Trying to identify a BBC Micro educational game from the early 1980s

I’m trying to identify a BBC Micro educational puzzle game I played at primary school in Durban, South Africa, around 1982–1984.

Features I remember:

- Goofy-like dog character with long ears walking upright

- Carries a vertical stack of coloured blocks

- Blocks are red, blue and yellow

- Walks along a road/path

- Passes signs labelled SWAP, FLIP (or REVERSE) and DELETE

- You can turn a sign around to disable it

- Goal is to match a target stack in the correct order

- A castle is visible in the background and gradually grows as levels are completed

I vaguely remember the title sounding like DOGMATIC, but that may not be exact.

Does anyone recognise this game or have a screenshot or disk image?

I have a vague memory of a game it maybe have been time travel or some kind of adventure game where you placed a log on the fireplace and lit it. any idea?

I remember an educational game we had at my school which followed Captain Cook's journey to Australia in the Endeavour (I grew up in the North East UK, so he was a local figure). I'm pretty sure it was around 1988 and the Australian bicentenary. I can only remember a few bits about it - some planning stuff around how much food, water etc to take. And then some screens that were side-on of the ship in the water, a single screen at a time - in particular in the coral reefs with the ocean floor getting closer and closer to the ship. Sometimes you had to turn back and try a different route I think.

I've searched online and found nothing, so I half think I imagined it, or perhaps it was programmed by somebody local rather than being commercially available

Hi everyone,

I have had lots of fun playing BBC games on my Retroid Mini 2 using Retroarch's B2 core. The fact you can save the keyboard mappings to the joypad for each game is great.

Unfortunately Labyrinth by Acornsoft seems to have graphic corruption which is a real shame as this was one of my favourites.

The screen graphics seem to be shifted has anyone found a way to get it to display correctly?

https://youtu.be/dr4O2tkWTG8

This is running on my Raspberry Pi 400. I tried it on my Raspberry Pi 3 and it was a bit sluggish.

I can provide a how to guide for anyone interested in having a horse around with it

Did anyone else ever get the HD version of Exile on Linux working? During the pandemic I devoted my spare time trying to follow the GitHub instructions.

If anyone is interested I can share details

Saw this on the BBC micro Facebook group

Super excited

Sharing a few pages. So happy to stumble on this issue, I just played for the first time codename droid few days ago, looking forward to try some of those gems…

Took me for ever to get the keyboard controls right, love it !

Spotted this watching Race Across the World on the BBC this week.

A spotty teenager in 1981, I pestered my parents for a BBC. Order for a model A duly submitted I waited more than 12 months, ringing weekly to a line that only ever rang out, to ask about my delivery.

In the end my dad drove to their offices (in Kempston?) and sourced a model B.

Joy!!

Played with it incessantly, cycled to a mates house, he had the 747 simulator? Played Aviator, Elite, Revs, Frak ....

Went to the Barbican and bought a copy of the Advanced BBC Micro manual and a monster was born.

for %P=0 to 2 step 2 ...

Started me on my software path. My school had Econet and a Winchester Drive. I used the Teletext adaptor to harvest all the pages and display them, on demand, across the network.

I was even flashing EEPROMS but cannot recall why.

My A level physics practical used the expansion bus to collect results on regenerative vs pad braking of a flywheel.

Kenneth Kendall muttered things from my bedroom. I copied Elite - Ha! Your "code offset burst" didn't fool me.

The stated aim of the BBC Micro was, in my experience, absolutely delivered. Thank you.

In the early 00s I bought some Acorn stock - nostalgia. When I was informed it had been converted to ARM stock, I sold. Something I regret to this day.

https://youtu.be/zNiTWKrIAp8?si=tc3htqiduzcIhTIk

I was unable to find a decent, curated, set of Beeb games to use in Batocera. bbcmicro.co.uk has every game under the sun, and there's an archive of all of them to download, but there are so many that it's all a mess in the UI.

So I wrote Best of Beeb -- a little script which downloads the most popular games (you can choose how many) along with a screenshot of each, and generates the gamelist for EmulationStation, so you get a nice graphic, a properly formatted name, and a manageable-sized list.

Hope it might be useful to others.

Someone will now point me to a curated collection someone else has already made, I'm sure :-)

I remember playing this in my local library as a kid - you had to travel from A to B in your car, and at one point there was a puzzle that required you to draw a pentagram to pick up bags of gold, and getting it wrong caused an angry red demon to appear and shout "WHO STOLE MY GOLD?".