So my journey began back in 1986 with my dad bringing home what was to become the first computer I used, which was an old Amstrad CPC 1628 with a built-in 3-inch drive and an external tape deck.

Over the years, my collection of games on the good old days of cassette grew, along with the collection of 3-inch disks piled up, like any young computer nerd back in the good old days.

I started to learn the basics of Basic programming language using the Amstrad, spending countless hours and days typing in the multiple lines of code to save to a floppy disk and playing computer games. I also had a basic introduction to the Hex language and Machine Code, when I got my hands on a Romantic Robot MultiFace 2 add-on card that did a number of things, such as transfer tape to disk, break into the code of the game at the machine code level and manipulate the game code so that I could cheat, amongst other things.

Then, in the mid-’90s, I started high school and moved onto the 286 computers, running Windows 3.1 for Workgroups and using BBC Microcomputers. Although I didn’t do much programming or gaming on these, apart from learning a few formulas in Excel, this was the closest thing to gaming I could get.

This was until I used part of my college grant to get my own PC. It was a 486 SX25 with 4MB of Ram and a hard drive that would now be considered that tiny, that it could store probably a few mp3 files and the drive would be full. It would do me for the time being during my college days, and upgraded this eventually to a DX100 bios chip, that I bent and snapped countless pins on this during the upgrade process, and maxed out the memory at 8MB of Ram.

With all the above said, this was my introduction to MS-DOS, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95, where I could actually play some games. They weren’t the best of titles back then as they were MS-DOS-based games, but they were fun, such as Commander Keen, Chess, Lemmings, Scorched Earth, and others that their titles escape me (old age I guess).

Then I moved into a better computer with the days of the Pentium 2 333MHz with 128MB of RAM, and I could play titles such as Duke Nukem, Age of Empires, Doom, and again, my old age escapes me.

It wasn’t until later on in the mid-2000s that I built up a half-decent computer after that, as I moved into the 1GHz processor ranges, and moved up to half a GigaByte of RAM, with a couple of hard drives with 200GB storage for other games, and I started on the good old Xbox (1st generation) and also the PS1 (1st Gen).

The games collections grew from here, as I favoured the Xbox more so than the PS, due to how the pad sat and felt in your hands. Like it was meant to mould perfectly. I started the journey on the Xbox with the Call of Duty franchise with First Person Shooters, Driving games (although I wasn’t much good at them back then), and the legendary “beat-em-ups” such as Tekken.

I then upgraded to the Xbox slim, and the call of duty franchise continued, along with the driving games and I got slightly better at those.

I then moved up to the Xbox One, which is where I am currently (I know it’s out of date and I’ll update it at some point), but I also moved over to the PC gaming, where my setup was an Asus M5A78L-M PLUS/USB3 motherboard, inside a Corsair ATX small tower case, with a 450W PSU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and a 2GB AMD R9 270x Graphics card that span the full length of the case, with not much room to upgrade. I ran this for about 3 years until recently I decided to upgrade to my current setup.

My current setup is below:

Aerocool Shard RGB Black Mid-Tower case with a tempered glass side panel

Corsair RM850 Watt Fully Modular 80+ Gold Refurbished PSU

Asus B550 Prime B550M-A Micro ATX Motherboard

AMD Ryzen 7 5800x 8 Core 16 Thread CPU (Base Clock 3.8GHz Boosting to 4.7GHz)

32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair Vengance LPX DDR4 3200MHz-C16 RAM

500GB Western Digital M.2 SSD Boot Drive

Crucial P3 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe

Crucial BX500 1TB 3D SSD

Asus RTX 2060 Dual OC EVO 6GB

Dual DELL P2214H 1080 Full HD Monitors