About Retro 247
Retro 247 is a reference archive for British eight-bit home computer games and the independent shareware scene that followed them. It is published at retro247.co.uk and it does not sell anything.
What the archive holds
There are three kinds of page here. Game entries record an individual title: what it was, which machines it ran on, when it was first covered on this site, and where its commercial standing is today. Reference pages compare or aggregate — the eight-machine specification comparison, the decade timeline, the status audit. Support pages, of which this is one, explain the method.
The subject matter runs across two periods that are usually treated separately. The first is the British home-computer boom, roughly 1982 to 1992, and within that the material is deepest on the BBC Micro and the Acorn Electron. The second is the Windows shareware scene of roughly 2000 to 2010, when very small studios sold games directly from their own websites.
They belong together because they were the same audience buying from the same kind of seller under the same kind of constraint. Splitting them implies a break that the people involved never made.
How an entry is sourced
Two kinds of claim, dated separately, because they age at different rates.
A description of what a game was does not go out of date. A statement about whether you can still buy it goes out of date constantly. This archive dates the two separately and says which is which.
Descriptive material is written from the record this site accumulated while it was covering games, supplemented by what can be established elsewhere. Every entry carries the date its page was first published rather than the date the current text was written, because moving that date forward would misrepresent when the coverage began.
Commercial statuses are established by requesting the publisher or product address directly, following any redirects to their destination, and reading the page that comes back. All statuses currently on the site were last verified on 31 July 2026. Reading the page is not optional: one address in this archive returns a completely healthy response and serves a United Kingdom betting affiliate site that has nothing to do with the game once sold there.
- Language
- English, United Kingdom
- Statuses last checked
- 31 July 2026
- Monetisation
- None. No advertising, no affiliate links
- Downloads offered
- None
How this archive handles other people's work
It does not host or distribute games. Not executables, not disc or tape images, not emulator bundles. Where a title is still commercially available the entry links to whoever sells it; where it is not, the entry records that and stops. Commercial unavailability is not a licence, and an archive that treated it as one would be a different kind of site with different problems.
It does not reproduce publishers' marketing copy. Game and studio names appear for identification, which is what names are for, and descriptive prose here is written rather than lifted. No developer logos are used and no endorsement is implied by any of it.
It does not fill gaps with plausible guesses. Several entries state that a publisher is not established, because the record does not establish one. A named studio would make those pages look more finished and make them less true. A visible gap is more useful than an invisible invention.
Questions about the archive
Independence, method, and what is deliberately not offered here.
Is this the official site of any of the publishers named here?
No. Retro 247 is an independent reference archive. Publisher and game names appear for identification only, and where a publisher still trades the entry links to their own site so the reader can go to the source.
Who writes the entries?
The archive is published without individual bylines. Entries are written from the record and from direct checks, and both are dated so a reader can judge the material rather than the author.
Can I get a game from this site?
No. Nothing is hosted or distributed here. Where a game is still sold, its entry links to the publisher selling it.
How do I report something that is wrong?
Through the contact page. Corrections that come with something checkable — an address, a statement from an author, a working store listing — are the most useful, and a status that changes gets a new date rather than a silent edit.
Does the archive make money?
No. There is no advertising, there are no affiliate links, and no publisher pays for placement. Outbound links to publishers exist so a reader can reach the source.