Spectrum Computing

I've quickly checked the first game (Mission X) and the databases for both versions attributed to H&D are identical. I'd imagine it'll be the same for the other three but I will verify at a later point.

This is the matching ZXDB entry, so I think it should be identical - https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/0013362 I will have a check though, later. Walter went on to release the games himself, where iirc he made various tweaks. Those versions later went on to be republished by GI Games/Zenobi. The...

Serious comment: I don't think many of these games got a lot of attention, so I wonder how meaningfully people can vote. Perhaps not from people who frequent these forums, but 8th Day were a big disrupter of the adventure market back in the day and they're probably one of the bigger "professio...

Skelvullyn Twine probably should be on the list as well. At the moment, there isn't (as far as I know) any evidence Peter himself sold any copies prior to 8th Day releasing the game. All the reviews we have are for the 8th Day version.

It wasn't bundled with the Quill, but there was a Characters pack from Gilsoft which had a lot of the fonts you'll see commonly used in homegrown adventures. The font pack was also released in an earlier form by Kevin Maddocks (Sigmasoft/King) and many of the same fonts were later licensed and bundl...

It's not an already known game.

It was produced with the earlier version of the Quill by the looks of things. Feels like unpolished homebrew... I think the author probably ran out of space as a huge chunk of memory is take up by those location descriptions.

There would need to be more evidence that the RM Software came before the printed version. A line in a listing isn't really enough, given especially that the RM version has always looked like it improves on the original and Alan would've submitted his listing at least as early as June 1984 anyway. (...

For some time now, I have noticed that some old games, when they are brought to Itch.io, are considered (even by Planeta Sinclair) as new releases. But in reality they are not. If they're only just being put onto itch.io then I'm sure Planeta Sinclair is still providing a useful service, highlighti...

Nadolig LLawen! Merry Christmas!

Best of all, on a section about games piracy, the television presenter says: "It's not a crime because unlike video movies there's no copyright on programs and games" . Errrrrm... that's not aged well! That would've been true in one sense that the Copyright Design & Patents Act of 198...

The Five Doctors is a text adventure that brazenly channels the 1983 TV Special of the same name. So that's yer first five Doctors covered... https://www.spectrumcomputing.co.uk/SCRtoImage.php?SCR=pub/sinclair/screens/load/f/scr/FiveDoctorsThe.scr&border=0 The Five Doctors is quite cool in that...

Yeah, I tend to use the Flax Cottage ones as they are quite easily browsable. The versions on the site aren't searchable though, and I'm not sure all the issues are on archive.org, so these new OCRed versions would be potentially be very useful. Computing Today has been invaluable for research into ...

I'd always grabbed them from Flaxcottage in the past...
https://www.flaxcottage.com/ComputingToday/default.asp

(That site is also great for Games Computing, but the February 1985 issue of is still unarchived anywhere as far as I know)

can't delete this now because the GIVE MEAT TO DOG text adventure man did a post and deleted it. Let's introduce him to Inform 7 so he can write a huge sprawling open-world adventure where you can give 80 types of sausage to 70 breeds of dog. p.s. TROWEL is in SHED but you have to examine it twice ...

There was a 29 year gap between John Wilson's Behind Closed Doors 3 and his Behind Closed Doors 7 on the Spectrum. (Although someone else wrote a sequel in 1994 and BCD 5 and BCD 6 were Twine games in 2011/12.) I guess John did sequels to 1989's From Out of the Dark Night Sky in 2019 and 2020. And t...

The current entry
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... rum/Erinia

Our computers were family ones so everyone played on them. Horace Goes Skiing was an early family favourite on the Spectrum. My dad played just as much of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Valhalla as I ever did. He probably dad more patience than I did for typing in various programs; including ...

Wall_Axe wrote: ↑Sun Nov 26, 2023 4:32 pm Wasn't there a knight orc game?

Yes, but it was published by Rainbird as part of their short-lived publishing deal with that label. These are just the Level 9 self-published titles.

Yes and no.

It is the incorrect release date but the actual release date for this newer version should be January 2023, I believe.

(January 14th is listed on the game's official page)
https://taskmastersoftware.itch.io/the- ... re-release

But @EdToo can advise if that's wrong anyway.

Seems to be based on (and include images from) the 1946 Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. (The film itself is public domain now)

From a game/database perspective they're identical. The "evaluation version" just has a pre-loader with copyright information etc. before the main Quill loader. It's not a demo. The game is fully completable... https://solutionarchive.com/file/id%2C24797/ https://solutionarchive.com/file/i...

There have been some successful Kickstarters by ex-Spectrum programmers; for games on modern platforms, though.

For example Julian Gollop did a Chaos-related game for the PC.

Is this true? I hadn't heard it before. At a time when Spectrum sales were probably declining, it would seem like an odd decision to exclude the largest portion of the Spectrum market. There may have been more 48K machines out in the wild, but I guess it was 128K (+2, +3 etc) that would've been the...

Yes, it's a screenshot from a magazine scan.
https://archive.org/details/Electronic- ... 2/mode/1up

The game is currently lost.

See this thread?
viewtopic.php?p=83476

Although a fair few of those are now defunct; so worth revisiting the topic.