As usual, 2010 has been a busy year in the retro scene. Dozens of new games have appeared on all of the 'popular' 8-bits of the 1980s, and even some lesser-known machines have had a piece of the action.

This hobbyist market is certainly growing and has proven resilient both during and after the Western world's recession. The fact that most emulators are generally free, and most independent developers offer their wares at no cost probably (or pocket-money prices) helps a little I suppose, but the most important thing is the personal and collective memories that we all share from days when making even the simplest thing happen inside a television screen was thought to be amazing.

It all started off strongly with Jonathan Cauldwell's 16K version of Matthew Smith's Jet Set Willy. It contained the same devilish gameplay and three dozen screens to explore. When you consider the memory limitations of a 16K Sinclair ZX Spectrum (which is actually less than 16KB when you take the screen, colour attributes and system stack into account), it's simply superb as to what Jonathan achieved with this remake, although the 'infinite death loop' could have been excluded.

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Talking of 'limited RAM' gaming, both the Sinclair ZX81 and Commodore VIC-20 have had solid years. With Sir Clive's monochrome wonder, some solid 1K games appeared, such as QFrog (a 1K Frogger clone), and T1K (a Tetris variant), but nothing could have prepared even the most avid of '81 fans for Bob Smith's sublime top-down shooter Virus. It tells the story of a hapless security guard who returns to work after the office Christmas party to find that the bio-hazard containment refrigeration units had stopped working, which allowed the strains of influenza inside to mutate into mucus-like cells that could be a danger to the whole of humanity. That same guard went above and beyond the call of duty by proceeding to eliminate the mutations before the rest of the staff return after the Christmas shutdown. As I said at the time, "[Virus] is Speccy-quality gaming on a ZX81. More of the same, please Bob!", and although we're still awaiting his next monochrome release, he did port Horace In The Mystic Woods from the Psion III palmtop to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum to much acclaim, building on his reputation for well-produced games regardless of the apparent hardware limitations.

Moving onto Commodore's VIC-20, one name has popped up more than once in 2010, and that is Robert Hurst, handling the conversion of Berserk to the mighty VIC along with other classic arcade games getting his remake treatment, including Break Out and Space Invaders. All have been done using Robert's own framework, allowing easy handling of dozens of software sprites, and even better is that Robert has an uncanny knack of getting the gameplay just right.

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Of course, the world's best selling 8-bit didn't miss out on any action, with the Commodore 64 seeing a number of free-to-download and commercially produced games during the year past. Independent publisher Psytronik Software released a compilation of games that didn't quite sell a million, called quite rightly They Didn't Quite Sell A Million, which included Jon Wells' superb platform RPG Sceptre Of Baghdad converted from the Speccy.

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At the other end of the sales chart (during the 1980s) was probably the Oric-1 and Atmos, but this year has seen some real gems thanks to Defence Force. The Elite universe was finally realised thanks to the hard work of Chema Enguita with his mission-based interpretation 1337, while Jonathan Bristow brought Oric fans Storm Lord and Impossible Mission. However, rather than being 1:1 ports, each was created with the host machine's hardware in mind, which is about the best way to program any 8-bit. See you next time!

1. 1337 for the Oric-1/Atmos (1337.defence-force.org)
2. Virus for the Sinclair ZX81+16K (www.bobs-stuff.co.uk)
3. Jet Set Willy 16K for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (tinyurl.com/JSW-16K)