Sherlock (release date, awards, versions and related titles).

Sherlock (video game)

According to Wikipedia, citing The Guardian in 1984, five programmers worked on Sherlock for 18 months, and a Sherlock Holmes expert was employed for a year. It was released on 11 September 1984 at £14.95, written by Philip Mitchell of Beam Software with an inlay by Lynda Warner (Spectrum Computing).

Sherlock was a Crash Smash (8/10 in issue 9), scored 10/10 in Personal Computer News and 9/10 in Sinclair User issue 31, came second for Best Text/Graphical Adventure in the 1984 Crash Readers Awards, and third in the Big K readers' poll. Source: Spectrum Computing.

A version 2.0 was released in which WAIT UNTIL can be interrupted. The game also inspired Robin Of Sherlock. Source: Spectrum Computing.

Sherlock reuses a great deal of The Hobbit's code; this disassembly has more than a hundred cross-references to the equivalent code in The Hobbit, for example PrintNewline, PrintTextAndHandleControlCharacters, GetCommonWord, SearchCommandHandlerTable, FindFirstNoun and DeleteInputCharacter. Wikipedia also describes Sherlock as building on The Hobbit.

The keyboard routine at WaitForKeyWithTimeout waits for a key only until a timer runs out. If you don't press anything in time, DeleteInputCharacter rubs out whatever you had typed and the game takes its turn without you, so it carries on in real time while you think. The timer starts at 3000 and is reset after every key.

The characters move about according to timetables. The table at Table_Timetable holds eight-byte entries, and is read by routines including Game_Initialisation and FindCharacter.

Sherlock has its own version of the start of the ROM's COPY_LINE routine at SetPrinterMotorSpeed, without the BREAK-key check, and jumps back into the ROM at 3858 to send each pixel line to the ZX Printer; 50148 stops the printer motor at 50173.