No pressure, Bill, since I'm sure you have a lot on your plate, but I would love to see some video of these games.

I thought I'd seen it all on the TRS-80, but I can't recall ever seeing or playing a licensed arcade translation for the platform. And I certainly never knew ports of "Frogger" and "Zaxxon" were made for the TRS-80!

There were many knock-offs of arcade games that were surprisingly good and exciting for the TRS-80. Adventure International's "Eliminator" was a very fun and graphically excellent clone of Defender. And then you have the "Big Five" games, which were considered the pinnacle of gaming excellence for the TRS-80. There was "Scarfman," a Pacman knockoff that was otherwise excellent, but had a fatal gameplay flaw in that you can easily beat the game by just eating the power pills and clearing the maze while the ghosts stayed vulnerable for much too long (who playtested this game?).

The screenshots of Frogger and Zaxxon on the back of the boxes (in the pictures you provided) look surprisingly good. I can imagine that Frogger could be competently ported, but I can't imagine how Zaxxon would play on the TRS-80.

Here's a video of "Scarfman" that someone was kind enough to upload on YouTube. Believe it or not, this primitive-looking game was considered a technical success for the TRS-80, despite being too easy to play.

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No, it's a strange mixture of RPG and strategy, perhaps single-key driven.

The tape image that can be downloaded at a Dragon webarchive contains a single 13 K BASIC file with several interesting text strings. All very primitive. Example for an "atmospheric" setting: "THE DREADED MORLOCK'S TOWER!" and here's the complete victory text: "YOU'VE CONQUERED THE FORCES OF EVIL! ALL HAIL THE VICTOR!!!!".
If that isn't incentive...
There's also some party (or rather: army) managment and item handling including buying stuff. I couldn't see anything related to saving the progress, though.

I think it's more or less identical with this game here as the Dragon is very similar to the CoCo 1:
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/quest.html

The reason why I suspect that is because the Dragon tape contains a BASIC program that contains this copyrights notice: "COPYRIGHT 1981 R.J.RETELLE" and "AARDVARK TECHNICAL SERVICES".
"R." stands for Robert/Bob (Retelle) and their company was also known as "Aardvark-80", "Aardvark Software" and "Aardvark Action Software". He and Rodger Olsen programmed some other more or less simply RPGs like "Dungeons of Magdarr", "The Search for Magdarr" and "Wizard's Tower" for the C64 and also several smallish text adventures similar to the Scott Adams stuff. Nearly everything was made in BASIC (perhaps compiled).

Later they tried their hands on action-oriented stuff like a Pac-Man-clone ("Pactron"), a Galaga-clone ("Zalaga"), a Pengo-clone ("Chilly-Willy") and a game with similarities to Kaboom! ("Catch 'Em"). Their most interesting stuff might be "Bagitman" but when you see screenshot of that game you also see a lot you've already seen in other games.

I also found a 3D pool game called "Sharkey's 3D Pool" or "Maltese Joe's 3D Pool" credited to "Aardvark Software" (published by Firebird) which may have been the first of it's kind.

take care,
Calibrator

Probably about as badly as two different versions of a game can compare. I actually still have my TRS-80 set up, so I'll try to take some video of them in action for you guys.

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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.

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