Gauntlet ate a lot of quarters from me in the old days... funny enough, playing it on MAME actually killed satisfaction with it for me. The fact I could insert unlimited virtual quarters and the realization that the game just went on forever eventually bored me to tears with it.

I didn't have a chance to play many of the computer versions of Gauntlet... I read a review about the TRS-80 Color Computer version (called "Gantelet") and played it a little, it ran all right but very slowly compared to the arcade game... enough that it became more tactical than action. For my TI-99/4a, no Gauntlet clone existed except one that I saw at a TI faire, put together by a brilliant programmer named Quinton Tormanean. He wrote several impressive arcade games for the TI and then abruptly disappeared... I think he's working here in Seattle somewhere now. Anyway, his Gauntlet Clone "Gold Vault" was very impressive because the maps were so large I got lost, but it was a work in progress, and I still kick myself today that I didn't ask for a copy of it...

The Tengen Nintendo was all right, but they turned it into a strategy/action CRPG, and it had considerable differences in appearance from the original. A few years later they put out a pretty close copy of the original Arcade game. The best console version I ever saw, though, was the Sega Genesis version... fantastically done. I especially liked the music option, something the original arcade game lacked.

There's a great page with a bunch of CoCo games, incidentally, you can find here: http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/

Adamantyr