Date   : Sat, 29 Jul 2000 04:23:29 +0200
From   : "Mark de Weger" <mark.deweger@...>
Subject: Alive again

Hi all,

It's been long time no write, but I regained my interest in the BBC.

Hope y'all are doing fine.

Inspired by all the emulator front-ends on the Web, I wrote a front-end for
BBC emulators, BeebEF. Hopefully you can download it from TBL! soon. Enjoy
it.

Now I had this nice frontend program, I of course had to set it up with all
my favourite BBC programs. So I downloaded all BBC programs I could find
from the Web, and set up many of them for use with BeebEF (which took me a
few weeks...). One way or another I could get most programs to work.
However, a few don't work or I have other questions about them. Any help is
appreciated.

* Who's got a working copy of Hampstead (adventure game by Melbourne House)?
The version from TBL! (which has spread to other places on the Web) doesn't
work.

* Who's got a working copy of Nightshade (by Ultimate)? Again, the versions
on the Web don't work.

* The copy of JetBoat (by Software Invasion) I found on TBL! has a weird
problem: the boat starts spinning clockwise right from the start. This can
be corrected by pressing the 'turn anti-clockwise' (or. in normal English,
turn left) button, which will make the boat go straight. However, it is
impossible to turn right. This happens both on PCBBC and BeebEm. Is this the
fault of the emulators or is the copy of JetBoat faulty?

* There is a version of The Hobbit (adventure game by Melbourne House) at
TBL! that's supposed to have graphics. It comes on three disks: a game disk,
a picture disk and a save game disk. When you run the program from the game
disk, it asks you if you want pictures. If you answer yes, it prompts you to
'insert' the picture disk. Indeed the program only continues when you
'insert' the picture disk. However... there's no pictures (at least not in
the first 15 minutes I played the game). If you look at the picture disk...
it's empty (or it's got the pictures cleverly encoded, so that the catalogue
seems empty). So my question is: where's the pictures?

Finally, I recall playing two games on my old Beeb which I have not been
able to find on the web. Does anyone know which they are?

* A game much like 'Airlift' by Superior. You fly around in a helicopter,
trying to pick up soldiers on the ground. This task is made more difficult
by tanks shooting at you while you're on the ground (and possibly by
mountains on which you cannot land). The soldiers come from houses that are
shot by the tanks.

* A game like the arcade game 'Moon Patrol'. You ride in a buggy on the
moon, shooting UFO's and rocks, and jumping over holes. The UFO's shoot
back. There's a large number of games like this for the Beeb, but I haven't
found the one yet I'm looking for. The ones I've found are: BMX on the Moon
(Superior), Spaceman Sid (English), Dune Riders (Micro Power) and a game
that's so horrible I forgot both its name and its publisher. Who knows the
missing one?

Cheers everyyone & thanxalot,
Mark.