Battleship – Sinclair ZX Spectrum

The first computer, which was in my family, was ZX Spectrum. I think, I was about 6 when my father bought the first computer. This computer I used for gaming of course. I started programming later and on PC. I will never forget the sound of loaded games on Spectrum (software was distributed on audio cassette tapes and loading into memory was a sound (perceived by the human ear), interpreted as a sequence of bytes)…

Last weekend I played with my 5 years old son in Battleship. I showed him this game first time and we used pencil and paper. He teaches the alphabet and I think this could be a good experience for him. You know that feeling when you have something to show your children, do you remember your childhood. I don’t know why, but I remembered not a “paper version”, but our first computer and how I with my older brother played in Battleship on Spectrum against the computer.

I thought about this until evening and at the same evening found this game in net. I found a lot of different information about this game, the most important of which was the fact that this game can be installed on any PC running GNU/Linux. Yaaay… I can’t remember what I planed to do on this night, but until I went to sleep I installed spectrum’s Battleship on my x86_64 openSUSE and plunged into childhood for few hours 🙂

To install spectrum’s programs on UNIX/Linux you need to install emulator. In case of openSUSE, you need to add Emulators project first. After that install FUSE package. It just works. Just start fuse-binary with game-file-name as a parameter.

I would like to thank FUSE developers and openSUSE FUSE mainainers. I don’t play in “today’s” games, but time-to-time can spend a bit time for games of my childhood.