OBTAINED: TZX of the Fernando Martín Basket Master concept demo (Spectrum)

RetroLEL’s colleague ENORM has relocated his tape with the pirated demo of Fernando Martín Basket Master and sent us a recording in WAV format, so that we could create a (more correct than the existing TAP) TZX dump from it.

Here’s a message from him:

My initial relationship with the Spectrum is linked to two very important people in my life: Sergio and José Manuel “el Pérez”. The first one introduced me to José Manuel when we were barely 12 years old. José Manuel was a guy who started programming with a Spectrum 48k and signing his works under his own label, NPS Software. Every Friday afternoon we went visit him at his house and spent the time drinking Cola Cao and playing a thousand and one games… and annoying his sister, must be said…

Years later, José Manuel bought a +2 and later a Commodore Amiga, but that’s another story… The one that matters now, how he got the Fernando Martín demo, is quite simple and not very epic.

According to what “el Pérez” told me, he simply saw it on a list of games sold by a guy whom he contacted through the “Buy, change, sell” section of Micro Hobby… He had already read about the game in the magazine, and when he saw that “Preview” in the title, he was curious if it could be the “half-finished” version of the game …

After loading the tape, a name appears: CARCHYPHONE and a telephone number, with the prefix 93, from Barcelona… Unfortunately, when I called that number years later, nobody knew anything about the subject I was asking about…

Years later, and after the sad death of José Manuel, “el Pérez”, I created a small website, www.newprograms.cjb.net, dedicated to his figure, posting some games that he had programmed… and the Preview of Fernando Martin.

At that time I hanged around IRC-Hispano and met ICEknight, TBrazil and other Spectrum fans… In fact, it was ICEknight who was interested in the game and fixed the dump that I had made and whose Basic block failed to load in some emus. This “fix” was published on January 10, 2000… exactly 21 years ago today.

Many thanks to “el Pérez” and ENORM for locating and helping properly archive this piece of Spanish video game history.

The TZX of the demo is temporarily available at the following link: http://www.filedropper.com/fernandomartnbasketmasterpiratedconceptdemo

Original text of this entry:

WANTED: TZX dump of the Fernando Martín Basket Master conceptual demo made by Gonzalo and Julio Martín Erro, which was pirated and sold in street markets.

Currently only available as TAP.