This page covers my favourite games with links to other home pages which cover the games in question better than I could ever hope to myself. I became interested in computers when I bought myself Sinclair ZX-81 complete with the 16K memory pack which plugged into the back & wobbled every time you tried typing on the terrible membrane keyboard, it was enough to put you of computing for life but with me it set me on the road to enlightenment. It was followed by a Commodore 64 borrowed from my Brother-in-law which really got me hooked. This was followed an Atari 1040STe in the early 90's which got me into the upgrading side of computers although the Atari was not easily upgraded at home & with the demise of the range Windows PC's began to beckon which led to the purchase of my first PC & Windows 95. I have been trying to replace the games that I enjoyed from that era either with the Pacifist Atari St emulator or by buying the PC versions of the games in question.

Until 1996 my main computer was the Atari STe & using it I first combined my two interests of computing & science fiction by collecting various diskzine's such as the Nova & Warp series it was following some of the articles on these disks that began to get me interested in the Internet. When it became possible for me to upgrade to a Pentium PC I transferred all my files from the Atari but lost contact with the people who compiled the various diskzine's, so if anyone out there knows if they are still running & how they can be contacted I would be grateful.

I have also become hooked on 3D shoot-em-up's like Doom, Quake etc. This was also after playing the Atari game Substation, which although the graphics were not up to much due to the limit's of the Atari, the atmosphere was brilliant, & watching my mates play the original DOOM at a club that I attend once a month which was originally set for Atari User's but as everyone upgraded to PC's we just carried on from there. The original PC system was a P100 with 48Mb memory (2x16Mb +2x8Mb) a basic 4Mb video card along with a Soundblaster soundcard, a 6speed CD drive & a 1.6Gb Harddrive, which I thought was state of the art. But by then the upgrading bug had bitten me badly, not sure what was the first thing to be swapped but with the easy access to the innards of the case a new graphics card followed by a 3DFx card where installed, spares sold on via my stepbrother who was getting into PC Upgrading at about the same time, the 2x8Mb memory chips where swapped for 2x32Mb giving 96Mb in total, the original Soundblaster was exchanged for a Soundblaster AWE64 & a 2nd 4Gb was also added. Then came the realization that the P100 was not up to the current games & the motherboard could only take a maximum of a P166, I did not at that time feel up to changing motherboards so I did the next best thing & put in a P200MMX overdrive chip. This was soon followed by more memory a DVD-Rom drive & decoder & a Voodoo 3 2000 to replace the graphic's card & 3DFx card.

Unfortunately this was the end of the road for that particular PC & with redundancy money & the help of my stepbrother again it was part exchanged for a AMD Athlon system. This comprised a 1GHz processor, 512Mb of memory, a GeForce 2MX with 64Mb of memory, a Fortissimo 2 soundcard, a HP 4speed CD-RW drive & a 40Gb & a 80Gb hardrive, I think there might have been various other hardrives before those but I can't remember the size's & CD & DVD drives had to be replaced along the way due to faults ( I know my mates at the Club where always having a chuckle about my system & what had gone wrong with it but I was learning all the while)

I then saved up & bought my son's a Pentium 3 1GHz which gained the GeForce whilst my AMD system became home to a MSI GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 128Mb. In the meantime I took my City & Guilds in Computer Maintenance & also did the A+ Certification course but haven't been able to afford the time or cost of the exam, became a single parent & had to take redundancy yet again, but have used the time to help repair friends & families PC's & have even given my stepdad the boys 1GHz P3 in exchange for his 500MHz P3 with the boys receiving my AMD system which was much faster than the P3 anyway. I then got the pieces together to build my current system which contains an AMD Athlon XP2600+ processor on a Asus A7N8X Deluxe Nforce2 motherboard with 2 x 512Mb PC3200 memory chips, a MSI GeForce FX5600 with 256Mb memory, a Fortissimo 3 soundcard, a LG CD-RW/DVD-Rom Combo drive, a Oporite DVD-/+RW drive plus the 40Gb & 80Gb drives in a nice new case. This leaves us with the 500MHz P3 system which I am trying to get ready to sell but am having trouble getting a reasonably sized & priced hardrive to put in it.

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