Searching for missing ... BBC and Archimedes Software

[thebabycub]

Having been reading through BBC and Archimedes magazines, checking out the software around back then - I had an A5000 but now run RPCEmu - I came across some interesting software reviews.

I have looked for in the following places:

Archimedes Archive, bbc.nvg.org, huininga.nl, internet archive, a number of CD-Rom collections, MAME Archimedes software list and Flaxcottage

I have been unable to locate full working copies of the following, although a couple had save-limited demos on some CD-Roms.

Those listed below are, to the best of my knowledge, no longer commercially available (I bought one title I found commercially available the other day to sort my clipart collection before converting tracing sprites, converting those to Draw files then my whole draw collection to SVG. Other sprites will be left as bitmaps, converted to a PC-available format).

If you know any of the following are commercially available, please contact me and I will remove them from the List.

It would be a true shame if these are no longer in existence, given the relatively large amount of BBC Micro software that has been saved. How can we have potentially lost so much of the Archimedes software, perhaps because it was not as popular and not used in as many schools as many went PC?

Here's the list.

Archimedes.
Plot, Clares Micro Supplies.
VoxSynth - part of Rhapsody 4, Clares Micro Supplies.
Midnight Express, Dabhand Computing, note: image conversion.
Design Processor, N.Yorkshire County Council.
Font Directory, LOOKsystens, note: not FontDir that was a less function pre-cursor.
Fancy2, Richard Blythe.
Navigator, Topologika.
Tempest, Clares Micro Supplies - note: some references say unreleased, others disagree.
Topographer, Clares Micro Supplies.
EasyFont 3, Fabis Computing.
Formulix, Computer Concept, note: successor to Equasor.
Versatile, Dial Solutions.
Map Importer, Minerva.
Coypu, shell centre for mathematics education, note: graph plotting.
Art Lesson, Christopher Jarman via Nash Pollak Publishing.

Archimedes compatible CD-Roms
Decades, Longman logotron
Victorian Crime and Punishment, Longman Logotron
Medieval Realms, British Library
British Isles from the Air, Anglia Multimedia
Animals in Art, Anglia multimedia
London from the Air, E&MMA
Map Skills, Cumana

BBC Micro
MUSIC 5000 Unlimited, Hybrid Technology, note: Extra software that came only with this version of Music 5000 package, enabling redirection of sound from select Commerical titles and BASIC/machine code user programs to the Hybrid Music 5000 hardware.
- these may be interesting to for the flaxcottage archive.
Although flaxcottage have a few Key files, alongside the database software itself, I have been unable to find the following files for Anglia Multimedia's Key database:
Britain and Ireland Series: birds, mammals, seafish, freshwater fish, minibeasts.
Second Science Series: food, fit to eat, acid drops.
CDT: materials: investigation and science.
Computer Studies: Mail Order - there are various applications with this name on flaxcottage but they are not key data database files.

This is a list prompted by my personal tastes, but there's a lot more if you go back through these magazines that aren't in any archives. I may add more as I work through them, still on Acorn User at the moment and you think it's a good idea.
admin - I hope this is the right section but seemed the most appropriate to me.

[paulb]

Tempest, Clares Micro Supplies - note: some references say unreleased, others disagree.

This was another Clares takeover of an Acorn product, albeit one that had already been released (unlike Schema). You can read a summary of the story in the appropriate section of the Timeworks Publisher page on Wikipedia, since that product is the effective origin of Acorn Desktop Publisher.

Bruce Smith did a preview of Tempest in the November 1990 issue of A&B Computing, but the screenshots are all pixelated, presumably due to the full-resolution pictures not getting substituted at publication time, inadvertently adding to the mystery. I imagine that the developer involved went off to do other things, and the competition from Impression was enough to keep it from being finished. I haven't seen any references of substance indicating its release, so any that you can find would be enlightening.