About Cabi-Soft

Since getting a ZX81 and soon after a Spectrum, I have been writing games for my own entertainment since 1983. Everyone made up a name for themselves in the good old days and mine was Cabi-Soft. I have used this name for most of the game I have written, only forgetting to put it into the last few !

Most of the early stuff was really bad, mainly very poor arcade games. I then drifted over to adventure games, mainly because I couldn't finish any of the commercial ones, so I wrote my own. I began with text only games and gradually shifted to 'Hobbit' style graphic/text adventures.

One of my games I sent to CRL for publishing, but they lost it, found it, sent it to someone else by mistake - who moved house and lost it. In short an almighty cockup ! At this time I settled to just writing for myself, a few friends and a local BBS (Bulletin Board System) called Phantom BBS. I think I have about 15 games that I later converted to run on the emulators, and still look at them now and again.

When the 8bit market began to diminish I moved over to the Amiga, bought (yes actually bought) AMOS Pro and the cycle started again. I wrote a few PD games including the very first Baldy game and a graphic adventure called Talisman. I also wrote a commercial video titling program called Video Ease for a company which hardly sold, making me about fifteen quid! Baldy and Talisman are available from Back To The Roots if anyone is interested.

The PC was the next platform, and moving onward I soon began to write various bits for that including a load of screen savers. Two of the more popular ones are available from WOS (World Of Spectrum - Hardware Page) called Speccy Classics and Spectrum Heroes.

Games came next, and the follow up to Baldy, cunningly named Baldy II was initially released to a small number of people. In 1999 to celebrate the release of Baldy 3D, I made it available for download for a few months. (don't know how many people got it!) This was a 2D platform game using locations and character from the place where I worked at the time, so many of the visual gags were 'in-jokes'.

Next I tried my hand at a text only adventure using the Z-Engine (used in the Infocom games). Strangely enough it was a Baldy game called Spadge II !

Then it was back to trying out various ideas to see what I could do next. I decided to complete the Baldy trilogy by doing Baldy 3D. During the writing of this game I discovered re-writes of some old Spectrum games, and thought it would be a good idea to have a go at a few...

The rest is history. 3D Lunar Crabs, Subterranean Stryker and Scumball... I have several other games queued up and ready to work on. Some have a few graphics done, some have some coding done, but that's a secret ;-)