Dave Curran Restores Survival Horror Classic 3D Monster Maze with a Little Tape Splicing

Tynemouth Software's Dave Curran has gone to quite some lengths to restore a copy of 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81/Timex Sinclair 1000 eight-bit micro — splicing and respooling an entirely new length of tape into the cassette, for maximum verisimilitude.

"When I am testing a Minstrel 2 or 3 [ZX80/ZX81 compatible microcomputers], or the new Minstrel 4th ZX80 and ZX81 modes, I try to load [software] from various sources," Curran explains. "One tape I can't load like that is unfortunately 3D Monster Maze. The problem is that [cassette] does not load. It always seems to fail at the same point, it fails to load one way or another on a ZX81. When I modified ZX81 BASIC for the Minstrel 4th, I ended up writing a whole new LOAD routine, which seem to perform better than the original one with some tapes — but not in this case."

Written by Malcolm Evans and first published by J. K. Greye Software, 3D Monster Maze was a first-person puzzle game in which the player must traverse a two-dimensional maze to find the escape — without first finding the dinosaur, a T-Rex that the game famously says "lies in wait" for the player before beginning to chase them through the maze. The game is recognized as the earliest first-person survival horror title — but in Curran's case, the horror was in being unable to load the game from tape.

Not wanting to ditch the original-issue cassette, Curran investigated exactly why it wouldn't load by analyzing the tape as audio rather than data. "[It] dips to almost nothing at one point," he notes of the problem — but an attempt to record a fresh copy of the game onto the same cassette, by taping over the holes that prevent over-recording, failed, suggesting that the magnetic layer on the tape itself is damaged or worn.

The solution: replace the tape, while keeping the cassette. "The case was unfortunately sealed on both side, [with] no screws, so I had to splice in a new section between the two sections of red leader tape," Curran explains. "I took a 'new' C15 tape and recorded 3D Monster Maze onto it. I cut the tape out of the original 3D Monster Maze tape and then spliced in the new C15 tape. I used my incredibly expensive professionally calibrated tape winding device [a Bic ballpoint pen] and wound the new tape carefully into the shell. Once it had all gone it, I cut the end from the C15 spool and spliced it to the other end of the [original] tape."

Such a procedure is likely to be familiar to readers of a certain vintage, and entirely alien to others — but the good news is it worked. "It's nice to be able to load 3D Monster Maze from tape again," Curran writes. "I was concentrating on getting the tape to lay flat for the photos and ended up with the splicing tape on the wrong side, I will need to go back and redo that, but it works fine."

The full write-up is available on Curran's blog.