CATALOGUE REVIEW
Book reviews are quite common. I like to be a bit different, now and then, so I decided to review a catalogue that arrived in my morning mail.
The catalogue I feel is of sufficient interest to the T-S community to warrant such special treatment is the 1985 EDITION 1, published by SOFTWARE SUPERMARKET, 87 Howard’s Lane, London, SW15 6NU, England, I might add at this point that Software Supermarket maintains a 24 hour telephone line, 01 789 8546, They will accept plastic money in the form provided by VISA, MASTERCARD, EUROCARD, and ACCESS. Naturally, this is the quickest way to order any of the items listed, and you don’t have to worry about the current exchange rate.
SOFTWARE SUPERMARKET stocks software (plus some hardware) for the SPECTRUM, C64, and BBC computers, The catalogue contains 28 letter-size pages plus two order forms in the centerfold, A few of the items listed are already available for the TS 2068 (and the C64) on this side of the pond, With the growing popularity (and availability) of the SPECTRUM ROM, I strongly suspect that we will soon become quite familiar with most of the titles in the catalogue, e.g., Quicksilva, Inc. has already introduced us to the imaginative games and superb graphic displays achieved by British SPECTRUM and C64 programmers.
PRO/FILE 2068 REVISITED
The occassion for revisiting Pro/File 2068 is the recent (and long awaited) delivery by Tom Woods (P.0. Box 64, Jefferson, NH 03583) of the final documentation.
While the program was perfectly useable with the temporary instructions supplied, those of us who had been “spoiled” by the excellent documentation supplied with the earlier ZX Pro/File were rather eagerly awaiting something similar to accompany Pro/File 2068 in our software libraries.
Tom Woods did a rather unusual thing during preparation of the Pro/File 2068 manual. He requested input from users to be included in the finished documentation! Thus the finished document contains quite a variety of solid applications of the program. I, for one, would suggest this be done on all serious software, even though there is a definite penalty in terms of development time.
In any case, I am quite willing to concede that the results were worth waiting for.
In accordance with the old Air Force saying to the effect that when the paper work exceeded the weight of the aircraft one was cleared for take-off, Pro/File 2068 should fly. The new manual, dimensioned 7 x 9-1/2 inches, is printed on very good quality paper with a durable and attractive cover. It contains over 140 pages delineating the aforementioned applications, numerous customizing suggestions, and complete annotated listing of the basic and machine codes.
Among the suggested modifications, one will find something as simple as short Basic lines to, for example, supply a bleep when a key is stroked, or rename a file. One will also find a PRINTER DRIVER to enable full-size printers (including use of imbedded control commands), which may be further customized for either the AERCO or TASMAN Centronics Parallel or the BYTE-BACK RS232 serial interfaces with the data supplied.
Complete instructions for preparing “working copies” of the program are supplied. One can, and of course should, perform modifications and experiments with these working copies and reserve the original for reference in case of disaster. The unmodified program contains 28000 bytes of open file space for data, and retains 1505 bytes free for additional programming use, which will allow one to do quite a bit of customizing. More programming space is easily obtained if required, but results in a corresponding reduction in the bytes available for data storage.
I need go no further, all of this is thoroughly explained in the manual. Including ZX Pro/File for the TS1000/ZX81, we now have two outstanding Data Base programs for our Timex machines, both accompanied by excellent documentation which other programmers should emulate.