Of course in those days, everyone sent and swapped packages by mail that may seem like a slow process now, but that’s all we had ( when I was a lad… – Ed). Over time, some people didn’t just want a return letter with a listing POKE (printed out on my trusty Commodore MPS-803 printer), and also sent games for me to hack. When I sensed that Zzap!64 was about to go under with the collapse of Newsfield, they kindly published my address for readers who wanted to obtain POKEs for games or simply get in touch.

Robin Hogg’s packages arriving in the post with games to hack also helped me keep focused and motivated. I was thankful at this time that some of the contributions I had made to Zzap!64 had earned me some software vouchers to buy games with, and I’d also managed to acquire some games from people who were moving on to other formats. With this in mind, I thought I’d go into the history behind its creation, and take a technical dive into its inner workings.ġ991 was quite a difficult year for me personally: the job I was working in was made redundant, and despite a small redundancy payout, it was difficult to purchase any games for the Commodore 64 as my priorities were, quite rightly, elsewhere. Whenever I’m asked a question about the listing POKEs I contributed to Zzap!64 and Commodore Format, one question that comes up a lot was how I ended up writing a multihack listing POKE which covered over 140 different C64 games from publishers such as Codemasters, Mastertronic, Zeppelin, and other publishers who occasionally used the same loading system.

Return of the Waz! Commodore Format’s Warren Pilkington is back, this time walking you through how he made one of his most loved listings.

Fruit machine emulator party time