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About
Smash Tips was a collection of cheats, pokes and solutions supplied with Your Sinclair Magazine and was put together by Jon North, David McCandless and the Your Sinclair team. It was first included with the August 1988 issue of Your Sinclair and was included with the magazine each month thereafter. Once you collected each section you then had a 72 page booklet which you then stappled together. It was probably the largest collection of cheats, pokes and solutions for ZX Spectrum games any Speccy magazine had ever released. Transcription of this HTML version of the original Smash Tips partwork is (c) Craig Daines. The original paper partwork still and will always remains the copyright of Dennis Publishing... I hope they do not mind the partwork being put on the web... For a full credits list of everybody who worked on the original paper partwork, you will be pleased to see your names mentioned in the Acknowledgements and Original Copyrights section.
Why I transcribed the original partwork
Between 1996 and into 1997 I began the daunting task of transcribing all of the cheats included in the original 'Smash Tips' booklet that Your Sinclair released. Just like most die-hard classic computing enthusiasts, I refuse to use Microsoft software! So, I sat down in front of my trusty floppy disk based Amiga 500 to transcribe everything to plain ASCII. This project took around 10 months on and off to complete: this also included having to proof read the entire 72 pages of the original partwork for any typing errors I may of introduced, and correcting any further errors which either Your Sinclair or the publishers originally made when the publication was printed. The completed transcription of the partwork I saved onto a floppy disk for my own conveince, since the original booklet had yellowed with age and was looking rather dog earred after many years of use. The transcription of the original paper partwork I had done then kind of lay dormant until 2004 when I was sorting through some of my vintage Amiga disks... the story continues...
Details of this HTML version
In 2004, after doing a six week crash course in HTML, I wanted to also work on an HTML version of the original 'Smash Tips' cheat booklet that Your Sinclair produced. Since I had already produced an ASCII version, working on an HTML release should not be too difficult. By coincidence, I discovered the floppy disk to which I had saved the ASCII transcription of the original partwork some six years later! I thought working on an HTML release of the partwork would be easy. How wrong I was: because I had further ambitions: not only to reproduce the original partwork in Hyper Text Markup to be posted on the web, but to retype and test every single Spectrum game hack in tap format that was published in the original Your Sinclair Smash Tips booklet. This HTML version has been produced entirely on the Amiga and the work began on an HTML release on 28 August 2004. I completed work on this project on 17 November 2004. The only difference between this version and the original Smash Tips publication is I have included a screen grab of each Spectrum game, and have retyped and tested each Spectrum hack in the popular 'tap' format which all Spectrum emulators use which you can download! Copyright of all the hacks remain mostly with Jon North and David McCandless. Getting the whole partwork transcribed to HTML and getting it finished has been a real slog - it took ten months in my spare time to transcribe the partwork to plain ascii and a further three months to get this HTML version completed. The HTML version you are reading now consists of 418 HTML files, 451 GIF files, and 1,786 internal HTML links. I am just glad the thing is now finished!
Reproduction of the hacks
YS Trainspotter is back at the keyboard!Whenever possible, I have also typed in the hacks for each Spectrum game to save you time which you may download by clicking on the relevant download link. The hacks I have faithfully reproduced in the popular TAP and TZX formats which all Spectrum emulators use. Indeed, I could of been lazy and tested none of the hacks, but I wish to state around 98% of the pokes and hacks I have tested with Spectrum game cassettes in the tzx format courtesy of the World of Spectrum CD-ROM and nearly all work fine. If there is a poke or hack which does not work, or a poke or hack which I am unable to test I have mentioned it in the text for the game. Since I have produced the hacks in the popular TZX emulator format, you can use either Hypraloader or PlayTZX for outputting the hacks into a "real" ZX Spectrum thus, allowing you to save them to cassette if necessary simply by connecting the audio output from your computer through a set of Speccy ear / mic cables to your ZX Spectrum's ear socket then LOAD ""... You can find Hypraloader and PlayTZX at the 'World of Spectrum' web page.
Printing errors
YS Trainspotter is back !The original 'Smash Tips' booklet featured various printing errors, which resulted in some Spectrum pokes not working correctly, hence "Your Sinclair" produced a seperare ERRATUM section dedicated to various printing errors introduced during the printing process, which they also detailed how to correct. Rather than reproduce the original corrections for you to make yourself, I have gone to the trouble of correcting them for you from the ERRATUM section which was included with the original publication. It should be noted that despite the corrections Your Sinclair introduced, I still found some pokes which were not corrected in the ERRATUM: in particular the game pokes which use the Alkatraz loader, hence pokes which use this loader to insert pokes into your game may not work. Other errors which were introduced when the publication was originally printed are game hacks using the Speedlock II hacker to insert pokes into games which use David Aubrey-Jones' Speedlock loader. All games using this loader I have replaced with a bugfixed version which was corrected in the ERRATUM section at the back section of the original partwork. Whilst reproducing and testing all the hacks with tzx images of original Spectrum cassettes, I found more errors which Your Sinclair never printed corrections for. This prompted me to compile a list of hacks which do not work, and other minor publication errors which slipped through when the partwork was originally printed. These findings are listed in the Errors section.
HTML compatability issues
I have only had the opportunity of testing the HTML in Amiga browsers to which their are suttle variations depending on the fonts used (out of all the three Amiga browsers I tested with, it views best with AWeb). I do not have access to a Windows machine, so I am unable to test everything with Netscape or Microsoft Explorer: that I shall leave up to you. I wish to state that although I am no expert at writing HTML, the HTML is simplistic, useable, and it works (which is more than I can say for most Microsoft software these days). With regard to this HTML release. all HTML links have been verified using Link Checker GUI written by Heiko Schröder. The HTML code was checked using CheckHTML by Kai Hoffman. Both programs are available for Amiga computers. Link Checker GUI allowed me to track down and correct any broken links very easily and in minutes rather than hours. The HTML was checked using CheckHTML, which uses the sgmls parser by James Clark, together with the HTML DLD from http://www.w3.org to check that all HTML is valid HTML 4.0. There are no HTML parser errors, no broken links and all HTML is 100% valid HTML 4.0 Transitional and follows the HTML guidelines and rules as set by the W3C, just as all well authored HTML should be. I wanted to support the latest Cascading Sheets HTML specification as used by most modern browsers, but this would break things, because alot of people who use older browsers for the classic machines such as Amiga and Atari Computer's either do not fully support it, or do not support is at all. These machines may be old, but I believe in 100% compatability!
HTML design issues
With regard to the HTML design: I did not want to use FRAMES, because I wanted to keep things compatable with older browsers as best as I possibly could. It should also be noted FRAMES looks great if the user is viewing the site in the intended screenmode the web page was designed to be viewed in, but otherwise completely messes up on lower resolutions screens such as 640x480 or 640x256 resulting in the columns of the buttons being taller than the screen and the browser adding a scrollbar to the frame resulting in a utter mess. This is something many people never take into consideration when incorporating FRAMES into their web pages. As I have not used frames, it will view fine in all screenmodes, and also ensure the HTML is backward compatable with the HTML 3.2 DLD. The downside is that I have had to cut 'n' paste the menu for the navigation buttons into each and every HTML document: this was a long winded process and resulted in a slightly larger file size for each HTML page, but maintains backwards compatability as far back as the HTML 3.2 DLD rules. I have no idea if the HTML will work in web browsers prior to the HTML 3.2 DLD - maybe someone would be kind enough to test this for me.
[ Valid HTML4.0 ]
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