Touché! My parents aspired to be in the BBC Micro class so I ended up with a BBC B but I lacked the cash to buy me anything to go with it so I use my Dad's Hifi tape deck to copy and load games.

Back on topic, few data points:

Matthew Smith wrote Manic Miner for the Speccy on a Model III Tandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Smith_(games_programme...

In 1987 the Oliver Twins were writing Spectrum games on an Amstrad: http://www.olivertwins.com/history/page/7 - I would think the cross-compiler and cable arrangement would have been pretty common.

Imagine were developing C64 games on something that wasn't a C64: https://youtu.be/ZoDh61sgCOg?t=155 and also a lot of detail about the Speccy specifically: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3314/how-...

There's quite a long discussion about the options available here: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9006/back...