Only for my own personal amusement. I received, along with my sisters, a ZX Spectrum 48k for Christmas in 1984 or so. The machine had a dead tape-deck on arri

Only for my own personal amusement. I received, along with my sisters, a ZX Spectrum 48k for Christmas in 1984 or so. The machine had a dead tape-deck on arrival, which meant that we couldn't play with any of the games in the bundle (10 IIRC). My sisters lost interest pretty much immediately, but I read the manual and started entering the simple BASIC programs. Over time I learned BASIC pretty well, eventually moving on to z80 machine code. I stopped programming for a few years, instead preferring to play games, but then I wanted to get extra-lives so I started "hacking". Slowly learning how to by-pass the loaders on commercial games, so I could examine the programs and tweak them for infinite lives, timers, & etc. I got a few POKEs published in UK magazines at the time, you'd write a little BASIC program that POKEd in machine-code to load the game from tape, patching it to return to your control, before modifying the game-code and jumping to the entry-point. That occupied me from 84-90 or so.