About
"A little about the author of this site."

Who did this site?
An 'in his 30s' man reliving his youth of old classic computers and games, especially the ZX Spectrum and Amiga, and reliving that great period in time that was the 1980's. I'm also a regular on eBay when budgets allow!

What's wrong with today's computers and games? I love my PC!
Everyone's got memories of their first computer, be it a games console or a humble zx81. For me it was the Spectrum 48k which my parents bought me way back in 1983 from good old WH Smiths. My first game was Roadrunner from Protek which ran on a tiny 16K of RAM! Then when I eventually had some of my own money I bought a Spectrum +2A in 1989 from Dixons. It came with fantastic games such as Disco Dan and Crazy Golf, which really showed off the power of the 128.....not. Eventually I built up a huge library of games filling several bookshelves.

Finally feeling left out from the big boys (and girls), I purchased from Tandy (remember them?) an Amiga 500 Cartoon Classics pack in 1991 and was totally blown away with the bundled Simpsons game Bart vs The Space Mutants. From then on I was hooked on this superb machine, playing superb Cinemaware and Bitmap Brothers games and annoying my family with the loud stereo sound. To me no other machine came close at the time for games, especially the PC.

In 1995 I sold my Amiga 500 and purchased a more powerful Amiga 1200 off a friend. Upgrading it with more ram and a hard disk meant that I could enjoy my favourite games like Monkey Island 2 running at optimum speed! I still found the time to go back to my spectrum days, using the KGB Spectrum Emulator on the Amiga as sadly I had sold all my old Spectrum stuff.

I suppose it had to happen - the Amiga market eventually stalled and began to lag behind. Fed up I sold my complete Amiga collection in 1997 for a PC (shock). And what did I start doing with this new PC? I played Spectrum and Amiga games using emulators of course!

Things really have came full circle, especially as I have purchased most of my old Spectrum and Amiga stuff!

Yes I have some new games that I enjoy playing on the PC such as Medal Of Honour and the Indiana Jones series - they are very impressive to look at and technically fantastic but I'll still head back for a quick game of Jet Set Willy or It Came From The Desert now and again!

Why do this site?
Why not? It's certainly not as unusual as some sites on the internet! Hopefully my passion (or sadness) and interest about everything here comes across to other people, old and young.

Why can't I download many games from this site, and why do you not review lots more?
There are already some excellent sites that offer tons of games to download and I don't have the webspace to offer many anyway - a few downloads are available though. I only review games that I actually own but a lot more have still to be added to the site in the near future.

What's with the name RetroIsland?
Two things really. At the time I first brought the site on-line early in 2005 there was no other site I could find called this as I wanted a unique name, and also because it shares part of the name of one of my all time favourite games The Secret Of Monkey Island.

Hey, what happened to the old site? I liked it!
I was never truly happy with the old sites as they were rather rushed, and were built in such a poor way as to be time-consuming to update. The guestbook and newsboard were always giving me problems. I think this new site is a whole lot easier on the eyes!