The history of this WWW page

### WARNING!

This page is overly long, self-indulgent and should only be read by those looking for the dribbly memories of a speccy fan who doesn't know how to organise his thoughts into a short coherent passage..
Still going on? Well, don't say you weren't warned!
Well, I guess I'd better start right at the very beginning... I started to hack speccy games many moons ago after a friend (Matt Lynch, who I heard from yonks ago. Last heard of living in Edinburgh.) and I worked out how to hack Rick Dangerous.
After a little while, we had got it to the stage of finding 255 lives. After he had gone home, I loaded up Rick again and continued where we had left off.. After a little while, I had managed to find 255 ammo and bombs, and a little later on I found out what to look for for infinite lives.. Chuffed? You bet!
I then went on to try and hack every speccy game I could get my paws on....
After I'd done a few games, I decided to have a little peek at the loaders.. I chose Space Harrier II because it seemed to just have a BASIC loader... That was to become my first "full" game hack :-)
I then repeated the process for every "simple" game loaders I could find until I became a bit more bold and had a look at headerless loaders.. If memory serves, Future Bike Sim was my first of those..
I should point out that to this day I am NOT a coder. I don't even know what half of the Z80 commands do.. I just know what the most common commands used in loaders usually are :-)
Anyway, I continued hacking away (no pun intended) until I mentioned to a friend (Jamie Murray) that I was considering sending some of my hacks into YS, and was wondering if I should give myself a name. He suggested Hackers Anonymous. I decided to use the name, but add an ironic twist by always giving our real names :-)
So, for a few issues in YS, Hackers Anonymous were credited first of all as being Gerard Sweeney and Matt Lynch and later on Gerard Sweeney, Matt Lych and Jamie Murray... I should point out that in an extra twist of irony, Jamie didn't even own a Speccy .. He owned an Amstrad CPC464!
A short time later, I met Raymond Russell in a lecture theatre at Bell College in Hamilton... My first lecture and we spent more time talking about YS and the Speccy than work :-) (A sign of things to come!).
After hanging about with Raymond for a while, we got talking about putting together a POKE tape similar to the ones which were getting popular... I pretty much left him up to the design of the thing, and concentrated on getting the POKEs together.
A few months later (hey, we had college work!) and Hack Attack was born. Looking back, it is very rough around the edges, but I am still proud to call it our baby :-)
One thing which does stick in my mind is that I mentioned HA to Jon North one time with the usual monthly batch of hacks and the next thing I knew, he had started mentioning it every month!
Before it was finished, we didn't really know what to do with it, so I said to Jon North that anyone wanting a copy should send an SAE to get details... Unfortunately, either someone misunderstood or it was misprinted but I got a couple of letters from people who had sent SAEs and asked for a copy (ie. they wanted me to send the tape in the SAE).. I dunno what their response would have been when they got an SAE with a letter, but would the following please come to the front of the stage...

- G. Carson and his friend S. Dury of Arran Drive, Auchinleck
- Chris Horry
  who both asked for the tape in an SAE...
- D. Simpson of Croft Park Rd in Littleport who got the wrong end of the stick, and sent me a tape, a quid, and asked for a copy of my Lemmings POKE (which I did send, along with Hack Attack)

If any/all of the individuals mentioned above want to chew the fat over old times, then please feel free to get in touch.
Anyway, I digress....
I always remember the day when I came home to a message from a "John" from "Your Sinclair"... To say I was happy when he asked if they could use it on their tape would be an understatement.
Needless to say this spurred me on to do a follow up, and we set to work... This time it was going to be bigger and better. I hoped to have 100 or more hacks, and Raymond came up with a nice menu system, and a way you could press BREAK if you had chosen the wrong hack...
However, by this time lethargy had set in on Raymond's side a bit as he had bought himself an A500, so I found myself doing all of the hacks and a fair amount of music, testing, debugging and typing.. I had finished up with a large amount of files which patched on to themselves to form a working Hack Attack 2. I just needed a few things done which only Raymond could do. By now, a LONG time had passed (about 6 months), and we got the thing finished. I bunged it in a jiffy and winged it down to YS.
A couple of weeks later, I phoned Jonathan Nash (as he was calling himself by then) about a completely seperate matter. I asked him about the tape (to make sure it had reached him intact). He said he had loved it, and would have put it on the tape, but that the next month of YS would be the last. I felt like I'd just been told a close member of the family had just been shot in the street.
I then moved onto an A1200, and one of the first things I did was find a speccy emulator (in the shape of Spectrum 1.7)..
6 months later, I had an Amiga with a 6MB 030 card installed, and got myself ZXAM.. I quickly realised I now had a way to use all my speccy POKES again, and was a very happy chappy...
I got hold of ZXAMPOKE.Guide, and found it to be an invaluable guide for all those games.. However, I found a lot of the POKEs didn't work and I had to re-hack them myself...
I then thought I could maybe do my own version of the guide, and tried to learn the AmigaGuide "language"... A few short days later, I had the bare bones for a POKE guide, and started to convert all my POKES... I then added all the ones from ZXAM_POKE which worked, and worked my way through YS, Crash and numerous other POKE sources.
In 1996, Hack Attack III was released to an unsuspecting public. I released it under the handle Rastan, as I was in a coder group at the time, and had adopted the name.
I had previously had a taste of the Internet, and quickly came to the conclusion that running it from a 14.4 modem was crap, especially as it wasn't a local call for me. Therefore, I didn't have an email address so I never really got any feedback.
April 1996, I started work for the University of Glasgow where one of the perks was a free Internet account and email address. I quickly started to roam all of the available speccy sites and was a very happy chappy to find out about Comp.Sys.Sinclair where I found out I wasn't the only Speccy freak out there :-)
Hack Attack III was uploaded to Aminet, where I received a couple of messages from people saying they liked it (which was nice). I mentioned it on CSS (where the majority of users seem to be PC owners, don't flame me if I'm wrong about this - it just seems that way!) where I was asked if I could do a text version of it for "Non-Amiga" owners.. I must say it felt quite good to be able to have a product which PC owners wanted, instead of the usual reverse situation...
So, I pondered on this for a while and decided that a text version went against the whole reason for me doing HA3 in the first place... I didn't want it to be just another text file, so I put the idea on the "maybe, but probably not" list.
Then one day, someone asked if there was a WWW page for POKEs. I took a look at the few there were, and realised that I had the potential to create something a LOT better (in terms of numbers of POKEs anyway).. The only 2 problems I had were (1). I couldn't code HTML, and (2). I had nowhere to put the WWW page...
Anyway, I looked at how other pages were done, so I at least knew how the basic page was set out, and a very kind chap by the name of Donald Sturgeon offered me his WWW space. It's still out there, and I do still get mail from people who visited it. If anyone knows how to get hold of Donald to get it killed, any chance you can let me know?
Not wanting to pester poor old Donald every time I updated a page, I moved to Geocities. All was splendid, until they decided that emulation was akin to mating with Lucifer to produce the destroyer of our Earth (Blimey! Ed).
The future looked bleak for our beloved hero. Until, that is, the mighty Martijn van der Heide stepped in, and offered to host Hack Attack and NVG Cat (now collectively and crappily known as Speccy Playground) on the same server as his mighty beast (FNAR! Ed), World Of Spectrum. Or WOS to its chums.
(Oy! you gonna be here all night, ya dimmock? Ed.)
(Ahem)..So, to finish up.. I'm looking to hear from any of the following..

- Anyone from Bell College who knew me :-)
- Any YS dudes out there, or even "other" speccy mags...
- Failing that, anyone who knows the whereabouts of the above.
- Oh, hell.. Anyone out there who wants to email me at all, even if it's just to reminisce about the good old days when they knew how to build computers with a bit of soul! None of this "throwaway" technology where software dictates hardware, and cruddy programming means you need 64MB of memory to run a word processor properly!!! And don't get me started on the games industry! That really does suck!! (Nurse!! He's off on another rant! Get the screens!!! Ed.)

I bid thee farewell. And remember kids - don't set fire to your arms!
Gerard Sweeney
Hackers Anonymous
Team Amiga