Spectrum Computing

R-Tape wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 7:31 pm Can I ask which USB tape player? There's loads out there and I want to make sure I get it right.

I can't really give a recommendation, as mine is an ION Audio Tape Express, which I see from my Amazon history that I bought 14 years ago!

I use a USB tape player and had good results following TMD2003's tips here... https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=122685&#p122685 WAV files saved from Audacity need to be mono, sampled at 44.1 kHz and - this is the crucial bit - 8-bit unsigned. When saving (use File > Export >...

Not "extremely rare". Less common, yes, but plenty around. It's just they haven't left the same "footprint" as their male counterparts. And they also seem less likely to be still be blathering on about things 30+ years later, unlike the blokes.

The black and white photos would seem to match issue 31's cover.


The real person in the photograph would seem to have been the basis of that cover whether she was, or was not, a contributor or even called Hannah Smith.

I'd come to vote for Lords of Chaos, but after noticing it was missing I checked the relevant magazine and it's down as being an (exclusive?) 4th scenario, not included in the main game. So, I'm guessing that's why it doesn't count as a demo.

I'm guessing that The Open Door was originally released in 1987 (not 1988) and it first appeared in compilation 6 in 1 . Is this information correct? Yes, I don't believe Open Door was released anywhere else before it appeared on the 6-in-1, introduction to adventure games, compilation. And the yea...

Is this from the same company that was at the centre of the Vega debacle? No. It's from the company that was formed by some of the people involved in the original Vega project, but it was a separate company they set up to produce other retro console revivals. The act of them setting that company up...

I've been able to copy across various CP/M programs to SAM from a Windows XP machine because SAM ProDOS (CP/M for the SAM) has a utility for reading from FAT formatted disks. http://8bitag.com/info/documents/cpm-to-prodos.txt

For the purposes of this I would probably suggest combining the Dragonstar entries. They're really multiple parts of the same game and when I asked Fergus I seem to remember that he thought the advert that suggests he was selling them separately may have just been badly worded. (They were only ever ...

No, it would not be true to say that DAAD is a Spanish version of the PAW. DAAD was a separate, specially commissioned development system that grew from the PAW, in a similar way to how the PAW itself came from The Quill. DAAD has its own entry in SC. (There *was* a Spanish version of the PAW. But t...

There is some past precedent for a single entry (for both language versions of the later DAAD version) e.g. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/34819/ZX-Spectrum/The_House_on_the_Other_Side_of_the_Storm And examples either way of whether the PAW and DAAD versions could be combined. The argument in...

Spectaculator is still my go-to emulator when it comes to playing and developing games. I must admit I've never experienced any of those issues mentioned in the "cons" section. At the moment, it runs perfectly well under Windows 11 so I'm not sure it needs a new version. Jonathan still res...

https://www.worldofsam.org/products/mgt-utility-tapes

Or more specifically...
https://www.worldofsam.org/products/spectrum-emulator

The tape inlay indicates the files have come from The Guild re-release of the game, yes. (The original release would've likely included the identical files but the existing version preserved is incomplete)

This would be the very first (text?) adventure I've heard about written in Afrikaans, so hopefully it can be found eventually. I've only previously come across games from South African that were written in English.

UnQuill is more for extracting the game's database to a text file. I don't think it will do what people are suggesting it will. (I use UnQuill & UnPAWs all the time) What do you have of the original game? Does it exist on tape? You could make a nice clean version of it by loading the game file b...

The current date on ZXDB for The Plagues of Egypt is incorrect. It's at least as early as 1989, as it was reviewed in the August 1989 issue of Adventure Probe. Plagues is a much bigger (two part) adventure written with the PAW, rather than the Quill as used in Noah.

The licences for games, products & other artistic works such as films based on The Hobbit and those based on The Lord of the Rings are often distinct. Which has caused... and continues to cause... headaches for the companies licencing works and the various Tolkien companies themselves. ;) The li...

We have discussed many of these entries in past threads, such as this one...
viewtopic.php?p=26260

Opens can of worms about whether the "UK" tag on ZXDB covers the Isle of Man etc.

Also on the text adventure front, Mark Walker, who wrote The Amulet of Darath and The Oppressed Land for Zenobi, is from the Isle of Man, iirc.

To be fair, I'd advised you in line with your usual rules. ;) Which I always respect, but don't agree with. White Door was disqualified as it was a non-Tartan type-in in its original Crisis at Christmas form. 1942 Mission wasn't originally at Tartan-published game. The Spy Trilogy slips in, as altho...

It was the early pre-DAAD version of... https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/6183/ZX-Spectrum/Cozumel ...I think? Unpublished at the time? I'll leave that to the Spanish adventurers like Rockersuke to confirm, but from what I read it was what Andres used as a demonstration to present to Dinamic bef...

They were pretty big sellers back in the day and their initial "budget" range was certainly disruptive; making what some companies were charging look extremely expensive. Although the tabloid (and House of Commons) baiting HRH probably gets a lot of the attention, some of the later PAWed t...