WIRED

YS presents a handy-dandy guide to having fun with your peripherals. And who better to lead us down the hardware path than JON PILLAR? Quite a lot of people to be honest, but they were all at lunch.

There's more to life than playing Speccy games. Using Speccy hardware is also to be recommended. Over the years a huge number of little black boxes have appeared for plugging into the back of everyone's favourite, um, little black box. Sadly, a lot of these have now gone forever. The Specdrum, the Slomo, the Music Machine... where are they now? Actually, they're still around, you just have to look rather hard for 'em. For those of you who can't be bothered looking rather hard, there are still plenty of goodies to be collected.

LIGHTWRITER
Datel/£15

Now we're getting silly. Light pens never really took off - trying to draw by poking a badly contoured tube of plastic at a TV screen strangely failed to capture the public's imagination. To be honest, it's not hard to see why. You just can't do it. It mangles your muscles, hurts your wrists and makes you wish you'd put the cash towards a mouse instead. "An interesting novelty," concluded our test artist, which is about as damning as you can get.

IT'S ALL GOING HORRIBLY WRONG DEPARTMENT

Speccies are like mushrooms. If you keep them warm and nurtured, they flourish. But if you trample them into the ground or allow your dog to eat them while walking in the woods, they tend to fall over. Furthermore, I wouldn't recommend that you put them in a pan and cook them with a nice free-range egg in an attempt to make a mushroom omelette, because it won't work. Um, actually, Speccies aren't like mushrooms at all. Forget I said that bit.

Anyway. The point I'm failing quite spectacularly to make is that Speccies are temperamental beasties. Inevitably, they'll break down. And while the most sensible course of action is to take your ill machine along to an authorised repair centre, you can fix some things in the comfort of your own home. But be sure to have a responsible adult on hand. They will then say, "I told you that you should have gone to an authorised repair centre," in a patronising tone of voice when you bodge the job and wreck your Spec. If you feel up to the task though, quite a few companies offer Speccy spares - everything from new ROM chips to new +3 disk drives. WAVE are particularly well-endowed with small bits of Speccies. Their catalogue has just about everything you need to build your own machine! Buy the spares direct, put them aside for that fateful day, and it'll be cheaper to repair your Speccy yourself. Or else get your local soldering iron whizz to do it for you. Just don't say we didn't warn you if things go even more horribly wrong.

Well, that's it. Hopefully this little trip through hardware land has been useful and informative. If not, why should I care? I'm off to digitise the climax of The Terminator and save it out to disk as an animated sequence. Just don't tell anyone, or they'll all be at it…