ZX Spectrum software
Tim and his brother Chris Stamper, along with Tim's girlfriend (later wife) Carole Ward and John Lathbury, published Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf and Knightlore: and many others, as Ultimate Play the Game, now known as Rare, maker of many famous titles for Nintendo and Xbox game consoles.
In many eastern European countries, the various Spectrum clones used to be more common than the original models, a fact that also reflects in the choices of hardware among the demoscene.
The eLeMeNt ZX computer is specially designed to support enhancements used by demomakers, that includes 3 memory models of the Pentagon and the ability of switching, on fly, between various zx-clones timings, CPU speeds and gigascreen graphics.
Megademos, demos with more content, usually split into several parts, appeared in the beginning of 90's, with the advent of The Lyra II by ESI.
Most of the demos since 1996 have been "trackmos" (effects fixed to music), often featuring 3D objects, sometimes in low resolutions, to achieve more colours.
ZX Spectrum demos have been shown at multi-platform demoparties such as Assembly, and there used to be various Spectrum-only parties, such as Funtop in Moscow.
The largest party today that regularly features the ZX Spectrum is Chaos Constructions in Saint Petersburg.
Striped border effects, as used in the standard loader or more complex ones (see below) can also be found on games written for other 8-bit computers, such as the Commodore C64, and the Amstrad CPC 464/664/6128: which, as it used the same Z80 CPU, often received ports of loading routines originally for the Spectrum[citation needed].
This could sometimes be fixed by pressing on the top of the player during loading, or wedging the cassette with pieces of folded paper, to physically shift the tape into the required alignment.
A more reliable solution was to realign the head, which was easily accessible on a number of tape players, with a small (jeweller's) screwdriver.
Audio filters like loudness and Dolby Noise Reduction had to be disabled, and it was not recommended to use a Hi-Fi player to load programs.
As the protections became more complex (e.g. Speedlock) it was almost impossible to use copiers to copy tapes, and the loaders had to be cracked by hand, to produce unprotected versions.
[39] The main use became to complement tape releases, usually utilities and niche products like the Tasword word processing software and Trans Express.
[citation needed] No games are known to be exclusively released on Microdrive, but some companies allowed, and even aided, their software to be copied over.
However, both systems had the ability to store memory images onto disk, snapshots, which later on could be loaded back into the ZX Spectrum and execution would commence from the point where they were "snapped", making them perfect for "backups".
The ZX Spectrum +3 featured a built-in 3" disk drive and enjoyed more success when it came to commercial software releases.
The software distributed in this way was in general simpler and slower than its assembly language counterparts, and lacked graphics.
The Buzzcocks front man, Pete Shelley, put a Spectrum program including lyrics and other information as the last track on his XL-1 album.
[40] The Freshies had a brief flirtation with fame and Spectrum games, with Frank Sidebottom making an early appearance in The Biz.
(Previously, Freshies frontman Chris Sievey's song Camouflage contained a ZX81 music video as a B-side.)
[41] Shakin' Stevens included his Shaky Game at the end of his The Bop Won't Stop album.
The program was branded after the popular '80s pop band Wham!, and some of the biggest hits of this group could be played with the Spectrum.
