Anyhoo, after playing games on the Speccy for a while, I got bored (as usual). When I was young and got bored, I took things apart to see how they worked. Luckily, I decided to take the Spectrum apart mentally rather than physically, and started hacking around in BASIC to see what I could do.

A lot, apparently.

I wrote games, utilities, simulators….then eventually moved on to the Atari ST and did the same thing. I dabbled in programming the Amiga, but never got very far with that – I didn't own an Amiga, so time for programming was limited! By 1992 I had 3 Atari STs (STFM, STE and a Mega with a hard drive), umpteen Spectrums, and a PC. Probably a 486. Maybe a 386. It definitely had DOS though.

Then I went to college, learned PASCAL and COBOL, and promptly gave up programming. Hmmm.

I dabbled from time to time, and then got in to web programming with PHP ending up being my language of choice. OK, I am more than happy to admit it's a scripting language rather than a full blown programming language, but whatever!

I've now started teaching my kids to write programs. Thought we'd start simple with a bit of logic, so I downloaded Just BASIC and knocked up a few simple programs with them, using variable manipulation, screen output and IF statements. Nothing exciting yet.

And then it occurred to me – I could write a game with this stuff! Which means my new mission is to write a game in Just BASIC…and it's already begun. It will be a simple concept – a bit like an arcade version of Othello – and has probably been done before. But I just want to prove 'I STILL GOT IT!'

Achieved so far:

• Programmable maps
• Keyboard reading loop
• Screen update subroutine
• Maze collision detection
• Flipping of tiles logic