At the beginning of the home computer revolution, the humble compact cassette was far and away the most popular choice for microcomputer data storage, especially on the European continent. As a volunteer at the Museum of Computing, [Keith] was instrumental in recovering and archiving the early works of Roger Dymond, a pioneering developer of early computer software in the United Kingdom.
In his video, [Keith] goes to great lengths detailing the impact that Roger Dymond had on the early home computing scene. After being let go from his council apprenticeship, Roger turned his attention to developing games for the ZX81, and later the ZX Spectrum. With the help of his family, he went on to run a moderately successful mail-order games publishing venture for several years. Increasing advertising costs and a crowded development scene saw Roger’s business become nonviable by 1983, but not before developing several gambling-style games and a standout Space Invaders clone.
Fast forward to 2021, and while some of Roger’s Spectrum software had been archived, much had been marked as ‘missing’ by online archivists. After further research, [Keith] realized that another potentially important tape had been forgotten about. ‘Games Compendium’ for the ZX81 had been completely lost to time, with the only evidence that it had ever existed coming from a 1983 advert in ‘Sinclair User’ magazine. Being written for the earlier model ZX81, the compendium would undoubtedly be of interest to software archivists and game historians.
Roger unexpectedly passed away in 1999, and his parents would later donate some of his computer software to the Museum of Computing in Swindon. Sixteen years after this first visit to the museum, [Keith] was able to get back in touch with Roger’s parents to inquire about the missing software. Delighted to help, Roger’s parents were able to find the missing master tape, and kindly donated it along with Roger’s other treasured computing possessions, including his original Spectrum.
The master tape was likely the only copy left in existence, and [Keith] took it upon himself to delicately repair the 40-year-old cassette mechanism. While a degrading foam spacer was an easy replacement job, the unusually sticky tape surface threatened to snap the tape during the first recovery attempt. Thankfully, the cassette was able to be fully cleaned and repaired, and the data was successfully recovered. With the permission of Roger’s parents, the contents of the tape were then archived online for all to enjoy.
Given another year, the contents of the Games Compendium tape may have been lost. Much has been said about storing these fragile media in the right environments, but entropy eventually catches up with everything. We’ve covered some exceptional stories of software archival in the past, but it’s impossible to know for sure how much software is on the verge of rotting away forever.
One nice thing about tape is that it is generally an extremely forgiving and flexible format. If all else fails, you can usually just read it back at a really low(but stable) speed on an analog device and record the read head voltages over time, and then find a way to reconstruct the data from there.
I have been looking for some ZX81 games I used to own but haven’t seen them anywhere, one is called Dragon (this was in Argentina, no idea about publisher or anything else), and another one was TK-MAN, that was a Brazilian game, maybe not related to this man.
Just in case you haven’t heard of it, there is a website you could check.
Several members have found “lost” games and made them available…
https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/index.php
Same as the Dick Smith VZ200 / VTech Laser 210.
There is so much software that has now been lost to history unfortunately. Ive been on the hunt for items for years now, with little to no luck.
His parents comments about how he felt about himself hit home. I feel like I’m a failure all the time. I have done OK at life, but I always think I’m a failure because I should have done better, and that I’ve let my parents and my children down by being mediocre. It sucks, but it may also be the thing that has driven me to achieve what I have managed by working hard not to fail anyone through fear of letting them down.
Pretty much the same here. Done OK, but knew I could do better. I did make a conscious priority of “family first”, which meant no crazy hours at work. I’m happy with the results: kids did OK, and they both still talk to me now that they’re in their late 30s. I wouldn’t trade that for all the money in the world.
I’ve worked with lots of high achieving people, most were not very pleasant. I am sure most families would prefer a ‘mediocre’ father who takes an interest and cares about them.
Hopefully, he’s also uploading these to the master preservation archive at archive.org.
It is possible to “bake” some tapes at a low temp to drive off the absorbed water that can cause stickiness. Some folks use a food dehydrator.