Software to Download - Introduction
This section contains some of the old Cowl Systems software. This is the original site for distribution of these, so if you find them elsewhere they were copied from here. (which is permitted - see below)
The Legal Bit
The Cowl Systems games may be distributed and copied freely on the Internet and elsewhere without specific permission PROVIDED THAT THEY ARE NOT MODIFIED OR ALTERED IN ANY WAY.
You may NOT charge for downloading or providing these files. CD-ROM compilations may include these files, as long as the entire compilation contains more than 300 distinctly different files and sells for less than £10 in total.
In other words, you can use these files, but don't try to make any money from them.
A link to this website would also be appreciated, but is not compulsory. Please link to http://www.cryptacet.com/spectrum/
Other Legal Gubbins
Amstrad have kindly allowed distribution of the Spectrum ROMs, so emulating the Spectrum is legal (unlike most other systems of the era).
Note that ROMs in this case refers to the chips originally built into the Spectrum which contained the operating system for the Spectrum (BASIC interpreter, cassette loading routines, and plenty more besides). It does NOT refer to any games or other programs for the Spectrum, because most Spectrum software was published on audio cassette.
(The word Spectrum is used a lot there!)
A few titles were published on ROM cartridge but this never really caught on, as for one thing you had to purchase the optional Interface II, and for another, the carts themselves cost more than the cassette versions.
How did we get here?
Cowl Systems was a name used by me during the late 1980s and early 1990s for various computer related items. Later, there was a Cowl Innovations which used the cowl.co.uk domain. This changed to Cowl Limited in 1999, and later still that was closed permanently. Then for a while, nothing happened. Flameport Enterprises is the replacement and incorporates anything worth keeping from all of the old stuff. More unwanted history lessons here (links to another site).
As of January 2012, this website is no longer updated (and actually hasn't been updated for years before that). Links to sites that don't exist have been removed, such as the ZX32 website which was deleted along with the rest of Geocities.