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Here’s another blast from the past. In the early 1980s, my dad bought me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum to celebrate my passage into the teenage years.

When I got fed up with the games that you could play by copying Spectrum Basic code from the pages of a magazine (and fed up with the seek / transfer times involved), I decided it was time to learn programming. When I got fed up printing rude words for my mates using Spectrum Basic, it was time to get serious and learn Z80 assembly programming.

The outcome was a fruit machine simulator called ‘MegaFruit’ which had some revolutionary graphics and sound for its day, and also speech synthesis! MegaFruit took 7 squeeking minutes to load its 16,384 bytes of Z80 code from an audio cassette tape.

To my delight, I was able to strike a distribution deal with Thor Computer Games, who marketed and sold the game, and paid me money! Here’s the cassette sleeve artwork:

Sometime in the 1990s, my last remaining copy of the MegaFruit cassette tape was lost, I suspect as I moved my possessions around England during Uni days. I was devastated that I would never again see my creation working.

Then came Google to the rescue. I’ve been a fan of Google since their early days, and they did good. My Google Moment came in 2005, when I searched and found the website of a Spectrum addict in Russia who had been creating ROM images of games that could be interpreted by a Spectrum emulator written in Java. Before long I was playing MegaFruit again with a massive smile on my face. I even found a port of the emulator that let me play on my Smartphone.

And here it is using the excellent QAOP emulator (so named after the forward / back / left / right keys of choice back then):

Keys:

F11 = mute
PgUp/PgDn = sound volume

Hello world! Okay, first thing to do here is to restore some ancient blog artifacts.

In 1997, I built a website for Dragoman, the adventure travel company, in return for a 3 month road trip through Central America. En route, we published an online travelogue onto the Dragoman site so that our friends and families back home could keep up to date with our adventures.

We found the odd internet cafe, even a couple with a scanner to digitize some of the Polaroid photos we’d taken. But mostly it was a big challenge to find computers with a modem and an internet connection.

The most memorable deployment was in Tegucigalpa, hiding behind a false wall in a small bookstore, trying to upload HTML files at a baud rate somewhere around the speed of morse code. In Tegucigalpa in 1997, there was a waiting list to get phone numbers because the local exchange only had 5 digits to play with. The owner of the shop explained that whenever a local died, there was a rush to get the phone number, so it’s really hard to get connected to the internet. “Some people around here would kill for an internet connection!”

This is possibly the first ever group travel blog, lost many years ago to some website redesign but re-published here again in it’s original glory.

One objective of this is to find and reunite all the wonderful people who were on that fateful trip, the Central American Explorer which departed Panama City on 6th November 1997.

My second objective; as part of the restoration process I will be embedding some digital maps showing parts of the trip, in an attempt to find the best digital map trip widget out there. I have recently been working on such a thing at Lonely Planet, so we’ll start with that:

Here’s all the Dragoman posts.