Not the original cover. No packaging for either TRS-80 title has surfaced; this is a modern illustration made for this archive, after the game’s own opening screen.
The Secret of Flagstone Manor
Opens at the entrance to Flagstone Manor, with an open door, a sign and a flagstone in view. READ SIGN answers: “FLAGSTONE MANOR — ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.” The title sequence credits “By B. J. Betts” and “Copyright (C) 1981 — Mountain Valley Software”.
Source: The game's own screens — no packaging has surfaced.1981 · © 1981, per the game's own title screen
The parser prompts “Tell me what to do?”, the house style of the Scott Adams adventures Betts was working from.
The notebook's room grid matches the drawn map on this site's home page, location for location.
Screens
Design notebook
A page from Brian Betts’s working notebook: the verb table with the BASIC line number each command jumps to, an abbreviation key for the puzzles, and a hand-drawn grid of every location. A sheet of unused printed cassette labels lies across the spread.
A modern Commodore 64 conversion
This is not a Mountain Valley release. Betts wrote The Secret of Flagstone Manor for the TRS-80 in 1981 and it never appeared on the Commodore 64. What follows is a present-day port of his BASIC listing, made for this archive so that a game with no surviving distributable copy can be run at all. Everything above this line is the historical record; this section is not.
Betts’s 1981 listing is TRS-80 Level II BASIC, and four of the things it leans on do not exist in Commodore BASIC V2. ELSE is the big one: the long IF…THEN…ELSE chains had to be unrolled into separately tested lines, which took 163 lines to 479. DEFSTR Q-Z had to become an explicit $ on every Q–Z variable, and PRINT@, which positions on the TRS-80’s 64×16 screen, had to be rebuilt for 40×25.
Line numbers map ×10 — line 460 in the conversion is line 46 in the original. Three traps were worth the trouble: PI is a reserved constant on the C64 and the original uses it as the wine-puzzle flag, so it became PN; every DATA statement had to be quoted, because the C64 tokenises keywords inside unquoted DATA and would have stored “Open door.” as the OPEN token; and the text was reflowed to 40 columns, replacing Betts’s hard-coded line breaks with a running column counter.
The original’s quirks were kept rather than tidied, including the IF L=17 OR L=14 AND DO=0 precedence oddity and the GOTO-out-of-FOR idiom. Both behave the same way on the C64.
It loads and the parser works. Saving, loading and the endgame have not been tested.
- Disk image (.d64) 171 KB — the conversion, for VICE or any C64 emulator
- BASIC listing — Betts’s original the 1981 TRS-80 Level II source this was ported from, plain text
Further reading
- Renga in Blue — The Secret of Flagstone Manor a detailed play-through and analysis, in posting order