About DeadFleshRetro

Hello there,

my name is not, in fact, DeadFleshRetro - that's just a nom de plume as writers used to say well before text was typed and rendered in pixels. My name is actually Chris, and these pages are dedicated to my increasingly obsessive hobby of acquiring old broken computers and video game consoles and trying to fix them up and bring them into use again.

I have been doing this since I resolved to resurrect my beloved childhood computer - a 48k ZX Spectrum in an aftermarket Fuller keyboard case - and, after watching a few YouTube videos, decided on a whim to bid on an 'untested' Acorn Electron to see if I could get it to work. That was in the summer of 2018, and you can read about that little project in the Repairs, Refurbs & Mods section. Since then I have acquired a very large number of old machines and associated gubbins, mainly from the late 70s and 80s, and I've even fixed some of it (although a lot of it is still sitting quite neglected in boxes all around me, as a constant reminder of my own futile fight against entropy).

I was, however, successful in fulfilling my original ambition of bringing my Spectrum back to life, a long and convoluted story that I will one day add to these pages (I promise). That machine was, after all, not just the impetus for these activity, but for the name as well - “DeadFleshRetro” was intended as an homage to the famous "dead flesh" rubber keyboard of the original speccie - although, as my son and occasional collaborator Flynn likes to point out, I don't even own a spectrum with a dead flesh keyboard!! I am a sham, it is true.

Anyway, it was the best name I could come up with at the time - which, I admit, is merely a bad reflection on the other options I thought of - and Flynn's older sibling Lucas liked it enough to create a cute little pixelart logo of a Zombie, which has remained my avater despite the fact that they have since disowned it and produced an updated logo that is awsome but also substantially less cute.

This is a hobby that I enjoy very much and try to share with my family, friends and anyone else when I get the chance to, and for this reason I have also embarked on a few livestreaming projects. Initially, this started during the Covid lockdowns as a way for Flynn and I to break up, and brighten up, our days and discover some old games together on a 6-switcher Atari 2600 we had refurbished together. We recorded 24 episodes of these vintage gaming livestreams in total, and they were great fun to do. I then also started livestreaming from my workbench occasionally, and our most recent project collaborative play throughs of classic text adventure games, which we livestream to YouTube nearly every Monday evening (7pm UK time). We even produced a podcast of the first season (Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls) so people could more easily catch up with our progress between sessions.

I hope you enjoy what you find in these pages. I'm going to add content as regularly as I can, and continue to do livestreams and new refurb projects as and when. This is a labour of love, and life very often gets in the way, but do please get in touch with any comments or questions - it's always good to hear from people who have a similar love and fascination for the dawn of home computing and videogames as I do.