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Retro cassette cover artwork for “Pavement Panic” on the Amstrad CPC, showing a pixel character running along a road while surrounded by colourful ghost enemies, styled like a vintage 1980s arcade game.

Pavement Panic – My Second Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

My second entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition is Pavement Panic, a fast-paced ghost-dodging survival game for the Amstrad CPC written in just 10 lines of BASIC. Inspired by simple road-crossing games, it starts gently, then quickly turns chaotic as the ghosts speed up and survival time becomes your score.

Retro cassette cover artwork for “Volt Maze” on the Amstrad CPC, featuring a glowing orange electrified maze, a small green player character, and a red robotic hunter, styled like a classic 1980s home computer game.

Voltmaze – My Third Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

Voltmaze is my third entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition… a procedurally generated maze game for the Amstrad CPC written in just 10 lines of BASIC. Inspired by classic 8-bit design and powered by a stack-driven depth-first search algorithm, it’s a small game with surprisingly sharp teeth… electrified walls, flickering hazards, roaming hunters, and a new maze every level.

FlySpy Loading Screen - Amstrad CPC

Let’s Hack… Fly Spy!

In the early days of Hacking, it was rare a protection system would be as memorable as the one created by Richard Aplin, Author of Fly Spy published by Mastertronic. Havking was always a trade of ideas and new techniques. In this post I'll cover off how to transfer FlySpy to disk that you can follow along.

DiscSys – XOR

DiscSys was a commonly used Disk Protection format in the 80s for the Amstrad CPC. For a protection system it was very basic, relying on modifying track and sector information to non standard formats to prevent copying with the supplied tools. Though it was very trivial to bypass the protection system and copy the disk anyway. Whilst reminiscing about the past, I discovered a small flaw with implementation in the game XOR, here's what I found...

Speedlock 1987

Speedlock '87 was a prolific Tape Protection System and Turbo Load for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. In this post I look at the protection system and how to hack to it using the same tools available to me in 1987 as a young teenager.