AGEMAME HQ

Perhaps I should stop the incredibly poor David Coleman impressions, and just get on with it.

For those who don’t know, we’re dealing with A Question of Sport, a still reasonably popular BBC show, licensed to BellFruit as a quiz machine in the late 80’s/early 90’s.

Phil Bennett has recently demonstrated progress in emulating it, as can be seen.

What’s the most remarkable thing about this, is the lineage of the hardware - it features the so-called SlipStream ASIC developed as part of the abortive Flare One/Konix MultiSystem project. When this failed, Flare sold it’s technology to BellFruit as a way of making powerful Z80-based games operate on hardware akin to their Scorpion platform. This integrated system became known as Cobra, and Question of Sport used an advanced version of the original that used a ROM card in place of the original floppy disk drive. And this is where we have the issue. There were a number of games released on near identical hardware, but prior to Question of Sport, the vital program data was stored on floppy disks, which we cannot find, if anyone knows of working machines or boardsets for:

*Brain Box,
*Every Second Counts,
*Inquizitor,
*Treble Top,
*QuizVaders

Or any other Bellfruit board with the word COBRA etched onto it, I ask that you contact me, as these discs have a limited lifespan, and we need to act fast to preserve them.

It’s interesting to note that, although the hardware on part of the board is similar to a Scorpion card, we only know of one game that used one in addition to the Cobra, and it’s another version of Quintoon.