I was born in 1978, which means I was 4 when Sir Clive Sinclair’s technological marvel, the ZX Spectrum, was brought into the world. This is the computer I grew up with; I was about 5 or 6 when I first played on one and was instantly hooked. I pestered my parents until they bought me one (a Spectrum+, in fact, with the improved but slightly soulless keyboard) and then spent the next five or so years playing on it until we got an Amiga 500.

The Spectrum is the thing that gave me an interest in computers, and for that I’m thankful. I have happy memories of eagerly pouncing on the newest issue of CRASH as it dropped through the letterbox, tearing open the polythene bagging and settling down to read about the latest games and admire Oli Frey’s magnificent (but confusingly homo-erotic) artwork; of borrowing the latest games from a mail-order library and compiling piratical C90 mixtapes, the currency of the 80s playground; of trying to write (but failing to complete) my own games, first in BASIC and then using programs such as GAC, all the while dreaming of the untold riches that would await me once they were published — and publication was always assured, of course.

I wasn’t the only person to embrace the Spectrum, of course; most of my friends had them (I could literally count the combined number of Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and BBC Micro owners I knew on one hand), as did the majority of the UK’s computer owners — the Spectrum being the best-selling home computer of the 1980s [citation needed]. It did well abroad, too, with Spain in particular being a large market for it.

However, what I find fascinating is its popularity in Eastern Europe. Spectrums were smuggled in and reverse engineered, leading to a proliferation of clones (thanks to the lax laws relating to copyright and intellectual property). Ultimately, these clones were married to the BetaDisc floppy disk interface, something of an also-ran in its native UK behind the likes of the +D and the Opus Discovery but an also-ran that found itself reverse engineered and widely cloned in the Eastern Bloc, again leading to widespread availability (and, so it seems, near ubiquity). It’s probably fair to say that given the sheer weight of numbers it was by far the most successful Spectrum disk interface out of all of them…

But I digress. I love the idea of a plucky British computer apparently conquering the Eastern European computer market, striding forth hand-in-hand with a disk interface that was a virtual unknown in its native country. Of course, original games would have been hard to come by in Eastern Europe; they just weren’t sold to that market, leading enterprising enthusiasts to import the games and remove the tape protection to facilitate easy copying. The prevalence of BetaDisc’s TR-DOS format meant that this became the de-facto standard for these pirated games, and as with most pirate game scenes, cracktros and trainers soon followed.

Recently I’ve discovered the delights of recracking games; namely, downloading cracked TR-DOS versions of games and patching them to load data from tape. The reason is simple; virtual tape loading is a far more commonplace feature in Spectrum emulators and modern storage interfaces (such as divIDE) than TR-DOS support, so recracking brings the disk versions to a wider audience (whether it be to admire and enjoy the cracktro, take advantage of the trainer or marvel at an enhanced version of a game with different music or levels or whatever). While this isn’t the reason I’ve seemingly abandoned tossr since October (moving house had at least a little to do with it), it’s certainly played its part in recent weeks. However I do aim to change that; while I may never re-attain the regular five-nights-a-week posting rhythm I once had I will strive towards at least one or two entries each week. Something I’m planning on doing is running a series of tutorials on producing recracks; there are literally thousands of TR-DOS versions of games waiting to get the recrack treatment (approximately 4,300 at last count) and while a proportion of these don’t need to be done (eg. I personally don’t see the point in recracking straight tape-to-disk conversions which haven’t been altered or added to in any way), there’s still a lot of them need doing.

So, hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have rustled up a beginner’s guide to recracking. In the meantime, you can investigate the wonderful world of Eastern Europe cracks (no, not the porny kind) over at Virtual TR-DOS and check out Tom-Cat’s page of recracked games if you want to see the end result.