Pssst/Frontlines

The news section was originally called Frontlines and dealt with Sinclair news and rumours. It also regularly contained mock celebrity interviews (such as the "At The Bus Stop With..." series) and trivial charts, as well as features about the writers themselves.

Subsections of Pssst and Frontlines included T'zers, a column which contained rumours about possible forthcoming releases for the Spectrum and, later on, the SAM Coupé. It was named after and originally written by Teresa Maughan, but the column remained after she left the magazine, as it was felt 'T'zers' was an appropriate title since it contained 'teasers' for future games. Rock Around The Clock, which first appeared in 1991, was a small column dedicated to looking at a particular back issue, as well as news and current affairs from the same time.

Perhaps one of the odder sections of Pssst was the Peculiar Pets Corner. Editor Matt Bielby originally intended this to be a showcase for YS readers' exotic pets such as snakes, pigs, monkeys or spiders, but these "pets" also included such things as a purple fruit gum and a tuba.

When an editor or member of the writing staff left, the magazine would often concoct fanciful stories surrounding their leaving. Matt Bielby was carted off to the funny farm after declaring himself to be God, Andy Ide became a Green Party ambassador, and Andy Hutchinson left to design a skate park at Alton Towers. In actuality, the majority of ex-YS staff went on to work for other magazines, such as Amiga Power.

The final issue of Your Sinclair, September 1993

Reviews

Your Sinclair's reviewing system varied throughout the magazine's life. During the Your Spectrum era, game reviews were confined to the Spectrum Soft section, later called Joystick Jury. Games were reviewed by a panel of reviewers and given a mark out of 10. In practice this was a score out of 9, since no game ever received a perfect 10, on the rationale that a better game could come along at a later date. After the name change to Joystick Jury, games were judged by each individual reviewer to be either a 'hit' or a 'miss' (in the manner of television show Juke Box Jury, after which it was named). The hit and miss system was abandoned with Issue 19, and with the transition to Your Sinclair, the review section was renamed Screen Shots. In Screen Shots, games were still rated out of ten, but they were also given separate ratings for graphics, playability, value for money and addictiveness. They were also now reviewed by individual writers, rather than a panel.

In 1988, Joystick Jury was superseded by Joystick Jugglers, and the familiar cartoons of reviewers were introduced. Screen Shots was removed as a self-contained section in 1989, and reviews began to appear throughout the magazine, generally with the bigger games being reviewed towards the front. Budget games had their own section, Bargain Basement (later replaced with Replay when it was felt that original budget games should be reviewed alongside full price games). The magazine also began using a rating out of 100, rather than ten, when reviewing games. However, this was referred to as a 'degree scale' rather than a percentage scale, with a graphic of a thermometer representing the rating; the higher the rating, the "hotter" the game. Reviewer Jon Pillar embraced both extremes of the review scale, giving Count Duckula 2 a mere 9˚ and Mercenary 99˚. The final change in review style came in late 1992 when the various ratings for addictiveness, graphics, and so forth were replaced by a summary of the game's good and bad points, with an overall mark (now as a percentage) below that.

Back cover of final issue.
"Our work here is done."

Games which were scored at more than 90˚/90%, or 9/10 before the degree scale was introduced, were awarded YS's coveted "Megagame" status, though this was undermined slightly when Duncan MacDonald gave it to his own deliberately bad Sinclair BASIC creation, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator,^[10] in a moment of surreal humour. Reader games were also reviewed for a while in the "Crap Games Corner", many being inspired by Advanced Lawnmower Simulator or being just as deliberately bad. Good reader games sometimes ended up on the covertape.

YS reviewers were often 'interviewed' in a column at first called Joystick Jury (the same as the reviews section in Your Spectrum), then Joystick Jugglers, and finally (when there were fewer games to review and they wanted to introduce the team as a whole, including design staff) The Shed Crew, a reference to the recurring joke that after the move to Future Publishing, their office was now a garden shed. The Jugglers were depicted with caricatures mostly drawn by Nick Davies, although some writers (such as Jon Pillar/Jonathan Nash) drew their own and art editor Andy Ounsted drew most of the latter reviewers. The Juggler caricatures took on something of a life of their own, and in 1990, a game, YS Capers, was given away with the magazine in which you had to shoot the YS crew, depicted in their cartoon forms.

Tipshop

Originally, the tips section of the magazine was called Hack Free Zone, to distinguish it from Hacking Away, which was dedicated to type-in POKEs. Hacking away was written by Chris Wood and "ZZKJ", while Hex Loader was written by Phil South under the pseudonym of Hex Loader. The sections were merged in 1987 to become the Tipshop.

It contained all tips, cheats and complete solutions sent in by readers, and spawned its own book, the YS Tipshop Tiptionary. Dr. Berkmann's Clinic (renamed The YS Clinic With Dr. Hugo Z Hackenbush after Marcus Berkmann left to go freelance), originally set up to provide help for the game Head Over Heels, allowed readers to provide solutions to each other's gaming problems, more often than not solved by Richard Swann. Practical Pokes, hosted mainly by Jon North, was the successor to Hacking Away, and contained both type-in and Multiface POKEs. The Tipshop was hosted variously by Phil South, David McCandless, Jonathan Davies and Linda Barker.

Technical sections

While YS is often thought of as primarily a games magazine, throughout its life it hosted a variety of technical columns, mainly dedicated to programming technique.

Program Pitstop, first hosted by David McCandless, then Jonathan Davies and finally Craig Broadbent, contained type-in programs and was one of the last columns of its kind, a remnant of an era when computer magazines would dedicate entire sections to BASIC program listings.^[11] Most of the programs were in Sinclair BASIC, although some were in hexadecimal machine code, for which a special interpreter, the Hex Loader, was written. It replaced the pull-out section Program Power; the main difference was that Program Pitstop mainly included listings for utility programs and demos (for example, a level editor for games such as Atari's Gauntlet), while Program Power also included games. Program Pitstop also featured contributions from well known programmers, such as the Rainbow Processor by Dominic Robinson, which allowed the Spectrum to display more than two colours per character.^[12]

Spec Tec (Adam Waring) and its descendant Spec Tec Jr (Simon Cooke) were home to readers' technical queries. The introduction to these columns were typically written in the style of a Philip Marlowe monologue, occasionally including ongoing plots.

Other technical columns included Rage Hard, an occasional page which brought news of peripherals and other enhancements for the Spectrum; Steve's Programming Laundrette, in which Steve Anderson took the reader step-by-step through producing a BASIC game; and Simon Hindle's Dial Hard, which helped you connect a Spectrum to the Internet.

Before the magazine's relaunch as Your Sinclair in 1986, Your Spectrum contained a plethora of technical articles, including guides on programming in machine code and Forth, and information on how to upgrade the basic Spectrum set-up to incorporate better sound and more memory.

Letters

From the magazine's inception, letters were answered mainly by the magazine's editor. The letters page contained several subsections, which varied through the magazines' lifetime, but included:

• Small Print – either deliberately short letters, or parts of longer letters taken out of context, most often for comedy value.
• Doodlebugs – readers' cartoons, often based around puns on current Spectrum games (e.g. a cartoon based on the game Midnight Resistance showed a house with the bedroom light on and a speech bubble saying "Not tonight dear, I've got a headache"). Doodlebugs spawned one of YS's occasional comic strips, Ernie The Psychotic Madman, drawn by Phil McCardle.
• Kindly Leave The Stage – readers' jokes, often nonsensical or surreal (an example being Q: Why is an orange orange? A: Because you can't clean a window with a spade), and often met with a gong.
• Wonderful World of Speccy – letters from readers for whom English was not their first language, many from Eastern Europe, where the Spectrum scene was flourishing well into the early 1990s.
• Trainspotters – where readers would send in mistakes they'd noticed in a previous issue of the magazine, in the hopes of convincing the editor to send them a Trainspotter Award. Most of the time, however, the editor found a way out of sending the award, by coming up with convoluted reasons why the 'mistake' wasn't a mistake at all (for example, by insisting there was no such place as the Isle of Man after accidentally omitting it from a map in Issue 50). The Trainspotter caricature was supposedly based on the man pictured on the cover of Issue 1 of Your Spectrum.^[13] As with the Jugglers, this was drawn by Nick Davies. The last ever award was given to Stuart Campbell, a then former writer who had since left, who found a mistake in a reprint of an article that he wrote.
• The Picos – a fictional family created for a series of columns in the letters page. Firstly there was Madame Pico, a psychic and agony aunt who answered readers' problems with "ooh, you poor dear". After her kidnapping, her son Bud Pico, a DIY specialist, took over. His solutions to readers' DIY problems often involved Rice Krispies. After Bud's "death", the baton was passed to cousin Femto Pico, a scientist and nightclub bouncer, and finally, Femto's sister Soya Pico, a vegetarian hippy. Most of the letters to the Picos were fictional.
• Norman Tebbit's Dead Serious Corner (originally Peter Snow's Dead Serious Corner) – one of the last additions to the letters pages, containing, as the name suggests, more serious letters than the rest of the pages. These often dealt with consumer issues, such as the price of games, or declining software support for the Spectrum.

The Star Letter was awarded three full-price Spectrum games. When asked what qualities a star letter possessed, editor Linda Barker answered "A star letter is one that makes the entire Shed crew rock with mirth, or touches their hearts",^[14] although other editors had their own criteria for the type of letter they awarded Star Letter status to.

Like many later computer magazines (such as Zero and Amiga Power) Your Sinclair created a sense of community with its readers through the letters page, and many readers wrote in regularly, becoming almost part of the team themselves. Indeed, several letter writers went on to write for YS in a freelance capacity, including Leigh Loveday and Rich Pelley. Along with Jonathan Davies, Pelley had formerly written for the fanzine Spectacular, and both became regular contributors for the magazine between 1988 and 1993. After YS closed, Davies went on to become editor of Sega Zone, Amiga Power and PC Gamer, while Pelley regularly wrote articles for a number of magazines.

Cover tape

By October 1988, the magazine had committed itself to including a cover tape every month. Content typically included an older full game, and a specially-made single-level demo of a new, high-profile game such as Cybernoid II or Power Drift. Other content included game soundtracks and user-submitted demos. In December 1988, the magazine became the first to include two tapes.^[15]

Online scans and archives

• Archive.org: Your Spectrum Magazine archive - Online archive of Your Spectrum magazine, issues 01-21 (Jan 1984 - Dec 1985).
• Archive.org: Your Sinclair Magazine archive - Online archive of Your Sinclair Magazine, issues 01-94 (January 1986 - September 1993).

Related sites

• The YS Rock 'N' Roll Years – Unofficial site, dedicated to archiving games reviews and feature articles from the magazine.
• Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive – Archive of articles from Your Sinclair's forerunner, Your Spectrum.
• Your Sinclair: A Celebration – Fan-written website detailing both YS and YS-related material.
• YS2/100 – An article written in dictionary form describing aspects of the magazine, written by former editor Jonathan Nash. (archived at archive.org)