Yeah, I'm talking about quite a long time before the Amiga - early to mid 1980s. In fact, the Amiga was the only time I ever really used a joystick (and I really don't miss it!).

Player 2 would take a turn after player 1 had died/lost a life. Simultaneous co-op or multiplayer was quite rare, with only a couple. Often in those cases one player would take one side of the keyboard, and the other player would take the other. Unless you happened to have one or two joysticks, but they were quite clumsy in my experience compared to the keyboard :)

In the 20 years prior to the K&M control method I used a joystick rarely - it was almost exclusively the keyboard (QAOPM) on the 8bit machines I owned. Moving from those machines, I had a brief play with 16bits (Amiga, Megadrive) but then moved on to the PC where keyboard control (with mouse) was the norm.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ Shedloads of documents, scanned books, pretty much all the magazines scanned in, vast library of games to play (with permission to host more acquired regularly), links to emulators *and ROM images* legally thanks to Amstrad (the current owners of the Sinclair Computers IP) allowing free distribution. A fantastic site.

Or indeed, http://www.specbas.co.uk/ Disclaimer: I'm the author of that interpreter. It's based on the old 8bit BASIC style, where you get a "command line" where you enter your code and execute statements. It's line-based, and has sprites and graphics and stuff like mod music and such. It's a little pet project which a small number of people enjoy messing around in. It's not a serious programming language.

Yeah, but it was a great game, you have to admit. I bought it once before, and now I've bought it again. Wonderful game, love it to bits! And now the source is available they've really gained some (more) good reputation from fans.

I started in 1980 with BASIC on a z80-based CPU, then migrated from there to z80 assembly, which stood me in good stead for later years coding in x86 assembly. I currently code in x86, with the occasional foray into Delphi or FPC for rapid prototyping. I've never needed any other languages.

Speaking as a member of the British National Health Service (in a medical capacity), I must say that this is a tad confusing. Although the family of someone in a persistent vegetative state will certainly be consulted as to their views on "pulling the plug," it is not a decision that is ever made by the family or even the closest next of kin - the medical team, following the Consultant's instructions will make that decision. I personally have been involved in end-of-life care in many cases like these and we have never, ever, allowed families to make these decisions. So why make the injunction to protect the family? They're not the ones ending someone's life. Although I suppose there's enough morons out there that will decide the family must pay for the NHS's actions... But again, I've never seen that happen either.

Apparently not - it will cost them a *lot* to upgrade for some reason that I couldn't get a satisfactory reason for... IT seemed to just sort of wave their hands about and said "nope, sorry mate, can't do it". So we're stuck in XP with IE6. Not a good thing in a hospital.

Some of us /can't/ upgrade - we're not allowed. I've been asking my workplace (UK NHS Hospital in the north of England) IT department to *please* upgrade to a better version of IE than v6, but they won't - their contract with MS which got them copies of XP for free doesn't allow for upgrades.

It's certainly not free entertainment - I pay for my broadband connection!

I'm actually doing this for fun right now - intending to have a stripped-down linux install with Sinclair BASIC as the front-end. Naturally, the system specs are higher (higher res, more colours, a hell of a lot faster) but the BASIC interpreter is almost identical, including the look and feel. I do have a public version of the BASIC interpreter available, but I'll refrain from posting a URL here :) D.

I dunno, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that for me and my social circle at least, the video gaming industry was thriving during those years with the only problem being how a teenager with limited income could actually find the cash to spring for the many fantastic games produced during the "crash" for the C64 and Sinclair machines that we owned. It's well worth taking a wander through the magazine archives at www.worldofspectrum.org for that period to see just how many games were produced which were worth playing for the spectrum alone (I assume that the C64 had similar publications). Each month there were more and more, sometimes more than thirty new games with reviews over 75%. That doesn't seem to represent a video-game crash to me, unless we're only talking about consoles and the companies that solely supported them - home computing (as opposed to video games) was taking off in a very big way and had a very healthy market here in the UK.

I'm confused by the phrase "near-dead". I distinctly remember back in 1985 seeing masses of new game releases from some of the real great publishers of the day, released in stores up and down the country. Nothing was "near-dead" at all - the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum were really going well, and looked unstoppable. Was this "near-dead" thing a US problem, or worldwide? I have some of my fondest gaming memories from 1982 to 1989. I'm talking about the UK of course.