8bitAG.com/info - British Text Adventure History & Resources

Interviews and profiles of text adventure authors:

• Profile - Tom Frost / Tartan Software

• An interview with Zodiac Software's Andrew Lowe

• An interview with Pelagon Software's Gary Power

• An interview with The Elven Adventurers' Jason Nicholls

• The Adventure Games of Jim MacBrayne

• Profile - Jack Lockerby & River Software

• Harvey Lodder & the Quest for the Golden Eggcup

• The Secret Games of St. Bride's (Silverwolf, The White Feather Cloak, & The Dogboy)

• Edmund J. Spicer's Adventures in Amstrad PD

• John Wilson - Zenobi Software... In His Own Words

• Martin Freemantle and Dream World Adventures

• An interview with Jonathan Scott

Early British text adventures:

• Adventure II An early British extended version of the mainframe game [1978/1979]

• Games Workshop's Adventure An early British text adventure? [July 1980 - ]

• Galactic Hitchhiker A very early British home computer text adventure for UK101! [October 1980 - ]

• Catacombs One of the earliest British home computer text adventures [March 1981 - ]

• Molimerx's Mysterious Adventures The early games by Brian Howarth [May 1981 - ]

• Syrtis Adventure An early British home computer port of the mainframe game Adventure [May 1981 - ]

• Hopesoft Early UK text adventures for the Atom and BBC Micro [July/August 1981? - ]

• Artic Adventures Early mentions & advertisements for their ZX80 and ZX81 adventures [August 1981 - ]

• Weird Wood Weird Wood (1981) and Weird Wood II (1985 & 2020)

• Early Level 9 Advertising The early Nascom days of Level 9 [October 1981 -]

• Level 9 16K Adventures References to the lost 16K versions of Level 9 games [April 1982 - ]

• Curse of the Seven Faces One of the earliest British adventures to feature ramsave?

Information about homegrown text adventure software & software companies:

• UK Homegrown Text Adventure Companies

• The Adventure Workshop

• (Temporary) Adventure Probe Archive & Index (1986 - 1988, 1990 - 1997, & 2000) (PDF)

Other material/research:

• The Personal Computer World Show Adventurers' Night Out 1987
  

Adventure Writing Resources

The Quill & AdventureWriter Resources:

• The Quill & AdventureWriter Reference Document version 1.0 (October 2020)

• The Quill (ZX Spectrum) Serial C - Supplement (scan) / The Quill (ZX) Microdrive Notes (scan)

• The Fix by Kelsoft, re-typed instruction sheet

Professional Adventure Writer (PAWs) Resources:

• Mark Cantrell's Process One, for PAWs Programmers

• PAWs Technical Manual - Index of Condacts (Useful index for Spectrum & CP/M versions)

• PAWs Flags - Quick Reference (Single A4 Page)

• PAWs A16 Supplement / PAWs +3 Supplement (scans of Gilsoft PAWs supplements)

• PAWs Microdrive Supplement / PAWs PTM Microdrive Notes / Zipped (Courtesy of Chris Dymond)

Converting ZX Spectrum PAWed games to PAWs CP/M and DAAD:

• A guide to porting a ZX Spectrum PAWed text adventure to the Amstrad CPC & PCW

• Differences between the ZX Spectrum & CP/M versions of the Professional Adventure Writing System

• Pre-Flight Checklist for converting PAWs text adventures to DAAD (via ANTUR) (PDF)

• Basic Tweaks for PAWs Games on DAAD (via ANTUR) (PDF) **draft** updated 5/4/19

• Notes on converting ZX Spectrum PAWs games to DAAD

Other Resources:

• Converting Adventuron games to the Spectrum & Amstrad using inPAWS (Note: This document is now out of date as there is an automatic converter for Adventuron, but it might still be useful as a inPAWs guide)

• Notes on getting Amstrad CP/M .com files onto Sam Coupe disks for use with ProDOS

Other Research / Research in progress / Research notes & documents...

• Snippets Interesting advertising and games for further investigation

• Adventure 10 UK publisher of games for the UK101