After GrimGent mentioned that the old 'Duelmaster' series had a 'Speccy' (had to google that...) equivalent, I thought I'd see if I could find a version of this (perhaps something playable with an emulator, not that I was expecting much given 80s computer graphics...).

Interestingly, I found here that there had been adaptations of a number of gamebooks:

http://homepages.tesco.net/~parsonsp/html/c64_gamebooks.html

Not just Duelmaster, but also Way of the Tiger, some Fighting Fantasy including Citadel of Chaos and Forest of Doom apparently have appeared on the Commodore 64...

Marginally off-topic, I've also seen a game version of the Dragon Warriors' adventure the Elven Crystals for the Amiga
http://outspaced.fightingfantasy.org/Bio.html

Found this interesting so wondering if anyone has played any of these. Or maybe can recommend an emulator or somesuch for either of these since I assume these count as 'abandonware' by now.

Avenger (and the first Way of the Tiger) was released for Spectrum, as well. As that site mentions, it's one of the better Gauntlet clones from the time, and far superior to Blood Valley.

You may already have found most of the gamebook adaptations, but the mind boggles at how many programs were put out for the C64. I came across what looked like a BASIC adaptation of GDW's En Garde! a while ago.

The general category of "Adventure" games -- from text only to point and click, and "arcade adventure" puzzlers -- is very rich. There are also "Computer RPGs", with ability scores and levels and other D&D-ish features.

The text adventures from Infocom, Level 9, and Magnetic Scrolls are as much worth playing as ever, for those of us who don't need video-game flash. An emulator can make light of disk-access times that would be trying on actual old hardware. The Infocom games, at least, might be playable in modern interpreters.

These beginner resources at the adventure game website Brass Lantern may be helpful.

For 8-bit Commodore machines, VICE is an excellent free emulator. CCS64 is another emulator that seems to be popular, a testament considering that it is not free. Here's a link to the VICE page: http://www.viceteam.org/

The Amiga Kickstart ROMs and Workbench disks are not 'abandonware'. Cloanto's Amiga Forever legally includes them. The Cloanto package is primarily geared to Windows, but the UAE emulator is available for other platforms.

I use old versions of both VICE (X11 version) and UAE (E-UAE version) on a considerably outdated Mac Mini with great satisfaction. Newer versions appear to have even better features, and there are many other programs that I have not been able to try.

DLH's Commodore Archive is a great source for Commodore and Amiga documentation, but little is generally needed for playing games. Kim Lemon's sites
Lemon 64
and
Lemon Amiga
are fine starting points for the retro-gamer.

The ZX Spectrum, Atari 800 and Atari ST (the ST not so much except for playing games) are other old platforms with a fair bit of online and emulation support. (The Apple IIGS and "Classic" MacIntosh look to me like a "second tier", while I would put the TRS-80 and others in a third.)

Often, a game is better on one, whether because it was designed to take advantage of the hardware or because the programmer(s) put in extra effort.

Quote from: Phillip;445681The ZX Spectrum, Atari 800 and Atari ST (the ST not so much except for playing games) are other old platforms with a fair bit of online and emulation support.

For Speccy in particular, a good starting point is World of Spectrum.

World of Spectrum is an awesome "one site for everything"! I especially like the links to magazine articles.

Besides getting a lot of adventures that were cross-platform hits, the Sinclair had some great ones that were rare or unknown elsewhere.

I would love a thread on the more general topic of 8-bit home-computer games, so I guess I should start one.

The game books basically were a makeshift adaptation of the computer adventure game. Their "pick from a menu" format was less a widely appreciated feature than a necessity of the technological limitations of the printed codex.

The digital medium offered much more flexibility. Even a simple two-word parser with a small vocabulary can open up more possible interactions, and Infocom set a much higher standard to which other houses aspired.

The UK 8-bit market generally, perhaps the Spectrum's especially, suffered somewhat from the prevalence of tape systems over the more expensive disk drive. Inclusion of graphics tended to exacerbate the problem, given the very limited storage, data transfer, memory and display resources.

Programmers, however, came up with ingenious solutions. Infocom implemented one of the first "virtual machines" to translate the mainframe system Adventure into the microcomputer Zork trilogy. Level 9 developed compression algorithms to squeeze in more text.

On the Commodore side, a number of Infocom releases take advantage of the 128's 80-column mode. The "gold" versions also include more text than other ones.

Going on to the 16-bit machines, graphics really came to the fore. Sierra's King's Quest and other early releases tended not to take advantage of the Amiga's power, instead porting over poor IBM graphics modes. Lucasfilm's software division really set the new style with Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island, but transitional games such as Maniac Mansion were hits on the Commodore.

On balance, I think there was some warrant to complaints that adventure games were losing some richness in the course of evolving into the graphically impressive point and click format. From some perspectives, there may be so much less bang per byte that even the order-of-magnitude-plus increase in the 16-bit era did not always make up for it.

Analogously with the older issue of tape storage, there was a lack of hard drive support in the Amiga game field. The combination of hard drive and compact disc was a big help for games with complex graphics!

The Amiga also highlighted the possibilities of sampled, rather than purely synthetic, audio. The Super Nintendo console system is another interesting machine, but I am not as familiar with it. I understand that many titles have been adapted to more recent consoles.

In terms of adaptations of gamebooks, the Fighting Fantasy series has been revived of late.  

In addition to reprinting the old series and commissioning a whole new series, they've created iOS apps for a number of the classic titles, like Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Deathtrap Dungeon, and Steve Jackson's Sorcery!  There's also a recently released Kindle version of Warlock, and a DS adaptation of Warlock turned into a fully fledged first-person 3D RPG.

There's also a series of original gamebooks for iOS that have reviewed fairly well.

Thanks guys for the links to VICE and World of Spectrum particularly! Some great stuff.
I found your info. on the evolution of the gaming field interesting Philip but unfortunately don't know enough to make any particularly intelligent comments here.

Oops on the Amiga - I'm thinking of dropping $10 on the Amiga emulator anyway since I found the Elven Crystals site I found years ago and its always nagged at me. (If I have trouble installing them I'll have to go poke my wife for IT support, who will no doubt give me a funny look before going back to playing Dragon Age II).

Sorry about the rambling; I have started another thread on the general topic.

As you may have seen, World of Spectrum has entries for three Lone Wolf games: Flight From the Dark, Fire on the Water, and The Mirror of Death.

The first two largely work like the books, but with the addition of graphics and "real time" combat. Perhaps as a trade-off, the paragraph text has (according to one review) in some cases been greatly cut. The original program packaging, though, included the actual books.

The third does not copy the book format but instead places the Lone Wolf character in a platform/ fighting "arcade adventure".

Here is a list of games at GameBase64 categorized as "Adventure - Selectable Answers" (the sort of format that gamebooks use).

TGA - The Great Adventure is a release last year of a VIC-20 conversion (in English, it appears) of a C64 version of an Italian gamebook written by Alessandro Castellari in 1983. The screen shots look pretty good for any 8-bit machine, and are especially impressive considering the VIC-20's low resolution.

Quote from: Phillip;445876Sorry about the rambling; I have started another thread on the general topic.

That's fine. I'm usually at least somewhat off topic so its probably "payback time". And it was interesting.

I've now gotten VICE running on my system, but the GM recommends I don't play Blood Valley until after the game - fair enough really. Will try one of the others. It turns out he's played the C64 game himself (and had the tape in his garage), unbeknownst to me.