The Acorn Electron is a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer introduced by Acorn Computers Ltd on 25 August 1983. It has 32 kilobytes of RAM, and its ROM includes BBC BASIC v2 along with its operating system.
Amstrad was a British electronics company, founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar at the age of 21. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in April 1980. During the late 1980s, Amstrad had a substantial share of the PC market in the UK. Amstrad was once a FTSE 100 Index constituent but since 2007 is wholly owned by Sky UK. As of 2006, Amstrad's main business was manufacturing Sky UK interactive boxes. In 2010 Sky integrated Amstrad's satellite division as part of Sky so they could make their own set-top boxes in-house.
GEM is an operating environment which was created by Digital Research (DRI) since 1984 for use with the DOS operating system on Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors.
Deluxe Paint, often referred to as DPaint, is a bitmap graphics editor series created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts. The original Deluxe Paint was written for the Commodore Amiga 1000 and released in November 1985. It was eventually ported to other platforms, including an MS-DOS version which became the standard for pixel graphics in video games in the 1990s, the only competitor being Autodesk Animator Pro.
The Quantel Paintbox is a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. Produced by the now-defunct British production equipment manufacturer Quantel, its design emphasized the studio workflow efficiency required for live news production. At a price of about $150,000 per unit, they were used primarily by large TV networks such as NBC, while in the UK, Peter Claridge's company CAL Videographics was the first commercial company to purchase one. Following its initial launch in 1981, the Paintbox revolutionised the production of television graphics.
Knight Lore is a 1984 action-adventure game known for popularising isometric graphics in video games. The game was developed and published by Ultimate Play the Game and written by company founders Chris and Tim Stamper. In Knight Lore, the player character Sabreman has forty days to collect objects throughout a castle and brew a cure to his werewolf curse. Each castle room is depicted in monochrome on its own screen and consists of blocks to climb, obstacles to avoid, and puzzles to solve.
Underwurlde is a 1984 action-adventure platform video game in the Sabreman series by Ultimate Play the Game for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. The player controls the adventurer Sabreman as he jumps between platforms in a castle and its caverns to find an escape past the exit guardians. Underwurlde features about 600 flip screen areas. Unlike other games of its time, Sabreman is not injured when touched by enemies and is instead knocked backwards. Underwurlde is the second game in the series, between Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore, and released alongside the latter for the ZX Spectrum during Christmas in 1984. Another developer, Firebird, ported the game to the Commodore 64 the next year.
The Pawn is an interactive fiction game for the Sinclair QL written by Rob Steggles of Magnetic Scrolls and published by Rainbird in 1985. In 1986, graphics were added and the game was released for additional home computers.
Quantel was a company based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1973 that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production and motion picture industries. They were headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire.
Winter Games is a sports video game developed by Epyx, based on sports featured in the Winter Olympic Games.
"You Might Think" is a song by American rock band the Cars from their fifth studio album, Heartbeat City (1984). The track was written by Ric Ocasek and produced by Mutt Lange and the Cars, with Ocasek also providing the lead vocals.
Bruce Lee is a video game designed by Ron J. Fortier, with graphics by Kelly Day and music by John A. Fitzpatrick. It was originally developed for the Atari 8-bit family and published in 1984 by Datasoft, along with ports for the Apple II and Commodore 64. Bruce Lee is a platform game, in which the player controls Bruce Lee. A second player controls either Yamo, or alternates with player one for control of Bruce Lee.
Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax is a video game first published in 1988 for various home computers. It was also released as Axe of Rage in North America. The game is the sequel to Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, which was published in 1987. In Barbarian II, the player controls a princess or barbarian character, exploring the game world to locate and defeat an evil wizard. The game's plot is an extension of its predecessor, although the gameplay is different. While the first game offers two players the opportunity for virtual head-to-head combat, the second is solely a single-player adventure with fewer fighting moves.
Hercules is a platform video game written by Steve Bak for the Commodore 64 and published by Interdisc in 1984. It was reissued in 1986 by Alpha Omega and ported to the Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Commodore 16, Plus/4, and ZX Spectrum. Alpha Omega changed its name to The Power House shortly after publishing the game.
Oric was the name used by UK-based Tangerine Computer Systems for a series of 6502-based home computers sold in the 1980s, primarily in Europe.
OCP Art Studio or Art Studio was a popular bitmap graphics editor released in 1985, created by Oxford Computer Publishing and written by James Hutchby.
Ace is a combat flight simulator video game published for the Commodore 64, VIC-20, and Plus/4 in 1985 by Cascade Games. It was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Amiga, and ZX Spectrum.
Robin of Sherwood: The Touchstones of Rhiannon is a 1985 video game by Adventure International, created as a TV tie-in to the television series Robin of Sherwood. It was released on the ZX Spectrum computer.
The Amstrad CPC character set the character set used in the Amstrad CPC series of 8-bit personal computers when running BASIC. This character set existed in the built-in "lower" ROM chip. It is based on ASCII-1967, with the exception of character 0x5E which is the up arrow instead of the circumflex, as it is in ASCII-1963, a feature shared with other character sets of the time. Apart from the standard printable ASCII range (0x20-0x7e), it is completely different from the Amstrad CP/M Plus character set. The BASIC character set had symbols of particular use in games and home computing, while the CP/M Plus character reflected the International and Business flavor of the CP/M Plus environment. This character set is represented in Unicode as of the March 2020 release of Unicode 13.0, which added symbols for legacy computing.
