How to play. Press play and wait for the tape to load, as you would have had to, or press QUICK LOAD to skip the wait. The council has asked for a survey of the field and some of the manhole covers are missing. Walk north with Q, A, O and P, the cursor keys or a joystick in port 2. Every square you stand on is surveyed. The number on a square is how many open drains touch it, corners included. Do not stand in a drain: you lose a hard hat, and with none left the survey is abandoned.
SPACE (or FIRE) lights a survey lamp, which shows the drains around you for a moment and sends home anyone standing nearby. The foreman walks his line, the goat wanders and the resident comes looking for you; any of them will take a hat. Pick up the dropped 10p coins. Keep moving to raise the BONUS. H opens the help, during a game too. RUN/STOP (ESC on your keyboard) asks whether to go home. M turns the sound off and on.
Click the screen and use your own keyboard (the cursor keys and SPACE work as the joystick), or press the keys under the screen, which press them for you: the four directions are a cross for your left thumb (press one, or keep your thumb down and slide round to the next) and LAMP is the big key on the right.
The Commodore 64 edition is the Spectrum game, recompiled. The picture is the Spectrum's, in the middle of the Commodore's screen, in the nearest colours, and the 128K's sound effects are played on the SID. The tape (drains64.tap) starts with a short program at the Commodore's own speed (LOAD and RUN, about half a minute), which loads the rest by turbo: the loading screen, then the game, in about a minute and a half.
Emulation by floooh/chips by Andre Weissflog (zlib licence). Commodore's ROMs are still under copyright, so it runs the MEGA65 Open ROMs (LGPL-3), free replacements written from the published specifications.