, disks and Spectrum microdrives for most of the software giants, including Ocean, US Gold (which even has an office in the Ablex factory), Firebird and Gremlin Graphics.

COS, by contrast, takes a smaller share of the market (which, like most of the software business, is torn by arguments over who’s bigger and stronger than whom) — but prides itself on the full service it offers. COS doesn’t just duplicate (though it ran off 489,000 cassettes in September) but also prints labels, inlays and boxes, stores the finished product in warehouses and even does some distribution for Firebird and Domark.

That would explain the blank tapes bit, but doesn’t really explain the Multiface snapshot. Maybe the guy did get the covers from his Dad, but just made his own tapes up using the Multiface? I can’t imagine someone at the printers getting a copy of the game for testing. (My dad did work at an industrial scale printers, but only for food bags like crisps and stuff. They never actually got any of the food to see what it was like, they just printed off the bags!!)

Anyway, interesting story!

[EdToo]

I guess his story could be correct, I’m know that Ocean used US Gold’s CentreSoft arm for distribution (like Gremlin and a few other publishers), but from doing a bit of digging around, it was Ablex that did the tape duplication : http://www.masis.co.uk/us_gold_information.htm (this has to be the hardest web page in the world to read!)

Crash have an article in issue 47 on how duplication worked, mentioning Ablex: https://www.crashonline.org.uk/47/copying.htm

However, it only mentions “ London-based COS group ” as being able to also do the full end-to-end bit of printing tape inlays and labels. So I’m going to take a guess that Ablex didn’t do that, it would have to be another printer that did this.



That would explain the blank tapes bit, but doesn’t really explain the Multiface snapshot. Maybe the guy did get the covers from his Dad, but just made his own tapes up using the Multiface? I can’t imagine someone at the printers getting a copy of the game for testing. (My dad did work at an industrial scale printers, but only for food bags like crisps and stuff. They never actually got any of the food to see what it was like, they just printed off the bags!!)

Anyway, interesting story!

Maybe his dad used to sneak them home for him to copy before returning it?

[equinox]

I'm more curious about what Betty Boo and the Bitmap Brothers have in common...

Their initials?

[XTM]

http://www.masis.co.uk/us_gold_information.htm (this has to be the hardest web page in the world to read!)

Ugh, that background is horrible indeed.

What I'd usually do in a rare case like this is to copy all the text into a text file and just read it there. But that won't work in case of annoying sites that disable right-clicking.

If you have uBlock Origin, it is another solution as you can use it to block a specific part of the site, in this case the annoying background graphic with the US Gold Logo:
- Right-click into "empty" background with no text and select "Block Element ..."
- In the upcoming dialogue, you'll see this bit at the bottom half:

Network filter
||www.masis.co.uk/IMAGES/usgold3.jpg

The top line of the dialogue will read something like "##p.MsoNormal:nth-of-type(10)" or another snippet of site code, doesn't matter what it says, just click on the www.masis.co.uk/IMAGES/usgold3.jpg URL once, confirm and voila, you have made a rule to block that background image

It's something I occasionally do on websites as I usually use a dark reader as I can't stand bright websites, but big and white glaring images may still remain, blinding my eyes so I just block them sometimes ...

[TakuikaNinja]

Firefox has a reader view mode you can toggle to just get the text data.

[PeteProdge]

Ugh, that background is horrible indeed.

What I'd usually do in a rare case like this is to copy all the text into a text file and just read it there. But that won't work in case of annoying sites that disable right-clicking.

If you have uBlock Origin, it is another solution as you can use it to block a specific part of the site, in this case the annoying background graphic with the US Gold Logo:
- Right-click into "empty" background with no text and select "Block Element ..."
- In the upcoming dialogue, you'll see this bit at the bottom half:

The top line of the dialogue will read something like "##p.MsoNormal:nth-of-type(10)" or another snippet of site code, doesn't matter what it says, just click on the www.masis.co.uk/IMAGES/usgold3.jpg URL once, confirm and voila, you have made a rule to block that background image

It's something I occasionally do on websites as I usually use a dark reader as I can't stand bright websites, but big and white glaring images may still remain, blinding my eyes so I just block them sometimes ...

Or you could just press CTRL+A to highlight all text, turning it to a high contrast instantly. It's what I did.

[Vampyre]

I'll raise you an old Pompey Pirates (used to release cracked games for the ST) site. It's reminiscent of an early Geocities site in all its glory. (Doesn't look like it's been updated in two decades to be fair).

https://www.gingerbeardman.com/archive/pompeypirates/

Special mention to this page. Blue text on a mostly blue background.

Just jumping back to Betty Boo/Bitmap Bros... Did I imagine this, or was one of the Bitmap Bros going out with her at one point? I'm sure I read they became a brief item after meeting during the Magic Pockets stuff.

[Vampyre]

Amazed no one's mentioned Mr Kizza/Kieren Hawken/TheLaird yet That's as tall a tale as the Speccy gets.

Did you know he's still going around and if anything is worse than the SDS 128K debacle? Selling books on Amazon now as well as YT, creating himself as a self-styled retro guru. Bit of a rabbit hole typing his name or pseudonyms into Google - his name is mud in retro circles, but he keeps on going. His review books are apparently appallingly researched.

[PeteProdge]

Bit of a rabbit hole typing his name or pseudonyms into Google - his name is mud in retro circles, but he keeps on going.

Oh, that jackdaw has claimed credit for things he was barely tangentially involved with and most of them NOT INVOLVED IN ANY WAY AT ALL WHATSOEVER. He's burnt bridges everywhere, even some of the toxic figures of retrogaming don't want to have anything to do with him.

The badly-written books have widely copy-and-pasted info to span multiple console/computer/hand-held formats so the specific things mentioned for, say, a C64 cassette or a Gameboy cartridge get attributed in the reviews for the game on other formats, which is shockingly awful.

I once saw Kieren in real life, we were in the same room at Play Expo Blackpool and he was smiling at me as if I was an old friend. He's very very much mistaken and that was at a time I just viewed him as a tedious Walter Mitty, at that point not knowing of his darker behaviour.

There are about a dozen people on the retrogaming scene I could pull apart and eviscerate for their gaslighting and vile actions, but on this forum I try to keep it light and only mention their misdeeds if it's relevant. I considered making a video on it, but as you hit middle age, it's best to just ignore trolls and other carry on in a positive manner, avoid the flame wars and all that.

[Vampyre]

There are about a dozen people on the retrogaming scene I could pull apart and eviscerate for their gaslighting and vile actions, but on this forum I try to keep it light and only mention their misdeeds if it's relevant. I considered making a video on it, but as you hit middle age, it's best to just ignore trolls and other carry on in a positive manner, avoid the flame wars and all that.

Yes, the retro scene does seem to attract a number of appalling individuals - fortunately they are the vast, vast minority, but some have caused some real damage (I've still not forgiven quite a few people over the Vega 2 sh*t-storm aftermath - and I'm not talking about the company owners either). I could name a few too but, like your good self, it's not worth the time and effort, or even the anger. Kieren's a prime example of someone who has been found out time and time again over the decades and it's just water off a ducks back. There has to be something wrong with him surely, or maybe he's onto a cash-cow and is a snake oil salesman.

[HEXdidnt]

I once saw Kieren in real life, we were in the same room at Play Expo Blackpool and he was smiling at me as if I was an old friend. He's very very much mistaken and that was at a time I just viewed him as a tedious Walter Mitty, at that point not knowing of his darker behaviour.

We once invited Kieren to present a talk at RetCon... 2019, I think, as that was my first year as a new member of the Club. I had no idea who he was, personally, and only looked into his books and YouTube channel after the show, because he got a bit aggressive and shouty with one of my guests.

Admittedly, there was a lack of due-diligence in booking him as a guest, but we learned our lesson from a lot of the feedback we received after the event, both from other guests and punters.

When the team started trying to book guests for 2021, the first question was always "Is Kieren going to be there?", and we had to be very emphatic in saying "No!".