PAW also supported NPCs, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K ZX Spectrum.

However, unlike The Quill, the PAW no longer supported other computer systems like the BBC Micro or the Commodore 64.

[5] To ensure that as much text as possible can be used, PAWS compresses the descriptions by replacing the most common letters combinations by tokens, using characters greater than 127 (the ones that, in the Spectrum, are used for storing the BASIC tokens).

It could read adventures written in PAW, but ran under MS-Windows and had a few extensions to the original.

The adventures made in WinPAW could only be played using the MS Windows runtime.