https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6489432


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GENERAL NEWS

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The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor
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The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor is an award-winning interactive horror from Stefan Vogt, the acclaimed author of Hibernated & The Curse of Rabenstein.
Take on the role of novelist Thomas King & his wife Cora as they move into
a remote Scottish manor house, just days before Christmas 1986. Seeking inspiration for his next book, Thomas begins to explore the history of Blackwood Manor, only to uncover a dark secret that dates back centuries to
the days of the Great Scottish Witch Hunts.

The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor is a complex interactive fiction piece written
in Infocom's advanced Z-machine format XZIP. The game has three different endings, a bad, a neutral & a good ending, depending on the player's
choices. It is very likely that the player, on a first playthrough, will not reach the good ending, even though it is possible. Reaching the bad or
neutral ending first is part of the experience & helps the player
understanding the true intentions of some of the NPCs & the impact of
decisions made, so they may be reconsidered.

SYSTEMS
The game is available for Commodore 64, Spectrum +3, Spectrum Next, Amstrad
CPC & PCW, Commodore Amiga, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Atari ST, MS-DOS, BBC
Micro, Acorn Electron, Commodore 128, Mega65, MSX 1 & MSX 2, Commodore
Plus/4, SAM Coupé, TRS-80 Model III, TRS-80 Model 4, classic Macintosh and modern PC. For playing the game on a modern machine, a .z5 file is provided, which allows you to run the game in a Z-machine interpreter of choice like Frotz, Lectrote or Fizmo.

PHYSICAL RELEASE
The physical release comes in a box that resembles the original Infocom packaging back from the day. You can order it through my publisher PolyPlay. rtro.de/blackwood

https://8bitgames.itch.io/ghosts


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Niklaus Wirth, Visionary Software Architect, Dies at 89 *******************************************************

Pascal, the programming language he created in the early days of personal computing, offered a simpler alternative to other languages in use at the
time. In 1970, while he was teaching at the Swiss university ETH Zurich,
Dr. Wirth released Pascal. He also built one of the first personal computers and was instrumental in helping a Swiss start-up company (Logitech) commercialize the mouse The Association for Computing Machinery honored
Dr. Wirth in 1984 with the Turing Award.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/niklaus-wirth-dead.html


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COMMODRE FREE REVIEW
Corespace CBM 64
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REQUIREMENTS
The game has been designed for & tested with PAL on various C64 & C64
emulators (e.g. TheC64) your NTSC mileage will vary

Joystick in port 2

As mentioned in the news section this is a new (ish) release for the
Commodore 64, having paid my $2 asking fee (suggested price, you can pay
more if you like & it is nice to support codes on our platform) I
downloaded the game from a secure site & saved the resultant PRG on an sd
card ready to load into my C64.

The game comes with Various cheats already available that can be activated during gameplay, but using them will prevent you from getting a high score:

T: Trainer mode grants infinite lives.
L: Gives you another life.
R: Restarts the current level.
S: Skips the current level.
H: Slows the game to half speed.

BOOTS UP
Loading is quick & the initial title screen looks really good, so I’m
hoping for a rely positive experience from this game having only seen the website, at this point I haven’t watched any video playthroughs, I
originally became hooked on this because it looked so much like the
uridium style of graphics, & that’s where it ends because this is a
shooter plain & simple.

The main load screen has credits & a funky sid tune with some scrolling
text

FAST PACE
Wow don’t expect an easy game here, you need a joystick in port 2 with the usual left right up down fire. The game is very smooth I didn’t notice any glitching or pausing in my play test review. The graphics look great, everything is very smooth & the ship has the right amount of inertia so
when you push left or right it’s a smooth transition, the animation adds to this, so it’s not just a jump left or right & music plays through the game seamlessly. The actual core coding is very professional then. If you touch
the edges & flying over solid buildings you will die, it takes a few
seconds then you loose a life, you then transported to the same place less
one life & can continue. obviously hitting an enemy, bullet or flying into solid objects isn’t recommended but you can collect coins for extra lives.

The game scrolls up the screen at a constant pace & moving your joystick
and ship up, of course speeds up the ship, but the action never ceases it’s
a relentless pace. You will have to really think fast as some of the area
needs careful thought, & isn’t at first easy to figure out how to get
round or though items, some calculations are shooting items to create a
path through, other times its just careful flying, but as I said it’s a
fast game & I seem to have perfected driving into things & dyeing very
quickly

Summary
Fast gameplay & great music & graphics, make this another great
commodore release, although the graphics are shaded & well-drawn, somehow
it seems to lack a 3d depth, it could be because the aliens & ship had no ground shadow, but if this sort of game has you excited you certainly won’t be disappointed.

Commodore Free Score 8/10

Video playthough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-uqijgkWco

download
https://drmortalwombat.itch.io/corescape


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Commodores 264 machine line
By Commodore Free
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There is a lot of confusion on the 264 range of Commodore machines, commonly known as the TED line, lets quickly look at the ending of the product line
and jack Tramiel’s ultimate Departure from Commodore then see if I can clear up some confusion or make things worse:

In 1984, after a heated board meeting on January 13, Tramiel made the
decision to leave Commodore. His resignation was primarily due to
disagreements with Irving Gould, the chairman of Commodore, regarding fundamental principles & how to run the company. Some claim it was also
because Tramiel wanted his sons on the board & they were refused, but
let’s just leave this as “he was upset & left the company he had founded”.

A quote from around the time states that Tramiel felt that if he couldn’t approach his office with a smile & happiness, then ultimately it was time
to step down & wiser words have never been spoken, if the job you do
doesn’t bring you joy then its time to leave or change jobs.

The 264 Series & Timing:
The 264 series was a line of 8-bit home computers that were developed by

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