The problem with rumours is that they are often a little unreliable. However, when something on headed notepaper "appears" it adds a little credibility. Acornsoft have started sending dealers advance information of their new products. This is a great improvement on the old situation of dealers not knowing what was on the way until they read advertisements, now they have a chance to order products ready for demand. I just hope that the time delay between my writing and your reading does not make it old news.

The first game on the list is Gateway To Karos. 9.95 cassette-based adventure game by Derek Haslam. With a particularly inventive scenario this looks to be one of the better adventures, the 'help' envelope may well be a necessity. Meteor Mission is a version of lunar rescue. The arcade version was written to use the same basic machine as space invaders allowing arcade owners to upgrade the game by just changing chips. The hardware limitations resulted in a slightly odd two-stage game. Home micros are more flexible and this is not the ideal choice for conversion to the Beeb. The game is very difficult due to the addition of meteors which fly around the screen even on the early sheets. Written by Walter Mansell it is not totally faithful to the original. This will be available on tape and 40/80 track disk.

Acornsoft's computer versions of board games are excellent. Their entry in to the original strategy game market is equally professional. Drogna, by Patrick Dowling, is based on the game from the BBC Adventure Game television programme. In a two player only game you have to move around a special mozaic grid to retrieve diamonds while dodging your opponent. The treasure can be stolen to completely change the course of the game. This game takes a very long time to play and is very absorbing.

Nick Reeves has written a game which is bound to be copied by other software houses. We first mentioned it a few months ago. It has now been renamed from Swarm to Tetrapod but the game itself has not changed, the new name being much more appropriate for the lizards which chase you. The play surface is covered in candy-striped pods. You control a spaceship (no credibility is not a pre-requisite of arcade games), which you have to defend from killer bees, red devils and poison orbs. The lizards are stupid and aggressive acting as both a friend and foe. When you shoot a pod a reptiles hatches and heads for the nearest denzien of the arena, be it you or your enemy. On making contact, it explodes.

This belongs to the just-one-more-game school of computer software. Great fun. Another of the games we have mentioned before will be available soon. This is Volcano. A bit like a sideways lunar lander, you have to fly your helicopter over a violently erupting volcano, rescue sightseers and fly back to base. You can shoot or dodge boulders for points, but time is of the essence. As the molten lava runs down the volcano's side it engulfs the tourists who turninto ghosts to haunt you. Once rescued, the little men hold on to the chopper's skids to be ferried back to safety. They are not very good at holding and tend to fall into the crater on the return trip.

Paul Fellows has written S-Pascal. A shrunken educational Pascal with a detailed manual. This might be useful for writing games but I doubt that Games Computing will review it.

Spooky Manor sounds like Pac-thingy meets the adventure game. It is an educational adventure game designed for use with Quinkey (nee Microwriter) keyboards so that four people can play at once. The qwerty keyboard can also be used. All the above run on the BBC.

The Electron is not neglected:- Hopper has been beefed up to run on the Acornlett. This game is believed to have been written in GOAL, Acorn's in-house games writing language which makes games writing much faster but causes the game to run slower. This has probably been tweaked extensively to bring it up to Acornsoft's standards.

Free Fall is a game which everyone admires but few people understand. You float about in a hi-res spaceship fending off funny nasties.

Sphinx Adventure is a pretty standard, if rather devilish text-only adventure. Arcadians is a Beeb version by Orlando (now Aarvaark Software and author of Zalaga) This is an Electron Galaxians. Very close to the arcade machine. Now for real rumours.

Acornsoft's Tim Dobson told me that he is working on a super realtime 3D maze game which you chase and are chased down corridors. This is a fair way from release so don't expect your dealer to know about it (unless he reads Games Computing)! Careless talk causes embarassment. At the Z80 second processor launch one of the Acorn men was heard to remark that all the software worked with the ADFS. This stands for Advanced Disc Filing System. Acorn have taken a lot of stick for the original DFS. Lots of people have produced "better" systems and most disk owners I know have bought the Disc Doctor ROM from Computer Concepts to make using the DFS easier. Chip shortages have affected everyone but the Acorn disk controller chip has been the worst hit, so it now looks as if they are to use a new controller with the new ADFS which will give the standard Beeb Econet level II-type commands such as unlimited files. Much nicer for disk owners but will it be compatible with the old DFS? I doubt it and this will make software houses and dealers lives very confusing.

Computer Concepts still have the Accelerator BASIC compiler (a program which takes BASIC and turns it into machine code or in this case pseudo-machine code) in the pipeline. The main problem is that BBC basic is already so efficient that compiling it can only make it two or three times faster but it does make the code more compact, leaving more room for graphics so you get something for nothing.

QL's are now circulating, the first game I have heard of is from Quicksilva. They plan to do a sequel to Ant Attack but with 32K of screen memory they will need to excel themselves. Psion plan to write QL Scrabble - can they get the whole of Chambers Dictionary into 96K or will they use the microdrives? There appears to be a microdrive cartridge shortage, the only way to buy them is through Sinclair mail order. The shops which have plenty of drives and interface 1's have all sold out of the tiny overpriced tapes, reported to cost Sinclair 40p (Thanks Micromouse). At the rate at which the QL uses tapes it is unlikely that the price will fall.

So that's it for this month folks. If any of you have any great ideas for me to feature in my files just write to me at No. 1, Golden Square, London W1. This month Simon Rockman, GC's micro maniac, reveals all about some new games for the BBC and Electron computers.