A Jupiter Ace was my second computer, when I was 14 or 15, after a Sinclair ZX81. Great little computer, but compared to the Spectrum that came out around the

A Jupiter Ace was my second computer, when I was 14 or 15, after a Sinclair ZX81. Great little computer, but compared to the Spectrum that came out around the same time, it had a worse keyboard, only black and white graphics and 3KB of RAM. Because it used Forth, you could do quite a lot in 3KB, but it was still a bit limiting. I think mine was a very early one, because it had some added soldered wires on the board, correcting some errors. Mine got modified quite a bit over the next couple of years. Extra RAM. Some dumpster diving got me several keypads with good quality keys. I took them apart and made a proper keyboard to replace the original dead rubber monstrosity. I made a parallel I/O port out of TTL logic and veroboard. And then temporarily my Ace rode about on the top of a fairly flaky micromouse exploring mazes. It didn't win any prizes but it did get me an A in O-level Technology. My school was throwing out an old teletype, so I scavenged that. Then I modified the parallel I/O port to output +/- 12V on one pin, and wrote software to bit-bang RS232 at 110 baud. Back before the Internet, just finding the specs for RS232 was not so simple - our local library was a bit limited in that way - but I got there in the end. A lot of guesswork and trial and error. I don't think anyone made a printer for the Ace, so I may have had the only one. Being able to print code listings really helped. The first summer I wrote a whole load of games, mostly in Forth, but sometimes Forth just wasn't fast enough. I got a copy of "Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81", and learned Z80 machine code. If there was an assembler available, I didn't have it, so this was all hand-assembled. Getting jumps right was a total pain, as was debugging. Generally, it either worked first time, or you started from scratch again. Usually I got there in the end. I sold those games through a ad in "Your Computer" magazine, and earned back the price of the computer several times. But recording and shipping tapes one at a time got tedious really fast, so I didn't take that any further. Somewhere over the years, with my parents moving house multiple times, the Ace disappeared. Many years later, I found one on Ebay, and still have it. But somehow I never fell back in love with it - it just wasn't as good as I remembered my one rather non-stock one being at that formative time in my life.