in a shipping product. While working at Atari, Palevich continued developing the game. During the period from February to May 1983, the original was cleaned-up for release. The new name, Dandy, is a play on the phonetic pronunciation of D and D, which at the time was a generic term for dungeon adventure role-playing games. According to Palevich, The file server was removed. Another change was to remove the ability to return to higher levels of the dungeon, after playtesting revealed that nobody ever went up to previous levels, except by mistake. Removing this feature sped up level changes, because the maze state no longer had to be written out to disk before the next level was loaded. It also enabled the game to work on cassette tape as well as on disk; on the tape version the cassette tape was stopped between levels, and then started again to load the next level. Palevich programmed the game on an Atari 800 with an AXLON RAMPOWER 128K memory expansion card and the SynAssembler from Synapse Software. Release Atari Program Exchange advertised Dandy as "the great new team game ... Bring up to three friends! Work as a team to battle monsters!", with a cartoon of four children exploring a dungeon. After APX folded, Antic Software published the game as Dandy Dungeon in 1985. In the fall of 1985, Atari Games released Gauntlet, a project led by Ed Logg, with the same fundamental gameplay as Dandy. A lawsuit from John Palevich was settled out of court. During a speech given at the 2012 Game Developers Conference, Ed Logg said that Dandy served as a direct inspiration for Gauntlet. Ports In 1986, Electric Dreams Software, having failed to secure the Gauntlet license, acquired the rights to produce the home computer ports of Dandy. Their intent to release their game as Dauntless led to a dispute with U.S. Gold who were publishing the computer versions of Gauntlet at the same time. Electric Dreams published the game as Dandy for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. In 1988, Atari Corporation released a Dandy-like game named Dark Chambers for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, and Atari 8-bit family (with the packaging in the style of Atari XEGS games). The manual states "Copyright 1983 John Howard Palevich. All rights reserved." It supports one or two players and has many fewer on-screen enemies than either Dandy