io.rrwm

So, after about 40  years I'm living the dream and doing what 9 year old me thought would be the best job ever, creating games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.... Well, actually, I started creating them 40 years ago; but that's another story. Like most stories, it is overlong and full of misremembered half-truths and over elaborate exaggerations.

I received a ZX Spectrum 48K for my 11th birthday. That little, rubber keyed doorstop was to be the most fun thing ever. Until I upgraded 4 years later to the 128K "Toast rack" which had a dodgy keyboard I never got replaced; and then, another couple of years and I had an MGT Sam Coupe.

My first ventures into coding were simple, BASIC, text adventures that I shared with friends at school. I doodled a cover, called myself N-Soft, and pretty much none of the games loaded due to the dodgyness of cassette recorders. But it was fun. During the 90's I started coding as KTB Productions (maybe a little influenced by a certain Sinclair User 'character'; although I only picked up Sinclair User for the cover disks. I was more a CRASH / Your Sinclair reader. Mostly CRASH, but Your Sinclair did have those programming tutorials and cool fast-loader (and load-a-game) routines you could use...)

I spent a lot of time writing BASIC games for both the Spectrum and the Coupe; I usually would be distracted by graphics and spend 99% of my time making it look pretty. I submitted a couple of disks to the SCPDL (Sam Coupe Public Domain Library) but don't know that anything happened to them.

I had been learning Z80 Machine code for a while, but went to University after an apprenticeship that had far fewer things to do with computers than I liked. There I learnt C, C++, C#, Java, Modula-2, Perl, php and other things. I also forgot most of them too.

I now work within the boring side of the Computer industry. It pays money. It can be fun. It has far too many meetings.

Before the pandemic I was writing some homebrew games with python for the PSP. I got too distracted by graphics and other than a few routines and proof of concepts, nothing surfaced. (Yet!)

Earlier this year (2023) I found the MPAGD and started playing with it. It seems intuitive. I managed to get a game out of it (and about half a dozen aborted attempts - usually running out of memory - 48K isn't all that much to work with! How early developers working with 1, 4 and 8K I have no idea!

I've now published my first game on here. My first game actually ever.

I'm currently working on  a second. Third.

I have noticed that the name "Ktb productions" is being used by some music people; I'll make the minor change to the name of the copyright messages going forward to say KTB Retro Computing Productions. (Or KTB RCP).