"The greatest achievement in the history of home computing..." is how Bug Byte describes it. What can it be: colour on a ZX81? A Commodore machine compatible with one of its predecessors? Put the trumpets away, it's merely a program conversion - Twin Kingdom Valley is now available on the Spectrum, with locations described in the halting tones of the Currah Speech unit.

The game will be in the shops by the middle of this month, priced at £7.95. To play "rock's first adventure game" Aural Quest you'll have to buy a Stranglers album, but you don't need to play that. Aural Quest will come with every copy of Aural Sculpture. The Inferno, from Richard Shepherd Software (06286 63531), is a graphics adventure based on a long poem by some Italian geezer. It costs £6.50. PSS (0203 667556) has unleashed Frank N Stein for £5.95.

Upper Gumtree is another Richard Shepherd offering, not based on a painting by Rolf Harris; it's an adventure set in a sleepy English village. The launch date is late September, the price £9.95 (£12.95 on disk). Creative Sparks (0252 543333) is releasing Danger Mouse In Double Trouble. The plot is roughly that you help secret agent Danger Mouse save the world - a snip for the world at £6.95.

Hewson Consultants (0273 693640) is joining forces with Longman to produce an exercise planning program called Shaping Up. At last, a use for those slimline disk drives you've been hanging on to.

As a sequel to its highly-praised action-packed Stock Control, Kemp has released Purchase Ledger (incorporating nominal analysis). The program has space for 180 creditor accounts and 250 nominal accounts. It can be used with either cassette or Microdrive and costs £24.95.

Peachtree Software (0628 32711) hopes to release MacLedger to follow MacCash in October in its MacAccounting series. MacPeachtree will charge £375 for the pair.

From the jolly blue giant itself comes news of three software packages for the PC: Multiplan 1.1 is a version with hard disk support as standard and extended memory, for £159 plus VAT; Pertmaster 1000 and 2500 are upgrades of the original Pertmaster, and they cost £646 and £845 respectively; and the ExecuVision Graphics Libraries store images on diskette for £63 to £69, again excluding VAT.

Over 150 micros, says Tectonics (0638 669106), can run its turnkey systems covering accounting functions from a database with various frills. Sagesoft (091-284 7077) is more specific: its Payroll program will run on CP/M and MSDOS systems at a cost of £195.

Cobol specialist Ryan-McFarland (0992 24981) has released version 2.0 of its RM/Cobol for machines running CP/M-86 and MP/M-86 - a prime feature is its cross-compiling facility, whereby the object code produced will run in any RM/Cobol runtime environment. Microft Technology (01-352 7876) is offering Menugen, a menu generator that will also run on MSDOS systems. It costs £34.50.

And PCDOS and compatible systems can now host UCSD Pascal, supplied by TDI (0272 742796). The company also supplies DOSFiler, a utility to let you read and write files interchangeably under MSDOS and the p-System.