About The Archive

If you spot anything wrong, such as layout bugs, broken links, typos, inaccurate information, a game not working, or if I have used content that you would like removed, please let me know in issues on my GitHub Repo and I will act swiftly.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was an important part of my childhood, so in 2001 I set out to build a website dedicated to the machine and the games I grew up with. The project was ambitious, but after two years of slow, laborious progress, I abandoned it. For the next 23 years it remained that way — a relic of early-2000s web design — until one day in April 2026, when I decided it was finally time to finish what I had started all those years ago.

My original intention for the reboot was modest: complete the CRASH Smash section and call it a day. But once I began working, it became clear the site needed far more than a bit of finishing off. I had built the original pages using FrontPage 2000 on Windows 98 (or possibly Windows XP), targeting a 1024×768 display and Internet Explorer 5/6. The HTML was a chaotic mess — with font tags everywhere, and random line breaks. The whole thing looked like it had been written as a practical joke. The web has changed dramatically since those days, and this project needed to change with it.

So much has changed within these pages compared to my original idea, that it is to all intense and purposes, a completely new web site to the one I left in 2003. Every page has been totally rebuilt from the ground up with modern HTML and CSS, using nothing more than Notepad++, with a cleaner template based structure and a more maintainable, and easy to manage layout.

Although the site has been modernised, it does intentionally preserve a late 90s, early 2000s feel — what I like to call “Web 1.5”. The layout now uses modern iframes instead of legacy framesets, but the multi-pane structure lives on as a tribute to the classic web. It’s a hybrid approach: contemporary HTML and CSS under the hood, with a Web 1.0 nostalgic skin that echoes the early days of the internet.

Back in 2001, the site existed mainly to accompany a folder I’d created containing ROMs, box art, instructions, and other stuff, all neatly organised to match the game lists on this site. Those lists originally linked to the instructions for the games stored in that folder — but that folder is now long gone. So, for this 2026 reboot, I decided to integrate everything directly into the site: box art, instructions, and even the games themselves now live within each game page. The game are playable right within a popup browser window via an emulator called RAZE.

Because of these changes, the game lists now point to magazine reviews rather than instructions. Each game page includes its own dedicated instructions anyway, so linking to them from the lists no longer made sense. CRASH Online became my primary source for reviews, though some titles are not covered there. For those, I created new reviews using OCR’d CRASH PDFs from RetroPDF, supplemented with material from Your Sinclair and Sinclair User.

Much of the content remains my own, with additional material sourced from various places around the web. I have stated where appropriate if the content is not my own and gave credit to it's original source.

The final milestone for me was getting the site online through GitHub Pages. It was never part of my original plan — not in 2001, and not even when I began this reboot in 2026 — but it turned out to be the natural next step. I also wanted to get the site formatted nicely for mobile devices, a goal I have now achieved — with the help from Claude Code I must confess. So, after more than two decades the project is no longer abandoned. It’s finally complete, modernised, and online.

For anyone curious, you can view the original 2003 version of the site here. It’s packed with dead links, cringeworthy text, and the unmistakable fingerprints of FrontPage 2000, but it offers an interesting glimpse into how the archive began and how far it has come.