Thanks to Patrick Furlong, the recently found Steve Ralph games (which were likely homebrew titles) have been almost been fully preserved for the Amstrad CPC and you can now download the progress so far to check out for yourself. The download consists of the following titles:
- Lost Legacy (Needs further preservation of main adventure or a file)
- Pools Winner
- Haunted House
- Captain Ralph’s Island
With Lost Legacy, it seems that it tries to load an extra segment or the main adventure, though listing the BASIC code seems to suggest that the game is present anyway. Just needs tidying up the code to access by the looks of it, but could be wrong. If you have any more joy, please let us know.
Inlay scans and tape backups will be coming soon and we will update this post once available. But for now, enjoy a look at some neat homebrew titles which would have been great to have seen released back in the day to a wider audience.
With a huge thank you to Patrick Furlong for his preservation work!
Download
Gallery
So, as expected, Haunted House seems to be one of the type-ins from Usborne’s Write Your Own Adventure Programs.
Ah interesting! Do you think the others might be based off of it too?
I think they use the same basic engine as outlined in the book, but they may well be more of his own work. Legacy seems familiar – but it does use a pretty common premise, so maybe that’s why it is giving me déjà vu.
There’s no evidence [yet] to suggest these were distributed widely, even on a homebrew scale. I’m imagining Ralph may have produced the cassettes for the amusement of himself and a small group of friends. Perhaps he’ll stumble across these posts and let us know more details.
The community spends quite a lot of time trying to unentangle the histories and provenance for all these BASIC adventures. Games like Haunted House, which appeared as type-ins in books and magazines, were often ported to other platforms and appeared elsewhere without any sort of credit to the original source material. [For example, Haunted House became Haunted Manor when it appeared on VicTape Computing, in a modified & expanded form]