I wrote this for fun, on a C64 in Turbo Assembler, during my one-year stint working at Mastertronic in London. I had done some games for them before, while I was still at school, and one day the guy I knew there, Terry Owen (who I owe a debt to), offered me a full time job. I was living in Bristol (large city on the west coast of England), aged 16 years old, a rabid computer geek, doing my A-levels (pre-university), and frustrated as hell that I couldn't write code all the time!

It was an offer I couldn't resist. My parents reminded me that if I followed my computer passion and quit my path to university that I might find myself stranded later in life, but they knew I loved geeking and they were very supportive. I was young and naive and I moved off to London as fast as I could. Well, not really London. Tunbridge in Kent, in fact. A quite different proposition.. A quiet, tedious commuter town, many miles outside the capital, that emptied every morning into the city on the trains (except for bored housewives) and returned every night. Well, I was young and probably would have got myself in trouble in the city anyway ;-) As it was I spent hours on Compunet, talking to the '64 scene (Ash'n'Dave, Diesel, Stoat'n'Tim, so many people!) and swapping files at the blistering 1200baud (down)/300 baud (up) data rate on the C64 modem.


Anyway, by night I compunetted, by day I did most of the techy stuff at Mastertronic - mastering games, fixing stuff, talking to the programmers who came by (I was rapid mates with the Bitmap Brothers when they came in with Xenon which was signed to Melbourne House (which was by this time owned by Mtronic)), and generally being very busy.

We did such a lot of games, and all the authors would come up with different loading schemes, often using crappy or incompatible or slow loaders, frequently accompanied by a scribbled page of paper with 'then type SYS 2061 and press REC and PLAY' type things. Gah.

Tape duplication was done at a place called Peak Myth (??) out in the wilds way outside London, in the back of an aircraft hanger on an airfield. Apparently it was used to duplicate porn videos previously, but was now running flat out as a cassette duplication plant. Games were recorded from a computer onto a reel-to-reel tape, over and over, and from that they were copied onto numerous high-speed tape machines, then spooled into cassettes and labelled etc. Quite a racket at that place!


Problem was that we needed to have a system so that the mastering guy at the tape place could make the computer save out a brand new copy of the game so he could get it onto reel-to-reel, and he wasn't very technical.

I turned thing around a bit by automating stuff; the Spectrum was easy because everyone used the built-in tape loading routines which were pretty good, so it was possible to write a program for the Spectrum +3 (that had a floppy drive) that would just read a whole program in from tape to disk and we'd then send the mastering guy a disk which when run would spit the data out to tape again.

The C64 was a drag for many reasons as listed above; I the eventual solution was to get the game loaded into memory so it was ready to start, compress it, and save that as a big single block to tape. Invade-a-load would boot, load the invaders game + music to high memory and start playing, then load the compressed game in the background. When loading was done, everything was unpacked and the game booted. Invade-a-load got used on lots of games because it was handy for mastering stuff and it worked pretty well.

Anyway, thanks for the memories, it's nice to think I did something that so many people enjoyed.