Matthew Smith, the author of the classic ZX Spectrum games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy was at the Play Expo 2019 retro gaming event in Manchester to do a talk marking the 35th anniversary of Jet Set Willy. I was lucky enough to attend this event and had taken some of my old cassette covers with me, just in case Matthew was up for doing some signing after his talk.

A list of machine emulators completely written in JavaScript that I find to be both impressive and interesting. Writing an emulator in any language is difficult and requires some serious programming chops. But to do it in JavaScript must surely require a level of programming genius (or maybe madness - I hear it’s a fine line!) that us mere mortals can only dream of aspiring to. These are my favourites that I’ve stumbled across, catalogued here so I can easily find them again whenever I feel the need for a retro computing fix…

A very simple Jumping Jack zx Spectrum remake written in JavaScript for the browser. Written as a programming learning exercise.

My original website (The Sinclair Archives) was removed from the Internet in 2000, and I thought I’d lost the content forever. But while sorting through a load of old cd-roms destined for the bin I stumbled across a 10 year old backup disk that contained a copy of my old website. On the old site was a short interview I’d done with Matthew Smith, the programmer of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.