Week 2: Load Goblin

Week 2: Load Goblin

52 Projects in 52 Weeks | October 11, 2026

I recently bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 on eBay. It came with the computer, a 16K RAM expansion pack, a stack of cassette tapes, and that miserable little blister membrane keyboard that makes typing anything feel like punishment.

I never owned a TS1k as a kid, but my friend Bruce did.

Bruce and I, mostly Bruce, would spend hours painstakingly typing BASIC programs from magazines like SYNC. Usually games. We had no idea what most of the code actually did, but figured typing it in was probably a good way to learn. More often than not, the program wouldn’t run. Somewhere in those hundreds of lines was a typo, and finding it could consume the rest of the afternoon.

If we finally got something working, or simply ran out of patience and wanted to pick it up the following weekend, it was time to connect the cassette recorder and enter SAVE “GAME”.

Sometimes it even worked.

I eventually got a Commodore 64 with a C2N cassette drive, which was specifically designed for the job and still managed to make loading and saving software an adventure.

I’m not saying those experiences scarred me. I’m just saying I know better than to repeat them.

Which brings me back to my newly acquired TS1k and its stack of tapes. Especially “The Cube Game” as I refuse to research it, and want to experience it for the first time myself.

I found a crusty old Jensen portable cassette player at a thrift store, but I wasn’t particularly optimistic that cassette technology had improved while nobody was looking.

Then I started thinking. The cassette contains software encoded as sound. The tape player sends that sound to the computer through an audio cable. My phone can store files and play audio.

Why not replace the entire pile of tapes and the Walkman with my phone? Yet another tech made obsolete by the super computer in your pocket.

And that’s where a perfectly reasonable little project started getting out of hand in my brain.

If my phone can play programs into the TS1k, why not keep an entire library of them? Maybe find programs other people have shared? Better yet, if the sound is just code converted into noise, couldn’t I write BASIC on my laptop and turn it into something the Sinclair can load?

Or have AI write the BASIC?

Now we’re talking.

Forty-some years after sitting at Bruce’s house, I could finally make my own game without wanting to take an axe to that blister keyboard. Maybe a version of Doodle Jump. Or Super Breakout, in homage to Woz.

See, my brain has a habit of taking a perfectly good solution to a problem and making it a bit extra.

Sometimes a lot EXTRA!

So, Week 2 of my 52 Projects in 52 Weeks challenge is Load Goblin.

Why Load Goblin? Because anyone who has ever waited for a cassette to load on an vintage computer knows there must be a mischievous little goblin bastard living inside that tape deck. IYKYK

The idea is a mobile website that turns your phone into a cassette player for vintage computers, starting with my Timex Sinclair 1000.

The first milestone is simple: connect my phone to the computer, select a program, press Play, and get the damn thing to actually load.

If that works, I’ll work on a library of programs. If that works, I’ll see whether I can convert BASIC code into the audio the computer expects. And if everything somehow falls into place, maybe I’ll have an AI-generated game running on actual 1982 hardware by Saturday.

Of course, I have no idea whether the phone’s audio output will work. Old cassette loading was notoriously finicky, and I don’t know whether converting BASIC to cassette audio will require a simple utility or a graduate-level education in noises.

I could discover tonight, after the Michigan basketball exhibition game, that this entire idea is nonsense.

Or I could spend the week recreating the exact frustration Bruce and I experienced forty years ago, only this time with AI helping me find the typos.

Either way, I get seven days.

And I’d really like to finally play a game I made myself on one of these little machines.