About Us
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.
What's wrong with today's computers and games? I love my PC!
Everyone's got memories of their first home computer, be it a games console or a humble zx81. For me it was the Spectrum 48k which my parents bought for me way back in 1983 from 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. Soon I built up a huge library of games filling several bookshelves.
Finally feeling left out 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.
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.
Slowly the Amiga market 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 from eBay 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 still miss the games of old.
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?
There are already some excellent sites that offer tons of games to download .
What's with the name RetroIsland?
Two things really. At the time I first brought the domain name 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.
