Growing up in the 80’s I cut my coding teeth on an EACA EG2000 Colour Genie, the only problem was that I could never get a tape recorder to work on the Genie, so my coding session were never saved and me code was always “byte” size.
At the time my dad had collected most of the issues of The Home Computer Course which later became The Home Computer Advanced Course.
I would page through every issue reading about all the personal computers and look at the code that I could not run on my Genie.
A few months ago, I watched a documentary “Rubber-Keyed Wonder” which covers the history of the ZX Spectrum and has interviews with “Bedroom Coders”, all those old memories came rushing back.
During COVID I went through a retro computer / gaming phase and bought myself a Pi 400 which in a way is an “Old Skool” computer running Linux (I know I have completely under sold this).
I picked up Linux again and a bit of Python thanks to The Mag PI magazine (now known as Raspberry PI magazine) and Wireframe which was like the “Old Skool” gaming “type-in listing” magazines.
After watching the documentary, the “retro bug” bit again. I went on a full on “hunt” for the magazines I grew reading and found every issue on the Internet Archive, which gave me an idea.
Imagine emulating those old 80’s computers on a Pi 500 (yes, I upgraded) and getting the old games working, then converting the old games code into their modern equivalent and documenting the process.
And so, Project Genie is born.
The Reboot Diaries 