8-bit memories

The wonderful people at softhouse.speccy.cz have converted my second book about computer games to PDF. (The first one is available here).

This is a two part book about ZX Spectrum games (in Czech!) I wrote in 1987, when I was 19. The most amazing thing are the screenshots from the games. The original book had really crappy black & white printouts of the screenshots. The good people from Softhouse.speccy.cz used the ZX Spectrum emulator and the actual games to painstakingly re-create the exact same situations from in the original screenshots and grabbed them in full color and full quality. And I mean EXACT SAME situations, to the last pixel (of course they needed occassional help of the graphics editor). Frankly, this is just mind-boggling.

The original title was supposed to be "What Mr. Sinclair didn't anticipate" but it was deemed too Capitalist and the book was renamed to vague "Computer Games" - certainly misleading because it was only about ZX Spectrum games. Also, the cover says it was written by "Frantisek Fuka and the team" but I wrote every last letter.

If I remember correctly, I got 10,000 Czechoslovak Crowns for both books from Svazarm (The Union for Army-Youth Cooperation) back then. That's exactly how much my Spectrum 128 cost me. That's also exactly for how much I sold my Spectrum 128 several years later because some fool agreed to pay so much money for "Spectrum owned by Frantisek Fuka himself" and put it on display somewhere.