About
A three-in-one sports compilation for the Tatung Einstein, published in 1987 by MicroBurger UK and supplied as FOOTRUN.DSK: Run Out, an animated cricket game “as played by Yorkshire’s Ashley Metcalfe”; Football Manager; and Super Manager, a second football management game. Behind the menu there is also Ashley Metcalfe’s Cricket, a full limited-overs match simulation spread over seven chained programs. Everything is written in XBAS, the Einstein’s Xtal BASIC, by Neil Murgatroyd, who found his own programs here in September 2026 after twenty years of looking. The story, and what the disc turned out to be hiding, is in The Author Who Found His Games, and the Game He Had Forgotten.
Files in the Package
The zip holds the disc in two forms, every file on it separately (they are flagged system and read-only, so XtalDOS’s DIR lists none of them), a plain-text listing of every program as LIST would show it, and the recovered golf game.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
FOOTRUN.DSK | the disc image, unchanged |
FOOTRUN.mfi | the same disc as a MAME flux image, which MAME can save to |
programs/LOADER.XBS | the menu: F0 Run Out, F1 Football Manager, F2 Super Manager |
programs/RUNOUT.XBS | Run Out, the animated cricket game |
programs/CRICKET.XBS, THETOSS.XBS, THETEAM.XBS, THETEAMS.XBS, INNS1.XBS, INNS2.XBS, INNS3.XBS, MEMLOSS.XBS | Ashley Metcalfe’s Limited Overs Cricket: county, university and Test sides, the toss, two innings, chained one into the next |
programs/FBALLM.XBS | Football Manager (“Neil Murgatroyd Feb87”) |
programs/SMANAGER.XBS | Super Manager |
programs/XBAS.COM | the Xtal BASIC interpreter the disc boots |
recovered/GOLF.XBS | Golf Simulation, deleted from the disc, recovered whole |
listings/*.txt | the BASIC source of all fourteen programs |
disassembly/XBAS.COM.asm | a Z80 disassembly of the interpreter, which reassembles byte for byte |
There is no .scp: this image reached the library as a .dsk, not from a physical disc read on a Greaseweazle. If you have the original disc, we would like to borrow it.
The Deleted Golf Game
Read the disc’s directory as bytes rather than through DOS and there are eleven deleted entries beside the live ones. One is GOLF.XBS: “GOLF SIMULATION, Neil Murgatroyd Feb87”, an 18-hole game with sprites, yardages, pars and a word of advice on each tee. Deleting a file on this disc format only flags the directory entry; the data stays until something else needs the space, and nothing ever did. Every block it points at was still unclaimed, so the file came back complete, 356 lines that decode cleanly from start to finish. To run it, copy it onto a disc alongside XBAS.COM and type XBAS GOLF.
RLGE2.XBS, by its name a rugby league game, is a deleted entry with no data behind it; only the name survives. Nine more deleted files are a snooker club’s 1988 subscriptions ledger with members’ names in it, so they are not in the download; they have gone back to the author.
Wanted
Neil also wrote a more detailed cricket simulation, and football and rugby league simulations of his own, none of which are on this disc or anywhere else in this library. If you have an Einstein disc from the late 1980s with any of them on it, we would very much like to hear from you.
About this File
Files and the golf game recovered on 23 September 2026 with the Einstein Disc Tools, whose einstein_dsk_recover now does this for any Einstein image; listings decoded with the keyword tables from the disc’s own XBAS.COM. Nothing has been altered.
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