Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (47 page)

As it turned out, they had been over-cautious, and quite brilliantly so. When the prototype arrived, it was one of the most energy-efficient chips ever made – it used a tenth of the power
consumption they had aimed for, and a tiny percentage of its closest rivals’. In 1987, this helped Acorn use a cheaper plastic case for its new Archimedes computer, but soon there was
interest from overseas – Apple needed a low-power chip for its new hand-held device the Newton. Acorn had never regained its momentum after the early eighties boom and had few resources to
call on, but the company was astute with its new invention: it moved its technology into a joint venture with Apple, called Advanced RISC Machines Limited. It was almost a virtual business: based
in a research lab in Cambridge, it had no silicon-fabrication or hardware-manufacturing plants – all it did was design chips, and license them.

At first it was a niche interest – the ARM chips were incompatible with most software, and Apple’s Newton was not a success. But the choice of chip had been shrewd, and as handheld
devices became more common and more complicated, the list of ARM’s licensees grew. Nintendo used it for most of its Game Boy range, and it was adopted for smart phones and tablets, even some
laptops. Year by year, the numbers grew until they were quite incredible: in 2008,
ninety-eight per cent of all mobile phones were powered by ARM technology; by 2011 there
was an ARM chip for every person on the planet. As playing hours were increasingly spent on mobile platforms, ARM became, by default, the most common gaming hardware. Now almost every game of
Pokémon
or
Angry Birds
played anywhere in the world uses a technology devised, with barely any money or resources, on a BBC Micro.

But in these devices, the ARM can’t be programmed by the user. Smart phones have beautiful, powerful interfaces, but they offer no opportunity to write even a line of code. The most
commonly used computers are closed systems and, in practice, almost all of them are. Until very recently, the programming deficit that followed the decline of the British 8-bit computers looked
permanent.

But it wasn’t unnoticed. In 2005, Eben Upton was painfully aware that the Cambridge University computer lab where he worked was suffering a recruitment problem. Upton himself had started
programming on a BBC Micro in 1988, and had graduated to an Amiga five years later. Like Andrew Gower, he was late to programming in terms of the British experience, and he seemed to be a member of
the very last cohort to take up the hobby – there had been no natural way to catch the coding bug since, and little encouragement from schools.

Upton was no defeatist, however, and he had an idea for rejuvenating British interest in programming. He built a small computer from chip components, and he built it on veroboard – the
same kind of equipment that Acorn had used to design its first machines three decades earlier. ‘That was very, very primitive,’ says Upton. ‘It was an 8-bit computer’s worth
of performance. I had a little version of
Zarch
running on it, but it was really a toy.’

The idea then stalled until 2008, when Upton was forwarded an email that had been sent around the Cambridge lab, with the subject line: ‘Redo BBC Micro’. It was a call to create a
modern computer to teach coding, sent in response to a US project to reproduce the Apple II. Upton, now in the corporate world working for the technology giant Broadcom, had been remembered for his
device.

Something that he had learnt at his new employer was how many components a large customer could buy for ten dollars – a small, low-cost computer could be very
powerful indeed. A nucleus of a technical team was established, looked over by a board of trustees which featured the cream of Cambridge’s industry establishment, including David Braben.
‘He’s had a long-standing interest in the fact that we don’t have any more programmers, because he needs to be able to hire them to work for his company,’ says Upton.

The design was specified and re-specified: it became an open circuit board roughly the size of a credit card, with an ARM chip, a port for a keyboard, and a port for a monitor. The final cost,
they hoped, would be £22. The machine had a name that reflected its cultural heritage. Computer brands at the beginning of the 1980s were often, bizarrely, named after fruit or, more
explicably, the technical and mathematical inclinations of their creators: so it was called the Raspberry Pi.

Throughout 2011, the Raspberry Pi attracted growing attention. The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, ran an article praising it on his blog, and interest snowballed. By
the time it launched in March 2012, its first run had long since sold out. Anxious customers were emailed with updates, and every subsequent shipment sold out before it arrived. The Raspberry Pi
was for sale around the world from launch and there’s a good chance that it will be the best-selling British computer ever. ‘I found myself pulling the sales statistics for 8-bit
computers from the 1980s, and eyeing them up a little bit,’ says Upton. ‘How many do you need?’ The Raspberry Pi already outsold the also-rans of the early eighties – the
Oric, the Dragon 32. The ZX Spectrum doesn’t seem an outrageous target.

There’s another parallel with the 8-bit machines. Raspberry Pi provides an independent, parallel architecture to the major computers. It arrives with an operating system, and the early
user community quickly built tricks and demonstrations to show off the hardware. But if it is sat in a living room, or the classroom, the obvious, perhaps only real use for the Raspberry Pi is to
learn to code.

And it seems that’s still a compelling hobby. When Upton was demonstrating the device to school children in Cambridge, indifference turned to enthusiasm when the
pupils realised that they would be creating their own computer games. ‘At the end of the lesson, we had to prise the kids off the machine and send them onto their next lesson,’ he says.
‘And all they were writing was
Snake
.’

The Raspberry Pi is a versatile piece of hardware. If it fulfils its plans, it will become a module for developers around the world, to include in any device that needs cheap, on-board computing
power. But its purpose when conceived was to create programming talent, so that by 2019 or 2020, universities such as Cambridge might attract thousands more engineering graduates. And Eben Upton
has a simple idea for spawning another generation of bedroom coders: ‘I would like them to be able to write games,’ he says.

The Raspberry Pi shares an ambition that the BBC held at the start of the eighties – to create a wave of deep computer literacy. For the BBC, it was an ideal born of a benign paternalism,
one which was both extraordinarily successful and had unforeseen consequences. Programming became a widespread skill because it was accessible, creative and challenging, the most compelling use for
a home computer. Apart from one other: playing games.

That the BBC would lose its grip over the direction of computing was inevitable: it soon became overwhelmed by freewheeling capitalists and bedroom boffins, struggling to sell and make games as
the market evolved at a breakneck pace. And the market was huge: the BBC Micro sold a million and a half units, and that was dwarfed by the ZX Spectrum’s five million. Each was a gameplaying
device, and each potentially a game-making tool. Even as these machines receded, they left an infrastructure of games companies, and a generation of coders. Britain created many of the most
influential and successful games in the world –
Elite
,
Populous
,
Grand Theft Auto
,
Tomb Raider
. And all of them can trace their genesis back to that
brilliant, chaotic whirlpool of homemade games and bedroom coders.

Deliberately, the Raspberry Pi is a continuation of the principles at the heart of Britain’s first culture of home coding. Like the BBC Micro, it aims to teach
computing, programming, and for some at least, games-making. And like the ZX Spectrum in its heyday, it hopes to be everywhere.

There is a difference, though. The BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum were released into an empty market – throughout their life, it looked to outsiders that games might be a fad. The stories of
early developers are filled with authority figures trying to steer young programmers away from making games. At the time, that was the sensible course.

But now, it’s a real and giant industry. It’s competitive, but has career paths, recruitment agents, and training courses. And with digital distribution, for the first time in
decades, there are opportunities for a bedroom coder. Today the advice for a young would-be developer is easy: dive into the whirlpool, learn to code, make games, have fun.

The Raspberry Pi was built to let developers loose – inspired by the conviction that after a hiatus, the culture of brilliant homebrew creations can be recaptured. It comes with two
options: a simplified Model A, and Model B with more ports. That the nomenclature mirrors that of the original BBC Micro is no coincidence.

By choice, the developers and players from the first generations of home computer games have become the custodians of the next. Entrepreneurs and entertainers have joined forces with hardware
manufacturers and educators – some sound a note of self-interest, but their fervour signals more than this. There’s a fierce hope that the traits that first inspired the British games
industry – passionate home coders, a market flourishing with ideas – are robust enough to take hold again.

In conversation at an Acorn anniversary party in 2012, Sophie Wilson talked about the ideal that inspired her when she was first designing an ARM-powered computer. It had always been intended to
carry on Acorn’s principles: accessibility, power in the hands of the user, a hobbyist’s tool. ‘We wanted a successor to the BBC machine,’
she
said. ‘One of the things about the BBC machine was that you could do astonishing things, but you had to write them in machine code. So we wanted a design where . . .’

But she was interrupted then, and led away for a photo call. She had to cut a cake: it was in the shape of a BBC Micro.

Free Demo!

There are still ways to experience the pleasures and frustrations of using the computers that gave birth to the British games industry in the early eighties. The easiest is to go online and find
an ‘emulator’ – a program which perfectly mimics another computer. At the time of writing, one popular ZX Spectrum emulator is FUSE, which works on both the PC and Apple Mac. This
software is free and is available to download here: http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net.

Simply save the file to your computer, unzip it, and run the set-up program. For the real ZX Spectrum experience, drag the corner of the window so that the emulator takes up the full screen.
Once run, it should display the start-up page, with a copyright notice. Press ENTER and the letter ‘K’ will appear in a box at the bottom. This is your cue to start typing the code.

Now, here’s where things might start to get confusing, especially for an experienced typist. The ZX Spectrum tried to overcome the shortcomings of its keyboard by assigning entire commands
to a single key. Pressing ‘F’, for instance, will produce the complete word ‘FOR’. So be tentative and use the on-screen keyboard to find the commands where you have to
– this can be located through accessing ‘Help’ and then ‘Keyboard’.

The keystrokes for entering some of the more obscure words are more complicated still, and here you really will need to look at the ZX Spectrum keyboard. Each key is capable of producing a
number of
words: some are shown in white on the key itself, some in green above the key, and others, including punctuation, in red, both on the key and below it. To enter
these commands, the Spectrum makes use of two SHIFT buttons. In the emulator, these have been mapped onto the LEFT SHIFT key and the RIGHT CTRL key of a PC, so we’ll refer to those from here
on. The keystrokes required to input the differently coloured commands are as follows:

Yet another quirk applies to the special ‘graphics’ characters in the code – pressing the LEFT SHIFT key and then ‘9’ will change the cursor to a ‘G’,
whereupon keys ‘1’ to ‘8’ will print graphics; pressing ‘9’ again will turn this off. It takes a while to get used to, but of such idiosyncrasies British gaming
was born.

The emulated computer will read the code quite pedantically, so it has to be entered precisely and to the letter. It is vital to include the numbers at the start of each line of the program, and
to press ENTER after each line, as if beginning a new paragraph. If there’s a mistake the computer recognises, it will highlight this with a question mark – simply delete the code and
try typing that line again. Unfortunately the computer won’t spot all errors though, so take care, making sure that every line has been included.

At any time, you can see what you have done so far by typing ‘K’ for ‘List’, and pressing ENTER. To change any line, simply retype it – the computer will spot that
it has the same line number, and
overwrite the previous version. In fact, the lines can by entered in any order you choose, as the computer always sorts them
automatically, although going through the listing as it is displayed below is probably the surest way to complete it accurately.

On an emulator, you can save your progress at any time by taking a ‘snapshot’ of the computer’s memory – the command can be found under the ‘File’ menu, and
it instantly saves the code as a file on your PC or Mac. Have sympathy for those users of the original hardware who had to laboriously save their work to cassette, and even then couldn’t be
sure that it had been recorded properly. Of course, for the authentic bedroom coding experience, you should try writing this game on a genuine ZX Spectrum – there are still plenty to be found
on auction websites and in specialist shops, and although its keyboard is wilfully cheap, it still holds a special magic.