I'm still in shock.
I did have the manual, and even more signifcantly, reading and rereading and rereading the manual was my thing. Now that you have pointed it out, that line in the manual does ring a bell, and I now recall reading those instructions during my early playing, and trying to press the cursor keys to no avail. I also remember resorting to pressing every key during those early days, but again never saw the combat text speed up. I gave up trying and subsequently read over those combat speed instructions as a Bards Tale myth.
I had the tape version, which differed to the disk version in that graphics and music were trimmed down. On watching videos of the C64 disk version, I noticed that enemy groups 'advance', a feature I had never seen on the tape version so that must have been trimmed out to save on memory. Perhaps the scroll speed adjustment also got trimmed out....
I hope so anyway, otherwise I might be the only person in the world to have completed the game in real time!!
God I spent a lot of time deveoping those characters. I remember setting up the 4x99 berserkers round off and leaving the C64 on every dinnertime with the TV off so that my mum and dad didn't tell me to turn the computer off.
If this long desired feature was present on the tape version... well then... I'm sueing those darn instruction writers for 1 lost year...
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)