Blake's ZX81 site:

Way back in 1980 I saw an ad in the back of an electronics magazine for a 'complete computer' for only $199.
That was the Sinclair ZX80 - and to me that was the holy grail.
The only other options for a personal computer at that time were the Comodore Pet, the Radio Shack TRS-80 ('trash 80') and the Apple I - all of which went for upwards of a thousand dollars.
I was 13 and I didn't even have $199.
So I schemed and plotted and scrimped and saved and my relatives helped me make up the difference so that by christmas I could send away for the new ZX81 and the 16k memory expansion module.
That's 16 kilobytes, this webpage wouldn't fit inside that amount of memory.

And when it arrived I started writing programs.
I had been writing software at school on Pets and Apples and TR(a)S(h)80s, as well as on various UNIX terminals, and even on some machines with punch cards - but now I could spend all day, and all night, and all of the next day writing software.
It was maniacal geeky bliss.
I even tried selling some of my programs, one of which was called 'Bomber' - I sold about 8 copies through an ad in a ZX81 magazine.
I was working on a dungeon adventure game I was calling 'Dunjun', but my membrane keyboard finally gave way two years after I first got my dream machine so I never made that first billion as a software tycoon.

My software masterpiece:

bomber.p

zxbomber.txt
the instructions

bomber.zip
both of the above zipped

My little game was almost lost to the ages,
but I managed to load it into my PC from the cassette tape
and then convert the .wav file to a .p file.
Then I discovered that only XTender has the same jerky keyboard response that the original ZX81 had.
Strange to say, but all of the timing in my game was based on the limits of the machine, so a faster emulator makes the game too fast.

Heres a quick download link to Xtender1.22

and heres the manual for Xtender

I had other games too, but I can't find the tapes.
There were a whole bunch of little arcade games I wrote that my friends and I would play. I even had a scoreboard tape that kept all of our scores.
I also had a monstrously ambitious dungeon adventure I was calling 'DUNJUN'.
For the ZX81 it was quite advanced, but I can't find those tapes either!
If I do find them, I'll be sure to post them here.

A Mac emulator can be found at http://www.maxon.de/homes/r_kurz/

• Steve McDonald's ZX81 Web site
• Kevin Baker's ZX81 Web site
• Roger Dipaolo's ZX81 Virtual Community
• Matthias Jaap's ZX81 Web site
• NVG (has Sinclair archives)

All other software can be found at ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/zx81/
and .ARJ packs with hundreds of titles in the folder ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/zx81/packs/