MIA on ebay... ?!

[Robbeasy]

There's an MIA for sale on ebay at the moment..

I feel I should alert people so it can be saved?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/145598378130

'Matthews and Smith Winning Games'

I was gonna bid, but sticking it on here probably means it will go beyond my budget...

[WhatHoSnorkers]

The games from the book! The book is available in PDF form, but that's not the same as having a proper copy of the games. Adjudicator looks intriguing!

[Bolton80]

Another MIA currently on eBay, and the seller even lists it as such!

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373960624536 ... media=COPY

Could someone at least download the artwork to add to the archive before it disappears?

[Robbeasy]

Blimey - second one going for 200 notes.. i'll probably give that a miss

First one - sat at £6 before I posted last night - now sat at £20 and will probably rise.

And to be clear, I have no connection to the sale, other than wanting to keep stuff preserved

Hopefully whoever grabs it will do the right thing

[PROSM]

As you say, hopefully whoever wins the first one will preserve it.

The second one, unfortunately, is likely to just fester in the seller's house, because nobody in their right mind is going to buy it for that much. Unfortunately, while a good portion of people who possess these rarities will share the contents, others get some sort of strange satisfaction out of having the only copy of a rare title, and getting to enjoy it all for themselves. Heaven help them if said item should ever fail or somehow be destroyed.

The Japanese collectors would seem to be the worst for this sort of thing - there was quite a controversy about one trying to erase all traces of a PC game called "Cookie's Bustle" from the Internet, because they wanted no one else to experience or even know of what they had one of the few extant physical copies of. Obviously that person had never heard of the Streisand effect...

[Old-User]

The games from the book! The book is available in PDF form, but that's not the same as having a proper copy of the games. Adjudicator looks intriguing!

I just loved the illustrations of these books when I was younger.
Sadly, many of them were far better at stirring the imagination than the actual games after having typed them...
But there was always one or two that really stood out from the rest.
Maybe Adjudicator is really an interesting piece of coding.

[druellan]

Thanks for the effort! I already downloaded the images in case we can't properly preserve the inlays.

[Bolton80]

One more detail about Super Soccer, it's listed on the database as football management, but the instructions clearly indicate it's not management but rather a normal football game. Might be worth updating?

✓ Reviewed

[lfaria]

I notice that this listing is for
Super Soccer - "Super One Player Version" (maybe id 10283 on the database)
and the database already contains two similar soccer games credited to this same distributor:
Big Match Soccer - "Two Player Game" (id 518 on the database)
Football - "Play The Computer" (id 1816 on the database)
It seems that Wintersoft /Winters Ltd. kept releasing a similar codebase with different names but the same cover art...
All from 1983 for 16Kb
...well, for this price it'll rotten, sadly.

[Pobulous]

It does sound like it's the same game as Football - Play The Computer.
Exactly the same nonsensical instructions

Press a key from b to y, the keys a to i will give progressively longer kicks, other keys give a short kick.

Unless they have a very exotic keyboard, that doesn't make much sense to me!

[druellan]

Yeah, pretty sure it is the same as https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... m/Football but with the name changed, but we don't know if it has some changes internally.

Edit: turns out the z80 on that entry is from another game

[Robbeasy]

Welp - I hope whoever bought that MIA game will hopefully send in all the necessary stuff for preservation...

auction just finished - went for £63 in the end!!

[Andre Leao]

I also bet on the game (to share here and on Planeta Sinclair), but it is too much for a single game (p&p to Portugal + customs would double the price)...