Annali da Samarcanda

Alberto Marnetto’s Notebook

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Ladies and gentlemen,

I am glad to present you the English edition of Travel Through Time in Detail, the book where the authors of one of the best retrogames for the ZX Spectrum reveal the tricks, techniques, design decisions and artistic choices behind their work.

You can download the book by clicking on the cover image. You can also get the original version in Russian on the website of Zosya Entertainment, or read further to understand what is this all about.

This translation appears with permission of Manu and Kit. I thank them for allowing me to share it and for creating such beautiful games.

The Spectrum

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum (wikipage) is a family of 8-bit home computers, designed by the visionary Clive Sinclair and first released in 1982. It’s hard to do it justice in few lines and most people reading this probably know it already. For the others, let us just say that it was a cheap, coloful machine on which a lot of cheap, colorful games were developed, and whose built-in BASIC interpreter was the first programming experience for a generation of future developers in Europe – not only in the “usual” France and Germany, but literally from the Atlantic to the Urals.

The hardware (a 48K variant, photo credit Bill Bertram) and the software (Sabre Wulf). Ironically, my father’s exemplar could only show grayscale due to a hardware failure, so I was never able to enjoy the flashy palette.

Like its competitors, the Spectrum was not able to resist the rising tide of IBM PC compatibles and dedicated game consoles. Sinclair discontinued the product in 1992 and the related software production quickly collapsed as developers moved on to newer and shinier products.

However, just like it happened to vinyls, as time passed the Spectrum was gradually promoted from “obsolete” to “classic”: maybe people who played with this simple machine in their youth started to feel nostalgic for a time before DLCs and lootboxes, maybe software engineers who first cut their teeth as developers on the simple BASIC or the tricky Z80 assembly wanted to relive their youth again, maybe writing games for constrained platforms is becoming a fashionable hobby, and the Spectrum has a flair that the PICO-8 cannot yet offer… Whatever the reason, people started again to pay interest to this machine and produce new software. We are far from the heyday of the early Eighties, but the “new wave” of retrogames created in the last decade does show up in the release numbers:

ZX Spectrum releases by year. Source: ZXDB.

Nowadays, the scene around the Spectrum (“Speccy” for the friends) is small but very lively, and stretches over many countries and languages. Some examples:

• The forums of Spectrum Computing and World of Spectrum feature dozens of new posts every day, and their game databases also see a steady influx of new creations. Worth noting also the site ZX-Art for a more visual/demoscene-oriented approach.
• Various blogs and sites like Planeta Sinclair regularly publish updates with the latest news.
• There is a very participated Discord server.
• The Spectrum subreddit offers new entries every day.
• Channels like El Spectrumero and Sinc LAIR produce a wealth of video content.
• A game competition is currently ongoing and others are planned.
• Books are being published for both nostalgic gamers and apprentice game developers.
• Modern remakes of the original hardware are available, like the ZX Spectrum Next and “The Spectrum”.

Zosya Entertainment

Among the many creators who kept and are keeping the flame of Spectrum computing alive, the authors known as “Manu and Kit” surely stand out. They have been known under various aliases in the past years; in particular, starting from 2019, they published under the company name “Zosya Entertainment”. Zosya released a series of racing and shooter games featuring graphics and gameplay apparently impossibile with the limited hardware of the ZX, and capable of stunning whoever remembers how the original titles of the Eighties looked like. The group won the Yandex Retro Games Battle competition in 2019 and 2023 and got both silver and bronze in 2025, as well as winning the 2021 and 2023 Game of the Year awards organized by the Planeta Sinclair blog and the LOAD ZX Museum.

The game Travel Though Time Volume 1: Northern Lights, released in 2021, is possibly the most remarkable of Manu & Kit’s creations. It’s the title that got them the 2021 GOTY prize, and received a perfect 10 in the review by Planeta Sinclair. Moreover, it was also the authors’ first demonstration of their new engine for racing games, which they would later employ in other well-received titles like Rubinho Cucaracha and Travel Unlimited.

Travel Through Time was introduced by a trailer illustrating the high production values behind the work, and showing the incredible effects that the Manu and Kit had managed to pack in the game. The entire code, assets, and working memory fits in 128 KB of RAM and is run by a 3.5 Mhz CPU.

For some years, Zosya managed the contact with its public via the group’s frontwoman, Natasha Zotova. All games were distributed for free on their website, where people could also buy physical editions with a number of goodies, for a price that barely covered the production costs. Travel Through Time was no exception, and its boxed edition, which included the beautiful folk soundtrack composed by the band Tiurula, went sold out in a matter of months.

The war in Ukraine put an end to most of this. In February 2022 the web shop closed its sales to Western countries, and instead of joyful social media posts annoucing incoming new games and planned ones, the group put out an elegiac announcement stating that they would abandon or freeze all projects under development. In the following years, new titles have come out and with good success, but they have been presented in a subdued manner. Gone are the days of trailers and social media posts: now the new creations by Manu and Kit just appear in this or that list of participants to some software competition, usually scoring high marks, and can be downloaded from there or from the usual ZX game databases.

The Zosya site continued for some times to sell to the domestic Russian market, but in 2024 it shut down, leaving only a bare “closed down” homepage. And it has stayed like that till nowadays, but in November 2025 a small addition was made to the page: a download link for a behind-the-scenes book with file name “TTT_in_detail.pdf”.

The book

In their book, Путешестние Сквозь Время в Деталих, Manu and Kit disclose a wealth of facts and techniques behind the production of Travel Though Time, its graphic engine and the following titles based on it. It is extremely rare that a group of expert hackers reveals their secrets of the trade, but here that’s exactly what happens, and while no source code is published the amount of information made available is incredibly generous. What’s more, the book is not a “testament” marking the end of the activity, as the authors reveal to be still working on the Volume 2 of the series.

While quite technical and mostly aimed to people with some experience in programming and 2D graphics, the book does not require deep knowledge of assembly and low-level architecture of 8-bit computers. For a layman like me it was very interesting to find out how much of the engine design consists of “smoke and mirror” effects to make the player perceive things that, due to the hardware limitations, cannot be really represented properly. And where pixels really must be drawn, a lot of skill is needed to do so efficiently. To make just one example, the engine applies different treatments to entities that conceptually should be similar (e.g. the player’s car uses different rendering algorithms and storage formats than the opponents’).

Not all chapters are dedicated to the graphic engine: many sections deal with topics such as the auxiliary tools used to create and pack the game assets (sprites, fonts and dialogues), the production of the complementary art like the soundtrack and the poster, considerations around gameplay, some fine details of the cutscenes. The whole book is a very pleasant read for whoever played the game and/or appreciates postmortems of software products.

The content also includes some “road not taken” (in this case, literally), and teasers about future projects.

As the original title implies, the book was originally published in Russian language and no English version was provided. I loved the game – and its soundtrack – and was excited to read a post-mortem about it, so I immediately started to feed page after page in an online translator. However, not everyone would have the time and patience to do that: without a full translation, the book would miss out on a big part of potential audience. So I decided to create a full English version as pdf and share it.

I was unable to find a tool that could translate the full document at once1, I did not have access to the source code of the book, and my knowledge of Russian is extremely limited – just the faint leftovers of some months spent learning the language during the COVID pandemic. Hence, I tried to do the best possible job using the crude tools at my disposal, with the awareness that the end result is far from ideal. I edited the original pdf with LibreOffice Draw, replacing the Russian text with the English equivalent but keeping the position of the sections intact (hence the irregular white space between them) since reflowing the text was not practical.

For the translation itself, I fed each paragraph into two online translators and chose the output that I deemed the better, sometimes combining fragments of both and sometimes rewriting parts based on my own understanding. During the final days (after I had exhausted my DeepL allowance) I resorted to ChatGPT, which is very good at this kind of tasks but would have further slowed down the process if I had used it for the whole content. In some occasions my tiny Russian knowledge was of help, e.g. prompting me to replace all instances of the word “machine” with “car”.

In general, Russian and English do not match well; I had some doubts on whether to keep some “filler words” of the source material (а вот, ну), which automatic translators are usually happy to ignore, or how to render the very first sentence of the book at an appropriate level of strength. In the end, this is not poetry and I am confident that most of the work is understandable, even if some fine points might have been lost in translation.

Manu and Kit read a early draft of the manuscript and helped to correct the most blatant errors. Any mistake still present in the English edition is my fault2 and I’ll be happy to accept typo fixes and other improvement proposals.

So, is reading this book worth your while? I guess it’s up to you to decide. Playing Travel Though Time is more entertaining than reading about it, and for your professional life learning how to create games in Unity is probably more helpful than discovering techniques devised for 40-year-old machines. With that said, I really enjoyed reading and translating this book, and I am sure that most of my blog’s audience are exactly the kind of people that could feel the same. Here, let me put another download link for your convenience…

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Later, another Spectrum fan managed to get such kind of full-text translation. The result was mostly usable but not pretty, and I decided that this book was worth the effort of a more meticulous process. ↩ 1.

Probably. ↩

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